“Hell, yes!” Serrin squealed. “Hell. Yes!”
As Thom got to work with the other agents, rebuilding the database and setting up a virtual computer that would house the Silk Road, Chris Tarbell wandered into the back room and pulled a giant piece of butcher paper, about eight feet long, from a plotter printer. With the long sheet of paper in hand, he taped it to the wall of lab 1A. He then pulled out a black marker and wrote the words “silk road“ across the top, followed by a series of boxes and numbers below.
In the same way that the organized-crime FBI agents who had worked out of the Pit decades earlier used to create charts on that same wall noting where mobsters sat in a crime family they were hunting, Tarbell was going to create a chart full of numbers and IP addresses that noted where the servers that belonged to the Silk Road were hidden. And just as in times past when lower-level mobsters would lead the Feds to the Don, the hope was that one of those servers would lead them directly to the Dread Pirate Roberts.
Chapter 52
THE FAKE IDS, PART ONE
July 10, 2013, was a particularly windy day at San Francisco International Airport. Powerful gusts of air rattled planes as they came in over the bay. On some passenger flights the luggage in the hold was jostled around, and on the mail carrier planes, packages and envelopes were shuffled to and fro. But when a Canadian mail flight came in for landing, the wind gusts seemed to stop for a brief moment and the wheels touched down smoothly on the tarmac.
The plane came to a stop and the cardboard boxes in the hull, filled with envelopes, made their way to the Customs Mail Center at SFO. Inspectors unloaded the boxes one by one and unloaded their contents onto different conveyor belts, all destined for small towns or big cities across the United States.
The mail handler on duty that day unpacked one of the boxes, reaching for a pile of square envelopes that had remained close together throughout the journey from Canada. Individually each of those square envelopes was not suspect, but together, as a group, something wasn’t right about them.
What stood out to the mail handler was that the envelopes were exactly the same shape and size, and the handwriting on their fronts was definitively the same, a jagged scribble that had been hastily carved into the labels. But, curiously, the return addresses and names on the envelopes were all slightly and strangely different.
One was sent from a “Cole Harris” who lived in Vancouver. Another was sent from “Arnold Harris” at a different address in Vancouver. And a third was from “Burt Harris” in still another corner of Vancouver. Three Harrises, all from different areas of Vancouver, all with the same handwriting on the same size envelopes was not only strange; it was suspect. To top off this curiosity, the letters were all addressed to different people in America, including one being sent to an “Andrew Ford,” who lived at 2260 Fifteenth Avenue, right there in San Francisco.
The mail handler grabbed a seizure form, filled out the appropriate boxes, and then sliced open the envelopes to see what was inside.
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Ross had been working around the clock on the site, trying to manage all of the new issues that kept arising, some from disgruntled customers, others related to employees who still weren’t working to their full potential, hackers, dealers who were being arrested by the Feds, and packages that were being seized or stolen somewhere along their routes. He was also gathering anti–law enforcement intelligence from someone called Kevin, who told him that the Feds were starting to arrest some of the biggest vendors on the site.
Luckily, Ross was safe from all of this chaos, hiding out as Josh in his sublet near the Outer Sunset and able to work around the clock without any questions from his roommates. (Though he did take a few breaks to watch Louis C.K. comedy clips and V for Vendetta again and to read books with libertarian messages that reminded him of his mission.)
With the confidence Ross now felt, he had started to become stricter with his employees, constantly lecturing some of them to work more productively. “I can do better,” one underling nervously acknowledged after a recent lecture.
To which Ross replied, “I’m sure you can.”
Ross, behind the elusive and fearsome mask of the Dread Pirate Roberts, had also decided to do his first interview, hosting a Q&A session with an intrepid reporter from Forbes, Andy Greenberg, who asked DPR questions about the site and its mission. Ross decided to do the Q&A as a text chat so he could run every question by Variety Jones and the two could answer them together. It was the perfect opportunity to spread Ross’s libertarian message and, more important, it was an opportunity to implement VJ’s plan to suggest that there could be more than one Dread Pirate Roberts.
When Greenberg asked, “What inspired you to start the Silk Road?” Ross cleverly noted, “I didn’t start the Silk Road, my predecessor did,” and then he explained that “everything was in place, he just put the pieces together.”
“Oh, apologies, I didn’t know you had a predecessor,” Greenberg replied. “When did you take over the Road from him? Before you announced yourself as the Dread Pirate Roberts?”
Ross continued to spin the tale. “It’s ok,” he wrote back. “This is the first time I’ve stated that publicly.” He told Greenberg that the original creator of the Silk Road was “compensated and happy with our arrangement” and that “it was his idea to pass the torch in fact.” The interview lasted four hours and was the perfect rallying cry for DPR’s mission.
When Ross wasn’t holed up at home on his laptop, barking orders at his underlings, he would go for long walks in the nearby parks, or hang out with his old Austin friends and new San Francisco pals, a nice reprieve from his other worlds.
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Agent Ramirez had worked for the Department of Homeland Security in San Francisco for more than a decade and was by all accounts a seasoned veteran. He always paid attention to the details and always knew the right questions to ask the nefarious people who came across his path.
In July 2013 he was working several cases and had just received an e-mail from someone at SFO Customs and Border Protection about a group of square envelopes they had intercepted from Canada. The mail, the e-mail said, had all contained fake IDs, or at least what appeared to be fake.