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Chapter 50<br />
A PARKING TICKET ON THE INTERNET<br />
For months Gary Alford read everything about the Silk Road that he could get his hands on.<br />
Every single thing, at least three times. He had become obsessed with the idea that he could<br />
find the Dread Pirate Roberts.<br />
Then, on the last Friday in May 2013, as he lay in bed with his laptop, Gary’s obsession gave the<br />
first hint of paying off.<br />
It had been the end of a typically long week working with the New York task force searching for<br />
DPR. Gary came home that evening and enjoyed a meal with his wife, and then the couple trudged<br />
upstairs to bed. Mrs. Alford fell asleep almost instantly, and their dog, Paulie, was curled up on the<br />
edge of the bed gently snoring.<br />
A lot of the decorations in the Alfords’ bedroom were red. The comforter, the pillowcases, and<br />
even the walls all looked like they had been spray-painted a deep crimson. In this red room, Gary<br />
clicked away on his laptop, still reading about the Silk Road.<br />
Over the past few months Gary had put together a few assumptions about who DPR might be.<br />
Dread also knew the American political system incredibly well, which meant he probably lived in the<br />
United States. And he must have an impressive computer science background to have built such a Web<br />
site.<br />
Then there was the biggest clue of them all.<br />
Gary had read early posts (three times each) by the Silk Road creator, in which he said that<br />
buying drugs from the streets, where other people could rip you off or beat you up, was dangerous,<br />
and buying from the Silk Road would be much safer. Gary, who was black and had grown up in the<br />
housing projects, immediately took offense to this. “What does he mean by ‘other people’?” he said to<br />
his wife when discussing the case. “Clearly,” he had reflected, “he hadn’t grown up with these ‘other<br />
people’ because if he had—as I have—he wouldn’t be calling us ‘other people.’” But while he was<br />
irked by the statement, it gave him that final and most important clue: that DPR was white and likely<br />
from the suburbs.<br />
Even with these leads Gary had narrowed his search down to about, oh, maybe twenty million<br />
people. Still, it was a clue.
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