Though resentment had driven them apart, love (and sex) kept them in each other’s lives and they continued to date sporadically.
Soon after Ross moved out, Julia had convinced her friend Erica to move from New York City to Austin, renting the spare bedroom in Julia’s studio. Everything was moving along just fine until one evening, while partying, Erica had a bad acid trip from drugs purchased on the Silk Road and ended up in the hospital. When she returned, a fight erupted between her and Julia. Ross, who just happened to be there, tried to break up the brawl. This only exacerbated Erica’s and Julia’s tempers, and the fight grew so raucous that the police were called. Ross, who at first was trying to be helpful, soon lost his patience and pushed Erica out of the apartment. As Erica left in a taxi to the airport to return to New York City, Ross and Julia assumed that was the end of it. Good riddance, Erica; thanks for the story we’ll get to tell our friends tomorrow.
But the next morning, when Ross went back to his apartment, he opened his beloved laptop, and checked the stats on the Silk Road before navigating to his social media accounts. There, in all its terrifying glory, was a new message from Erica posted on his Facebook wall, publicly, for all to see. “I’m sure the authorities would like to know about Ross Ulbricht’s drug website,” she had written, like a giant neon billboard on the Internet.
The earth could have swallowed Ross whole. He began crying. He quickly deleted the message. Hands quivering, heart thumping, he picked up the phone and called Erica.
“Please, I am so sorry,” Ross stammered on the phone, tears streaming down his face. “Please promise me you will never tell anyone about the site.” Hearing Ross cry, sounding like he was going to kill himself, Erica assured him that she wouldn’t say anything to anyone and hung up.
But Ross’s mind swirled in a hurricane of thoughts. Who else knew?
Fudge!
There was only one person who could answer these questions. Ross got into his truck, floored it to Julia’s house, and then stormed up the stairs.
“You betrayed my trust!” he yelled. “Who else did you tell?”
“No one, I swear,” Julia pleaded as rivulets of tears rolled down her cheeks. “I can’t believe I told her. I’m so, so sorry. It was so stupid. It just came out of my mouth, I didn’t mean to—”
Ross grew angry. “You’re a liar. I can’t trust you.”
Hearing his accusations, Julia became defiant. “You left me alone in all of this. You told me all of this stuff and didn’t think about the risk to me.”
“This is a huge breach to my security,” Ross replied, “because someone actually knows me and knows my face and knows I made the site.”
Ross was remorseless and stern. Julia had broken his trust, and to Ross, that was much worse than any situation he had ever placed her in. Having simply uttered his name to someone else, having shared his most guarded secret in the world, she was done. Julia looked into his eyes, sensing that her explanation had only pissed him off more.
“Maybe this is a sign that you shouldn’t even be doing this site anyway,” Julia whimpered as she fell to the floor in tears, pleading for his forgiveness.
“No, it’s . . . not,” Ross stammered as he tried to calculate what he was going to do. “It means I’m going to have to hide. I’m going to have to leave Austin. All because of you.”
“I’m sorry, I’m—” Julia said, sobbing. But it was too late.
“This is over,” Ross said. He turned and walked out of the studio, the door slamming shut behind him.
Chapter 15
JARED AND THE FIFTY-TON FLAMINGO
Chicago’s Federal Plaza appeared dark and morose against the late-November sky—except for two specks of color that punctured the gloominess. There was the red-white-and-blue American flag, rattling voraciously in the wind. And the massive bright red sculpture, called the Flamingo, that stood motionless in the center of the plaza’s black pavement.
That fifty-ton Flamingo, with its abstract steel arches, was the first thing many people saw as they exited the L train onto the plaza, with most wandering past or below it as they headed into one of the adjacent federal buildings, including the post office, the courthouse, or the most intimidating of all, the thirty-story black tower at 219 South Dearborn Street known as the Dirksen Federal Building.
On a late-November morning in 2011, two men with the last name Der-Yeghiayan were inside the Dirksen Federal Building. On the nineteenth floor, fifty-nine-year-old Samuel Der-Yeghiayan adjusted his robes and court documents as he prepared for the cases he would hear later that day as a U.S. federal judge. Sixteen floors below Samuel’s chambers his thirty-one-year-old son, Jared, was walking through the halls of the U.S. Attorney’s Office, his giant backpack over his shoulder, which was bulging with laptops, a Rubik’s Cube, and folders with pictures of evidence inside. In his hands he carried a large white mail-room tub filled with thirty or so envelopes of all shapes and sizes.
Young Jared Der-Yeghiayan’s nerves were frayed as he made his way toward what would be the most important meeting of his career. It wasn’t lost on him that if he screwed this up, the story of his fuckup would make its way up all those flights of stairs to his father’s office.
Jared had traded the baggy street clothes he wore at O’Hare for an oversize black suit and a crisp white shirt. His group supervisor from HSI followed behind at a leisurely pace. The two men arrived at the office of the assistant U.S. attorney for narcotics, who oversaw all prosecutions of drug-related cases in the state of Illinois.
After a few introductions Jared dropped the mail tub in his hands onto the office floor with a thud. The attorney looked down at the container, then back at Jared, noticeably confused. This wasn’t exactly what the attorney had expected to see when he agreed to this meeting about drug smuggling through the Internet. A picture of a couple of big bricks of heroin? Sure. Some salty white kilos of cocaine? Yeah. Pounds of marijuana? You betcha. But a box of empty envelopes in a mail carton? Not so much. Still, the attorney sat back to see what this was all about.