The sidewalks of Manhattan reminded New Yorkers that summer wasn’t in sight just yet. Half-frozen, dirty dollops of sludge lined the city streets as wind whipped garbage down the avenues like frigid tumbleweeds. On a mid-February morning in 2013, in front of 290 Broadway, just off Duane Street, a line of men and women waited pensively to pass through a security checkpoint into a massive beige tower. While the mere sight of the building was intimidating enough, the name that hung on the gold placard on its east wall could—regardless of the temperature outside—send shivers down anyone’s spine: INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE.
This was one of those rare government buildings in which someone who uses a calculator for a living can wield more power than a person who carries a gun.
One of those calculator-carrying men was Gary Alford, who arrived for work at that beige tower like clockwork each day. A large and forbidding man with wide shoulders and a square jaw, when Gary stood still, he was completely motionless, like an anvil that had fallen to the floor and couldn’t be moved. He was African American, and his dark complexion often seemed even darker against the white of his shirt, which he always wore to work, along with a crisp suit and tie.
While Gary looked like a normal IRS employee in his business attire, he was far from ordinary and had a number of eccentricities that made him stand out from all his coworkers.
One of the strangest of these idiosyncrasies was the bizarre fact that he read everything—literally everything—three times. It didn’t matter what it was; if it had text on its pages, Gary would read it once, then again, and then once more. When he received an e-mail, he would read it three times before replying. He would read news articles three times. Books; text messages; research papers; someone’s tax forms. He did this, he told people, to ensure that he remembered more information than those around him. When he was younger, he had heard that the brain retains only a small percentage of words when you read, so he reasoned that if he started consuming every snippet of text at least three times, he would remember more.
Sure, it was repetitive, but most of the things Gary did were.
Each of his mornings was a replica of the one before. Gary would commute exactly the same route to work, arriving at the IRS offices at exactly the same time and walking the same worn path through the same marble lobby.
There was no reception desk or waiting area on Gary’s floor, just two locked doors—one to the north and one to the south. On the wall of the hallway there was a poster of Al Capone, the American gangster who controlled the flow of liquor during Prohibition. The mug shot on the poster was there to remind employees that when it came to the Criminal Investigation division of the IRS, where Gary worked, it was good old math that took down Al Capone in the 1930s, not liquor bottles or smoking guns. And it was the IRS that landed the gangster in Alcatraz Federal Penitentiary, off the coast of San Francisco.
Like most of his coworkers, Gary had a strong New York accent. He’d grown up in the city, gone to college there, and now lived there with his wife and their fluffy Maltese-Yorkie mix, Paulie. But unlike other agents he worked with, who had grown up in high-rise apartments or the suburbs of Long Island, Gary had been raised in one of the city’s grittiest low-income housing projects.
He was born in the Marlboro Houses in Gravesend during the summer of 1977. The week of Gary’s birth, a brutal heat wave caused a lightning storm, which struck a power station and plunged New York City into complete darkness. Within a matter of hours after Gary entered the world, chaos ensued, with looting, riots, and arson sweeping across New York’s boroughs. (Gary used to joke with people that “I shut the city down when I was born!”) On top of the riots and power outages, New York was also being haunted that summer by a serial killer nicknamed the Son of Sam.
Gary didn’t last long in the housing projects. In the 1980s his family moved farther east, to Canarsie, after colorful crack vials from New York’s rising crack epidemic had started to line the gutters around Stillwell Avenue, where they lived.
Now, thirty years later, Gary sat amid the faded green and white cubicles at 290 Broadway, checking his e-mail (reading each one three times) and finishing up reports from previous investigations that involved people who had tried to hide money from the U.S. government in far-off countries.
But while Gary’s morning had begun like any other, it was about to change drastically. His phone rang with a call from the IRS supervisor, asking the young and ambitious agent to come into his office.
As Gary wandered into the room, taking a seat in an uncomfortable lime green IRS chair, his director immediately pounced. “There’s a task force we want you to join,” the supervisor said. (There would be no small talk here; this was the IRS, after all.) The supervisor continued, moving into an explanation of who, what, and why. The case, he told Gary, involved a Web site where you could buy drugs and guns. “What do you know about the Silk Road Web site?” (Gary knew nothing about the site and stared back with wide eyes.) “What about Tor?” (Nope. Nothing.) “And Bitcoin?” (Blankness.) “Well, that doesn’t matter,” the supervisor said. “The strike force is a drug task force, and you’re going to be leading the money-laundering side of the case.” (A tinge of excitement.) “It’s a big change, Gary.” (You’re damn right it is.)
The strike force, Gary was told, included local and state police investigators, DEA agents, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York. That alone made the case seem important to Gary. Finally Gary was told that he would be moving to a new office in Chelsea, a few dozen blocks north.
It was time to bring in the people with the calculators.
He left the supervisor’s office grateful for, and invigorated by, his new assignment. Back in his cubicle he immediately logged on to his computer and began reading as much as he could about the Silk Road, three times over.
He started with the Gawker article, then clicked on dozens of other newer links, scouring the words and images, until he leaned back in his chair, staring at his computer as pages of articles about the drug-dealing site and Bitcoin and Tor flickered on the screen. He knew full well, as his supervisor had told him, that teams of law enforcement had been searching for the creator of the Silk Road for almost two years, and each road they had traveled down had gone nowhere. He also knew that he would have to find a new investigation technique if he wanted to have any chance of taking down the site and its creator.
But how? he thought.
His mind spun in a thousand different directions as he tried to figure out how he could approach the case anew. Almost immediately an idea struck him. He thought back to a time in his life that he didn’t remember but that he had heard so many stories about: the summer of 1977, the year Gary Alford was born. He remembered the story of David Berkowitz, the American serial killer who had murdered six people and wounded seven others in New York City that year, the man better known as the Son of Sam. And Gary imagined that the way the cops had caught that ruthless serial killer would be the way Gary Alford could catch the leader of the Silk Road.