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Chapter 42<br />
THE FIRST MURDER<br />
Ross had figured that one day it might come to this. That one day he would be faced with this<br />
kind of ruthless decision—to “call on my muscle,” as he’d told an associate. When that day<br />
came, he’d imagined that maybe he would have to end the life of a dealer gone rogue or someone who<br />
threatened the mission of the Silk Road. But not one of his own people. And certainly not Curtis<br />
Green from Spanish Fork, Utah.<br />
While this decision was daunting for DPR, at least one part of it would be easy: figuring out who<br />
would do the job. With so much cash on hand, it turned out there were plenty of people who were<br />
willing and able to murder someone—particularly in a barren stretch of Utah. Variety Jones had<br />
access to a man he simply called “Irish,” who could be dispatched—from Ireland—to Utah, where he<br />
would find Curtis and make him disappear. (One slight problem here was that Irish wasn’t very tech<br />
savvy, so retrieving the $350,000 in Bitcoins Green had stolen could prove to be a complicated<br />
challenge.) Inigo, another Silk Road employee and one of a few people DPR actually trusted<br />
implicitly, volunteered to go and take care of the problem himself, but he was way too important to<br />
the infrastructure of the site to be a foot soldier. So DPR decided the job would have to be done by<br />
Nob, the South American drug dealer he had become so close to.<br />
After all, it was Nob who had lost a kilo of “Colombia’s finest” when Green had been busted by<br />
the DEA a week earlier, a salient fact that Ross had discovered by a simple Google search of Curtis<br />
Green’s name after he didn’t show up to work one day, which had led him to a Web site that<br />
catalogued recent arrests.<br />
There, in all its glory, was the mug shot of his chubby employee.<br />
Ross hadn’t imagined this was what he would be dealing with when he woke on a cold winter’s<br />
morning in early 2013. At first when he found out about Green, the only thing he could do was feel<br />
sick to his stomach, as he told VJ in a chat. Then, a couple of hours later, the taste of vomit was<br />
quickly turning into one of vengeance.<br />
DPR spoke to all of his associates about what to do. There was a real fear that Green would sing<br />
to the cops about the Silk Road, telling the Feds about the innards of the site, how it worked, and who<br />
was involved with it. That, plus the $350,000, left Ross with essentially three options for how to<br />
handle his rogue employee.
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