The little house on East 600 North Street in Spanish Fork, Utah, had seen better days. The white slats of siding were chipped from years of neglect, as was the wooden fence on the edge of the property. In all directions small white steeples rose into the Utah sky, offering endless places of worship. This was, after all, Mormon country, home of the Latter-day Saints.
On a Thursday morning in mid-January 2013, every few minutes the silence was punctured by a car passing through the nearby intersection. And in the distance there was the echoing rattle of the wind irritating a dozen or so ragged American flags that lined the nearby streets.
But there was something unusual about the street that day. An uncommon number of cars were parked along the road, including a windowless white van that sat across the street from the house. If a passerby could have seen inside the van, he or she would have spotted a group of men checking the chambers of their semiautomatic machine guns while others placed masks over their faces and adjusted their bulletproof vests.
Just after 11:00 a.m., right as the HuHot Mongolian Grill across the street from the white house opened its doors for the daily $8.99 all-you-can-eat buffet, a man emerged from the white van wearing blue jeans, sneakers, and a dark blue jacket with a U.S. Postal Service emblem on its sleeve. He walked up to the little white house with a small package in his hand and knocked loudly. “Hello!” he yelled as his fist thudded against the screen door. “Anyone home?”
No one answered, but it was apparent that someone was indeed inside. The man with the postal jacket dropped the package onto the decrepit checkered welcome mat on the stoop and headed back toward the white van.
Nearby, Special Agent Carl Force of the DEA watched this spectacle from an unmarked police car. “He’s not going to fall for this,” Carl said to another much older agent sitting next to him in the car.
“Give it some time,” the older agent said. “He’ll come out.”
Carl waited, savoring the serenity of the moment: the vast open sky and the flapping flags, all surrounded by the snowcapped Wasatch Mountains and the sweeping emptiness beyond. Carl had ended up there, as had all the other men with him, as a result of his online persona Nob having concocted a brilliant plan to have the Dread Pirate Roberts find a buyer for a kilo of cocaine. In no time at all DPR had connected him with a dealer on the site, and after agreeing to the $27,000 price, Carl had been given the address of a man named Curtis Green, who worked for DPR and who had agreed to take possession of the coke as a middleman for the buyer.
As soon as the deal was struck, the Marco Polo task force had to scramble to get things in order. Thankfully, Carl had a connection at the Major Crimes Unit in Utah, which had agreed to loan the agents the kilo of cocaine from the evidence vault for their sting operation.
A few days later Carl picked up the coke and a Priority Mail package. Before placing the drugs inside, he drove over the package in a truck a few times to make it look like it had been through the mail. The agents decided to do a “controlled delivery” of the drugs, with one guy posing as a postal worker to drop off the package at Green’s house and then, hopefully, arrest him. But given that this was the Marco Polo task force, the operation was a mess from the moment they landed in Utah. In particular, the agent tasked with dressing up like a mailman had decided not to dress up like an actual mailman. He just lazily slipped the postal jacket over his normal clothes for the delivery.
“This guy looks nothing like a postal worker,” Carl said to the gruff agent next to him as they watched the fake postal worker slip back into the white van.
A few minutes went by, and finally the door to the dilapidated house creaked open and a heavyset man with short, dark hair emerged, peeking out of the doorway like a timid and lost animal. This was Curtis Green, who appeared to be in his early forties and who had a visible look of worry across his face. Green, Carl knew, was one of the key lieutenants in the Dread Pirate Roberts’s vast drug network, spending his days holed up in the house, brokering deals between buyers and sellers and resolving disputes when transactions went wrong.
Green looked directly toward the white van, then down at the package, and walked cautiously out onto the porch. A pink walking stick in hand, he hobbled toward the parcel, then leaned down to pick it up and examine it. The package was a Priority Mail box, no bigger than a brick, and there was no return address anywhere. He wore a fanny pack around his waist, and it shifted slightly as he ambled across the porch. Seemingly deciding he wanted nothing to do with the package, Green threw the parcel into a trash bin on the lawn and limped back inside.
“What the fuck?” Carl exclaimed. The men in the van were in disbelief too. What now? They all knew that you can’t arrest someone for throwing a brick of cocaine in the garbage. As they contemplated what to do, Green reappeared, slowly peering out of the doorway as he had a few minutes earlier. This time he retrieved the package from the garbage and brought it inside.
The door clicked closed behind Green. It was go time.
It took only a few seconds for the back of the white van to burst open, which prompted a cascade of subsequent thuds from the doors of the cars parked around the corner. Dozens of men from the local SWAT team and DEA streamed out of the vehicles, with long dark guns drawn, and trampled across the dead grass on the lawn. A black battering ram appeared and slammed into the front door of the little white house. The agents of the Marco Polo task force stormed inside. “On the floor!” one of them yelled as Green stood over the now-open package of powder with a pair of scissors in his hand, a plume of cocaine covering his face.
Green, stuttering, did as he was told, lying down on the ground as quickly as he could. He called out the names of his two Chihuahuas, Max and Sammy, as they yapped at the men with guns. “Keep your hands where we can see them!” an agent yelled. Max, the older of the two dogs, couldn’t handle the mayhem and lost his continence, shitting himself on the living room floor, while Sam, the smaller pup, tried to bite another agent’s shoelaces. On the wall above this chaos there were pictures of Green’s wife and kids and a square decorative tile that offered the welcoming message “If I had known you were coming, I would have cleaned up!”
Green was searched—the cops found $23,000 in cash stuffed in his fanny pack—and was read his rights. He was visibly petrified, telling the cops he’d do whatever they needed; tell them whatever they wanted to know; show them how Bitcoins worked and the computer he used to log on to the Silk Road.
The cops in the back of the house rummaged through Green’s drawers, pulling out his wife’s big black dildo that became the butt of several jokes. Other officers went down into the basement, where they found a series of computers linked together for what they were told was Green’s Bitcoin-mining farm. These computers ran software Green had downloaded that constantly crunched numbers trying to find Bitcoins online that he could then turn into real physical cash.
As the cops rummaged through his stuff, one of the HSI agents from Baltimore took timid Green aside and began questioning him. This left Carl and Shaun Bridges, the Secret Service agent who had tried to set up the meeting with the NSA, to examine Green’s computer. They soon discovered that Green, as an employee of the Silk Road, had a special account on the site with privileges that allowed him to change people’s pass codes and even log others out of their accounts. This was an administrative right that, Green told them, had been granted to him by the Dread Pirate Roberts himself.
As Carl and Shaun explored Green’s account for evidence that would bring them closer to capturing DPR, they noticed one other feature about Green’s administrative abilities on the site that seemed out of the ordinary. It appeared that Green, as a moderator, also had access to other people’s Bitcoins on the Silk Road. Hundreds of thousands of Bitcoins, to be precise. Green could have easily stolen that money if he wanted to. After all, everyone believed that Bitcoins couldn’t be traced like cash. But Green would never do such a thing, fearing a vicious reprisal from the Dread Pirate Roberts. Neither, one would think, would federal agents with the Marco Polo task force who had taken an oath to protect citizens, “so help me God.”
But in the coming days, without the knowledge of anyone else inside that little house on East 600 North Street in Spanish Fork, Utah, or within the U.S. government, Shaun Bridges of the Secret Service was about to do the unthinkable. He started tinkering with the computer that belonged to Green and furtively siphoning $350,000 out of other people’s accounts on the Silk Road, all using Curtis Green’s log-in credentials. Rather than turning this money in to the U.S. government as evidence, Shaun would instead secretly transfer that $350,000 into his own personal accounts online.
It didn’t stop there.
It wouldn’t take long for do-gooder, churchgoing dad Carl Force—completely separately from Shaun Bridges—to start stealing money from the Silk Road too. But rather than purloin the money, as Shaun did, Carl would instead sell information back to the Dread Pirate Roberts in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars in Bitcoins. This information would help Ross Ulbricht stay ahead of law enforcement as they hunted for the leader of the Silk Road.
Just as he had before, Carl was about to cross the line between covering a criminal and becoming one.
So help me God.