It was 4:45 a.m. when the silver SUV pulled into its usual parking spot on the corner of Church and Thomas streets in Lower Manhattan. Right on time. The car had black tinted windows with government plates and blue and red police lights hidden under the front grill. The door to the SUV swung open and FBI Special Agent Chris Tarbell stepped out, wearing gym clothes and a light jacket, even though the winter temperature in New York City had dipped into the teens.
Come rain or shine, sleet or snow, this was Tarbell’s ritual. He worked out every day before he went into the FBI offices at 26 Federal Plaza, a couple of blocks away. But today’s routine was going to be different. While the cybercrime FBI agents hadn’t lost interest in the Silk Road, that topic hadn’t moved past a discussion in the Whiskey Tavern among the Pickle Back shots and cham-pag-nay, mostly because of bureaucratic bullshit within the system that Tarbell couldn’t stand. Higher-ups at the Beau (which they pronounced “B-you”) had argued that drugs were not the mandate of their division of the FBI.
But finally, after months of discussions over how to get in on the Silk Road case, an opportunity had presented itself. Later that day a woman from the DEA in New York City would be coming by to talk about the site and ask if Tarbell and his crew could help the DEA’s investigation.
After leaving the gym, Tarbell changed into a dark suit and white shirt and grabbed his coffee from the nearby Starbucks before making his way up to the twenty-third floor of the federal building. As he sat with his other agents in the Pit, a woman from the DEA arrived with Serrin Turner, the assistant U.S. attorney in New York City whom the FBI had worked with on the LulzSec case.
The DEA agent wore jeans and a sweater, proudly displaying her badge and gun on her waist. She sat down in an empty chair and explained that she was part of a New York task force based a few miles away in Chelsea. They had been sporadically looking into—“well, trying to look into”—the Silk Road for the past year and a half, and their attempt at an investigation had gone nowhere. Shortly after the Gawker article had published back in June 2011, Senator Chuck Schumer had done what most politicians do, holding an impromptu press conference and demanding that the government go after the drug site, even though he was clueless as to what that entailed.
Since the Silk Road sold drugs, the DEA agent explained, the government had asked her office to look into the site. That had been a mistake, it turned out, as her office knew how to do only physical busts with physical drugs, not digital busts with technologies like Bitcoin, Tor, or even the Dark Web, whatever the fuck that was.
“People upstairs are pissed that we haven’t gotten very far,” she lamented. And then she explained that the leader of the site—“who now calls himself the Dread Pirate Roberts, you know, from the Princess Bride movie”—had grown more brazen with the contraband that was for sale, including hawking guns and hacking tools. What’s more, this Dread Pirate Roberts was publicly denouncing the U.S. government. The New York DEA had hit a dead end, and they needed the help of the FBI.
When the meeting ended, Tarbell and his team said they would talk among themselves and be in touch. They shook hands and parted ways.
“Well,” Tarbell said to the agents in the Pit, “there are two problems here.” First, his team didn’t want to just be “assistants” to the New York DEA. If the FBI was going to go after the Silk Road, the FBI was going to do it alone. The Beau didn’t work well with others. Never had. Especially the douche bags over at the DEA.
Which led to that other salient issue: they had been told several times by their higher-ups at the FBI that drugs were not in their job detail; computers were.
But the meeting with the DEA agent had given Tarbell and his crew an idea. The site was no longer just hawking drugs. People were now peddling several hundred different types of hacking tools too, including key loggers, banking Trojans, malware apps, spyware, and a slew of other digital goods that landed right in the purview of the men sitting in the Pit.
There, in that moment, the FBI team decided that was how they would get involved with the Silk Road case. Rather than help the DEA find drug dealers, the cybercrime agents would go after the site themselves. Tarbell picked up the phone, presenting the strategy to his bosses.
Several weeks later approval finally came back down the chain of command, saying that the team could open an investigation on the site. After months of red tape and wasteful officialdom, Tarbell and his coagents opened a new case file, numbered 288-3-696.
In addition to HSI in Chicago, a task force in Baltimore, and another group of local and federal officials in New York City, there was now a new agency hunting for the Dread Pirate Roberts: the Cyber Division of the FBI, and the Eliot Ness of cyberspace would be leading the charge.