The forensics truck was a large white beast the length of a small yacht. There were no windows in the back. Inside, a long gray desk stretched from the front of the van to the rear, with computer equipment everywhere. Screens flashed amid a snake pit of wires, and a long row of power outlets stood at the ready, with a computer forensics expert from the local FBI office waiting to receive the laptop.
Thom and the other agent started checking the computer for booby traps, probing to ensure that the machine wouldn’t die if they plugged it into an external drive that they would use to siphon out all of the files. It was then that Thom saw a “scripts” folder. In it there was code that Ross had written to protect the computer in case of this very scenario.
A few feet away FBI agents swarmed Ross’s house, looking for evidence and clues that would tie him to the Silk Road. In the garbage can they found a handwritten note that was scribbled on a piece of crumpled paper, outlining a new file system he was building for the site. On Ross’s bedside table two thumb drives sat, though the Feds didn’t know yet what those drives contained.
Over the next ten hours the Samsung computer was copied half a dozen different ways. Backups were made of backups. Agents came and went. They ate McDonald’s as they worked. The streetlights flickered on and the forensics van was moved to an FBI safe house nearby. When Tarbell arrived after dropping Ross off at central booking, Thom and his forensics colleague were trying to go deeper and deeper into the computer, with the hope that they could pluck Ross’s passwords out of the laptop’s memory, possibly to enter the other side of the laptop. The Ross Ulbricht side. But at around 2:00 a.m., as they tried to break into the other side of the machine, it died.
They had the backups of the computer, but it would be days before they found out exactly what kind of evidence they had retrieved.
A couple of miles away, in a stone jailhouse on Seventh Street in San Francisco, Ross sat staring at a concrete wall, frightened by where he found himself but unfazed by how long he might be in jail. He had played through this scenario a thousand times before. Sure, they had caught him with his fingers on the laptop while he was logged in to the Silk Road as DPR. But that didn’t mean that he was the DPR who ran the Silk Road. There could be more than one Dread Pirate Roberts, like the old tale in The Princess Bride.
Ross was sure that they would never be able to figure out his passwords on the computer, either. All the most important files had been encrypted and locked under his secure code word, “purpleorangebeach.” No one, not even the FBI, would be able to figure that out. The most they could prove, he was sure, was that he was logged in to the site when they arrested him. And that didn’t mean anything. In a worst-case scenario he knew he could admit that, sure, he had once been involved in the Silk Road, but he had handed the site off to someone else years ago. If the FBI asked whom Ross had given the site away to, he could simply say, “I don’t know who it was. All I know is that they called themselves the Dread Pirate Roberts.”
Chapter 67
ROSS LOCKED UP
For the first two weeks after his arrest, inmate number ULW981 was locked up in solitary confinement at a jail in Oakland, California. His street clothes were taken away, exchanged for a red prison jumpsuit with ALAMEDA COUNTY JAIL written across the back. His shoes were swapped out for a pair of socks and flip-flops. His wrists were shackled to a chain around his waist. He was allowed outside for one hour a day as he waited to be transported to New York City, where he would hear the charges against him and stand trial.
The news of his arrest was like an atom splitting on the Internet. Thousands of blogs, newspapers, and TV outlets covered the story of the Boy Scout who had secretly been running a Web site that, the FBI alleged, had trafficked $1.2 billion in drugs, weapons, and poisons, in just a couple of years.
For those who knew Ross, the story, and his arrest, just didn’t add up. His friends and family believed that it was one giant mistake.
When a reporter called his best friend, René, whom Ross had stayed with on Hickory Street in San Francisco, asking what he knew about Ross’s involvement in the Silk Road, René was so flabbergasted and confused that he said, “I don’t know how they messed it up and I don’t know how they got Ross wrapped into this, but I’m sure it’s not him.” When Ross’s family found out, they felt the same way. There was just no way that Ross could be involved in such a site. Cousins, aunts and uncles, and his siblings, were sure that he had been framed. That the truth would set him free. On Facebook elementary-school chums, high school buddies, and old neighbors shared links in disbelief, shocked by what they read. There’s no way. Not in a million years. Not Ross.
In San Francisco one of the men whom Ross had lived with on Fifteenth Avenue was walking to work and stopped to pick up a copy of the San Francisco Examiner. On the front page of the paper, above the fold, there was a picture of Ross smiling next to a screenshot of the Silk Road. The roommate snapped a photo of the front page with his smartphone and then sent it to the other renter in the Fifteenth Avenue apartment. “Funny,” he wrote in the text message. “Looks kinda like our subletter,” Josh.
“Not looks like,” the other roommate replied. “Is.”
“Holy shit . . .”
And then there was Julia, who had planned to video chat with Ross the night he was arrested. She had stripped down to her sexy lingerie and logged on to Skype, hoping to see a handsome Ross staring back at her through his laptop camera. But he never showed up. She rang and rang, trying to reach him, but no one answered. She was completely unaware that at that very moment, the man she hoped to flirt with through a tiny little camera on her computer was sitting in handcuffs in a jail cell, and that his laptop was being probed in an FBI forensic truck by two federal agents. Eventually she gave up trying to call him that evening, assuming that Ross had forgotten about their online assignation, and she went to bed alone.
The next morning a client came into her office, and as they sat going through photos, Julia’s cell phone rang, interrupting the meeting. It was a friend from Austin who simply uttered the words “Google Ross Ulbricht.”
“Huh?” Julia queried.
“Just do it,” the friend demanded. “Google Ross Ulbricht’s name.”
Julia turned to her computer, typed in a name she had written ten thousand times before, and waited for the results to load on her screen. When she saw the news she almost fainted. Shock took over her body as she fell on the floor and began wailing.
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