You paid for the drugs with this online digital currency called Bitcoin, and you shopped using an anonymous Web browser called Tor. Anyone could go onto the Silk Road Web site, select from the hundreds of different kinds of drugs they offered and pay for them, and a few days later the United States Postal Service would drop them into your mailbox. Then you sniffed, inhaled, swallowed, drank, or injected whatever came your way. “It’s like Amazon.com,” the roommate said, “but for drugs.”
When Julia asked what libertarianism was, Ross, without judgment, explained: everything—from what you do with your life, to what you put in your body—should be up to each individual, not the government.
The College Republican responded to his arguments: “How can you legalize something that kills tens of thousands of people a year?” The College Democrat agreed. Ross calmly countered, “So do you think we should outlaw Big Macs from McDonald’s too, because people gain weight and have heart attacks and die as a result of them?”
“There are no gang wars over the sale of alcohol or Big Macs, because those are legal,” he continued. And on top of it all, he reasoned, if drugs were legalized, then they would eventually be sold in regulated form. Bad drugs, cut with rat poison or talcum powder, would disappear from the marketplace.
There was a Web browser called Tor, which enabled people to slip behind a curtain online into another, separate Internet—one where the U.S. government couldn’t track people because, thanks to Tor, everyone became invisible. Unlike the normal Internet, where Ross’s every move was stored in databases by Facebook or Google or Comcast, on this side of the Internet, called the Dark Web, you simply couldn’t be found.
While you needed dollars to buy things in America, pounds in England, yen in Japan, or rupees in India, this new Bitcoin currency was meant to be used all around the world and specifically on the Internet. And just like cash, it was untraceable. To get some Bitcoins, you could exchange them online in the same way you could go to the airport and exchange dollars for euros. It was the missing piece Ross had been waiting for to build his experimental world with no rules.
Coming up with a name for his store was a challenge, but he finally settled on the Silk Road, a title borrowed from the ancient Chinese trade route of the Han dynasty.
As for the return on his investment, he estimated he could get $15 or so per gram for the mushrooms. Given that there would be several kilos of product at the end of the yield, he could easily make tens of thousands of dollars in profit. But—and this was a big “but”—this was a lot of mushrooms to offload, and it wasn’t obvious that his Web site was even going to work. Would people want to buy magic mushrooms off a stranger on the Internet?
somehow there had been a water leak in the apartment housing his secret magic mushroom farm. The landlord had gone into the space to inspect the flood and instead had found Ross’s drug laboratory. Irate, the landlord called Ross to tell him the next phone call was to the local police. Ross tore through the space, trying to get everything out before the cops arrived, and thankfully screeched away just in time.
By himself he had essentially done the work of a twelve-person start-up, acting as the front-end programmer, back-end developer, database guy, Tor consultant, Bitcoin analyst, project manager, guerrilla marketing strategist, CEO, and lead investor. Not to mention the in-house fungiculturist.
“So first,” Ross said as he typed, “you will need to download Tor; remember, Tor is a Web browser which makes you completely anonymous online, so that the thieves”—Ross’s term for the government—“can’t see what you’re doing and searching for.”
The site, he proclaimed, would be his greatest contribution to society. He was helping people, keeping them safe from the streets, where drug deals could get one thrown in jail or, worse, hurt or killed.
Ross’s reveries of the Silk Road growing so large that one day he would overturn the drug laws and be lauded for the positive impact he had had on society.
“So the government can have guns, but the people can’t?” Ross said. (He would echo this on the Silk Road, privately telling his new employees, “I’ve always been pro gun. It is a power equalizer against tyrannical governments.”)
For Julia, the guns were an enough-is-enough moment. Light drugs? Absolutely. Hard drugs? Fine. Maybe Ross was right; maybe we all did have the right to put whatever we wanted in our own bodies. How could the government say that we could drink alcohol, which killed ninety thousand Americans a year; or that people could smoke cigarettes, which killed forty thousand people a month in the United States; or even red meat, which caused hundreds of heart attacks a day; and it wasn’t okay to smoke weed, which killed no one? But buying illegal guns anonymously? This Julia couldn’t agree with. A few weeks later she boarded a plane to New York City.
Everything was moving along just fine until one evening, while partying, Erica had a bad acid trip from drugs purchased on the Silk Road and ended up in the hospital.
There, in all its terrifying glory, was a new message from Erica posted on his Facebook wall, publicly, for all to see. “I’m sure the authorities would like to know about Ross Ulbricht’s drug website,” she had written, like a giant neon billboard on the Internet.
Given that real money was now flowing into the site too, with Ross pulling in tens of thousands of dollars a week in revenue for the sale of drugs and guns, there would surely be more authorities hunting him soon.
But first VJ wanted to ensure that the creator of the site knew what was at stake here. “Not to be a downer or anything,” he wrote to Ross, but “understand that what we are doing falls under U.S. Drug Kingpin laws, which provides a maximum penalty of death upon conviction . . . the mandatory minimum is life.”
The Silk Road, which he had started only a year earlier, had just crossed a line of $500,000 a month in drug sales, which would subsequently turn into hundreds of thousands of dollars in commissions that flowed right into Ross’s pocket.
Back in December the Silk Road had been processing $500,000 in drug sales each month. Now, in late March, the site was doing $500,000 in sales a week.
Ross’s cut from the commission fees was now averaging $10,000 a day and growing
when he looked at the current trajectory of the Silk Road, if he calculated the future sales of the enterprise, “it could happen.” He could very well be a billionaire in two years.
But Variety Jones and DPR both knew it wasn’t contests and the Silk Road alone that would get Ross to his coveted billionaire status. The site needed to diversify into other markets and to reach a larger set of customers.
His mother and father didn’t have a clue what their son was working on. How can you look at your own flesh and blood, who was once a Boy Scout, then a physicist, who donated books to the local prison in his early twenties, and think, Oh, maybe he’s becoming one of the most notorious drug dealers alive? You can’t.
Ross believed the day would come when the movement he’d launched would become unstoppable and prove to the U.S. government that the only way to win the war on drugs was to legalize them completely. Then, and only then, would the Dread Pirate Roberts be able to remove the mask, and Ross Ulbricht would step out onto the world’s stage and take a bow.
Because of his unflinching acceptance, there were now more than two thousand different types of drugs for sale on the site, as well as lab supplies to make your own drugs and products to store and sell those drugs. There were digital goods, including key loggers, spy software, and other similar tools to hack into someone’s e-mail or webcam. People could buy forged documents, including passports, fake IDs, and even counterfeit cash that was indistinguishable from real money. And then there was the most contentious section of the site, labeled “weapons,” which had grown so much that you could buy everything from handguns to AR-15 automatic weapons. You could pick up bullets, grenades, and even a rocket launcher if need be.
If he really wanted to make drugs legal, which was his ultimate quest, he was going to have to solve the gun issue. While he wouldn’t bar them—he wouldn’t bar anything—he instead decided to create a gun-only Web site.
Just twenty-four months ago he had been broke and aimless; now he was rich and as steadfast as ever.
“So,” Ross said as he took a deep breath, preparing to tell Julia something important. “I just want you to know that I quit the site—I quit the Silk Road.”
Now the arguments the Dread Pirate Roberts was making about the war on drugs were actually starting to make a little sense. Maybe the answer to all this violence and waste of government resources and the hundreds of thousands of people rotting away in jails was to legalize drugs.
The employee then forwarded an e-mail that had come into the Silk Road’s support page from someone who said they wanted to sell kidneys, livers, and other body parts; according to the anonymous sender, the sales of these internal organs would “all be consensual” between the sellers and the buyers.
And DPR had finally put a hit out on Green. The cost wasn’t too insane, either: $40,000 up front and another $40,000 after he was dead.
There was a team in Baltimore (Carl), a lone agent in Chicago (Jared), and more than a dozen others scattered around the globe, all trying to figure out the identity of the Dread Pirate Roberts—but the case so far had proved unsolvable.
To the roommates, Josh appeared to be a quiet and polite day trader, not the man who over the past few months had ordered the murders of half a dozen people on the Silk Road.
Ross could never have imagined that the first small bag of magic mushrooms he had sold on the Silk Road would grow into a site where he was helping a million people buy and sell illegal drugs and other restricted goods.
So paying an informant $50,000 here or the Hells Angels half a mil for a couple of murders there was just the cost of doing business.
Carl told him to chill out and continue to lie low, as DPR still believed he was dead, and, twisting some fear into him, he warned that if the leader of the Silk Road found out Green was really still alive, you could be sure that wouldn’t last long.
But as Gary dug further, he discovered that the Altoid username had another e-mail address associated with it that had since been deleted but still existed in the forum’s database. The account, he discovered, belonged to a “RossUlbricht@gmail.com.”
Of course, being the first person to ever post about the Silk Road online by no means meant that this was the man who had created the Amazon of drugs. For all Gary knew, dozens or even hundreds of people might have already been discussing the site in private chats, or on unsearchable areas of the Internet, before “Altoid” wrote about it on those forums. But it was enough to add Ross Ulbricht’s name to a handful of other suspects Gary had been collecting,
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.
“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 site was making more money than he knew what to do with. He had tens of millions of dollars on thumb drives scattered around his apartment.
Whenever Jared saw the Dread Pirate Roberts log on to the Silk Road, he would let the undercover FBI team on the ground know, and they would confirm that at that very moment, Ross had opened his laptop too. Then, when DPR logged off the site, the undercovers would confirm that Ross had closed his laptop.
It appeared that either the Hells Angels had disposed of the bodies perfectly or, more than likely, no one had actually been killed at all. Rather, the Dread Pirate Roberts had been scammed for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Advocates came in from all over the country to champion Ross, protesting on the steps of the courthouse that he was a hero, that all he did was run a Web site, and, if that was a crime, then the CEOs of eBay and Craigslist should stand trial too, as illegal goods were sold on those sites.
Behind him, in the benches of the courtroom, all that could be heard was the uninterrupted sound of cries. “In the federal system,” the judge continued, “there is no parole and you shall serve your life in prison.”
After Ross was arrested, the Silk Road Web site was promptly shut down. But it took only a few weeks before a new Silk Road 2.0 opened for business, with a new Dread Pirate Roberts at the helm of the ship. When that was subsequently shut down by the Feds, another Silk Road appeared, along with hundreds of other Web sites that anonymously sell drugs online.
In all, several hundred people from forty-three different countries around the globe were caught buying, selling, and working on the Silk Road and were subsequently arrested by authorities, concluding with the capture of Variety Jones.