The informant set up a few meetings to get the initial operation off the ground, but things went haywire almost immediately. Whenever Carl would show up for an undercover drug buy, the informant would spin into a panic, frantically telling Carl that he looked too much like a cop and, as a result, was putting the entire operation (and possibly both of their lives) in serious danger.
Carl didn’t like to be told what to do, but upon peering into a mirror he realized the informant was right; he looked exactly like a cop. So Carl decided to go through a mini physical transformation. He got his ears pierced with golden hoops, grew his hair out, and started to dress less like a DEA agent and more like someone who sold drugs for a living.
To ensure he couldn’t be fingered as a Fed, he also took on a made-up persona that had an elaborate backstory. This taught Carl the crucial lesson that you don’t just show up to an undercover operation and simply say you work in the world of organized crime. You have to show someone that you do.
A decade later, as he sat in the DEA office in Baltimore, staring at the user registration page for the Silk Road Web site, he was about to apply that lesson again.
Carl had done his homework, prepping for this very moment. But before he could sign up for an account on the site, he had to figure out who he was going to be on the Silk Road. Unlike in his real-life undercover work, this time he would be hidden behind a keyboard, which meant he could be whoever, or whatever, he wanted. He could be black, white, Spanish, or Chinese. Male or female, or something in between. The online world was his stage; he just needed to decide who would come out from behind the curtain.
Carl started with what he knew, plucking stories from his time down south, and he settled on the character of a smuggler from the Dominican Republic who siphoned $25 million of mostly coke and heroin into the United States each year. He gave this character the name Eladio Guzman, notably adapting the surname of the world’s most famous analog drug lord, El Chapo Guzmán, the head of Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel. He then created an elaborate history for his Guzman, saying that he knew people all over South America to traffic drugs, launder money, or have people killed. Oh, and he was blind in one eye and wore an eye patch as a result.
To ensure everything about him seemed real, Carl had a fake driver’s license created by the DEA with his real photo and his new made-up name.
But on the Silk Road people wouldn’t use their real name, even if it was fake. So, in the same way that the leader of the site called himself the Dread Pirate Roberts, Carl would need to create a moniker for his made-up persona. Again, he decided to pick his nickname from something else he knew well: the Bible. Call it a gut feeling, years on the job, or overconfidence, but he wanted the nickname he chose to illustrate what was going to happen as a result of his work on the Silk Road. And so he chose a name from the Bible of a city that was destroyed by a king: the town of Nob.
So Carl Force would become Eladio Guzman, the Dominican drug smuggler, who would go by the online nickname Nob.
He went home and told his twelve-year-old daughter he needed her help. He grabbed a piece of white paper and with a black marker aggressively scribbled “ALL HAIL NOB.” He then placed an eye patch over his fake blind eye, pulled a dark hoodie over his bald head, and held up the piece of paper as his daughter snapped a picture of him.
Then he signed up for an account as Nob.
For the past month Carl had been meeting with the Baltimore agents to discuss a strategy for their probe. The plan wasn’t too different from Jared’s. They would try to build up a case (obviously a competing one, as they knew Jared was already working his own Silk Road investigation out of Chicago) by arresting dealers and then working their way up the ladder. There had been countless meetings to discuss this strategy, though Carl thought such a path would be too laborious.
Or Carl could just say “fuck it” and try to knock on the big boss’s door.
He chose the latter. On Thursday, April 21, at around noon, Carl sat at his computer, transformed himself into his new drug smuggler identity, and wrote an e-mail to the Dread Pirate Roberts. “Mr. Silk Road,” he began. “I am a great admirer of your work.” This accolade was followed by a brief explanation that Nob was a man of “considerable means” who had been in the drug business for more than twenty years. He noted quite frankly that he saw the Silk Road as the future of drug trafficking and that, most important, he had a proposal: “I want to buy the site.” He hit “send” and waited for a reply.
When the HSI team in Baltimore found out what Carl had done, they were irate. This wasn’t part of the plan. Carl had gone rogue before they had even decided what they were going to do. There were calls from supervisors to the assistant special agent in charge, or ASAC, whose main job was to ensure that people like Carl didn’t go rogue. But Carl didn’t really care. He just kept looking at his e-mail, waiting for a reply from the Dread Pirate Roberts.
He checked that afternoon—no reply. The following morning: still nothing. Tomorrow, he reasoned. The Dread Pirate Roberts will reply tomorrow.
Chapter 25
JARED’S CHICAGO VERSUS CARL’S BALTIMORE
Jared’s tiny HSI office was starting to look less like an office and more like an extension of the mail center at Chicago O’Hare. Circling the room along the walls were dozens of tubs piled as high as a small child, all filled to the brim with envelopes—around five hundred in all. These packages all had one thing in common: they had at one point contained drugs purchased on the Silk Road.
Above those piles of mail, the office walls were decorated with printouts and photos of the different drugs—pills, baggies, rocks—that had once been inside those envelopes.
It was clear that Jared, who didn’t take no for an answer, had fallen deep into the Silk Road case with his stubborn obsessiveness.
He had been working on a system to try to figure out which envelopes (and drugs) came from which vendors on the site. When a package was discovered by the customs officials, no matter what time of the day or night, Jared would get in the Pervert Car and drive to the airport, pick up the narcotics, snap pictures, and fill out seizure documents before returning everything to his office. Then it was off to the Web site to look through every single picture of the drugs for sale and try to figure out where the package had come from.