Nope. Not going to happen. Carl had zero interest in chatting with a drug lord by committee. So after mulling over the e-mail from DPR, he decided to go rogue and reply anyway.
“I could pay nine figures but I am not sure Silk Road is worth that, as of now,” Carl wrote under his pseudonym Nob. And then he offered a proposal that he was sure would help capture the site’s leader. “I would like to do a spin-off for the major dealers called ‘Masters of the Silk Road,’” in which big vendors on the site can facilitate drug deals in the hundreds of kilos, or even tons, rather than in ounces. Nob assured DPR that he could help with this new Costco for drugs, if you will, because he knew smuggling routes all over the world. Finally, he offered the Dread Pirate Roberts an injection of $2 million for 20 percent ownership of this new “Masters of the Silk Road” operation.
He hit “send” and then bounded into Nick’s office to tell him, with rebellious glee, what he had done. Nick, obviously, was incensed, responding to Carl’s confession with a fusillade of “Fuck you!” and “Fuck this!” and “Fuck that!”
Carl didn’t give a shit what Nick thought. Sure, he was his boss, but Carl knew no one could fire him for something like this. That was the one benefit of the red tape that came with a government job; getting fired was often much harder than getting hired. As for those “mopes,” as Carl called them, over at HSI Baltimore, he could give even less of a shit what they were going to say.
As far as he was concerned, Carl was talking directly to the leader of the Silk Road. And if his scheme worked, he’d develop a relationship with DPR. And if that worked, Agent Carl Force would have the Dread Pirate Roberts locked up in a matter of weeks. The founder of the Silk Road would be behind bars, and Agent Force would be lauded as the hero who caught him.
Chapter 28
THE ASPIRING BILLIONAIRE IN COSTA RICA
Everything was so calm. The ocean, the air, the sky. Ross consumed it all in one gasp and felt happy to his core. It was early morning in Costa Rica, and the wind blew softly from the east, across the placid water where he sat bobbing on his surfboard.
The looming mutiny that had been bubbling to the top of the Silk Road for the past few months had finally fizzled out, though some of those behind the insurrection had left for new, much smaller, competitors on the Dark Web.
With those troublemakers gone, the site was now running relatively fluidly again—employees were toiling away under the direction of the captain, Dread Pirate Roberts—and it was continuing to grow at a staggering pace. Ross’s profits were multiplying by the second, quite literally, as the value of Bitcoins was dramatically increasing. It was as if he stuck a dollar bill in his pocket before he went to sleep and found two (or even three) dollars there the next day. As a result, his personal net worth was well into the tens of millions of dollars.
He was tightening up security protocols too. To be sure that the people who worked for him had not been compromised by the cops, Ross made his closest advisers adopt a question-and-answer system that only those two people would know. So if he asked one of his employees, “How’s the weather?” the employee would have to reply with the exact phrase: “Boy, is it cold here in the Bahamas.” If the employee said something else, like “Oh, fine, how is it with you?” Ross would know something was amiss and could immediately shut down their account. Each employee had their own question and answer. “[If I say] can you recommend a good book?” Ross wrote to another underling, “you reply, ‘Anything by Rothbard.’”
But more important than any of that was that Ross had finally figured out how to put the issue of Julia’s knowledge about the Silk Road to rest—something he would address once and for all when he returned to Texas in a couple of weeks.
He had flown down to Costa Rica at the end of May to stay at the hidden plot of magic that his family owned there: a four-acre enclave called Casa Bambu at the southern tip of the country’s peninsula. Paradise with an Internet connection.
This place was special to Ross for many reasons. When he wasn’t in Texas as a child, he had come of age here, exploring the jungles with his sister, sitting on the porch with his mother, listening to the howler monkeys, and learning how to surf on a mini foam surfboard with his father. But Ross loved Casa Bambu for a more salient reason: it had been one of the influences that led him to start the Silk Road. Twenty years earlier his parents had fallen in love with the area while on vacation and decided to build a family holiday home in the pasture. Ross’s dad (along with a few friends and locals) built four cabanas that made up a tranquil solar-powered Swiss Family Robinson retreat. The Ulbrichts rented the space to tourists part of the year, so paradise paid for itself, and then some. This accomplishment had made Ross want to pursue a similar goal of starting something from scratch.
And boy, had he ever.
Ross had confided in Variety Jones about some of his lofty earlier dreams and how they now seemed within reach. Specifically Ross shared a silent declaration he had made to himself in 2004, that by the time he was thirty years old, he would be worth $1 billion.
For so long it had seemed he would fail dismally at that quest. Yet now, two months after he turned twenty-eight, the goal wasn’t so out of reach anymore. As Ross said to VJ in one of their long conversations, when he looked at the current trajectory of the Silk Road, if he calculated the future sales of the enterprise, “it could happen.” He could very well be a billionaire in two years.
When Ross showed VJ the latest Excel spreadsheets outlining the revenue and projections of the Silk Road, VJ responded with a shocked “Fuck me!” then added, “A hundred million is starting to look lite for 2012! On for a billion in 2013!”
“Giddy up,” Ross replied.
To get there, though, they would need to continue expanding. DPR and VJ had been experimenting with different ideas to grow the site, including a “4/20” contest where people could enter a raffle and win different illegal things, and some legal ones, including an all-expenses-paid vacation with some additional spending money.