It was more than a year after the trial until the last employee was arrested for working on the Silk Road. And yet he was, without question, the site’s most influential. One of the highest-ranking advisers and one of the most prolific dealers, he went by the curious moniker “Variety Jones.”
For a while it seemed that Jones would actually get away. He had been holed up for more than two years in a small beach town in Thailand. He paid off some local cops, and whenever anyone started to come close, Jones was able to evade the authorities.
Jones had been sitting in a hotel room in Asia, watching the news, when he discovered that his friend and boss, the Dread Pirate Roberts, had been arrested. Well, you could knock me over with a feather! Jones thought at the time, seeing a picture of Ross Ulbricht on his television.
Like everyone associated with the site, VJ followed Ross’s trial religiously, getting to know more about the former Boy Scout and physicist he had advised and helped mold into the Dread Pirate Roberts. But unlike others, VJ got to see just how influential he had been to the site’s leader, as the diaries from Ross’s computer were presented as evidence in court. “This was the biggest and strongest willed character I had met through the site thus far,” Ross had written about his friend and consigliere, Variety Jones. “He has helped me better interact with the community around Silk Road, delivering proclamations, handling troublesome characters, running a sale, changing my name, devising rules, and on and on. . . . He’s been a real mentor.”
There was also another piece of evidence that was talked about in the trial: The Feds had found the folder on Ross’s laptop with the IDs of all of his employees, including a picture of a passport that belonged to a fifty-four-year-old Canadian man whose real name was Roger Thomas Clark. A man whom authorities soon discovered was hiding out in Asia.
On an early morning in December 2015, through a joint operation of the FBI, DHS, DEA, and local Thai police, VJ was captured in a small room in Thailand. As the cops barged into the hideout, placing him in cuffs, the first thing Clark said was “Call me Mongoose,” referring to a more famous nickname he had used on other drug forums, “The Plural of Mongoose.”
But while they had captured the man behind Variety Jones, attempts to divine his past revealed a conflicting and complex picture. There were signs that Clark was truly a dangerous criminal, far more dangerous than DPR had ever imagined. But there were other clues online that painted a picture of a broken man who hid behind a computer with one goal: to torment the world.
Or maybe the Internet allowed him to be both.
Stories about Clark and his identities go back decades online. Some allege that Clark was once the most powerful weed dealer in Europe. Others talk about people who crossed him and whom he had sent to jail in a setup. One person alleged that he was multiple people and that the real Roger Thomas Clark died many years ago. Other tales about Clark and his early associates are rife with theft, murder, drug busts, shoot-outs, and international intrigue.
Clark himself, or at least a version of himself, has claimed in the past that he has multiple sclerosis; that his muscles are wasting away; that he suffers from muscle cramps, spasms, or twitching; and that “any 7 year old kid in a playground could beat the heck out of me, without having to put down their ice cream.” He is believed to have family abroad, in England and Canada, some in Scotland too, none of whom he has spoken to in years.
By all accounts Clark was someone to be wary of.
In 2006 a reporter for High Times, a magazine devoted to marijuana, wrote a story about a collection of characters who used to sell weed seeds on online forums, and while the reporter spoke to a number of people for the article, he chose not to interview Clark, whom he thought of as a dangerous puppet master. The man now known as Variety Jones was known to infect people’s computers with viruses and to tell long and elaborate stories, and no one really knew whether they were true—except, of course, for Roger Thomas Clark.
When Clark was arrested in Thailand, the agents snapped a photo of him with a smartphone, and the message was sent to their counterparts in the United States. In the grainy, low-resolution image a disheveled and broken man peered up at the camera through his droopy eyes. His gaunt, ravaged body looked like it belonged to a man who had been to hell and back and who had loved every moment of the trip.
Now that man is sitting in the Bangkok Remand Prison. There, a team of lawyers are fighting his extradition to the United States, where he will stand trial for narcotics trafficking and money laundering and could face life in prison.