One minute the library was silent; the next, an Asian woman yelled, “Fuck you!” at a man standing next to her.
Everyone in the library looked up, startled by the outburst. The man who had just been told to go fuck himself raised his fist to seemingly punch the woman in the face. As his clenched hand went into the air, a startled Ross Ulbricht turned around in his chair to witness the commotion.
And just in that moment, as Jared and Tarbell stood at the base of the stairs, the Asian woman with the fair complexion who had been seated at the table across from Ross reached over and gently slid his Samsung laptop away from him. Ross turned back, half comprehending what was going on as he tried to lunge for the laptop. Yet he couldn’t. Someone had grabbed his arms from behind.
“FBI! FBI!” the couple who had just been yelling at each other now bellowed at Ross as they slammed him against the table. Brophy rushed over, slapping handcuffs around Ross’s wrists, and retrieved him. Thom, visibly shaken by the intensity of the moment, came to retrieve the laptop, which was still wide open and, thanks to Jared, also logged in to all three administrative areas of the Silk Road, including the “Mastermind” page, an area of the site that only the Dread Pirate Roberts and Ross Ulbricht could log in to.
As Tarbell and Jared entered the second floor of the library, Brophy appeared, holding by the arm a young man who was now handcuffed and had a panicked look on his face.
“This is going to be your new best friend,” Brophy said to Tarbell and Jared as he handed Ross Ulbricht over to them.
Inside the library patrons started to yell at Brophy and the others. “What did that kid do?!” they hollered. “Leave him alone!” To them the young man now in handcuffs had been minding his own business, just using his laptop.
Tarbell and Jared led Ross down the concrete steps, out into the street. Tarbell then turned Ross around, gently placed him up against a wall, and began patting him down. In Ross’s pockets there were only two $1 bills, some spare change, and a set of house keys.
“I am Special Agent Chris Tarbell with the FBI,” he said as he spun a handcuffed Ross back around, placing his hand on Ross’s chest to ensure he wasn’t having a heart attack or any other emergency. “Do you have any medical conditions? Do you need any medical attention?”
“No, I’m fine,” Ross said. The shock of the moment had already worn off and Ross was now nonchalant, as if this was just a small bump in the road. “What am I being charged with?” he asked, knowing full well that the cops could have grabbed him for any number of reasons. Maybe it was the fake IDs he had ordered or something innocuous related to the Silk Road.
“We’ll go over that in the car,” Tarbell replied, “once we get you off the street.”
FBI cars and vans from the local FBI squad now screeched in from all angles and directions onto Diamond Street, with almost thirty agents swarming in every direction. Tarbell walked Ross toward an undercover van that was stopped in the middle of the road as Jared walked back upstairs to check the laptop they had seized during the arrest.
The library was quiet again as Jared made it to the seat next to Thom, who was taking photos for the arrest report. As Jared scanned the screen, he saw it. The other side of the chat that he had been engaged in with DPR a few minutes earlier. The computer was logged in, using Tor, on the Silk Road support page and on a dashboard called Mastermind, which displayed a bounty of millions and millions of dollars in Bitcoins. Off to the right there was a chat window, which was midway through a conversation with Cirrus—Jared’s undercover account—and there was the name of the man he had been chatting with: “Dread.” The computer was called “Frosty.”
“Holy shit,” Jared said aloud.
Downstairs Tarbell helped Ross into the backseat of the undercover van. “You asked what you’re being charged with,” Tarbell said. A woman sat in the front seat wearing an FBI jacket, and behind her a child’s seat sat empty. Next to it Ross was now settling in with his hands cuffed behind his back. Tarbell then lifted up a piece of paper and held it in front of Ross’s face for him to read. As Ross looked at the page, he saw the words written across the top:
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
-v.-
ROSS WILLIAM ULBRICHT
a/k/a “Dread Pirate Roberts,”
a/k/a “DPR,”
a/k/a “Silk Road.”
Ross’s eyes narrowed as he looked at Tarbell and uttered four words. “I want a lawyer.”
Chapter 66
THE LAPTOP
In the corner of a smoggy industrial park in South Korea, as the sun peeks through the morning dew, thousands of men and women wake up and move toward several enormous factories. They all wear the same uniform—a flamingo-pink jumpsuit and matching rose cap. The workers never pause, going day and night, trading out their positions like cogs being swapped out of a clock that is incapable of stopping. For hours upon hours, day after day, they will assemble computers for Samsung Electronics Limited.
Thousands of times a minute a Samsung laptop is built by those workers. The LCD screen is connected to the chassis; the SSD hard drive encased in its aluminum housing; chips soldered to green circuit boards. Robotic arms ensure the hinges of the laptop open and close properly. Then these things that moments earlier were just scraps of metal and silicon and plastic come to life. The glowing computers are loaded with software, placed into boxes, and wheeled away through the building, entering the vast logistical arteries of the worldwide shipping systems.
In April 2012 one of those Samsung laptops was purchased online for $1,149. It traveled 6,989 miles away from that factory in Korea to a quaint home in the suburbs of Austin, Texas. No one but Ross Ulbricht and the Dread Pirate Roberts ever touched that Samsung 700Z, that is, until the afternoon of October 1, 2013. While Ross was whisked away to the nearby jail with Tarbell, the silver Samsung laptop was carefully carried by Thom Kiernan of the FBI down the stairs of the library, out onto the street, and into the back of Brophy’s unmarked police car.
Thom walked carefully with the machine, as if he were transporting an egg resting in the bowl of a spoon. There, with Jared in the backseat next to him, Thom nervously moved his finger back and forth along the mouse to ensure the laptop stayed alive as they made their way a few blocks to Ross Ulbricht’s house, where a mobile computer forensics lab waited outside.