Agent Ramirez knew that most of the time customs officials at SFO simply destroyed packages with drugs or fake documents; it was just easier than passing them off to Homeland Security agents. But one of the envelopes had contained nine—nine!—fake IDs. This was a major red flag. Who needs nine fake IDs? One, sure. Two the agent could understand. But nine? The addressee on the particular envelope that was supposed to receive the IDs was an “Andrew Ford,” who apparently lived at 2260 Fifteenth Avenue in San Francisco.
While the IDs were perfect copies of driver’s licenses from New York, California, Colorado, and the United Kingdom, they all appeared to have a variation of the same person’s face on them: a white man with hazel eyes who stood six feet two inches tall and was born on March 27, 1984. In some pictures the man had a thick beard that had been Photoshopped on, and in others he was clean shaven.
This was very unusual, Agent Ramirez thought, and after inspecting the documents further, he decided he would go out to the Fifteenth Avenue address and try to find Andrew Ford to question him about the fake licenses.
? ? ?
While months earlier Ross had sworn off Julia, vowing never to speak to her again for telling Erica his secret, he was still undeniably attracted to her. So after they reconnected, he invited her out to visit—a weekend of romance and diversion that Ross needed to take the edge off things. It was at least a month before she’d fly out to San Francisco, so he had time to work out the details, but it was highly unlikely that he’d bring her to his sublet.
The home along Fifteenth Avenue where Ross was subletting wasn’t much to look at. It was a medley of Spanish elements, with a white exterior and brown terra-cotta roof combined with five whatever-was-on-sale-at-Home-Depot-that-week windows in the front of the house. The front door was glass, and the front yard was a pathetic patch of stark green plants that stood about six inches tall.
Ross, being Ross, didn’t care how things looked. For him it was all about the privacy of the house, which was close to the edge of the city, near the beach.
? ? ?
Agent Ramirez looked at the map on his phone as he pulled up to 2260 Fifteenth Street in San Francisco. He parked and then scanned the building, wondering if “Andrew Ford” was home.
The house was situated in Duboce Triangle, smack in the middle of the city, and was a long rectangular shape, painted blue and gray on the outside. There was no yard in the front, and the entrance to the house was a thick wooden door. Agent Ramirez spent several hours staking out the place, waiting to see if the man in the fake IDs would walk outside to check his mailbox so they could talk to him. But he never showed up.
So the agent got out of his cruiser and knocked on the bright blue door with one hand as he held a photo of the fake IDs in the other.
? ? ?
The packages Ross had been waiting for should have arrived days earlier, but they still weren’t there. He had walked down the orange brick steps to check the mailbox daily. But nothing. Of course, he wasn’t looking for mail that had his name on it but rather anything that had been sent to Andrew Ford, the man Ross was subletting his room from, and that had come from Vancouver.
The Canada Post Web site wasn’t much help, either. When Ross typed in the tracking number he had been given for the packages of fake IDs he had bought, all he could see was that the envelope was “still in transit.”
? ? ?
After Agent Ramirez waited for a few minutes, the door to 2260 Fifteenth Street opened and an older Asian man stepped outside.
“Hi, my name is Agent Ramirez,” the officer said. “Is Andrew Ford home?”
The older Asian man looked at Agent Ramirez, assuming that he was trying to sell him something, and tried to shoo him away. “No!” the Asian man yelled angrily. “No! He no live here!”
The agent asked again. “Andrew Ford?” This time holding up a photo of nine fake IDs, each of which had a picture of Ross Ulbricht on the front. “Is there an Andrew Ford who lives here?”
“No!” the Asian man vehemently responded, quickly closing the door in his face. “Now go away!”
? ? ?
Just as Ross didn’t talk to his roommates, he chose not to talk to his neighbors, either. He just stayed in his room working on his laptop. If he had talked to the people who lived next to him on Fifteenth Avenue, he would have heard the horror stories about packages getting muddled up in the mail. He might have even heard the tale about the history of the street he lived on: the story about how in the late spring of 1909, the mayor of San Francisco had set up a commission to renumber the houses and roads of the city after years of confusion over the similarity between the streets and avenues. While the commission was started with noble goals, it set entire neighborhoods into feuds with one another, with residents arguing over which streets would be renamed and which would not.
In the end the numbered streets and the numbered avenues remained unchanged.
As a result, packages that were being sent to Fifteenth Avenue sometimes ended up at addresses on Fifteenth Street, and envelopes that were mailed to people on Fifteenth Street sometimes ended up at homes along Fifteenth Avenue.
And in mid-July 2013 an agent from the Department of Homeland Security ended up at the wrong address too, accidentally searching for the man who had purchased nine fake IDs at 2260 Fifteenth Street instead of the address that had been written on the envelope: 2260 Fifteenth Avenue. The address where Ross Ulbricht lived.
Chapter 53
THE DECONFLICTION MEETING
Every year around this time, Gary took the day off from work to celebrate the week in 1977 when the lights went out in New York City—the day he was born. But this year, just a couple of days before his birthday, he was asked to go down to a classified location near Washington, DC, to attend a highly classified and incredibly important meeting. Possibly the most important of his career.
The gathering, he was told, was a “deconfliction meeting” about the Silk Road, and it would be held by the highest brass at the Department of Justice, the top echelon of the legal system in the United States. Apparently the DOJ had called the meeting because all of the factions of government that were investigating the Silk Road (which included almost all the factions of government) were not playing well together. Agents weren’t sharing evidence. Government resources, aka people’s tax dollars, were being squandered on the investigation. Even people within the same agencies weren’t communicating, with DEA agents in Baltimore not sharing their findings with those in New York and HSI agents in San Francisco not talking to those in Chicago or Baltimore.
There was also relentless bickering among agencies. These squabbles were routine within any big investigation, but with the Silk Road they were monumentally worse. Everyone wanted the fame and glory of bringing down the big target.
Hence the deconfliction meeting.