It was time to go into hiding.
But this time, rather than the Dread Pirate Roberts having to disappear, it was Ross Ulbricht’s turn.
A lot of other terrible things had happened since the murder of Green. Someone was looking for DPR as retribution. The heat was onto him too, with FBI, DEA, HSI, and a slew of other agencies scurrying around the Silk Road site—a sign that there was no fucking around right now. Time to begin an emergency landing.
It was early June 2013, and Ross had no choice but to go through the list he had put together months earlier. The “in case of an emergency” checklist. “Find place to live on craigslist for cash,” he had written to himself back then. “Create new identity (name, backstory).”
As he scrolled through rental listings on Craigslist, he came across the perfect place: his own room in a three-bedroom house on Fifteenth Avenue near San Francisco’s Outer Sunset, where he could pay cash to cover the $1,200 monthly rent. He anonymously e-mailed the lessor and, following step two on his checklist—“Create new identity (name, backstory)”—rather than calling himself Ross Ulbricht, he used a completely fictitious name, Joshua Terrey. Another name that he reasoned could never be traced back to him.
But creating a new identity was going to be difficult. After all, there were already two people: Ross and DPR. If he had to remember details about a third person, lies would get complicated very quickly. To ensure that Ross didn’t forget much about Joshua, he stuck to stories he knew when he e-mailed his new potential landlord. He explained that he, Josh (for short), was twenty-nine years old, was from Texas, and had recently returned from a trip to Sydney, Australia. “I am a currency trader and do some freelance IT work as well,” Ross, as Josh, wrote to the couple who were renting out the apartment. “I mostly keep to myself, spending most of my time working.”
Ross wouldn’t have to worry about any of his real-world friends, like René or Selena, finding out about his new alter ego Josh, as he had a plan to keep everyone separate, never having his old friends over to his new place or his new roommates out to meet his old friends. As for Kristal coming down to visit from Portland, well, that had imploded almost as quickly as it had ignited. As soon as things started to deepen, Ross lost interest. How could you sustain a relationship with someone when you were only giving them half of yourself? As he had confided in his pals, both in the real world and on the Silk Road, he wanted a family one day. Just not yet and just not with Kristal.
But that didn’t matter, because just as Ross was going into hiding, another special someone was slowly but assuredly coming back into his life. The person he had sworn he would never talk to again: Julia.
This was not part of his checklist.
Prior to deciding to lie low for a while, he had been reading a book on productivity, which offered a message that wasn’t too dissimilar to the approach he’d taken in his college days, when he’d trimmed the unnecessary banalities in his life by not showering for a month or eating only a bag of rice for a week. One of the messages in the book was that the reader should “reboot” their online calendar by starting anew. When he had done just that, the computer had canceled an old event with Julia and automatically sent her a message letting her know.
“How have you been?” she wrote back to him. “Still think you are amazing.”
This led the onetime lovebirds to start e-mailing each other sporadically. While it was just flirting right now, maybe it would become something again in the future. If nothing else, it was a nice distraction from the chaos of his now many other worlds.
As Josh, Ross went to the house on Fifteenth Avenue and took a brief tour. He was introduced to the people who rented the other bedrooms in the house and, after handing the cash to Andrew Ford, the man who was renting the room, Ross moved right in.
Josh’s new roommates were unaware that the twenty-nine-year-old Texan who was now unpacking his few belongings, arriving with literally a laptop and a small bag of clothes—enough for a week’s travel—was really called Ross Ulbricht. And they certainly didn’t have any suspicion that he was also the Dread Pirate Roberts, who had tens of millions of dollars in Bitcoins on his laptop and in thumb drives in his pocket. To the roommates, Josh appeared to be a quiet and polite day trader, not the man who over the past few months had ordered the murders of half a dozen people on the Silk Road.
Yes, there had been more people put to death at the hands of the Dread Pirate Roberts.
Shortly after the drowning and subsequent killing of Curtis Green, someone else had tried to scam DPR out of $500,000 in Bitcoins. Though, unlike in the previous case, where the money was just stolen and needed to be dealt with accordingly, this extortioner had threatened to release hundreds of real names and addresses of Silk Road users that had somehow been stolen. The only way to avoid this, DPR was told by the extortioner, was to pay $500,000.
But Ross wasn’t going to fall for this again, so he had recruited a new group of henchmen, the Hells Angels, whom he had met through the site, to find the thief and have him killed. “This kind of behavior is unforgivable to me,” DPR explained to the Hells Angels over chat. “Especially here on Silk Road, anonymity is sacrosanct.”
The cost for this hit had been quoted as $150,000 for a “clean” murder. Dread wasn’t happy about this price, as he told the Angels; he had paid half that for a previous murder.
Still, negotiating with a group of ruthless thugs wasn’t exactly an easy task, and $150,000 was nothing to Dread at this point, so he agreed to the fee. Over the coming days a picture of the dead man and an e-mail arrived in DPR’s in-box. “Your problem has been taken care of. . . . Rest easy though, because he won’t be blackmailing anyone again. Ever.”
Unfortunately, this didn’t end the problems for Ross. Shortly before the Hells Angels had murdered their prey, the extortioner had admitted to spilling his secrets to four other associates, one of whom went by the moniker “tony76” on the Silk Road. Without skipping a beat, DPR paid $500,000 to have them killed too.
In Ross’s diary on his computer, he wrote about what he had done. “Sent payment to angels for hit on tony76 and his 3 associates,” which was followed by an update about some complicated work he had done on the servers of the site that day: “Very high load (300/16) took site offline and refactored main and category pages to be more efficient.”
It seemed that murder, like code, was becoming easier to execute with practice.
To top off all of this chaos, DPR had been issued a death threat from someone called DeathFromAbove, who claimed to know that he had been involved in the murder of Curtis Green. Ross also had another scare when a screwup with the coding on the site leaked the server’s IP address. If someone from the FBI or elsewhere had been watching, they would have been able to figure out where the server that ran the Silk Road was—something Ross had kept hidden for more than two years.
And so the mix of the murders, the death threats, the Hells Angels, and the heat that came with them made it imperative for Ross to go into hiding.
Variety Jones had done the same thing too, moving to Thailand to try to avoid being caught if things went up in flames. VJ explained that he had corrupt cops on his payroll there, so he would know if anyone was coming after him and would easily be able to scurry away before the Feebs knocked on his door.
While all this turmoil was raining down on Dread, there had been a good development. VJ was no longer the only person with crooked cops on his payroll. DPR had managed to hire a couple too.
He had put out some feelers to his network on the site, offered up some incentives here, some more there, and it appeared he might have an informant in the government who would keep him apprised of the hunt for the Dread Pirate Roberts, for a fee. The cost, the informant said, was going to be a measly $50,000 for each droplet of intelligence. It was still unclear how this would all play out and whether the details would help him evade the Feds. But it couldn’t hurt to try.
Thankfully for DPR, the site was bustling with business. By the end of July, the Silk Road was on track to register its one millionth user. All in the span of a little over two years. Ross could never have imagined that the first small bag of magic mushrooms he had sold on the Silk Road would grow into a site where he was helping a million people buy and sell illegal drugs and other restricted goods. Even with all this stress now being catapulted in his direction, this salient fact was amazing to him.
So paying an informant $50,000 here or the Hells Angels half a mil for a couple of murders there was just the cost of doing business. It barely put a dent in the site’s profits.
Thankfully for Ross, he had become an adept and confident CEO of the Silk Road. There was no question now that he was in charge, and while others supported him, DPR was the final arbiter of every decision and no longer sought the approval of his onetime mentor, Variety Jones.
As the boss, Ross often reminded some of his employees that “we are out to transform human civilization.” And he offered long and inspiring lectures to them, learning how to motivate the troops when tensions tightened. Which was exactly what some of his workers needed right now, with all the pressure on the site from hackers and law enforcement.
“Let me tell you a little parable,” Dread wrote to one employee. “It’s the middle ages in Europe. . . .” He went on with the story: A man walks onto a construction site and he sees a group of laborers carving stone blocks for a building. Most of the men are working slowly, with long, unhappy faces. “What are you doing?” the man asks the laborers, to which they reply, “What does it look like we’re doing? We’re carving stone blocks.” But then the man sees another worker who has a glint in his eye and a smile across his face. This worker seems to be toiling at twice the speed of the others, and his stone carvings are impeccable. So the man goes over and asks him, “What are you doing?” To which this laborer looks back and answers: “I’m building a cathedral to the glory of God.”
“If someone asked you what you’re doing,” DPR continued to his employee, “would you say ‘dealing with people’s problems’ or ‘working to free humanity’?”
This was why Ross had to go into hiding: because there was too much to lose. He wouldn’t be working from René’s spare bedroom anymore. He wouldn’t be traipsing off to Momi Toby’s café on Laguna Street to hole up in his favorite coffee shop and work on the Silk Road. With so many government agencies searching for DPR and “DeathFromAbove” looking to kill him, it was imperative that he become more careful.
So as the bedroom door on Fifteenth Avenue near the Outer Sunset closed, the men outside in the living room assumed that their new roommate, “Josh,” was getting to work trading stocks or doing some freelance IT support.
But inside that room, Ross, Josh, and DPR knew that they were all working together to build their “cathedral to the glory of God” and, in doing so, working to free humanity from the tyranny of the U.S. government.