Nob immediately asked why he had this man’s ID.
“I had him send it to me when I hired him,” Dread wrote back, “for just this kind of situation.”
As Carl chatted with Dread, he played dumb about what had happened with his kilo of cocaine, but he was also surprised that Green had the audacity to steal $350,000 in Bitcoins shortly after he had been arrested. “You stole money from DPR?” Carl asked Green, shocked that the Gooch would do such a thing. Shaun, who had really stolen the money, just watched silently.
“No!” Green replied, panicked. “You’ve gotta be kidding me. I wouldn’t even know how to steal a penny from him.”
“Just admit it!” Carl yelled. And then Shaun jumped in too. Shaun’s glare was intimidating, with his narrow, snarly eyes. “Just admit you stole the money!”
“I didn’t!”
“Why are you protecting him?” Carl asked.
“I didn’t do it!” Green sobbed.
During this exchange, a request from the Dread Pirate Roberts popped up on Carl’s computer screen asking if he knew anyone who could beat Green up and force him to send the money back. Given that Carl was posing as a big-time drug smuggler, he told DPR that of course he knew people who could do that kind of work.
“How quickly do you think you can get someone over there?” DPR asked. “And what does that cost you?”
Carl looked up from his computer and informed Green that his day was about to change—slightly. Green, still rambling, was terror-stricken as he heard what they were going to do next. They would have to make the beating look real, Carl informed Green. DPR wanted evidence.
They returned to the hotel room, and Carl told Green to go into the bathroom. The tub was filled with water. The camera clicked on, and the postal worker thrust Green under, his arms waving as he gasped for air. His screams sounded like a rumble under the water. He couldn’t breathe. And then, after a few seconds, the postal worker yanked his head out by his hair and held the drowning man’s face up to a video camera as the Gooch panted, trying to regain his breath and making every effort possible not to cry again.
“I think we should do it again,” Carl said as he peered over the video camera at Green’s pathetic-looking face. The postal worker agreed, grabbed Green’s head again, and pushed him back under the water. It was pure chaos, like Lord of the Flies, but rather than children trying to kill poor chubby Piggy, special agents with the U.S. government were drowning the Gooch.
Green begged them to stop, but they did it again and again. “We have to make it look real,” Carl sneered.
“I swear,” Green said as his face was pushed under the water again, “I didn’t steal the money!”
“Just admit it!” Carl yelled back at him. “Stop trying to protect DPR!”
And yet while all this was going on, there was one person who was not in the bathroom. Shaun of the Secret Service had told the others on the task force that he was going to take Green’s laptop and submit it into evidence at the nearby bureau. But instead he was going to use it to steal more money from the Silk Road, money that no one knew he was taking. As Shaun closed the door behind him, the sound of the Gooch’s cries echoed through the hotel suite in the Marriott as Carl continued to yell at him. “Just admit it, you piece of shit!”
“I swear,” Green wept. “I didn’t steal a penny!”
Chapter 42
THE FIRST MURDER
Ross had figured that one day it might come to this. That one day he would be faced with this kind of ruthless decision—to “call on my muscle,” as he’d told an associate. When that day came, he’d imagined that maybe he would have to end the life of a dealer gone rogue or someone who threatened the mission of the Silk Road. But not one of his own people. And certainly not Curtis Green from Spanish Fork, Utah.
While this decision was daunting for DPR, at least one part of it would be easy: figuring out who would do the job. With so much cash on hand, it turned out there were plenty of people who were willing and able to murder someone—particularly in a barren stretch of Utah. Variety Jones had access to a man he simply called “Irish,” who could be dispatched—from Ireland—to Utah, where he would find Curtis and make him disappear. (One slight problem here was that Irish wasn’t very tech savvy, so retrieving the $350,000 in Bitcoins Green had stolen could prove to be a complicated challenge.) Inigo, another Silk Road employee and one of a few people DPR actually trusted implicitly, volunteered to go and take care of the problem himself, but he was way too important to the infrastructure of the site to be a foot soldier. So DPR decided the job would have to be done by Nob, the South American drug dealer he had become so close to.
After all, it was Nob who had lost a kilo of “Colombia’s finest” when Green had been busted by the DEA a week earlier, a salient fact that Ross had discovered by a simple Google search of Curtis Green’s name after he didn’t show up to work one day, which had led him to a Web site that catalogued recent arrests.
There, in all its glory, was the mug shot of his chubby employee.
Ross hadn’t imagined this was what he would be dealing with when he woke on a cold winter’s morning in early 2013. At first when he found out about Green, the only thing he could do was feel sick to his stomach, as he told VJ in a chat. Then, a couple of hours later, the taste of vomit was quickly turning into one of vengeance.
DPR spoke to all of his associates about what to do. There was a real fear that Green would sing to the cops about the Silk Road, telling the Feds about the innards of the site, how it worked, and who was involved with it. That, plus the $350,000, left Ross with essentially three options for how to handle his rogue employee.
The first possibility was the easiest: to simply pay a visit to Green at his home in Spanish Fork, Utah, and scare him into returning the money he had stolen. The second was more difficult—but definitely more just—and involved beating Green for his unscrupulous treason. Maybe one of DPR’s guys would bind Green to a chair, slap him around a bit, break a few fingers, a nose, threaten his family, and scare him into returning that money. But there was a problem with both of these choices: If word got out that it was okay to sing to the cops and steal hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash, the Dread Pirate Roberts wouldn’t be the most feared pirate sailing the Dark Web, but rather a weakling pushover. The Silk Road would be known as a place where you could break the rules without reprisal.
This led to the third option for Green: killing him.