He surveyed the damage. The mystery novels lay on top of the computer-programming books. The science fiction and romance section of Good Wagon Books was crushed beneath everything. It quickly dawned on Ross that when he had built the bookshelves, with his mind clearly preoccupied by the Silk Road, he must have forgotten to tighten several screws. The result of those actions could have killed him.
He quickly rushed back into his office to call Julia and tell her the story. But as he told her about the noises and the mess, Ross also realized that the books falling was not actually an inauspicious event that would cause him more stress and turmoil. This was serendipitous. Maybe it was a sign from God, fate, or sheer luck. But it meant that Ross now had an excuse to shut down the book business and let his part-time employees go. He could tell everyone that rebuilding the shelves and reorganizing the books would just be too laborious. He could do all of this without seeming like he was giving up.
Now, rather than split his time among the Silk Road, Good Wagon Books, and Julia, he could focus on just two of those things. Though one was about to put the other in jeopardy.
Chapter 11
THE GAWKER ARTICLE
The Café Grumpy coffee shop in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, looked like every other hipster enclave in America. Laptop screens glowed while headphones blared silently into people’s ears. The men and women who sat sipping overpriced coffee wore the uniform of hipster Brooklyn: skintight jeans and bohemian tattoos that crawled up their arms and across their fingers. Outside was the industrial wasteland of McGuinness Avenue, the thoroughfare that connected Brooklyn and Queens above the sewage-laced Newtown Creek. Chop shops and gas stations lined the streets. A few trendy condos were going up—a sign that this subset of creative types, who huddled around their laptops each day, were an endangered species too. For now, though, they were the linchpins of the gentrifying neighborhood, this rump state, and Café Grumpy was its capital.
Most of the people in that coffee shop were writers trying to learn how to blog, or bloggers trying to learn how to write. A new class of creatives, living their own unique American dream, freelancing and hoping to be read by someone, somewhere.
Amid these writers sat Adrian Chen, a young Asian man, seemingly lost in his own world at his laptop as he scrolled through a long discussion on a Web forum. The chatter he was reading, with skepticism and disbelief, was about a Web site on the Dark Web that was being labeled the “Amazon for drugs.”
On the forum some people complained that this Web site, called the Silk Road, was dangerous—that selling heroin on the Internet could kill people who didn’t know how to use “H.” Or that this new drug bazaar could give the new digital currency, Bitcoin, a bad name—while others contended that this site might make buying drugs safer and that it perfectly took advantage of online anonymity in a way that had never been done before.
But Adrian thought something entirely different: This has to be a hoax. After all, he knew the underbelly of the Internet better than almost any writer alive. He had been a blogger for Gawker, a New York–based gossip site, for almost two years. While working the weekend and graveyard shifts, he had become synonymous with finding and writing about trolls and hackers online. He trod through the dark, dangerous side of the Web and brought back stories of people doing crazy, fucked-up things.
But was anyone really crazy enough to set up a Web site like this? he wondered. Adrian knew there was only one way to find out. He downloaded Tor and navigated to the Silk Road, and sure enough, someone was.
You could buy any drug imaginable, he saw—by his count 343 different kinds of drugs, to be precise. Black tar heroin, Afghan hash, some Sour 13 weed, and ecstasy. All for street prices; in some instances less expensive than street. You simply traded some cash for Bitcoins, traded some Bitcoins for drugs, and waited for the U.S. Postal Service to deliver your drugs.
Adrian was skeptical, though, that if the Silk Road was real, anyone would actually buy drugs on the site. He registered an account on the forums under the username Adrian802 (802 was his area code from Connecticut, where he had grown up). He then posted a query asking if anyone would mind being anonymously interviewed for a story he was going to write about this defiant Web site.
He received some responses, then a man’s phone number, and while pacing on the sidewalk outside Grumpy, he interviewed Mark, a software developer, about what it was like to buy drugs on the Internet.
“It kind of felt like I was in the future,” Mark said over the phone, explaining that he’d ordered ten tabs of LSD from someone in Canada, and four days later the mailman dropped the acid off at his house.
Another person responded to Adrian’s query too: the person who apparently ran the Silk Road.
? ? ?
As the Silk Road had grown, Ross’s anxiety had expanded at an equal clip. When he had first posted anonymous messages on forums less than five months earlier, he had been oblivious to just how quickly it would drive people to the site. At first it was a trickle of customers, a few dozen here or there, but since he had shut down Good Wagon Books, his drug Web site had rapidly grown. Hundreds of people were now selling drugs on the site, and thousands were buying.
Ross was making money from his enterprise too. The mushrooms, most of which he had offloaded, had turned into a hefty profit of tens of thousands of dollars.
All of this came with a mixture of exhilaration and fear, and Ross had been in a constant state of worry, fretful that maybe Julia was right, that he could be tied to his creation. He constantly had to reassure himself that no one would ever be able to connect him with the Silk Road.
That was, except for two people.
Weeks earlier, Ross had been left with no choice but to tell his old college buddy Richard that he was the founder of the Amazon of drugs, as Richard had refused to help anymore without an explanation. “Tell me about this or leave me out of it,” Richard wrote to Ross over chat. “I’m officially forbidding you from mentioning your secret project to me again unless you’re going to reveal it.” Without Richard’s expertise, Ross was completely and utterly “fudged.” If the site went down, Ross would be abandoned alone in a dark and complex maze. So he was left with no choice but to come clean.