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When that detour didn’t work out, Carl returned to the goal of befriending DPR, and in doing so,
would say whatever he wanted to the site’s leader.
Not surprisingly, almost anyone who read the chats between Nob and Dread started to question
why they were so detailed.
On more than one occasion Nick, Carl’s boss at the DEA, saw the conversations between the two
men and was livid. He would call his underling into his office, slam the door shut behind him, and,
amid the din of heavy metal music, erupt into an apoplectic rage. (Carl found glee in pissing off his
boss, so he sat there undeterred.)
“I’m just doing this stuff to get close to him,” Carl told Nick unapologetically, which was half
true. “I need to develop trust with DPR.”
It was hard to assert that this approach wasn’t working. There was an argument to be made that
Carl was going to bring down the Silk Road before other agents, and it was becoming apparent that
there were plenty of others in the U.S. government who wanted that glory, including (as Carl had
heard) Jared Der-Yeghiayan over in Chicago. It seemed perfectly fine to overlook Carl’s peculiar
interaction with DPR if it meant the Marco Polo crew was going to win.
Which is why when Carl approached his team about doing a controlled drug buy that would be
facilitated by none other than DPR himself, no one questioned if it was a bad idea.
The plan Carl came up with was to have his online persona, Nob, sell a bulk order of cocaine or
heroin to a buyer. And as he suspected, the Dread Pirate Roberts was happy to help expedite the sale.
“How much can you sell 10 kilos for?” DPR asked one afternoon.
Of heroin?
Yes, of heroin.
Nob, playing the part, explained that he had only “Mexican brown H, not china white” but that
the first ten kilos would be $57,000 apiece, or just over half a million dollars. If the sale went well,
he would drop the price to $55,000 a kilo, and then to $53,000. But what he could sell for less
money, Nob explained to Dread, was a kilo of cocaine.
“All right,” DPR wrote, he would find a buyer for a kilo of coke.
And so, as Dread went off to facilitate the sale, it was starting to become unclear who would be
on the other end of that transaction. Would it be the churchgoing DEA-agent dad who wanted to
capture the Dread Pirate Roberts and get the glory of bringing down the most notorious drug dealer of
his career? Or would it be Nob, the fearless drug smuggler who wanted to help DPR find safe
passage along the Silk Road?