The lobby of the Marriott Hotel in Salt Lake City was as bland and soundless as any other. The carpet was as hard as concrete, and a stale smell of coffee hung in the air. In the corner of the foyer, a television played with a ticker streaming below the newscaster who read the latest headlines, noting that new home sales in the United States had fallen by 7.8 percent over the previous month, and the economy was again sputtering.
Upstairs in one of the hotel suites, a pink walking cane lay on the floor. And a few feet away, in the bathroom, the owner of that cane—Curtis Green—was being drowned by a postal worker from the Marco Polo task force. Across from him, as Green’s head was held underwater and his arms flailed about in panic, Carl Force of the DEA stood with a digital camera videotaping this torture.
It had been a week since the DEA had come into Green’s house with a battering ram, smashing down his front door and scaring the shit (quite literally) out of his poor Chihuahuas. After he had been booked, processed, and let go from the local police precinct, he had gone home, dropped onto the couch, and cried. He reasoned that the next steps would be getting a lawyer, having a court date, and maybe striking a deal with the DEA that would grant him a lesser sentence. But events had played out differently.
After his arrest the Marco Polo task force returned to Baltimore, and the Mormon boy, Green, had been told to lie low. Carl and the rest of the team had assumed that they would have time to question Green later and could sift through his computer for more evidence in the meantime. But as Carl had learned (as Nob), the Dread Pirate Roberts had figured out that his employee had been arrested.
Amid a flurry of confusion, Shaun Bridges, Carl Force, and a postal worker from the task force had returned to the Salt Lake City Marriott to question Green, to try to glean what they could while he still had access to his Silk Road files.
Green arrived at the Marriott with his lawyer and immediately began babbling on about how the ruthless Dread Pirate Roberts would soon surely send his goons to have him killed. He was so petrified he couldn’t sleep, he said. He kept peering out of his window in Spanish Fork, fearing that someone would come and tap on the door and that would be the end of Curtis Green and his two Chihuahuas. Green went on like a scared teenager telling the principal about some bullies that would get him after school.
Green had always been a rambler and, as Carl soon believed, a weakling. In high school Green’s classmates had called him “the Gooch.” At the time, young, chubby Green didn’t know what the term meant and laughed along with the other boys when they referenced him by that nickname. It wasn’t until years later that he found out that a gooch was the area on a man’s body between his scrotum and his asshole.
Carl could easily see why the nickname had stuck. After a few minutes of his rambling, Carl wanted to slap him or tell him to shut the hell up, or both. (Gooch!) Green seemed as nervous as his three-pound Chihuahuas. Sometimes he whimpered as he spoke to the Marco Polo task force about his role on the site and about the dreaded Dread Pirate Roberts. At other times he pleaded, “I’m just a good Mormon boy.”
Eventually, after a couple of hours of questioning, Green’s lawyer (who was apparently the worst lawyer in Utah) grew bored and decided to leave, noting that his client should just tell the cops everything he knew. As the lawyer walked out, the Gooch started crying. Carl thought about how pathetic this man was and how he was everything Carl hated in the world: not tough enough to stand up for the choices he had made.
At around noon, exhausted from hours of interrogation, they decided to go down to the restaurant of the Marriott Hotel and grab lunch. As everyone ate, Carl logged on to his laptop as Nob to chat with DPR and see if he knew more about the man sitting across from him. It was then, as Green sat eating french fries and trying not to upset his DEA captors, that Dread told Nob what had happened. One of his employees had stolen some Bitcoins, and he wasn’t happy about it. “Not a ton of money,” DPR said as they began typing to one another, “but it pisses me off to no end.”
“Who is it and where is he,” Nob wrote back as he looked up from his laptop at the Gooch, who nervously looked back.
“I’ll send you his ID,” DPR replied.
Nob immediately asked why he had this man’s ID.
“I had him send it to me when I hired him,” Dread wrote back, “for just this kind of situation.”
As Carl chatted with Dread, he played dumb about what had happened with his kilo of cocaine, but he was also surprised that Green had the audacity to steal $350,000 in Bitcoins shortly after he had been arrested. “You stole money from DPR?” Carl asked Green, shocked that the Gooch would do such a thing. Shaun, who had really stolen the money, just watched silently.
“No!” Green replied, panicked. “You’ve gotta be kidding me. I wouldn’t even know how to steal a penny from him.”
“Just admit it!” Carl yelled. And then Shaun jumped in too. Shaun’s glare was intimidating, with his narrow, snarly eyes. “Just admit you stole the money!”
“I didn’t!”
“Why are you protecting him?” Carl asked.
“I didn’t do it!” Green sobbed.
During this exchange, a request from the Dread Pirate Roberts popped up on Carl’s computer screen asking if he knew anyone who could beat Green up and force him to send the money back. Given that Carl was posing as a big-time drug smuggler, he told DPR that of course he knew people who could do that kind of work.
“How quickly do you think you can get someone over there?” DPR asked. “And what does that cost you?”
Carl looked up from his computer and informed Green that his day was about to change—slightly. Green, still rambling, was terror-stricken as he heard what they were going to do next. They would have to make the beating look real, Carl informed Green. DPR wanted evidence.
They returned to the hotel room, and Carl told Green to go into the bathroom. The tub was filled with water. The camera clicked on, and the postal worker thrust Green under, his arms waving as he gasped for air. His screams sounded like a rumble under the water. He couldn’t breathe. And then, after a few seconds, the postal worker yanked his head out by his hair and held the drowning man’s face up to a video camera as the Gooch panted, trying to regain his breath and making every effort possible not to cry again.
“I think we should do it again,” Carl said as he peered over the video camera at Green’s pathetic-looking face. The postal worker agreed, grabbed Green’s head again, and pushed him back under the water. It was pure chaos, like Lord of the Flies, but rather than children trying to kill poor chubby Piggy, special agents with the U.S. government were drowning the Gooch.
Green begged them to stop, but they did it again and again. “We have to make it look real,” Carl sneered.
“I swear,” Green said as his face was pushed under the water again, “I didn’t steal the money!”
“Just admit it!” Carl yelled back at him. “Stop trying to protect DPR!”
And yet while all this was going on, there was one person who was not in the bathroom. Shaun of the Secret Service had told the others on the task force that he was going to take Green’s laptop and submit it into evidence at the nearby bureau. But instead he was going to use it to steal more money from the Silk Road, money that no one knew he was taking. As Shaun closed the door behind him, the sound of the Gooch’s cries echoed through the hotel suite in the Marriott as Carl continued to yell at him. “Just admit it, you piece of shit!”
“I swear,” Green wept. “I didn’t steal a penny!”