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the site had grown, DPR’s message had become more brazen. While at first the founder’s idea had
been to make drugs legal, more and more he wrote about how terrible the U.S. government was, and
how it was a place for the abuse of power. In one post DPR gloated that the “state is unable to get its
thieving murderous mitts on [the Silk Road].”
Based on all of his writings, Jared had started to build a profile of who this Dread Pirate
Roberts might be. He was likely very educated, young, not rich but not poor either, and while he
wanted to destroy the American legal system, he was also doing this for the money. DPR had even
admitted this in postings on the site, noting that “money is one motivating factor for me. . . . I also
enjoy a few first-world pleasures that I feel I have earned. . . . Compared to most I know, I still live
quite frugally.” But from Jared’s readings it appeared that DPR also believed that what he was doing
was making the world a better place. “As corny as it sounds,” Dread had written online, “I just want
to look back on my life and know that I did something worthwhile that helped people.”
Jared, trying to find things that others couldn’t see, started to analyze DPR’s speech patterns. For
one, Dread used the word “epic” a lot, which showed that he was likely younger. He also used emoji
smiley faces in his writing, though he never used a hyphen as the nose, writing them as :) rather than
the old-fashioned :-). Yet the one attribute about DPR that stood out to Jared was that rather than
writing “yes” or “yeah” on the site’s forums, Dread instead always typed “yea.”
DPR was constantly recommending books to his followers—a litany of literature from the Mises
Institute. Jared wanted to understand Dread’s thinking and read along too. But the books were so
dense that nothing he read made any sense. To him it appeared that the arguments made by the authors
were just a series of justifications for doing things in the world without taking responsibility for how
those actions might affect other people.
All those books and all that research hadn’t brought Jared any closer to DPR.
To make matters worse, Jared had heard from his counterparts at the Homeland Security office in
Baltimore that a DEA agent, Carl Force, had managed to get close to the Dread Pirate Roberts, and
Carl had been chatting with him undercover.
Hearing this, Jared reluctantly asked the HSI Baltimore team to look through some of Carl’s chat
logs to see if he could find more patterns in DPR’s language.
When an e-mail arrived containing some of the logs, Jared was shocked at what the DEA agent
was writing to DPR. Carl Force appeared to be offering more information than he should to the man
he was supposed to be hunting, explaining how drug-smuggling routes worked and how to buy and
sell heroin in bulk. It was one thing to curry favor with a perp whom you were trying to lure into
public, but this felt like it was going several steps too far.
As Jared sat at his desk in Chicago, staring at all the mail tubs on the floor, the Mises books on
his desk, and the pictures of drugs that covered his walls, he felt so frustrated that he was being
caught up in dead end after dead end. Jared needed a break in his case. Something, anything, just a
little sign that he was on the right track.