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you were only giving them half of yourself? As he had confided in his pals, both in the real world and
on the Silk Road, he wanted a family one day. Just not yet and just not with Kristal.
But that didn’t matter, because just as Ross was going into hiding, another special someone was
slowly but assuredly coming back into his life. The person he had sworn he would never talk to
again: Julia.
This was not part of his checklist.
Prior to deciding to lie low for a while, he had been reading a book on productivity, which
offered a message that wasn’t too dissimilar to the approach he’d taken in his college days, when
he’d trimmed the unnecessary banalities in his life by not showering for a month or eating only a bag
of rice for a week. One of the messages in the book was that the reader should “reboot” their online
calendar by starting anew. When he had done just that, the computer had canceled an old event with
Julia and automatically sent her a message letting her know.
“How have you been?” she wrote back to him. “Still think you are amazing.”
This led the onetime lovebirds to start e-mailing each other sporadically. While it was just
flirting right now, maybe it would become something again in the future. If nothing else, it was a nice
distraction from the chaos of his now many other worlds.
As Josh, Ross went to the house on Fifteenth Avenue and took a brief tour. He was introduced to
the people who rented the other bedrooms in the house and, after handing the cash to Andrew Ford,
the man who was renting the room, Ross moved right in.
Josh’s new roommates were unaware that the twenty-nine-year-old Texan who was now
unpacking his few belongings, arriving with literally a laptop and a small bag of clothes—enough for
a week’s travel—was really called Ross Ulbricht. And they certainly didn’t have any suspicion that
he was also the Dread Pirate Roberts, who had tens of millions of dollars in Bitcoins on his laptop
and in thumb drives in his pocket. To the roommates, Josh appeared to be a quiet and polite day
trader, not the man who over the past few months had ordered the murders of half a dozen people on
the Silk Road.
Yes, there had been more people put to death at the hands of the Dread Pirate Roberts.
Shortly after the drowning and subsequent killing of Curtis Green, someone else had tried to
scam DPR out of $500,000 in Bitcoins. Though, unlike in the previous case, where the money was
just stolen and needed to be dealt with accordingly, this extortioner had threatened to release
hundreds of real names and addresses of Silk Road users that had somehow been stolen. The only
way to avoid this, DPR was told by the extortioner, was to pay $500,000.
But Ross wasn’t going to fall for this again, so he had recruited a new group of henchmen, the
Hells Angels, whom he had met through the site, to find the thief and have him killed. “This kind of
behavior is unforgivable to me,” DPR explained to the Hells Angels over chat. “Especially here on
Silk Road, anonymity is sacrosanct.”
The cost for this hit had been quoted as $150,000 for a “clean” murder. Dread wasn’t happy
about this price, as he told the Angels; he had paid half that for a previous murder.
Still, negotiating with a group of ruthless thugs wasn’t exactly an easy task, and $150,000 was
nothing to Dread at this point, so he agreed to the fee. Over the coming days a picture of the dead man
and an e-mail arrived in DPR’s in-box. “Your problem has been taken care of. . . . Rest easy though,
because he won’t be blackmailing anyone again. Ever.”