Which is why when Carl approached his team about doing a controlled drug buy that would be facilitated by none other than DPR himself, no one questioned if it was a bad idea.
The plan Carl came up with was to have his online persona, Nob, sell a bulk order of cocaine or heroin to a buyer. And as he suspected, the Dread Pirate Roberts was happy to help expedite the sale.
“How much can you sell 10 kilos for?” DPR asked one afternoon.
Of heroin?
Yes, of heroin.
Nob, playing the part, explained that he had only “Mexican brown H, not china white” but that the first ten kilos would be $57,000 apiece, or just over half a million dollars. If the sale went well, he would drop the price to $55,000 a kilo, and then to $53,000. But what he could sell for less money, Nob explained to Dread, was a kilo of cocaine.
“All right,” DPR wrote, he would find a buyer for a kilo of coke.
And so, as Dread went off to facilitate the sale, it was starting to become unclear who would be on the other end of that transaction. Would it be the churchgoing DEA-agent dad who wanted to capture the Dread Pirate Roberts and get the glory of bringing down the most notorious drug dealer of his career? Or would it be Nob, the fearless drug smuggler who wanted to help DPR find safe passage along the Silk Road?
Chapter 39
KIDNEY FOR SALE!
Ross stood in his bedroom, his white sheets rumpled on the bed, as he buttoned his pink-and-green-checkered shirt before heading out on another San Francisco adventure.
Over the past few months he had explored every crevice of the Bay Area. On some days he had ventured south to Bernal, where he climbed to the peak of a hill. He took long walks past the piers with sunbathing sea lions. He had gone north with his roommate and best friend, René, over the Golden Gate Bridge to Marin, where they hiked the trails amid the redwood trees, clambering through the salty fog and stopping every few feet to marvel at thousand-year-old trees that seemed to almost touch the heavens. Between explorations Ross went on boating trips with friends through the choppy waters of the bay, brushing past Alcatraz, the notorious prison that had once been home to Al Capone, the American gangster who fought the U.S. government during Prohibition.
But one of the more memorable experiences of his time in San Francisco happened on a Thursday afternoon in early December, when Ross and René happened upon the Contemporary Jewish Museum in the South of Market area of the city.
Homeless people, mostly drug addicts who had fallen on hard times, lined the streets, pushing their lives in carts from one soup kitchen or rehab center to the next, past the big glass buildings where those billion-dollar start-ups grew larger and more powerful by the hour. It was chilly that day, and a light sprinkle of rain fell from the sky as the two friends walked inside the museum. They wandered around the brightly lit, cavernous rooms until they came upon a metal box the size of a shed on whose side the word sTORYcORPS was written in big bubbly red letters. Ross and his friend pulled open the door to the metal box and sat down in front of two microphones. A red light soon came on to indicate that what they were about to say to each other was going to be recorded.
Ross began, introducing himself and noting, “I’m twenty-eight years old.” His voice was calm and crackly.
The recording they were about to make was part of a National Public Radio experiment; the box they sat in would travel the country, enticing Americans to tell their stories for posterity, to try to capture the change the United States was going through at the time. Some of the recordings people had already done in other parts of America were sad, like the two parents who told the story of their young son who had died because he couldn’t get a bone marrow transplant for a fatal disease. Another man talked about his experience being hit by a roadside bomb while serving in Afghanistan. And other stories were more uplifting, like the couple who fell in love during Hurricane Katrina.
It might not have been the wisest thing for Ross to draw attention to himself. But if on the Silk Road the Dread Pirate Roberts got to speak the truth about society all the time, why shouldn’t Ross be able to do the same thing in this world? No one would ever be the wiser that the man about to speak into the microphone was actually two men.
Ross and René were instructed to talk to someone who might listen to their conversation two hundred years in the future. They began discussing how they had ended up in San Francisco. René had come for the “start-ups and the money,” he said. Then it was Ross’s turn to tell the story of how he had ended up inside this metal box.
“I was living in Austin, Texas,” Ross said, and then he trailed off, as if he were traveling back there in his mind. “And, ehm,” Ross continued, stuttering slightly as he stared off into the distance. “And, ehm,” he said again.
René looked back, waiting for his friend to finish the sentence, seemingly oblivious to where Ross’s mind had just wandered off to.
As close as Ross had gotten to René, he kept the promise he had made to himself a year earlier. He would never tell anyone else in the real world about the online world he had created. He had learned that bitter lesson with Julia.
It had been difficult hiding the truth. Friends in the real world would say things to him like “Why don’t you try this business idea or work on that app?” to which Ross would simply say, “Good idea, dude. I’ll think about it.” But, as he told his employees on the site, he just wanted to “scream at them, ‘Because I’m running a goddam multi-million dollar criminal enterprise!!!!’”
Lying came at a price. To separate those two worlds, and to justify the actions he had to make in each—telling stories to his family and friends in one and making resolute decisions with vast repercussions in the other—the man in the pink-and-green-checkered shirt had become incredibly adept at separating the life of Ross Ulbricht from that of the Dread Pirate Roberts.
As Ross he would go on these walkabouts with his friends (or alone), and the biggest decisions he had to make each day were where the adventure would begin and what he would eat for lunch. When he stepped into the role of the Dread Pirate Roberts, he hid Ross away, and DPR reveled in the power that came with dictating the rules of a world in which hundreds of thousands of people roamed. He was the one who decided who got to stay on his island and what they could and could not do while they were there. And DPR, while seemingly the same person as the sweet Ross his mother had raised, was able to make tough decisions that a younger self would have cowered away from.
This had happened just two weeks earlier, when DPR had been faced with a query on the site that no one had ever posed to Ross in his debate clubs back at Penn State.