Still, “You know?” and “Riiiight” aside, the task force agents explained where the investigation stood. It was May 2013, exactly two years since the famed Gawker article had been published, and there were dozens of government agents and task forces all over the world trying to figure out how to breach the Silk Road. There was a team in Baltimore (Carl), a lone agent in Chicago (Jared), and more than a dozen others scattered around the globe, all trying to figure out the identity of the Dread Pirate Roberts—but the case so far had proved unsolvable.
Midway through his briefing Gary was informed that since nothing else had worked, the task force wanted to try a new strategy. They instructed Gary to follow the money rather than the drugs. One of the places they wanted him to start with was a user on the Silk Road who had been buying and selling Bitcoins for drug dealers and the site’s creators, acting as a digital money launderette. The strike force told Gary to try to figure out who this human Bitcoin-to-cash ATM was. Then they could try to trace some of those Bitcoins.
Gary was completely up for the task of finding the money launderer, but he also had an idea how they might be able to find the Dread Pirate Roberts.
“How?” one of the cops dubiously asked.
“The Son of Sam,” Gary replied.
Gary had heard stories about that New York City serial killer known as the Son of Sam so many times as a kid that it was impossible to forget. But what had always stuck out to him, he explained to the agent, was the way authorities caught the murderer.
It had all taken place between 1976 and 1977 in the same neighborhood where Gary was raised. At the time, the Son of Sam had gone on a killing spree in New York, terrorizing the city and making fools of the NYPD. No matter how many police officers and detectives City Hall threw at the investigation, it was unsolvable. A task force that was set up to find the murderer went nowhere. Yet shortly after the blackout of 1977, one police officer decided to try a new and creative angle to find the killer. Rather than search the crime scene looking for weapons or clues, the officer decided to look for cars in the areas of the murders that had received parking tickets around the same times as the crimes. The cop reasoned that even the most brazen murderer wouldn’t have stopped midway through to go and feed a parking meter. So maybe the Son of Sam had gotten one or two parking tickets during his attacks.
After a painstaking search through tens of thousands of violations, the cops found a pattern. There was a 1970 yellow Ford Galaxie sedan that belonged to a man who lived in Yonkers and had been ticketed numerous times within blocks of each of the murders. When detectives went to the car owner’s home, they were greeted by David Berkowitz, a defiant twenty-four-year-old, who admitted instantly that he was the Son of Sam. “Well, you’ve got me,” Berkowitz said at the time, and then, with one last barb toward police: “What took you so long?”
Gary told his new team that the similarities abounded. In 1977 traditional policing techniques had failed to solve the murders in the same way that in 2013 modern-day procedures for capturing drug dealers had failed to catch DPR. Both men taunted the police. Both men grew more brazen as they continued to get away with their crimes. And the task forces then and now had failed to find them both.
“I’m going to crack this case,” Gary told anyone who would listen. “I really think I’m going to get DPR.”
Just like the parking citations had helped catch the Son of Sam during the summer of 1977, Gary was convinced that somewhere out there the founder of the Silk Road had made a mistake. He believed that in a dark corner of the Internet there was the digital equivalent of a parking ticket that would help unmask the Dread Pirate Roberts. And Gary Alford was determined that he was going to find it.
Chapter 48
ROSS GOES UNDERGROUND
It was time to go into hiding.
But this time, rather than the Dread Pirate Roberts having to disappear, it was Ross Ulbricht’s turn.
A lot of other terrible things had happened since the murder of Green. Someone was looking for DPR as retribution. The heat was onto him too, with FBI, DEA, HSI, and a slew of other agencies scurrying around the Silk Road site—a sign that there was no fucking around right now. Time to begin an emergency landing.
It was early June 2013, and Ross had no choice but to go through the list he had put together months earlier. The “in case of an emergency” checklist. “Find place to live on craigslist for cash,” he had written to himself back then. “Create new identity (name, backstory).”
As he scrolled through rental listings on Craigslist, he came across the perfect place: his own room in a three-bedroom house on Fifteenth Avenue near San Francisco’s Outer Sunset, where he could pay cash to cover the $1,200 monthly rent. He anonymously e-mailed the lessor and, following step two on his checklist—“Create new identity (name, backstory)”—rather than calling himself Ross Ulbricht, he used a completely fictitious name, Joshua Terrey. Another name that he reasoned could never be traced back to him.
But creating a new identity was going to be difficult. After all, there were already two people: Ross and DPR. If he had to remember details about a third person, lies would get complicated very quickly. To ensure that Ross didn’t forget much about Joshua, he stuck to stories he knew when he e-mailed his new potential landlord. He explained that he, Josh (for short), was twenty-nine years old, was from Texas, and had recently returned from a trip to Sydney, Australia. “I am a currency trader and do some freelance IT work as well,” Ross, as Josh, wrote to the couple who were renting out the apartment. “I mostly keep to myself, spending most of my time working.”
Ross wouldn’t have to worry about any of his real-world friends, like René or Selena, finding out about his new alter ego Josh, as he had a plan to keep everyone separate, never having his old friends over to his new place or his new roommates out to meet his old friends. As for Kristal coming down to visit from Portland, well, that had imploded almost as quickly as it had ignited. As soon as things started to deepen, Ross lost interest. How could you sustain a relationship with someone when you were only giving them half of yourself? As he had confided in his pals, both in the real world and on the Silk Road, he wanted a family one day. Just not yet and just not with Kristal.
But that didn’t matter, because just as Ross was going into hiding, another special someone was slowly but assuredly coming back into his life. The person he had sworn he would never talk to again: Julia.
This was not part of his checklist.
Prior to deciding to lie low for a while, he had been reading a book on productivity, which offered a message that wasn’t too dissimilar to the approach he’d taken in his college days, when he’d trimmed the unnecessary banalities in his life by not showering for a month or eating only a bag of rice for a week. One of the messages in the book was that the reader should “reboot” their online calendar by starting anew. When he had done just that, the computer had canceled an old event with Julia and automatically sent her a message letting her know.