But Variety Jones and DPR both knew it wasn’t contests and the Silk Road alone that would get Ross to his coveted billionaire status. The site needed to diversify into other markets and to reach a larger set of customers. They discussed an entire genre of underground Web sites that would borrow from the Silk Road brand. SilkDigital could be for downloadable digital goods, like stolen software and tools for hackers. SilkPharma would be for pain meds, uppers, or downers. Maybe they could build a site for weapons, they reasoned. But these expansions would take work. So Ross had decided to come down to Costa Rica, to his parents’ patch of paradise, to focus on this exact problem.
His mother and father didn’t have a clue what their son was working on. How can you look at your own flesh and blood, who was once a Boy Scout, then a physicist, who donated books to the local prison in his early twenties, and think, Oh, maybe he’s becoming one of the most notorious drug dealers alive? You can’t. It doesn’t enter the mind. When Lyn and Kirk looked at their son, they saw a brilliant and idealistic twenty-eight-year-old who spent so much time on the computer because he was trading stocks.
Ross believed the day would come when the movement he’d launched would become unstoppable and prove to the U.S. government that the only way to win the war on drugs was to legalize them completely. Then, and only then, would the Dread Pirate Roberts be able to remove the mask, and Ross Ulbricht would step out onto the world’s stage and take a bow. His mother would proudly look at her son, the hero of the libertarian movement, a movement that had first been planted in Ross’s mind as a tiny seedling at his parents’ dinner-table discussions back in Austin.
Though Ross and VJ knew that wasn’t going to happen just yet.
As Ross sprung out of the water in Costa Rica, he rinsed the sand off his body and scarfed down breakfast before scurrying away to work on his laptop in private, hidden from prying eyes. “I’m in a magical place right now to be sure,” he told Variety Jones when he logged into their chat window. “I’m stoned on oxygen and the sea breeze.”
But that now-familiar specter of something bad was looming again, and VJ had something else to talk about.
“Dude, I’m worried about our winner,” Variety Jones said, referring to the person who had won the 4/20 contest and was about to be awarded the all-expenses-paid vacation and a few thousand dollars in cash.
“Whasamatta?” DPR replied.
“He’s trying to dry out; Heroin; it’s not working, and I think his recent influx of cash didn’t help.”
“Oh geez. Fuck, what are we doing,” DPR said, then joked: “Shoulda thought more carefully about dropping $4k on an addict; maybe our next prize will be 3 months in rehab.”
“Yeah,” VJ said. “It does show we’ve got problems Gillette doesn’t have in their promos.” Variety Jones then joked that their next promotion should be “Win 3 months in Rehab! The more drugs you buy, the more chances you have to win!”
As Ross changed the subject of the conversation to more pressing issues, specifically how to expand the Silk Road and grow the business so he could reach that special ten-digit number, the calm Costa Rica sky was starting to turn a deeper gray. A violent storm was on the horizon, ominously moving closer to land.
Chapter 29
VARIETY JONES GOES TO SCOTLAND
It was dark and quiet in Glasgow, Scotland, as the clock in the hotel room wound past 2:00 a.m. and a middle-aged man, sitting at his computer, sipped some water to quench his thirst.
The man known as Variety Jones was balding and disheveled, his T-shirt stained and stretched at the neck, his eyes worn and droopy like a plastic figurine left too near a fire. This was a man who had been through hell and back, his body ravaged by years of disease, drugs, and jail, but he had clearly enjoyed the trip.
On his computer screen a number of windows sat splayed open. One had some sort of programming code and another appeared to be a chat window with two people talking.
The man with the droopy eyes clicked on the chat box and then began typing.
“Tappity tap tap,” he wrote to DPR, then pressed the “return” key.
A moment later there was a reply: “Taparoo.”
“I’m in the land of 12 Euro tins of beer in a mini fridge,” Jones wrote. “Oh joy!”
“Hello hotel bill.”
VJ had been lying low in London with his girlfriend for the past few months while he worked on the Silk Road for his unofficial boss, the Dread Pirate Roberts. Mostly their relationship had gone swimmingly. Their skill sets were complementary, and they largely shared the same worldview. But a fissure had begun to surface. After Jones had come to Glasgow to celebrate his uncle’s death—yes, celebrate: as VJ told DPR, the “Jones” clan “threw bigger funerals than weddings,” with the casket in the middle of a pub and a revelry of dancing and drinking, made up of four hundred friends and family, flowing around the deceased uncle—he had logged on to check in with DPR and resolve a moral disagreement they were having.
It wasn’t often that they argued. The relationship between Jones and Dread was impenetrable, and a true and tight friendship had developed between the two men since a year earlier, when they first met through the Silk Road. Their alliance had blossomed over their shared belief that drugs should be legal, and guns too. VJ was a loyal servant and companion. He had even talked about buying a helicopter company to break DPR out of jail if he was ever caught. “Remember that one day when you’re in the exercise yard, I’ll be the dude in the helicopter coming in low and fast, I promise,” he had written to Dread. “With the amount of $ we’re generating, I could hire a small country to come get you.”
But even with that bond, fundamental disagreements over the direction of the site would crop up, and Variety Jones was trying desperately to steer DPR in a new direction on a particular topic.
It wasn’t even up for debate in VJ’s mind that the Dread Pirate Roberts was as libertarian as they came and that he believed the Silk Road should be a place to buy and sell anything. There were no rules and no regulations, and as a result there was something illegal for sale on the site for literally every letter of the alphabet. Acid, benzos, coke, DMT, ecstasy, fizzies, GHB . . . but it was the letter H that had Variety Jones in a very difficult quandary. He was fine with everything before and after that letter, but heroin—he hated it.
“I don’t even have a problem with coke,” VJ wrote to DPR, but “H, man—in prison I’ve seen guys—I wish that shit would go away.”