Variety Jones was open about the time he had spent in jail. He told long and funny stories about people he had met behind bars and explained the ins and outs of getting around the system, including how cans of “mackerel” were the currency of choice in the British prison he had been confined to years earlier. “I treat [prison] like being in a 3rd world country with poor communications infrastructure,” he joked.
But he told Dread about his time in jail not for amusement but as a prelude to sharing a story about what he had seen heroin do to people in prison: In lockup they drug-tested you randomly, but they performed these exams only during the week, on Monday through Friday. Everyone inside knew how long each drug lasts in your system. If a prisoner smoked some weed, for example, it would show up in his piss for up to a month. As a result, no one ever smoked weed behind bars. But heroin only sticks around in your bloodstream for two days, tops. Which meant that if you injected H on a Friday, it was out of your system by Monday morning, just in time for the drug tests to begin.
“On Fridays,” VJ wrote, “folks would go wild on H.” And in the maximum-security wing where he was housed, H days had been nicknamed Hell Days, because that’s exactly what they were like. “Guys would jam a week’s worth of H in 4 hours.” The wails from the inmates who were under were followed by moans as they came to and then a week of vomiting and tweaking as they spun out, unable to sleep, jerking and tugging and twisting in their beds as they waited for the following Friday to arrive, when they could ease the pain from the Friday before, and the cycle would begin anew.
“It wasn’t pretty in there then,” VJ said. “They just wanted to sleep.”
Now, long out of jail and the deputy of the biggest drug site the world had ever seen, VJ found himself in a moral predicament.
DPR had been talking to the South American smuggler, Nob, about transporting massive amounts of heroin through the United Kingdom and selling it in bulk on the Masters of the Silk Road site. But before they could even begin building such a site or taking money from Nob, DPR wanted to ensure this Nob character was legit. So he had asked VJ, his consigliere, to help facilitate an early test deal.
Morally, though, Jones told Dread, “I don’t think I could make money off importing H. If you want to, I’ll offer all the help and advice you need, but I don’t want to profit off of it.”
Ross had never seen the effects of heroin in person, as he noted to VJ that the experience of Hell Days “sounds awful.” But it still didn’t deter him from his belief system. As Ross had argued back at Penn State, it wasn’t his place to say who could put what into their body. “I’ve got this separation between personal and business morality,” DPR explained to VJ. “I would be there for a friend to help him break a drug dependency, and encourage him to not start, but I would never physically bar him from it if he didn’t ask me to.”
Variety Jones contemplated how hard he should press the issue. He had been doing his best to counsel the Dread Pirate Roberts, but sometimes DPR’s ego got in the way. On more than one occasion VJ had lost his patience. “You should be acting like Steve Jobs, not Larry the Cable Guy,” he had written to DPR about a previous debate. “Leaders lead, they don’t throw out things willy nilly, and wait to see who follows what.”
Often Dread would try to defend his ideas, but there was no grappling with Variety Jones; a maestro on the keyboard, he was a master debater, a true contender who could have stood up to Ross on any topic—and often did.
The conversation about H dragged on for a while, but there was no sign that DPR was ever going to relent. So, while sitting in that dark Glasgow hotel room, VJ ultimately decided to let DPR win the discussion about heroin.
There were two reasons, though. The first harkened back to the last time he had let a disagreement like this cause a rift between him and a business partner, years earlier when VJ co-ran a Web forum that sold weed seeds online. That dispute had destroyed that enterprise and, according to Jones, had ended in a shoot-out in Texas.
But more important, Variety Jones decided to let the issue go because he had much bigger plans for his involvement in the Silk Road. While the Dread Pirate Roberts didn’t know this yet, VJ didn’t want to just be an employee; he wanted to be co-captain of the ship.
Chapter 30
THE ARMORY OPENS
Ross had anticipated a lot of different scenarios for the Silk Road, but not this. In his mind, years earlier, he had envisioned a free market where anyone could buy or sell anything without being traced by the government. There would be no bureaucrats telling people what they could sniff, swallow, or inject. It would be completely free and open. And that was exactly what the site had become.
Yet to some of the buyers and sellers on there, this freedom was a problem. The mellow people who bought and sold weed on the site didn’t want to be associated with the speedy people who bought and sold cocaine. Some of the hard drug dealers didn’t want to be in the company of the right-wing crazies who hawked guns. And some of the gun guys didn’t want to be in the same shopping cart as the scummy heroin dealers. Round and round it went.
Even though all these people were dealing in illicit activities, they each had a moral sense that their particular outlawed product was more just than another.
Variety Jones was preternaturally aware of these hidden dynamics. He had been warning his boss about this for some time, pressing Dread to at least get the guns off the site so he didn’t lose the weed sellers. This would also help mainstream customers feel more comfortable shopping in the drug aisles. “So grandma can come here for her cheap Canadian pharma meds,” VJ wrote, “and not trip over a Glock 9mm” handgun on the way to the cash register.
Ross saw things differently. The ability to accept anyone was in many ways Ross’s superpower. He had practiced this philosophy from high school to the Silk Road. So he found it perplexing that others couldn’t just go about their business and enjoy the free world he had created.
Because of his unflinching acceptance, there were now more than two thousand different types of drugs for sale on the site, as well as lab supplies to make your own drugs and products to store and sell those drugs. There were digital goods, including key loggers, spy software, and other similar tools to hack into someone’s e-mail or webcam. People could buy forged documents, including passports, fake IDs, and even counterfeit cash that was indistinguishable from real money. And then there was the most contentious section of the site, labeled “weapons,” which had grown so much that you could buy everything from handguns to AR-15 automatic weapons. You could pick up bullets, grenades, and even a rocket launcher if need be.
But if Ross wanted to keep growing his flourishing business, he needed to appease the more conventional customers, libertarian or not.