American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road
Nick Bilton
Author’s Note
My mother, who passed away in 2015 and who was a voracious reader, had a strange quirk when it came to books. She began every book by reading the last page first, then returning to the beginning. Every novel, for her, began at the end.
I tell this story because, for this book, I have decided to place the beginning—traditionally the preface, in which the author explains how the book was made—at the end.
In the “Notes on Reporting” I explain how I reported and wrote the pages you are about to read, detailing the millions of words and research, photos and videos, thousands of hours of reporting (including research from the incredible reporters Josh Bearman and Joshua Davis) that went into the creation of this book, and in doing so, I give away how the story ends. I hope reading about the reportage won’t ruin this epic tale for you, but it seems unnecessary to explain how a structure was built before you’ve had a chance to wander through its halls.
In the book, you will see quoted conversations between the Silk Road leader and employees of the site. These are verbatim chats. With the exception of illegible typos, any spelling errors or peculiarities in the text have been left as is to preserve the authenticity of the conversations.
With that, I promise all will be revealed at the end. It always is.
Cast of Characters
The Silk Road The Dread Pirate Roberts (Ross Ulbricht) Variety Jones, consigliere and mentor (Roger Thomas Clark) Nob, drug dealer and henchman (Carl Force, DEA) ChronicPain, forum moderator (Curtis Green, Spanish Fork, Utah) Richard Bates, friend and programmer OTHER SILK ROAD EMPLOYEES
SameSameButDifferent, Libertas, Inigo, Smedley Law Enforcement
DHS, CHICAGO
Jared Der-Yeghiayan (undercover as “Cirrus” on the Silk Road) MARCO POLO TASK FORCE
Carl Force, DEA, Baltimore (undercover as “Nob” on the Silk Road) Mike McFarland, DHS, Baltimore
Shaun Bridges, Secret Service, Baltimore FBI, NEW YORK CITY
Chris Tarbell
Thom Kiernan
Ilhwan Yum
IRS, NEW YORK CITY
Gary Alford
U.S. ATTORNEY’S OFFICE, NEW YORK CITY
Serrin Turner, assistant U.S. attorney
PART I
Chapter 1
THE PINK PILL
Pink.
A tiny pink pill with an etching of a squirrel on either side. Jared Der-Yeghiayan couldn’t take his eyes off it.
He stood in a windowless mail room, the Department of Homeland Security badge hanging from his neck illuminated by pulsing halogen lights above. Every thirty seconds, the sound of airplanes rumbled through the air outside. Jared looked like an adolescent with his oversize clothes, buzz cut, and guileless hazel eyes. “We’ve started to get a couple of them a week,” his colleague Mike, a burly Customs and Border Protection officer, said as he handed Jared the envelope that the pill had arrived in.
The envelope was white and square, with a single perforated stamp affixed to the top right corner. HIER ?FFNEN, read the inside flap. Below those two words was the English translation, OPEN HERE. The recipient’s name, typed in black, read DAVID. The package was on its way to a house on West Newport Avenue in Chicago.
It was exactly what Jared had been waiting for since June.
The plane carrying the envelope, KLM flight 611, had landed at Chicago O’Hare International Airport a few hours earlier after a four-thousand-mile journey from the Netherlands. As weary passengers stood up and stretched their arms and legs, baggage handlers twenty feet below them unloaded cargo from the belly of the Boeing 747. Suitcases of all shapes and sizes were ushered in one direction; forty or so blue buckets filled with international mail were sent in another.
Those blue tubs—nicknamed “scrubs” by airport employees—were driven across the tarmac to a prodigious mail storage and sorting facility fifteen minutes away. Their contents—letters to loved ones, business documents, and that white square envelope containing the peculiar pink pill—would pass through that building, past customs, and into the vast logistical arteries of the United States Postal Service. If everything went according to plan, as it did most of the time, that small envelope of drugs, and many like it, would just slip by unnoticed.
But not today. Not on October 5, 2011.
By late afternoon, Mike Weinthaler, a Customs and Border Protection officer, had begun his daily ritual of clocking in for work, pouring an atrocious cup of coffee, and popping open the blue scrubs to look for anything out of the ordinary: a package with a small bulge; return addresses that looked fake; the sound of plastic wrap inside a paper envelope; anything fishy at all. There was nothing scientific about it. There were no high-tech scanners or swabs testing for residue. After a decade in which e-mail had largely outmoded physical mail, the postal service’s budgets had been decimated. Fancy technology was a rare treat allocated to the investigation of large packages. And Chicago’s mail-sniffing dogs—Shadow and Rogue—came through only a couple of times a month. Instead, whoever was hunting through the scrubs simply reached a hand inside and followed their instincts.
Thirty minutes into his rummaging routine, the white square envelope caught Mike’s eye.
He held it up to the lights overhead. The address on the front had been typed, not written by hand. That was generally a telltale sign for customs agents that something was amiss. As Mike knew, addresses are usually typed only for business mail, not personal. The package also had a slight bump, which was suspicious, considering it came from the Netherlands. Mike grabbed an evidence folder and a 6051S seizure form that would allow him to legally open the envelope. Placing a knife in its belly, he gutted it like a fish, dumping out a plastic baggie with a tiny pink pill of ecstasy inside.
Mike had been working in the customs unit for two years and was fully aware that under normal circumstances no one in the federal government would give a flying fuck about one lousy pill. There was, as every government employee in Chicago knew, an unspoken rule that drug agents didn’t take on cases that involved fewer than a thousand pills. The U.S. Attorney’s Office would scoff at such an investigation. There were bigger busts to pursue.