But the pile of digital money introduced a whole new set of problems. Besides the issue of turning it into cash—and doing so without the tax man finding out—more money meant more customers, and that brought a slew of issues. There were the rampant conflicts on the site between dealers and buyers, slowing servers overloaded with new visitors, and a lot more attention from law enforcement.
“All that money won’t be worth much if we’re behind bars,” Ross wrote to VJ as they discussed the site’s vertiginous growth and the anxiety that came with it—anxiety that Ross knew he had to take ahold of, or it would take ahold of him, inevitably leading to a mistake. A mistake was the surest way to be caught. And being caught was the absolute last thing Ross, VJ, or the tens of thousands of people now buying and selling on the site wanted.
“We need . . . contingencies,” VJ argued, “and a plan.”
So with Variety Jones’s guidance, Ross came up with just that: a plan.
First and foremost, Ross would leave Australia and go home. Traveling had given him some much-needed perspective, but months on the road had also given him a whole new set of worries. At first he had found solace and comfort staying with his sister in Australia. He fell in love with the idyllic climate and the fun that came with that, including being battered around by the Bondi Beach waves. With no day job to tie him down, Ross had soon set out for a month jaunting around Asia. Looking just like every other backpacker trekking through the islands around the Pacific Ocean, he stayed in youth hostels and ate noodles from roadside vendors. The only difference between him and the throwaway friends he met along the way was that they were mostly broke college students exploring the world before they moved back to America or Europe to get a job and settle down. Whereas Ross was surreptitiously running the biggest drug-dealing Web site in the world and was personally worth millions of dollars.
Blending in had been easy, with his scarce belongings and scraggly hair. That was, until something went wrong on the site.
Ross had been left with no choice but to try running the Silk Road from Internet cafés and glacially slow Wi-Fi hot spots across Asia, which meant every single time he had to check the site there were dozens of prying eyes to peer over his shoulder. This meant that in the middle of conversations he would tell his employees he had to relocate.
“I’m going to move location,” he wrote, “brb.”
“Moving location.”
“I don’t like this spot anymore.”
“Gotta move, I’ll be right back.”
“Changing location.”
Sometimes he would just slam his laptop shut if someone caught a glimpse of his computer screen. Then he would scurry away (hopefully) unnoticed. But often he didn’t have any choice but to be stuck near the Internet, hovering like a fly waiting for a dog to take a shit. Under the guise of the Dread Pirate Roberts, Ross told his confidant, “I organize my life around being on my computer in private.” And this lifestyle was killing him.
“Brb, gotta move.”
In one of the more nauseating experiences, while on his travels, Ross had set off to a sleepy surfer town in the middle of the jungle in Thailand. The plan was to lap up the waves, enjoy the beach, hike through the palm trees, maybe smoke some weed, and (if all went well) meet a pretty young backpacker. Except something went catastrophically awry on the site the moment he pulled into town. Someone had started stealing Bitcoins from his account as a result of a major programming error. Ross had no choice but to fix it right there and then—and it wasn’t an easy fix.
He was holed up from morning until night in the local Internet café, incessantly biting his nails while he tried desperately to stop the Bitcoin robbery, all while locals and backpackers lackadaisically wandered down the jungle town’s dirt roads, drank beers, and surfed in the warm ocean waves. (“The people there thought I was a nut,” Ross later told Variety Jones. “There I was 18 hours a day on my laptop chewing my nails off. All these mellow people on vacation lookin at me like wtf is up with that guy?!”)
Adding to this anxiety, Ross was terrified that someone would see the Silk Road logo or images of drugs on his screen or ask questions about the code he was writing. Worse, a local, trying to gain favor with his local cop buddies, might anonymously alert the authorities.
The anxiety could be petrifying when he was at his most lucid. Given that Ross’s site was making it possible to buy drugs from anywhere with Internet access, he was technically a wanted man all around the world. That meant he could be subject to the laws of almost any country on the planet. And the last place Ross wanted to be arrested for enabling the sale of vast amounts of drugs was in Southeast Asia, where Westerners had been hanged when they were caught trafficking mere ounces of heroin.
So there was only one thing to do. When it was clear that Erica’s Facebook post had gone unnoticed and that no one else suspected him of being anyone but Ross Ulbricht, he set a date to return to Texas. That alone didn’t resolve the anxiety of running the site. But Ross had a plan there too. He promised Variety Jones that he would start taking long walks, eating healthier meals to stay focused, and tripling his daily meditation quota to at least thirty minutes before he went to sleep. With VJ counseling him, Ross was going to try to handle the stresses that came with running the biggest drug Web site the world had ever seen.
As for the nails? On April 10, a few days before he left Australia, he walked into a pharmacy, slid a few dollars across the counter, and walked out with a bottle of anti-nail-biting formula.
He excitedly told Variety Jones about his new purchase. Ross said that he was going to apply the magic ointment to his nails at least once a day for the next week. “Time to kick the habit,” he told VJ.
But he wouldn’t be able to kick it for long. Upon returning to America, Ross was going to discover that not only had the Silk Road grown immensely over the past few months, but law enforcement’s zeal to capture the Dread Pirate Roberts had too.
Chapter 24
CARL, ELADIO, AND NOB
For a DEA agent, going undercover was one of the most exciting, and equally nerve-racking, aspects of the job. If you did it right, you could catch some unscrupulous people; if you did it wrong, those people could catch you.
Carl Force had learned this lesson the hard way, as a newbie DEA agent almost fourteen years earlier, when one of his first assignments was on a case in the small town of Alamosa, Colorado.
Carl had ended up there after arresting and then turning an informant, who promised to help facilitate some drug buys with the local dealers. The town was just north of the New Mexico border, so it was a perfect smuggling port to get coke and meth into the country.