This is so frustrating! Jared thought.
He held on to his son Tyrus’s hand as he continued walking down the aisles of the Barnes & Noble in Lincolnshire, Illinois. They trudged up one row of books and then down another. Every few feet Tyrus, who was now three and a half, looked up at his dad as Jared searched intently for something among the stacks.
“Hello,” a chirpy woman at the information counter said to them finally. “Can I help you find something?”
“Erm,” Jared said, “I’m looking for some books on the Mises Institute.” He looked around to make sure no one had overheard what he was asking about. The last thing Jared wanted to do was get into a discussion with a random person on this topic.
“The My Says Institute?” the woman asked loudly, looking down at her computer.
“No, it’s Mises, M-I-S-E-S,” Jared whispered. “It’s a libertarian think tank that focuses on Austrian economics and . . .” He trailed off, realizing this probably made no sense to the woman in front of him. After all, this made no sense to Jared.
But still, he needed these books for the next phase of his investigation, which was starting to stall.
Since the beginning of the year, Jared had seized almost two thousand new shipments of drugs coming into the country, all by figuring out what each package would look like, and in doing so had disrupted the Silk Road as best he could. Jared had also arrested and detained a few dealers on the site, including one of the busiest, who sold ecstasy and other drugs from the Netherlands. And he had subsequently taken over some dealers’ accounts on the Silk Road, gaining a better understanding of the inner workings of the operation.
But he was still no closer to unearthing the founder of the site. So after finding himself circling around in too many online cul-de-sacs, Jared decided he would try to get inside the mind of the Dread Pirate Roberts, which was why he was standing in the Barnes & Noble in Lincolnshire, awkwardly asking about the Mises Institute.
In recent weeks he had sat at his desk, a Rubik’s Cube always spinning in his hand, as he read all of the online postings by the Silk Road’s creator, looking for similarities in the author’s language. As the site had grown, DPR’s message had become more brazen. While at first the founder’s idea had been to make drugs legal, more and more he wrote about how terrible the U.S. government was, and how it was a place for the abuse of power. In one post DPR gloated that the “state is unable to get its thieving murderous mitts on [the Silk Road].”
Based on all of his writings, Jared had started to build a profile of who this Dread Pirate Roberts might be. He was likely very educated, young, not rich but not poor either, and while he wanted to destroy the American legal system, he was also doing this for the money. DPR had even admitted this in postings on the site, noting that “money is one motivating factor for me. . . . I also enjoy a few first-world pleasures that I feel I have earned. . . . Compared to most I know, I still live quite frugally.” But from Jared’s readings it appeared that DPR also believed that what he was doing was making the world a better place. “As corny as it sounds,” Dread had written online, “I just want to look back on my life and know that I did something worthwhile that helped people.”
Jared, trying to find things that others couldn’t see, started to analyze DPR’s speech patterns. For one, Dread used the word “epic” a lot, which showed that he was likely younger. He also used emoji smiley faces in his writing, though he never used a hyphen as the nose, writing them as :) rather than the old-fashioned :-). Yet the one attribute about DPR that stood out to Jared was that rather than writing “yes” or “yeah” on the site’s forums, Dread instead always typed “yea.”
DPR was constantly recommending books to his followers—a litany of literature from the Mises Institute. Jared wanted to understand Dread’s thinking and read along too. But the books were so dense that nothing he read made any sense. To him it appeared that the arguments made by the authors were just a series of justifications for doing things in the world without taking responsibility for how those actions might affect other people.
All those books and all that research hadn’t brought Jared any closer to DPR.
To make matters worse, Jared had heard from his counterparts at the Homeland Security office in Baltimore that a DEA agent, Carl Force, had managed to get close to the Dread Pirate Roberts, and Carl had been chatting with him undercover.
Hearing this, Jared reluctantly asked the HSI Baltimore team to look through some of Carl’s chat logs to see if he could find more patterns in DPR’s language.
When an e-mail arrived containing some of the logs, Jared was shocked at what the DEA agent was writing to DPR. Carl Force appeared to be offering more information than he should to the man he was supposed to be hunting, explaining how drug-smuggling routes worked and how to buy and sell heroin in bulk. It was one thing to curry favor with a perp whom you were trying to lure into public, but this felt like it was going several steps too far.
As Jared sat at his desk in Chicago, staring at all the mail tubs on the floor, the Mises books on his desk, and the pictures of drugs that covered his walls, he felt so frustrated that he was being caught up in dead end after dead end. Jared needed a break in his case. Something, anything, just a little sign that he was on the right track.