But finally, after months of discussions over how to get in on the Silk Road case, an opportunity had presented itself. Later that day a woman from the DEA in New York City would be coming by to talk about the site and ask if Tarbell and his crew could help the DEA’s investigation.
After leaving the gym, Tarbell changed into a dark suit and white shirt and grabbed his coffee from the nearby Starbucks before making his way up to the twenty-third floor of the federal building. As he sat with his other agents in the Pit, a woman from the DEA arrived with Serrin Turner, the assistant U.S. attorney in New York City whom the FBI had worked with on the LulzSec case.
The DEA agent wore jeans and a sweater, proudly displaying her badge and gun on her waist. She sat down in an empty chair and explained that she was part of a New York task force based a few miles away in Chelsea. They had been sporadically looking into—“well, trying to look into”—the Silk Road for the past year and a half, and their attempt at an investigation had gone nowhere. Shortly after the Gawker article had published back in June 2011, Senator Chuck Schumer had done what most politicians do, holding an impromptu press conference and demanding that the government go after the drug site, even though he was clueless as to what that entailed.
Since the Silk Road sold drugs, the DEA agent explained, the government had asked her office to look into the site. That had been a mistake, it turned out, as her office knew how to do only physical busts with physical drugs, not digital busts with technologies like Bitcoin, Tor, or even the Dark Web, whatever the fuck that was.
“People upstairs are pissed that we haven’t gotten very far,” she lamented. And then she explained that the leader of the site—“who now calls himself the Dread Pirate Roberts, you know, from the Princess Bride movie”—had grown more brazen with the contraband that was for sale, including hawking guns and hacking tools. What’s more, this Dread Pirate Roberts was publicly denouncing the U.S. government. The New York DEA had hit a dead end, and they needed the help of the FBI.
When the meeting ended, Tarbell and his team said they would talk among themselves and be in touch. They shook hands and parted ways.
“Well,” Tarbell said to the agents in the Pit, “there are two problems here.” First, his team didn’t want to just be “assistants” to the New York DEA. If the FBI was going to go after the Silk Road, the FBI was going to do it alone. The Beau didn’t work well with others. Never had. Especially the douche bags over at the DEA.
Which led to that other salient issue: they had been told several times by their higher-ups at the FBI that drugs were not in their job detail; computers were.
But the meeting with the DEA agent had given Tarbell and his crew an idea. The site was no longer just hawking drugs. People were now peddling several hundred different types of hacking tools too, including key loggers, banking Trojans, malware apps, spyware, and a slew of other digital goods that landed right in the purview of the men sitting in the Pit.
There, in that moment, the FBI team decided that was how they would get involved with the Silk Road case. Rather than help the DEA find drug dealers, the cybercrime agents would go after the site themselves. Tarbell picked up the phone, presenting the strategy to his bosses.
Several weeks later approval finally came back down the chain of command, saying that the team could open an investigation on the site. After months of red tape and wasteful officialdom, Tarbell and his coagents opened a new case file, numbered 288-3-696.
In addition to HSI in Chicago, a task force in Baltimore, and another group of local and federal officials in New York City, there was now a new agency hunting for the Dread Pirate Roberts: the Cyber Division of the FBI, and the Eliot Ness of cyberspace would be leading the charge.
Chapter 44
CAMPING AND THE BALL
February 2013
I can’t remember if I told you,” DPR wrote to Inigo. “But I’ll be gone until Sunday afternoon.”
Ross was relieved to be getting away. The past few weeks had been a complete disaster. He had even wondered if there was something wrong with him. In his online world nothing was going right. His employees were screwing up all over the place (including Variety Jones, who had failed to deliver some new security code on time). And his off-line world wasn’t much better, given that he was single and lonely and couldn’t seek advice from anyone he actually trusted.
On top of his melancholic state of mind, he had discovered that in addition to Curtis Green stealing $350,000 a couple of weeks earlier, someone else had purloined another $800,000 in a different heist.
Eight. Hundred. Thousand. Dollars. Just gone. That was more than $1.15 million stolen in a matter of days. Luckily for Ross, a million dollars was now just a small fraction of his savings, but it still stung. There had been a reprisal, of course. And DPR had finally put a hit out on Green. The cost wasn’t too insane, either: $40,000 up front and another $40,000 after he was dead.
The decision hadn’t been easy. That was for sure. But he was convinced that it was the right one; illustrating to the world that society could be safer by legalizing drugs was more important than the life of a man who might squeal to the Feds. Plus, Green had broken the rules of DPR’s world. There had to be consequences. Without them there would be chaos.
Before leaving town, DPR sent Inigo one last message, instructing him to “hold down the fort for me.” Then Ross closed his laptop, leaving DPR hidden within the encryption software he had installed on his computer. There would be no need for him where Ross was going for the next few days. He grabbed his bag and left his apartment.
San Francisco’s temperature had clung to the high forties most of the day, yet Ross was dressed as if he were going to the beach, not up north for a two-day hike in the wilderness. His fellow campers had planned appropriately. Selena, whose birthday they were celebrating, was bundled up with woolly socks and a thick scarf. René was wrapped three layers thick, like a piece of precious porcelain about to be shipped in the mail. And Kristal, Selena’s sister who was in town from Portland, looked like she was going camping in Antarctica. Ross, on the other hand, had decided this trip would require only a pair of thin Adidas shorts and his new, bizarre, bright red Vibram FiveFinger shoes, which made it look like he was wearing a pair of gloves on his feet.
But in a matter of minutes the cold ceased to matter to Ross; he felt warm inside as he looked over at Kristal, who was, quite frankly, too beautiful to have him worried about his outfit.
Ross instantly had a crush.