As Gary read the address from the DHS report, Serrin began typing it into Google Maps. The map on his screen zoomed across the United States into the jagged protrusion of San Francisco, then down to Hickory Street, which sat almost in the middle of the seven-mile-square city. As Gary spoke in the background, Serrin clicked on the address on the map and then entered the only other piece of evidence that tied the Silk Road Web site to a person or place: Momi Toby’s café on Laguna Street in San Francisco.
“Holy shit!” Serrin blurted aloud. “It’s around the fucking corner from Momi Toby’s café, where we found the IP address.”
Gary leaned back in his chair as Serrin leaned forward in his.
To Serrin it made no sense that a kid with no programming background, whose Facebook photos were mostly moments of him camping, kite-boarding with suburban friends, and hugging his mother, was responsible for creating what authorities now believed was a multibillion-dollar drug empire. And what made even less sense was that this kid had ordered the cold-blooded murders of almost half a dozen people. Nope. It simply didn’t add up. But it also didn’t add up that this kid lived a block away from Momi Toby’s café, that he was the first person on the Internet who had ever written about the Silk Road, and that he had been caught buying nine fake IDs.
“I’m going to send out an e-mail to Jared and Tarbell,” Serrin said. “I want to get us all on a conference call.”
? ? ?
The office in the Dirksen Federal Building, where Jared sat, was completely sparse. There were no computers or books in the room, just a solid oak desk and a phone that Jared was now reaching for.
He looked at the e-mail he had received from Serrin a few minutes earlier and began dialing the number for the conference call. As the phone rang, Jared sat back in his chair, slouching exhaustedly as he blankly stared out the window at Chicago’s skyline.
? ? ?
Tarbell walked into his house in New York, greeted his wife, Sabrina, and the kids, and said he had to hop on a quick conference call. He walked into his bedroom and began his evening ritual, kicking off his dress shoes and suit and replacing them with a stained pair of Adidas shorts and a T-shirt. He then belly flopped onto the bed with a thud. He was so tired he could have closed his eyes at that moment and slept for a month. But instead he let out a deep, exhausted sigh and reached for the devices in his bag.
Like a casino dealer fanning out a deck of cards, Tarbell placed his laptop, iPad, and phone out in front of him. He then dialed the conference-call number from Serrin’s e-mail and stared blankly at his iPad, which lay in between the two other devices, displaying the map Serrin had sent out an hour earlier.
? ? ?
“Gary.”
“Serrin.”
“Tarbell.”
“Jared.”
“We all here?”
“Yes.”
Serrin began speaking, giving Jared and Tarbell a recap of the conversation he had wrapped up with Gary a few minutes earlier. He then asked Gary to tell them what he had found.
Gary began talking with a sense of urgency in his voice. He explained about the Google search and how the very first reference to the Silk Road online originated in a forum post on the Shroomery Web site in late January 2011, from a person with the username Altoid.
Tarbell and Jared were somewhat nonchalant about the evidence Gary was presenting. Maybe Altoid was just an early user on the site. And coincidences were easy to find in a case this large. God knew there had been dozens of coincidences with other people. Agencies had ruminated over the leader of the Silk Road being the CEO of a Bitcoin exchange, a Google engineer, or even a professor at a U.S. university. Others had believed it was an inner-city drug dealer or possibly the Mexican cartels now working with programmers. And some had surmised that it was Russian hackers or Chinese cybercriminals. Yet here was Gary Alford, insinuating that the ruthless, deriding, and wealthy Dread Pirate Roberts was a twenty-nine-year-old kid from Austin, Texas, who had no programming background and who was living in a $1,200-a-month apartment in San Francisco.
Jared wasn’t sold. Tarbell wasn’t, either. And Serrin knew that if they weren’t, he certainly wasn’t. Jared, after all, had spent the most time with DPR, working for him for months undercover and chatting with him extensively online. Plus, Jared had an entire office full of fake IDs and people admitting they had gotten them from the Silk Road, and they certainly weren’t DPR.
But Gary continued to talk.
“And then I found a question posted on Stack Overflow, where a user by the name of Ross Ulbricht had asked about coding help with Tor. You know?” Gary said. “And then, a minute after he had posted the question on Stack Overflow, he went in and changed his username from Ross Ulbricht to Frosty, and then—”
“What did you say?” Tarbell interrupted, sitting up in his bed.
Gary was caught off guard by the question but answered anyway. “Stack Overflow. It’s a site where you can post programming questions—”
“No, not that,” Tarbell said, his tone coming across as aggressive. “What did you say after that?”
Gary explained that Ross Ulbricht had signed up for an account on Stack Overflow with his real e-mail as his username, but a minute after asking a question on the site, he had changed the username to Frosty.
Jared and Serrin listened silently, unsure of what this all meant.
“Frosty?” Tarbell said, now sounding amped. “Are you sure?” He then impatiently spelled out each letter: “F-R-O-S-T-Y—as in ‘frosty’?”
“Yes! Frosty!” Gary replied, growing annoyed that Tarbell was being so rude. “And he later changed his e-mail address to [email protected]. What’s the deal? Why do you keep asking that?”
“Because,” Chris said, taking a deep breath, “when we got the server from Iceland”—he took another breath—“we saw that the server and the computer that belonged to the Dread Pirate Roberts were both called ‘Frosty.’”
The phone line was dead silent, just a hush of air as the four men sat contemplating what they had all just heard.
Finally the speechlessness broke. “Well,” Serrin said. “That’s interesting.”
As this settled in, Jared looked up “Ross Ulbricht” online, and came across his YouTube page, where, amid a dozen videos about libertarianism, was the title that Ross had given his YouTube account: “OhYeaRoss.” There it was, the word that DPR used all the time in his chats with Cirrus: “yea.”
No h at the end, just “yea.”
Chapter 61
THE GOOD-BYE PARTY
The beach was eerily dark and quiet as the white pickup truck pulled into the parking lot. Specks of yellow from the streetlights hung in the air, trying desperately to bleed through the San Francisco fog. Waves crashed rhythmically into the sand. As Ross stepped out of the truck, he pulled his thick black jacket tight to stay warm. The air was salty and wet.
He looked out at the dark horizon, and while there wasn’t much to see, it was the beach, and it was beautiful.