American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road

As was true for all New Yorkers, the stories people told of that day could feel palpable to Gary. But nothing was as real as the conversation taking place in front of him right now, over a decade later—on September 10, 2013—between the two men on the task force who were now sitting next to him in adjacent cubicles. These two men, it appeared, had run toward the towers that fateful day and then spent weeks digging through the dust and debris for survivors, mostly finding death.

“You getting your medical tomorrow?” Gary overheard one of them, an NYPD detective, in the cubicle in front of him say to another from New York’s Clarkstown Police Department. As Gary listened, the two men talked briefly about their breathing issues and other ailments that still lingered twelve years later. They talked about other first responders they knew who had developed serious illnesses, some who had even died. As Gary overheard this, he grew increasingly irate as he thought about what terrorists had tried to do to America in 2001 and what he saw the Dread Pirate Roberts trying to do to America in 2013.

Gary had read all of DPR’s writings (three times) and had seen the Dread Pirate Roberts proclaiming to his legion of followers that the government’s time was “coming to an end”; that the state was the “enemy”; that people should have utter disdain for federal authorities, including everyone who sat in the room with Gary at that moment. The same men and women who had run toward the World Trade Center on September 11 and who tomorrow would have to go to the hospital for health checkups for their heroic efforts.

As these thoughts all piled up atop one another, Gary had had enough. He spun around in his chair, looked directly at another detective on the Silk Road task force, and with vexation in his voice proclaimed, “I think I’m right. You know? I think it’s him.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It’s him. Ross Ulbricht,” Gary said.

“You really think you’re going to find him from a Google search?” Gary’s coworker said.

Gary had suspected that Ross Ulbricht might be in some way involved with the Silk Road and had mentioned it to his coworkers months earlier, but the lead had gone nowhere. They couldn’t pursue a case against someone based on the mere fact that they had posted about the Silk Road on the Internet. But after Gary had seen the IP address from a café in San Francisco on the wall at the FBI office, the city where this Ross Ulbricht character apparently lived, he had become convinced that he was at least involved, if not actually the Dread Pirate Roberts.

“Yes!” Gary said, his hands animated, his voice growing louder. “I’m right. I’m telling you, I’m right.”

After a few minutes laying out the facts again, Gary stood up and announced that he was going to go back through the case again, starting from the beginning. Just as he had read every e-mail, blog post, news article, and forum posting three times, Gary was going to go back through his investigation three times, from start to finish. Maybe, he reasoned, he had missed something.

He wandered away from his cubicle and around the corner to a woman nearby who worked for the Department of Homeland Security. “I need you to run Ross Ulbricht’s name,” Gary told her as he sat down in an empty seat nearby, requesting the same background check he had done on Ross months earlier. Gary didn’t expect the woman would find anything new. He just wanted to see if some small detail had floated by unnoticed. A speck of DNA, a parking ticket, anything.

After a minute the records loaded onto her screen. The woman first reviewed Ross’s travel record, noting that he had gone to Dominica, a data point that Gary knew about and that he thought was suspect, as criminals often hid money in the Caribbean. She kept going through Ross’s file and then she stopped suddenly. “You know there’s a hit on this guy?” the woman said.

“What?” Gary asked, confused.

“Yeah, there’s a hit on this guy from a few weeks ago.”

Gary was in shock as he heard the word “hit.” He was simply trying to dot his i’s and cross his t’s three times over.

“You want me to read it?” the woman asked.

“Yes!”

She read aloud, explaining that Customs and Border Protection had “seized counterfeit identity documents” and a Dylan Critten from DHS had visited Ross Ulbricht at his house on Fifteenth Avenue in San Francisco. The file she read from noted that Ross’s roommates had said his name was Josh, not Ross, and that Josh paid for his room in cash. She paused, looking over at Gary for a moment, and said, “You want me to keep reading? Is this helpful?”

Gary’s brow furrowed. What he was hearing was surreal. “Yes!” he blurted out. “Keep reading! Keep reading!”

She turned back to her computer and continued. In addition to the Fifteenth Avenue address, it appeared that Ross had lived on Hickory Street in the center of San Francisco. And then she began reading the report Dylan had written, verbatim. “Ulbricht generally refused to answer any questions pertaining to the purchase of this or other counterfeit identity documents,” she read. And then, like some sort of practical joke, she read the following sentence: “However? Ulbricht volunteered that hypothetically anyone could go onto a Web site named ‘Silk Road’ on ‘Tor’ and purchase any drugs or IDs.”

Gary’s heart began thudding in his ears. It didn’t add up. This was all too much for it to be a coincidence. Gary immediately charged toward his supervisor’s office and burst into the room, adrenaline coursing through his veins.

“It’s him!” Gary bellowed. “It’s him!”

The supervisor told him to calm down and then listened to Gary make the case for why it was Ross Ulbricht—a case that was now more convincing than before, yet the supervisor cautioned that there were still many details that didn’t make sense. Still, Gary was told to take a deep breath and to call the U.S. Attorney’s Office to explain.

? ? ?

When Serrin Turner answered the phone, he didn’t expect to hear an agitated IRS agent on the other end of the line. “Slow down,” he said as Gary jumped right into his tirade. “Which guy are you talking about?”

“The guy who I think has been running the site,” Gary said.

“What about him?”

Gary began a convoluted speech, laying out everything from the Google search results to the travel to Dominica—all of which he’d mentioned to Serrin a few weeks earlier while Gary had gone through a list of other potential suspects, but this time he added the details from the DHS report, noting the story of the fake IDs, the phony name “Josh,” and the mention of the Silk Road Web site.

Serrin wasn’t sold by the evidence Gary had just delivered, but he was intrigued. “And this guy lives in San Francisco?” Serrin asked. “What’s his address?”

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