Ross closed his laptop, crawled under the soft white sheets on his bed, and slept for fourteen long hours.
When he woke up, sounds from the Caribbean were waiting outside his window. Birds—seagulls, pelicans, and colorful parrots—talked among themselves as the sound of the water washing over the rocks below trickled into the hotel. He walked out onto his balcony and looked off to the right, where the cruise ship dock sat empty. To his left he could see Champagne Beach and the top of Pointe Michel. It should have been the perfect morning in paradise, but when DPR went online, he found himself back in a living hell. While Ross had slept, the attackers had returned with a vengeance, and the Silk Road was completely incapacitated. A hacker who went by the moniker “JE” had e-mailed DPR and demanded a $10,000 Bitcoin bounty to stop the assault. DPR messaged his consigliere, Variety Jones, and asked what to do. “Pay,” VJ counseled.
After all, $10,000 was nothing to DPR these days. Considering the Silk Road was now, on average, facilitating a quarter million dollars in sales each day, an hour of the attack was costing DPR more than the hacker’s measly ransom fee. (The $10,000 fee soon turned into a demand for a $25,000 payoff.) Reluctantly he sent the money.
“Had to swallow my pride there,” DPR wrote to Jones after transferring the Bitcoins to the aggressor. But the site was back alive—again, just for now. Before the pummeling resumed, there was a lot of work to do to plug holes in the ship. VJ said that he would work with Smedley to get everything back in order and prepare for new assaults. “Take some time to meditate,” Variety Jones told DPR. “Get centered ‘n shit.”
Ross was grateful that the relationship between the two men was now back at its peak, and they had started offering affectionate quips to each other once again, especially when they signed off the site at night. “Love ya :)” Dread would write to VJ, who replied, “Dude, you know I love ya’ too, eh.” At other times they would end the day with “smooches ‘n shit” and a “smoochie boochie” back.
So when Variety Jones told Dread to go and meditate, that’s exactly what Ross did. He closed his laptop and set off through the hotel in search of a Jacuzzi. The resort was a stunning three-hundred-year-old inn that sat along the edge of the island. On the roof there was an infinity pool, and next to it a steaming hot tub. Ross slipped into the frothy water, his body feeling lighter under the weight of two worlds sitting on his shoulders. As he peered at the splendid Caribbean Sea, he took a deep breath and calmness enveloped his mind.
These types of chaotic issues, like hackers and ransoms, didn’t bother Ross for long. In many respects he had started to enjoy them.
“How lucky are we to get these problems,” he had written to VJ. “I always wanted big problems on my plate; never knew if I’d get there.” And such problems, he explained, had Ross thinking about his legacy and what he would leave behind when he was gone.
“Winning the drug war is gonna be easy,” Jones said.
“I think that’s more or less a foregone conclusion,” Ross replied.
DPR wasn’t the first pirate to visit Dominica. For hundreds of years it had been home to real raiders, the ones who hid their booty in the caves around the archipelago. Now pirates like Dread could hide their digital wealth in bank accounts around the islands without worrying about the U.S. government reaching in and grabbing any of it.
“My top priority right now is getting a new citizenship,” Ross had told Variety Jones, who had in turn counseled, “Make sure your plan includes at least two backup locales.” While Ross was in Dominica, he had also started exploring other countries, including Italy, Monte Carlo, Andorra, Costa Rica, and even Thailand, as alternate places to live if he went on the lam.
But disappearing came with its consequences. Ross worried about those closest to him and whether he could handle never seeing them again. “I grew up here,” he said to VJ about leaving the United States. “My family is here.” And more important, he admitted, one day he wanted to start his own family. “The worst part is that I have no one to talk about this stuff with,” Ross wrote. “It just bounces around in my head.”
Jones knew that feeling better than anyone, and he counseled his friend as best, and as sternly, as he could. “Best advice I can give right now is plan on a few years without emotional attachments,” VJ wrote. “Ex’s can put you in jail for life.”
“I’m not complaining about any of this,” Dread wrote back, noting that this was a “great fucking problem to have.”
Over the following two weeks Ross tackled his objective methodically. The process of getting citizenship wasn’t as easy as dropping a bag of hundred-dollar bills, or a thumb drive of Bitcoins, on someone’s doorstep. Ross had to gather letters of recommendation from some longtime Texas friends, telling them that he was exploring a citizenship in Dominica because there were some interesting tax opportunities for non–U.S. citizens. Then there were official forms to fill out, documents to submit, background checks, and even a medical exam. All annoying but necessary officialdom Ross had to go through for the sake of DPR and his future should he have to follow his emergency plan.
When he wasn’t dealing with his citizenship application, Ross made friends in Dominica. There was Lou, a midthirties, sinewy local island woman who showed him the coves and shantytowns and poured him lots of liquor–and–Coca-Cola drinks, a Dominican specialty. He spent time at the beach, kicking a soccer ball back and forth with Kema, another local. He swam in the Lagoon River at sunset, then spent the evening under a gazebo on Purple Turtle Beach, eating barbecue, plantains, and rice, partying late into the night as the sound of the waves trickled onto the shore in the distance. It really was paradise.
When his new friends asked Ross what he was doing in the country, he simply replied, “I’m here on business.” Sadly for Ross, that wasn’t far from the truth.
He was forced to spend more time than he would have liked on his trip dealing with the growing pains of the site. Ross had to oversee customer-support tickets that seemed endless, with people complaining about drugs not arriving on time, the site being too slow, or harassment on the forums. There were more hackers to fend off with even larger ransoms, the Feds to hide from, and his employees to inspire. Fudge, this was hard work. But Ross’s bank account was brimming with his bounty. When things were difficult, all he had to do was look at the spreadsheet with those numbers, and those numbers would look back at him, the ultimate pep talk to keep going.
Thankfully for DPR, during this particularly tumultuous moment there was relief in sight: Silk Road Movie Night!