Gary sat silently in his cubicle, growing increasingly frustrated as he listened to the conversation going on around him. A conversation that took him back to that fateful morning exactly twelve years and one day earlier. The day the world changed.
He had been a student at Baruch College at the time, and he had seen the first responders charging toward the towers. Later that morning, as he walked home to Brooklyn across the bridge, the World Trade Center had crumbled behind him, leaving 2,606 people dead.
In the days after the attacks, as the reality of what had happened to New York City—to America—set in, Gary had started to learn some of the names and faces of those who perished. Each morning on his path to school he walked along Lexington Avenue past a building called the Armory, which was covered in flyers of the thousands of people who were now missing in the plume of dust. It quickly became clear that none of those people, whose pictures looked back at him helplessly, would ever go home to their loved ones.
As was true for all New Yorkers, the stories people told of that day could feel palpable to Gary. But nothing was as real as the conversation taking place in front of him right now, over a decade later—on September 10, 2013—between the two men on the task force who were now sitting next to him in adjacent cubicles. These two men, it appeared, had run toward the towers that fateful day and then spent weeks digging through the dust and debris for survivors, mostly finding death.
“You getting your medical tomorrow?” Gary overheard one of them, an NYPD detective, in the cubicle in front of him say to another from New York’s Clarkstown Police Department. As Gary listened, the two men talked briefly about their breathing issues and other ailments that still lingered twelve years later. They talked about other first responders they knew who had developed serious illnesses, some who had even died. As Gary overheard this, he grew increasingly irate as he thought about what terrorists had tried to do to America in 2001 and what he saw the Dread Pirate Roberts trying to do to America in 2013.
Gary had read all of DPR’s writings (three times) and had seen the Dread Pirate Roberts proclaiming to his legion of followers that the government’s time was “coming to an end”; that the state was the “enemy”; that people should have utter disdain for federal authorities, including everyone who sat in the room with Gary at that moment. The same men and women who had run toward the World Trade Center on September 11 and who tomorrow would have to go to the hospital for health checkups for their heroic efforts.
As these thoughts all piled up atop one another, Gary had had enough. He spun around in his chair, looked directly at another detective on the Silk Road task force, and with vexation in his voice proclaimed, “I think I’m right. You know? I think it’s him.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s him. Ross Ulbricht,” Gary said.
“You really think you’re going to find him from a Google search?” Gary’s coworker said.
Gary had suspected that Ross Ulbricht might be in some way involved with the Silk Road and had mentioned it to his coworkers months earlier, but the lead had gone nowhere. They couldn’t pursue a case against someone based on the mere fact that they had posted about the Silk Road on the Internet. But after Gary had seen the IP address from a café in San Francisco on the wall at the FBI office, the city where this Ross Ulbricht character apparently lived, he had become convinced that he was at least involved, if not actually the Dread Pirate Roberts.
“Yes!” Gary said, his hands animated, his voice growing louder. “I’m right. I’m telling you, I’m right.”
After a few minutes laying out the facts again, Gary stood up and announced that he was going to go back through the case again, starting from the beginning. Just as he had read every e-mail, blog post, news article, and forum posting three times, Gary was going to go back through his investigation three times, from start to finish. Maybe, he reasoned, he had missed something.
He wandered away from his cubicle and around the corner to a woman nearby who worked for the Department of Homeland Security. “I need you to run Ross Ulbricht’s name,” Gary told her as he sat down in an empty seat nearby, requesting the same background check he had done on Ross months earlier. Gary didn’t expect the woman would find anything new. He just wanted to see if some small detail had floated by unnoticed. A speck of DNA, a parking ticket, anything.
After a minute the records loaded onto her screen. The woman first reviewed Ross’s travel record, noting that he had gone to Dominica, a data point that Gary knew about and that he thought was suspect, as criminals often hid money in the Caribbean. She kept going through Ross’s file and then she stopped suddenly. “You know there’s a hit on this guy?” the woman said.
“What?” Gary asked, confused.
“Yeah, there’s a hit on this guy from a few weeks ago.”
Gary was in shock as he heard the word “hit.” He was simply trying to dot his i’s and cross his t’s three times over.
“You want me to read it?” the woman asked.
“Yes!”
She read aloud, explaining that Customs and Border Protection had “seized counterfeit identity documents” and a Dylan Critten from DHS had visited Ross Ulbricht at his house on Fifteenth Avenue in San Francisco. The file she read from noted that Ross’s roommates had said his name was Josh, not Ross, and that Josh paid for his room in cash. She paused, looking over at Gary for a moment, and said, “You want me to keep reading? Is this helpful?”
Gary’s brow furrowed. What he was hearing was surreal. “Yes!” he blurted out. “Keep reading! Keep reading!”
She turned back to her computer and continued. In addition to the Fifteenth Avenue address, it appeared that Ross had lived on Hickory Street in the center of San Francisco. And then she began reading the report Dylan had written, verbatim. “Ulbricht generally refused to answer any questions pertaining to the purchase of this or other counterfeit identity documents,” she read. And then, like some sort of practical joke, she read the following sentence: “However‚ Ulbricht volunteered that hypothetically anyone could go onto a Web site named ‘Silk Road’ on ‘Tor’ and purchase any drugs or IDs.”
Gary’s heart began thudding in his ears. It didn’t add up. This was all too much for it to be a coincidence. Gary immediately charged toward his supervisor’s office and burst into the room, adrenaline coursing through his veins.
“It’s him!” Gary bellowed. “It’s him!”
The supervisor told him to calm down and then listened to Gary make the case for why it was Ross Ulbricht—a case that was now more convincing than before, yet the supervisor cautioned that there were still many details that didn’t make sense. Still, Gary was told to take a deep breath and to call the U.S. Attorney’s Office to explain.
• • •
When Serrin Turner answered the phone, he didn’t expect to hear an agitated IRS agent on the other end of the line. “Slow down,” he said as Gary jumped right into his tirade. “Which guy are you talking about?”
“The guy who I think has been running the site,” Gary said.
“What about him?”
Gary began a convoluted speech, laying out everything from the Google search results to the travel to Dominica—all of which he’d mentioned to Serrin a few weeks earlier while Gary had gone through a list of other potential suspects, but this time he added the details from the DHS report, noting the story of the fake IDs, the phony name “Josh,” and the mention of the Silk Road Web site.
Serrin wasn’t sold by the evidence Gary had just delivered, but he was intrigued. “And this guy lives in San Francisco?” Serrin asked. “What’s his address?”
As Gary read the address from the DHS report, Serrin began typing it into Google Maps. The map on his screen zoomed across the United States into the jagged protrusion of San Francisco, then down to Hickory Street, which sat almost in the middle of the seven-mile-square city. As Gary spoke in the background, Serrin clicked on the address on the map and then entered the only other piece of evidence that tied the Silk Road Web site to a person or place: Momi Toby’s café on Laguna Street in San Francisco.
“Holy shit!” Serrin blurted aloud. “It’s around the fucking corner from Momi Toby’s café, where we found the IP address.”
Gary leaned back in his chair as Serrin leaned forward in his.
To Serrin it made no sense that a kid with no programming background, whose Facebook photos were mostly moments of him camping, kite-boarding with suburban friends, and hugging his mother, was responsible for creating what authorities now believed was a multibillion-dollar drug empire. And what made even less sense was that this kid had ordered the cold-blooded murders of almost half a dozen people. Nope. It simply didn’t add up. But it also didn’t add up that this kid lived a block away from Momi Toby’s café, that he was the first person on the Internet who had ever written about the Silk Road, and that he had been caught buying nine fake IDs.
“I’m going to send out an e-mail to Jared and Tarbell,” Serrin said. “I want to get us all on a conference call.”
• • •
The office in the Dirksen Federal Building, where Jared sat, was completely sparse. There were no computers or books in the room, just a solid oak desk and a phone that Jared was now reaching for.
He looked at the e-mail he had received from Serrin a few minutes earlier and began dialing the number for the conference call. As the phone rang, Jared sat back in his chair, slouching exhaustedly as he blankly stared out the window at Chicago’s skyline.
• • •
Tarbell walked into his house in New York, greeted his wife, Sabrina, and the kids, and said he had to hop on a quick conference call. He walked into his bedroom and began his evening ritual, kicking off his dress shoes and suit and replacing them with a stained pair of Adidas shorts and a T-shirt. He then belly flopped onto the bed with a thud. He was so tired he could have closed his eyes at that moment and slept for a month. But instead he let out a deep, exhausted sigh and reached for the devices in his bag.
Like a casino dealer fanning out a deck of cards, Tarbell placed his laptop, iPad, and phone out in front of him. He then dialed the conference-call number from Serrin’s e-mail and stared blankly at his iPad, which lay in between the two other devices, displaying the map Serrin had sent out an hour earlier.
• • •
“Gary.”
“Serrin.”
“Tarbell.”
“Jared.”
“We all here?”
“Yes.”
Serrin began speaking, giving Jared and Tarbell a recap of the conversation he had wrapped up with Gary a few minutes earlier. He then asked Gary to tell them what he had found.
Gary began talking with a sense of urgency in his voice. He explained about the Google search and how the very first reference to the Silk Road online originated in a forum post on the Shroomery Web site in late January 2011, from a person with the username Altoid.
Tarbell and Jared were somewhat nonchalant about the evidence Gary was presenting. Maybe Altoid was just an early user on the site. And coincidences were easy to find in a case this large. God knew there had been dozens of coincidences with other people. Agencies had ruminated over the leader of the Silk Road being the CEO of a Bitcoin exchange, a Google engineer, or even a professor at a U.S. university. Others had believed it was an inner-city drug dealer or possibly the Mexican cartels now working with programmers. And some had surmised that it was Russian hackers or Chinese cybercriminals. Yet here was Gary Alford, insinuating that the ruthless, deriding, and wealthy Dread Pirate Roberts was a twenty-nine-year-old kid from Austin, Texas, who had no programming background and who was living in a $1,200-a-month apartment in San Francisco.
Jared wasn’t sold. Tarbell wasn’t, either. And Serrin knew that if they weren’t, he certainly wasn’t. Jared, after all, had spent the most time with DPR, working for him for months undercover and chatting with him extensively online. Plus, Jared had an entire office full of fake IDs and people admitting they had gotten them from the Silk Road, and they certainly weren’t DPR.
But Gary continued to talk.
“And then I found a question posted on Stack Overflow, where a user by the name of Ross Ulbricht had asked about coding help with Tor. You know?” Gary said. “And then, a minute after he had posted the question on Stack Overflow, he went in and changed his username from Ross Ulbricht to Frosty, and then—”
“What did you say?” Tarbell interrupted, sitting up in his bed.
Gary was caught off guard by the question but answered anyway. “Stack Overflow. It’s a site where you can post programming questions—”
“No, not that,” Tarbell said, his tone coming across as aggressive. “What did you say after that?”
Gary explained that Ross Ulbricht had signed up for an account on Stack Overflow with his real e-mail as his username, but a minute after asking a question on the site, he had changed the username to Frosty.
Jared and Serrin listened silently, unsure of what this all meant.
“Frosty?” Tarbell said, now sounding amped. “Are you sure?” He then impatiently spelled out each letter: “F-R-O-S-T-Y—as in ‘frosty’?”
“Yes! Frosty!” Gary replied, growing annoyed that Tarbell was being so rude. “And he later changed his e-mail address to frosty@frosty.com. What’s the deal? Why do you keep asking that?”
“Because,” Chris said, taking a deep breath, “when we got the server from Iceland”—he took another breath—“we saw that the server and the computer that belonged to the Dread Pirate Roberts were both called ‘Frosty.’”
The phone line was dead silent, just a hush of air as the four men sat contemplating what they had all just heard.
Finally the speechlessness broke. “Well,” Serrin said. “That’s interesting.”
As this settled in, Jared looked up “Ross Ulbricht” online, and came across his YouTube page, where, amid a dozen videos about libertarianism, was the title that Ross had given his YouTube account: “OhYeaRoss.” There it was, the word that DPR used all the time in his chats with Cirrus: “yea.”
No h at the end, just “yea.”