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Unfortunately, this didn’t end the problems for Ross. Shortly before the Hells Angels had
murdered their prey, the extortioner had admitted to spilling his secrets to four other associates, one
of whom went by the moniker “tony76” on the Silk Road. Without skipping a beat, DPR paid
$500,000 to have them killed too.
In Ross’s diary on his computer, he wrote about what he had done. “Sent payment to angels for
hit on tony76 and his 3 associates,” which was followed by an update about some complicated work
he had done on the servers of the site that day: “Very high load (300/16) took site offline and
refactored main and category pages to be more efficient.”
It seemed that murder, like code, was becoming easier to execute with practice.
To top off all of this chaos, DPR had been issued a death threat from someone called
DeathFromAbove, who claimed to know that he had been involved in the murder of Curtis Green.
Ross also had another scare when a screwup with the coding on the site leaked the server’s IP
address. If someone from the FBI or elsewhere had been watching, they would have been able to
figure out where the server that ran the Silk Road was—something Ross had kept hidden for more
than two years.
And so the mix of the murders, the death threats, the Hells Angels, and the heat that came with
them made it imperative for Ross to go into hiding.
Variety Jones had done the same thing too, moving to Thailand to try to avoid being caught if
things went up in flames. VJ explained that he had corrupt cops on his payroll there, so he would
know if anyone was coming after him and would easily be able to scurry away before the Feebs
knocked on his door.
While all this turmoil was raining down on Dread, there had been a good development. VJ was
no longer the only person with crooked cops on his payroll. DPR had managed to hire a couple too.
He had put out some feelers to his network on the site, offered up some incentives here, some
more there, and it appeared he might have an informant in the government who would keep him
apprised of the hunt for the Dread Pirate Roberts, for a fee. The cost, the informant said, was going to
be a measly $50,000 for each droplet of intelligence. It was still unclear how this would all play out
and whether the details would help him evade the Feds. But it couldn’t hurt to try.
Thankfully for DPR, the site was bustling with business. By the end of July, the Silk Road was on
track to register its one millionth user. All in the span of a little over two years. Ross could never
have imagined that the first small bag of magic mushrooms he had sold on the Silk Road would grow
into a site where he was helping a million people buy and sell illegal drugs and other restricted
goods. Even with all this stress now being catapulted in his direction, this salient fact was amazing to
him.
So paying an informant $50,000 here or the Hells Angels half a mil for a couple of murders there
was just the cost of doing business. It barely put a dent in the site’s profits.
Thankfully for Ross, he had become an adept and confident CEO of the Silk Road. There was no
question now that he was in charge, and while others supported him, DPR was the final arbiter of
every decision and no longer sought the approval of his onetime mentor, Variety Jones.
As the boss, Ross often reminded some of his employees that “we are out to transform human
civilization.” And he offered long and inspiring lectures to them, learning how to motivate the troops
when tensions tightened. Which was exactly what some of his workers needed right now, with all the
pressure on the site from hackers and law enforcement.