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government was the casino; DPR was the gambler. Eventually, Gary believed, because the Dread
Pirate Roberts wouldn’t stop playing, he would lose.
To say Gary was excited about this case was the understatement of his career. He was ecstatic!
As soon as he was settled into his office (or as close to settled as he could be), he was briefed by his
new teammates. This was when he very quickly learned that everyone else was not as enthusiastic
about the Silk Road case as Gary was—at least, not anymore.
Investigators were burned out and fed up, given that their probe had gone nowhere. To them Gary
arriving with all of this enthusiasm for the case was like a child waking up in mid-August thinking that
it was Christmas morning.
His co–case agents immediately noticed something about Gary too. When he spoke, he would
often interrupt himself and utter a rhetorical “You know?” or “Riiiiight!” almost like someone saying
the words “rye” and “tight” together very quickly. He did this all the time. Gary could be chatting
away at full stride, and in midsentence he would reach into the depths of his core and, as if he were
trying to impersonate a bear, bellow the word “Riiight!” followed by “You know? You know?” and
then he would just keep going as if nothing had happened.
Still, “You know?” and “Riiiight” aside, the task force agents explained where the investigation
stood. It was May 2013, exactly two years since the famed Gawker article had been published, and
there were dozens of government agents and task forces all over the world trying to figure out how to
breach the Silk Road. 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.
Midway through his briefing Gary was informed that since nothing else had worked, the task
force wanted to try a new strategy. They instructed Gary to follow the money rather than the drugs.
One of the places they wanted him to start with was a user on the Silk Road who had been buying and
selling Bitcoins for drug dealers and the site’s creators, acting as a digital money launderette. The
strike force told Gary to try to figure out who this human Bitcoin-to-cash ATM was. Then they could
try to trace some of those Bitcoins.
Gary was completely up for the task of finding the money launderer, but he also had an idea how
they might be able to find the Dread Pirate Roberts.
“How?” one of the cops dubiously asked.
“The Son of Sam,” Gary replied.
Gary had heard stories about that New York City serial killer known as the Son of Sam so many
times as a kid that it was impossible to forget. But what had always stuck out to him, he explained to
the agent, was the way authorities caught the murderer.
It had all taken place between 1976 and 1977 in the same neighborhood where Gary was raised.
At the time, the Son of Sam had gone on a killing spree in New York, terrorizing the city and making
fools of the NYPD. No matter how many police officers and detectives City Hall threw at the
investigation, it was unsolvable. A task force that was set up to find the murderer went nowhere. Yet
shortly after the blackout of 1977, one police officer decided to try a new and creative angle to find
the killer. Rather than search the crime scene looking for weapons or clues, the officer decided to
look for cars in the areas of the murders that had received parking tickets around the same times as the
crimes. The cop reasoned that even the most brazen murderer wouldn’t have stopped midway through