Inspired by the clubs he had joined back at Penn State, and as a remedy for his loneliness, Ross had started Movie Night on the Silk Road, as well as the Dread Pirate Roberts’s Book Club.
For tonight’s film, DPR had instructed everyone on the site that on “Friday the 16th, at 8 pm EST,” they should simultaneously press “play” on the movie V for Vendetta (with a link to download the film). The movie, DPR told his shipmates, was about a country under occupation by a police state and a vigilante known only as V, a masked marauder who fights against the government.
Sure enough, at 8:00 p.m. Eastern, people from all over the world, including those in America, Thailand, and Australia, pressed “play” on their laptops as the picture began. And on the island of Dominica, Ross sat in his hotel room watching the film, enamored by its message. It was as if some lines had been written by DPR himself. “People should not be afraid of their governments,” V says in the film. “Governments should be afraid of their people.”
Over the following week, as DPR worked on the site, he was invigorated by the message in the film. But unlike V in the movie, Ross had a different goal in mind: he was making money, lots of it.
If the Silk Road had been valued as a start-up in Silicon Valley, it would now easily have been one of those fabled unicorns, worth a billion dollars or more. Venture capitalists would have been salivating to meet with the site’s CEO and invest millions more in the company. While most start-ups are in the red for the first few years of their existence, the Silk Road had mushroomed to be worth more than the value of the entire country Ross was visiting right now, Dominica. But for now it wasn’t a company; it was an illegal entity. It didn’t have a CEO; it had a leader who was a pirate. A pirate who at this moment was packing his bags at the Fort Young Hotel, preparing to leave paradise.
After two weeks on the island, with his citizenship application now going through the system, it was time for Ross to return home.
The trip back to the United States took almost two days, Ross finally touching down at San Francisco International Airport after the four-thousand-mile journey.
On the surface it seemed that the trip had gone unnoticed, that the Dread Pirate Roberts had slipped in and out of the United States without detection—which was true. But Ross wouldn’t be so lucky.
As an American customs official swiped his passport into a digital scanner, Ross William Ulbricht didn’t know that his name and where he had just traveled from were now being converted into a million ones and zeros. Or that this information was now traveling from the customs official’s computer across the country, in mere milliseconds, through the same wires that enabled people to buy and sell drugs on the Silk Road, and landing in a database that belonged to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
Chapter 38
CARL LIKES DPR
On paper the Marco Polo task force was an all-star team of talent, composed of Carl Force at Baltimore’s local DEA and other agents hailing from various local departments of the federal government, including the postal service to help with seizures and the Secret Service to trail the money (Carl, of course, was in charge of the drugs). In the months since the task force had been realized, the group had proclaimed that it would be the first in the United States to crack the Silk Road case.
Yet almost from the start the Marco Polo crew was entangled in disorder.
First there were the serious turf wars that emerged. If you were the one who took down the site, you’d be lauded as a hero forever. This case could change a career. As a result, some on the task force were backstabbing more experienced agents to try to gain leadership control of this hot new case (and in many instances were succeeding).
The cherry on top of that chaos was Carl Force, who wouldn’t take orders from anyone, even his own boss. More often than not, when requests came in from others on the task force, Carl just ignored them altogether.
This wasn’t the first time in his career that Carl had acted this way. During one of his last real-world undercover operations, years before he started playing the lead role of Nob the drug smuggler on the Silk Road, he had gone rogue on a case and soon found himself in a lot of trouble with the DEA, and his wife.
Back then Carl was working undercover among a group of drug dealers when he started to go deeper and deeper into their clandestine world with the hope that they would trust him more, which could lead to a big bust. But Carl was slightly too good at the undercover part of the job. While he was manipulating the people he was trying to arrest, he started to blur the line between cop and friend. At nightclubs he would get blackout drunk with the people he was monitoring. When women approached him and his new friends, Carl didn’t shoo them away to focus on trailing his subjects but rather embraced these bad girls with open, inebriated arms. Before long the line between pretend drug dealer and churchgoing DEA-agent dad faded so much that he had to quit the undercover work and go off to rehab, eventually landing, sober, with the desk job in Baltimore.
Years later, when Carl decided to become Nob, he reasoned that this was a different kind of undercover job. He was safe from the temptations of the underworld because he was behind a computer. And yet, just as in his old days with the drug cartel, Carl found himself increasingly drawn into the world of the Dread Pirate Roberts. After a day in the DEA offices, Carl would go home, straight into the spare room of his old Colonial house in Baltimore and onto the computer to converse with the man he was supposed to be hunting.
The room where Carl sat typing away wasn’t much to look at, with a single bed and a bookcase that had once belonged to his grandfather. Here Carl would sit in an old brown and white lounge chair, his legs stretched out on the ottoman, as his online personality, Nob, chatted with DPR about everything and anything, and Pablo, the family’s mentally deranged cat, which hated being touched, watched from the bed.
At times they talked about family, with Carl saying prayers for Dread and his loved ones. During other occasions, they talked about their health.
“Tell me about your diet,” Carl asked.
“Minimize carbs,” DPR replied, “no bread, no pasta, no cereal, no soda. I eat lots of hard boiled eggs.”