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Like all the other agents in law enforcement working on the case, Gary had already corralled a
list of names that he thought could possibly be the Dread Pirate Roberts. These names included a
programmer who had very libertarian-leaning views, someone who worked with Bitcoin, and yet
another was a man who managed an online Web forum. But the chance of DPR being any of these
people was slim.
So late that evening, as he lay on his red bed, his head on his red pillow, Gary had an idea.
He wondered about the first person to ever write about the Silk Road on the Internet. As far as
everyone knew, it was Adrian Chen, the blogger for Gawker who had published the notorious first
story on the Silk Road. Maybe, Gary thought, Adrian Chen was really the Dread Pirate Roberts.
If so, then maybe Adrian Chen would have written about the Silk Road somewhere else before
he wrote about it on Gawker.
So Gary went to Google on his laptop and read the Gawker article again, three times. On his last
pass he saw something interesting in a link that he hadn’t seen before: that instead of“.com,” the Silk
Road’s URL was followed by “.onion,” which was the domain used on the Tor Web browser.
With that, Gary went back to Google, typed “Silk Road.onion” into the search box, and then
filtered by date, saying he wanted to see only results from before June 1, 2011, the day the Gawker
article was published. This time only a handful of blue links appeared. Click. Click. Click again. And
out of nowhere he saw a post on a forum called the Shroomery that had been posted at exactly 4:20
p.m. on Thursday, January 27, 2011—the same week the Silk Road had allegedly opened for
business. He clicked the link and began reading.
“I came across this website called Silk Road,” someone had written on the Shroomery back in
2011. He continued to skim the Shroomery Web site, which explained how to grow magic mushrooms,
until he noticed that the author of the comment about the Silk Road called himself Altoid. Gary sat up
in bed.
“Where are you going?” Gary’s wife asked, half asleep, as he stood up.
“Downstairs,” he whispered. The blue glow of his laptop left the room as he walked across the
hall. Paulie jumped down and scampered behind him.
He sat on the couch in the living room and continued to look further. He went to Google again,
this time typing in “Silk Road.onion” and “Altoid,” and a couple more blue links appeared. Click.
Click. Click. And there was another post on a separate forum that talked about the idea of creating a
“Heroin Store” that would allow people to buy “H” on the Internet using Tor and Bitcoin. And as on
the other site, there was a post written by Altoid.
“What an awesome thread! You guys have a ton of great ideas. Has anyone seen Silk Road yet?”
Altoid had written around the same time, in January 2011. “It’s kind of like an anonymous
amazon.com.”
Over the coming days Gary contacted these forums and, using his government credentials,
requested the names and e-mail addresses that were associated with the “Altoid” accounts. It
appeared that they had been registered to someone with the e-mail address “frosty@frosty.com,”
which wasn’t a real e-mail account and went nowhere. But as Gary dug further, he discovered that the
Altoid username had another e-mail address associated with it that had since been deleted but still
existed in the forum’s database.
The account, he discovered, belonged to a “RossUlbricht@gmail.com.”