A few days earlier he had been working on the Silk Road when his new confidant and friend, Variety Jones, had messaged him with a bizarre question. “Have you even seen The Princess Bride?” VJ asked.
It was a completely random query, even for Variety Jones. And even more bizarre given that a few minutes earlier Ross had been talking to VJ about coding problems and drug sales. The movie he had asked about, The Princess Bride, was a cult dark comedy from the mideighties about a farmhand who becomes a pirate and has to save Princess Buttercup from a fire swamp.
A very random question from VJ, indeed. But often the conversations between the two men would veer in any number of directions.
Over the past few weeks they had chatted for several hours a day about a medley of different topics. Since they had become friends, there was barely an hour that went by without Ross and Variety Jones checking in with each other.
They had become so close that most evenings ended with some digital pillow talk. (“Alright, off to sleep. See you in a few,” Ross would write. “You make sure you get some sleep,” VJ would reply.) Most mornings began with another aloha to see how the other was doing. (“Hey, good morning,” one would say. “Howdy, rowdy,” the other would reply.) During the rest of their waking hours, they would banter about politics, the war on drugs, porn, and books, and laugh at each other’s jokes. VJ was always able to make Ross chortle. “My mailman is a drug dealer,” VJ wrote when a package arrived. “He just doesn’t know it.”
The bond between Variety Jones and Ross had blossomed so much that in recent weeks the longest period of time that had passed without them chatting was a two-and-a-half-day period over New Year’s Eve. As Ross rang in January 1 watching a fireworks show in Australia and fixing someone’s elbow after a drunken incident, Variety Jones was in London, fast asleep after dropping a couple of tabs of ecstasy, drinking two bottles of champagne, and passing out thirty minutes before the ball dropped. Their bond had grown so strong that Ross had even greeted VJ when he returned to work after the holiday by saying, “I missed you :).”
VJ was likable and funny and witty, but more important, he was someone whom Ross could really trust in a world where you couldn’t trust anyone. For the first time since he’d started the Silk Road, Ross Ulbricht had a best friend. Variety Jones, of course, was also making money from the friendship. Ross paid him for his services, sometimes as much as $60,000 at a time, which covered travel expenses and subordinate programmers who worked for VJ.
It was the perfect time for such a connection to blossom, as the stresses of running the site were only growing more intense. When it had begun, the site offered a few magic mushrooms and some weed. Now it was home to almost every narcotic imaginable, some of which were being sold in very large quantities. People were also hawking lots of different guns; you could buy Uzis, Beretta handguns, AR-15 assault rifles, endless rounds of ammunition, and silencers. All of this brought more press, with the media taunting the government, noting that it still hadn’t shut down the site. EIGHT MONTHS AFTER SEN. CHUCK SCHUMER BLASTED BITCOIN, SILK ROAD IS STILL BOOMING, read one headline.
The pressure this put on Ross was monumental. But his new best friend had a plan. A plan that was somehow rooted in a discussion about the movie The Princess Bride.
Ross replied to VJ’s query about the film with a sort-of yes: like many kids of his generation, his parents owned a copy of the movie on VHS.
“So,” Variety Jones wrote, “you know the history of the Dread Pirate Roberts?”
Ross couldn’t quite recall, but he began typing what he remembered about the movie and the name of the main character. When he was lost, Variety Jones finished the summary for him: something about a guy called Westley, who took on the name of the Dread Pirate Roberts from someone else . . . and over the years, a new person would take on that name, and the old one would retire. So no one knew who the original Dread Pirate Roberts really was.
“Yep,” Ross replied. That was it. That was the movie.
And then here it was. “You need to change your name from Admin, to Dread Pirate Roberts,” VJ wrote.
The words “Dread Pirate Roberts” hung on the screen as if they were suspended in some sort of alternate reality.
Dread. Pirate. Roberts.
What a brilliant idea. Ross loved it. Ooooh, that’s good. That’s really good. The moniker “the Dread Pirate Roberts,” who was technically a pirate, also went along perfectly with Ross’s “captain” analogy, which he had used on the site’s forums before.
VJ noted that, most important, changing his name to Dread Pirate Roberts would allow Ross to erase his old trail from the past, to maintain that he really had given up the Silk Road. It was the perfect alibi: saying he had retired and passed ownership, and the name of the site’s leader, along to someone else. “Start the legend now,” Variety Jones pressed.
Variety Jones had no idea how seriously Ross would take his suggestion, though he assumed Ross would be enthusiastic. Ross had already told VJ that two people knew about his connection to the Silk Road after Jones had wondered who, if anyone, might know. “IRL,” VJ had asked back in December (Web slang for “in real life”), “is there anyone with a clue at all” that you—whoever you are—started the Silk Road? “Girlfriend, boyfriend, bunny you talk to, online buddys who you’ve known for years? Gramma, priest, rabbi, stripper?”
“Unfortunately yes,” Ross had replied. “There are two [people], but they think I sold the site and got out.” Ross paused before going on to explain that he had told these two people a couple of months earlier that he had sold the site and given it away to someone else. “One [person] I’ll prob never speak to again, and the other I’ll drift away from.” He added: “Never making the mistake of telling someone again.”
Now, as the Lunar New Year approached, it was the perfect time for Ross to reinvent who he was. To forget about the troubles of the past year and to hope for a better year to come. And his new best friend, Variety Jones, had come up with a brilliant, astounding, amazing idea to solve not only the Julia Problem but also the Richard Problem, the Erica Problem, and any other problem that could arise from people who found out he had created the site.
Sure, if he was ever caught, Ross could hypothetically admit that sadly, yes, he had been involved in the early days of the Silk Road, but the site had just become too stressful. And if someone asked, “What did you do with the site after you stopped working on it?” Ross could respond that he “gave it away to someone else.” And if they asked, “To who?” he could simply say, “I don’t know who it was. All I know is that he called himself the Dread Pirate Roberts.”
Chapter 21
CARL FORCE IS BORN AGAIN