Gary woke up the morning of his birthday, kissed his wife good-bye, and got into his Ford Explorer to begin the five-hour drive to DC, where he would present his findings so far on the case.
As the road signs zipped by and the clouds in the sky darkened, Gary was somewhat giddy that he would be able to stand up in the meeting, in front of all of these big and important people, and explain that he had found a few people who might have been involved in the Silk Road from the beginning. It was unclear if any of them was the Dread Pirate Roberts, but he could lay out his cards and at least have a discussion about them. Among these clues, he would be able to talk about “Altoid,” the moniker that Gary had determined through a few subpoenas belonged to a man named Ross Ulbricht.
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Chris Tarbell had decided he wouldn’t travel down to the deconfliction meeting the Department of Justice was setting up. He knew he was being a prima donna, but he also knew he “didn’t have time for that shit.”
The FBI agents in the Pit didn’t have time for much these days. They were, after all, sifting through the biggest bounty anyone could ever hope for on this case: the Silk Road servers.
“We’ll conference in from New York,” Tarbell told Serrin Turner, the assistant U.S. attorney from the Southern District of New York. “Plus, you’ll be there.” There wasn’t much of a discussion about it; Tarbell had made up his mind. But to ensure they didn’t piss off anyone at the DOJ, they decided to send down two other agents on the case.
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The door to Jared’s hotel room clicked shut behind him as he wandered down the hall of the Hilton in downtown Washington, DC, walking toward the elevator. His mind was spinning, trying to figure out what he was going to say at the deconfliction meeting that had been organized by the DOJ.
He had been warned by the agents on the Baltimore task force that he shouldn’t say anything at all. The reason for this, they told him, was that there were rumors floating around that the FBI would be in the meeting, and “everyone knows how shady those FBI fuckers can be.” If Jared stood up and named one of his own suspects in the investigation, and someone from the Bureau was indeed in the room, they could run off and use that name in their own probe. “They are the worst snakes in the world,” the Baltimore team warned him. “Don’t say anything in the meeting.”
But Jared wasn’t so sure that was true; maybe the best way forward was to collaborate. Baltimore was no help at all, but there could be other agents out there whom he could pool resources with. His go-it-alone attitude had gotten him far in the case, but he was starting to question if it could get him all the way.
As Jared drove toward the secret facility in DC where the meeting would be held, he couldn’t figure out what to do. He didn’t know if he should tell everyone about his recent arrests, or about the other accounts he had taken over on the Silk Road, or about the more than 3,500 seizures that now took up every crevice in his office, piled from floor to ceiling.
Fuck, he thought. What am I supposed to do?
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The conference room was massive, with enough seating for more than thirty-five people. In one corner Gary sat, staring at the morass of people, most of whom he had never seen before. In another corner Jared inspected the screen on the wall, which displayed the faces of two men, both in another location, who were staring down at everyone. And from that screen Tarbell looked out at the sea of government employees who were now taking their seats.
Wow, there are a lot of people in this meeting, Tarbell thought. Sure is a good use of government money.
“Okay, let’s get started,” a man said as the room quieted down. “Let’s go around and introduce ourselves. I’ll start. I’m Luke Dembosky with the Department of Justice.” The room went quiet instantly, as if someone had pressed a mute button somewhere. Luke Dembosky was high, high, high up in the U.S. government. He was someone you didn’t interrupt or fuck with. Everyone knew that.
The ground rules of the meeting, Dembosky explained, were that everyone needed to be open and honest about where they were in their investigation. Then the DOJ would decide who got to lead the case going forward.
“Shall we begin?” Dembosky said, looking directly at the Baltimore investigators in the room.
A woman from the Baltimore task force stood up, introduced herself, and began presenting the evidence the Marco Polo task force had gathered over the past year and a half. She read off a few bullet points that were mostly negligible about a couple of informants the team had arrested and then wrapped up almost as soon as she had begun.
“What about the undercover account you have?” Luke Dembosky asked, referring to the undercover drug smuggler persona Nob, which Carl Force from the DEA (a man who was, curiously, not present at this meeting) had been managing for the past year and everyone at the DOJ was very aware of.
“We can’t talk about that,” she replied. Then she said, “That’s 6E.”
People in the room looked around in shock. Every member of government there knew that “6E” meant part of a current grand jury hearing, which was a way of keeping the investigation sealed. But it made no sense to pull 6E in a meeting with the DOJ.
“The whole purpose of this meeting is to put your cards on the table,” Dembosky declared when he heard this.
“It’s 6E,” the woman said again, nervous yet defiant. She didn’t want to talk about the case, not because she was protecting someone in that grand jury investigation but because she didn’t want the other people in the room to steal any of Baltimore’s work.
In a matter of minutes a screaming match erupted, with the DOJ attorneys demanding information on the Baltimore investigation and the Baltimore task force petulantly reiterating “6E” over and over.
Dembosky, losing his patience, said it was time to take a break.