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usts with physical drugs, not digital busts with technologies like Bitcoin, Tor, or even the Dark Web,
whatever the fuck that was.
“People upstairs are pissed that we haven’t gotten very far,” she lamented. And then she
explained that the leader of the site—“who now calls himself the Dread Pirate Roberts, you know,
from the Princess Bride movie”—had grown more brazen with the contraband that was for sale,
including hawking guns and hacking tools. What’s more, this Dread Pirate Roberts was publicly
denouncing the U.S. government. The New York DEA had hit a dead end, and they needed the help of
the FBI.
When the meeting ended, Tarbell and his team said they would talk among themselves and be in
touch. They shook hands and parted ways.
“Well,” Tarbell said to the agents in the Pit, “there are two problems here.” First, his team didn’t
want to just be “assistants” to the New York DEA. If the FBI was going to go after the Silk Road, the
FBI was going to do it alone. The Beau didn’t work well with others. Never had. Especially the
douche bags over at the DEA.
Which led to that other salient issue: they had been told several times by their higher-ups at the
FBI that drugs were not in their job detail; computers were.
But the meeting with the DEA agent had given Tarbell and his crew an idea. The site was no
longer just hawking drugs. People were now peddling several hundred different types of hacking
tools too, including key loggers, banking Trojans, malware apps, spyware, and a slew of other digital
goods that landed right in the purview of the men sitting in the Pit.
There, in that moment, the FBI team decided that was how they would get involved with the Silk
Road case. Rather than help the DEA find drug dealers, the cybercrime agents would go after the site
themselves. Tarbell picked up the phone, presenting the strategy to his bosses.
Several weeks later approval finally came back down the chain of command, saying that the team
could open an investigation on the site. After months of red tape and wasteful officialdom, Tarbell
and his coagents opened a new case file, numbered 288-3-696.
In addition to HSI in Chicago, a task force in Baltimore, and another group of local and federal
officials in New York City, there was now a new agency hunting for the Dread Pirate Roberts: the
Cyber Division of the FBI, and the Eliot Ness of cyberspace would be leading the charge.