And with that, a new relationship blossomed.
Under the guise of Kevin, Carl was able to help DPR stay one step ahead of federal authorities by sharing secret and highly sensitive knowledge about the investigation thus far. In return this bad cop required a “donation” of around $50,000 each time he handed over something worthwhile. A donation that DPR was more than happy to pay. It was a foolproof plan: The messages were encrypted, so no one except Carl and DPR could ever read them, and the payment was in Bitcoins, so no one could ever trace them. Carl would offer information about the investigation to the Dread Pirate Roberts, surreptitiously sharing the names of people who might be suspects in the case or of drug dealers on the site who had been arrested and might have turned—pertinent information that would help DPR stay ahead of the Feds. In exchange the man Carl was supposed to be pursuing would pay him $50,000 here, $100,000 there. Money that for Carl would eventually add up to $757,000.
For the Dread Pirate Roberts, it was money well spent to ensure that if anyone in law enforcement ever figured out who he really was, Ross could run before they knocked on his door.
Chapter 50
A PARKING TICKET ON THE INTERNET
For months Gary Alford read everything about the Silk Road that he could get his hands on. Every single thing, at least three times. He had become obsessed with the idea that he could find the Dread Pirate Roberts.
Then, on the last Friday in May 2013, as he lay in bed with his laptop, Gary’s obsession gave the first hint of paying off.
It had been the end of a typically long week working with the New York task force searching for DPR. Gary came home that evening and enjoyed a meal with his wife, and then the couple trudged upstairs to bed. Mrs. Alford fell asleep almost instantly, and their dog, Paulie, was curled up on the edge of the bed gently snoring.
A lot of the decorations in the Alfords’ bedroom were red. The comforter, the pillowcases, and even the walls all looked like they had been spray-painted a deep crimson. In this red room, Gary clicked away on his laptop, still reading about the Silk Road.
Over the past few months Gary had put together a few assumptions about who DPR might be. Dread also knew the American political system incredibly well, which meant he probably lived in the United States. And he must have an impressive computer science background to have built such a Web site.
Then there was the biggest clue of them all.
Gary had read early posts (three times each) by the Silk Road creator, in which he said that buying drugs from the streets, where other people could rip you off or beat you up, was dangerous, and buying from the Silk Road would be much safer. Gary, who was black and had grown up in the housing projects, immediately took offense to this. “What does he mean by ‘other people’?” he said to his wife when discussing the case. “Clearly,” he had reflected, “he hadn’t grown up with these ‘other people’ because if he had—as I have—he wouldn’t be calling us ‘other people.’” But while he was irked by the statement, it gave him that final and most important clue: that DPR was white and likely from the suburbs.
Even with these leads Gary had narrowed his search down to about, oh, maybe twenty million people. Still, it was a clue.
Like all the other agents in law enforcement working on the case, Gary had already corralled a list of names that he thought could possibly be the Dread Pirate Roberts. These names included a programmer who had very libertarian-leaning views, someone who worked with Bitcoin, and yet another was a man who managed an online Web forum. But the chance of DPR being any of these people was slim.
So late that evening, as he lay on his red bed, his head on his red pillow, Gary had an idea.
He wondered about the first person to ever write about the Silk Road on the Internet. As far as everyone knew, it was Adrian Chen, the blogger for Gawker who had published the notorious first story on the Silk Road. Maybe, Gary thought, Adrian Chen was really the Dread Pirate Roberts.
If so, then maybe Adrian Chen would have written about the Silk Road somewhere else before he wrote about it on Gawker.
So Gary went to Google on his laptop and read the Gawker article again, three times. On his last pass he saw something interesting in a link that he hadn’t seen before: that instead of“.com,” the Silk Road’s URL was followed by “.onion,” which was the domain used on the Tor Web browser.
With that, Gary went back to Google, typed “Silk Road.onion” into the search box, and then filtered by date, saying he wanted to see only results from before June 1, 2011, the day the Gawker article was published. This time only a handful of blue links appeared. Click. Click. Click again. And out of nowhere he saw a post on a forum called the Shroomery that had been posted at exactly 4:20 p.m. on Thursday, January 27, 2011—the same week the Silk Road had allegedly opened for business. He clicked the link and began reading.
“I came across this website called Silk Road,” someone had written on the Shroomery back in 2011. He continued to skim the Shroomery Web site, which explained how to grow magic mushrooms, until he noticed that the author of the comment about the Silk Road called himself Altoid. Gary sat up in bed.
“Where are you going?” Gary’s wife asked, half asleep, as he stood up.
“Downstairs,” he whispered. The blue glow of his laptop left the room as he walked across the hall. Paulie jumped down and scampered behind him.
He sat on the couch in the living room and continued to look further. He went to Google again, this time typing in “Silk Road.onion” and “Altoid,” and a couple more blue links appeared. Click. Click. Click. And there was another post on a separate forum that talked about the idea of creating a “Heroin Store” that would allow people to buy “H” on the Internet using Tor and Bitcoin. And as on the other site, there was a post written by Altoid.
“What an awesome thread! You guys have a ton of great ideas. Has anyone seen Silk Road yet?” Altoid had written around the same time, in January 2011. “It’s kind of like an anonymous amazon.com.”
Over the coming days Gary contacted these forums and, using his government credentials, requested the names and e-mail addresses that were associated with the “Altoid” accounts. It appeared that they had been registered to someone with the e-mail address “[email protected],” which wasn’t a real e-mail account and went nowhere. But as Gary dug further, he discovered that the Altoid username had another e-mail address associated with it that had since been deleted but still existed in the forum’s database.
The account, he discovered, belonged to a “[email protected].”