Decisions, decisions.
How quickly life changes. One minute you’re making $300 a week as a college researcher. You’re sleeping in a basement and your only belongings are two black garbage bags, one full of clean clothes, the other dirty, and your biggest worry in the world is whether the pretty girl with the black curly hair whom you just met at the drum circle will call you back. Then an idea hits you. It starts as just a thought, like a kid’s daydream of a giant invention. But once it becomes lodged there in your mind, it won’t go away. Then something happens, like a bolt of lightning striking a kite, or mold accidentally contaminating an experiment, and you realize this idea is actually possible. You type lines of code into your computer and out comes a world that didn’t exist before. There are no laws here, except your laws. You decide who is given power and who is not. And then you wake up one morning and you’re not you anymore; you’re one of the most notorious drug dealers alive. And now you’re deciding if someone should live or die. You’re the judge in your own court. You’re God.
But God wasn’t ready to end another man’s life. At least not yet. So he issued a directive to Nob to go off and find Green and have him roughed up.
“I’d like him beat up. Then force him to send the Bitcoins he stole back,” DPR wrote to Nob. “Like sit him down at his computer and make him do it.” He then reiterated to Nob that getting the money back “would be amazing.”
Nob said he would send his guys to Utah to do just that.
But while Nob had set off to find Green, and Ross had issued a pardon of sorts, he still wasn’t sure this level of amnesty was the right decision. How could he let someone steal that much money from DPR and get away with a measly beating? The conundrum lay in the reality that violence was not something Ross was used to, though it was something he believed in when absolutely necessary.
Back at Penn State, a short lifetime ago, while sitting in the Willard Building off Pollock Road, Ross had defended this very topic with Alex and his friends in the College Libertarians Club.
“Yes, but the use of force is completely justified if you have to defend your own rights or personal property,” young Ross had argued while discussing one of the latest Murray Rothbard books he had devoured. Back then it had just been idealistic, hypothetical banter by a group of college students. The conversation had even followed some of the club members to the Corner Room bar on College Avenue, where, amid the sound of sports talk and the clink of pints of Samuel Adams, they had discussed Rothbard’s War, Peace, and the State, which explained why you could use violence against any “individual criminal” trying to harm you or steal your personal property.
Now, as the Dread Pirate Roberts, the more Ross thought about it, the more he wondered if beating Green up would be enough of a punishment to deter others on the site from betrayal. He started to wonder if he might not have a choice but to put his libertarian theories to their ultimate test. Curtis Green had, after all, stolen DPR’s “personal property.” All $350,000 of it.
As Ross weighed the decision, his chief adviser offered an alternate argument. “At what point in time do we decide we’ve had enough of someone’s shit, and terminate them,” Variety Jones asked rhetorically upon hearing about the theft. He no longer referred to Green by his name but simply as the “Organ Donor.” To VJ, heroin was harmful and he wanted no part of it, but murder, well, that was a completely different story.
Given that Green had been arrested, Variety Jones (who knew a bit about actually being arrested) pointed out that the Organ Donor might strike a deal with the “Feebs” to divulge everything he knew about the Silk Road. Or he might skip the country, VJ cautioned, and disappear with DPR’s 350 grand.
Soon other advisers jumped into the fray. “There are certain rules to the underworld,” one wrote to DPR. “And problems can sometimes only be handled one way.”
All these devils on DPR’s shoulder, and the only angel was Ross Ulbricht. (It wasn’t like Ross could call up his best friend René in the real world and ask his opinion. Hey, buddy, got a minute? I’m thinking about having this guy killed for stealing hundreds of thousands of dollars in drug money from me. You think I should do it?)
Given what everyone was saying to DPR, these arguments had started to make sense. This was not a playground; it was a fucking drug empire, and there had to be consequences to people’s actions. “If this was the Wild West, and it kinda is,” Ross replied to Variety Jones, “you’d get hung just for stealing a horse.”
Exactly! Now you’re talking. VJ stoked the fire further, questioning what it would take before the sheriff of this Wild West did just that. “At what point in time is that the response,” Jones asked.
“It’s a good question I’ve been thinking about the last 24 hours.”
Finally, Variety Jones rang the final death knell. “So, you’ve had your time to think,” he said. “You’re sitting in the big chair, and you need to make a decision.”
Ross, jump off a cliff.
“I would have no problem wasting this guy,” DPR replied.
And in eight words the hit was put out on Curtis Green. With a few strokes on his keyboard, the creator of the Silk Road had just sanctioned his first murder. Now he just had to find the right person to kill him.
Chapter 43
THE FBI JOINS THE HUNT
It was 4:45 a.m. when the silver SUV pulled into its usual parking spot on the corner of Church and Thomas streets in Lower Manhattan. Right on time. The car had black tinted windows with government plates and blue and red police lights hidden under the front grill. The door to the SUV swung open and FBI Special Agent Chris Tarbell stepped out, wearing gym clothes and a light jacket, even though the winter temperature in New York City had dipped into the teens.
Come rain or shine, sleet or snow, this was Tarbell’s ritual. He worked out every day before he went into the FBI offices at 26 Federal Plaza, a couple of blocks away. But today’s routine was going to be different. While the cybercrime FBI agents hadn’t lost interest in the Silk Road, that topic hadn’t moved past a discussion in the Whiskey Tavern among the Pickle Back shots and cham-pag-nay, mostly because of bureaucratic bullshit within the system that Tarbell couldn’t stand. Higher-ups at the Beau (which they pronounced “B-you”) had argued that drugs were not the mandate of their division of the FBI.