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take a few breaks to watch Louis C.K. comedy clips and V for Vendetta again and to read books with
libertarian messages that reminded him of his mission.)
With the confidence Ross now felt, he had started to become stricter with his employees,
constantly lecturing some of them to work more productively. “I can do better,” one underling
nervously acknowledged after a recent lecture.
To which Ross replied, “I’m sure you can.”
Ross, behind the elusive and fearsome mask of the Dread Pirate Roberts, had also decided to do
his first interview, hosting a Q&A session with an intrepid reporter from Forbes, Andy Greenberg,
who asked DPR questions about the site and its mission. Ross decided to do the Q&A as a text chat
so he could run every question by Variety Jones and the two could answer them together. It was the
perfect opportunity to spread Ross’s libertarian message and, more important, it was an opportunity
to implement VJ’s plan to suggest that there could be more than one Dread Pirate Roberts.
When Greenberg asked, “What inspired you to start the Silk Road?” Ross cleverly noted, “I
didn’t start the Silk Road, my predecessor did,” and then he explained that “everything was in place,
he just put the pieces together.”
“Oh, apologies, I didn’t know you had a predecessor,” Greenberg replied. “When did you take
over the Road from him? Before you announced yourself as the Dread Pirate Roberts?”
Ross continued to spin the tale. “It’s ok,” he wrote back. “This is the first time I’ve stated that
publicly.” He told Greenberg that the original creator of the Silk Road was “compensated and happy
with our arrangement” and that “it was his idea to pass the torch in fact.” The interview lasted four
hours and was the perfect rallying cry for DPR’s mission.
When Ross wasn’t holed up at home on his laptop, barking orders at his underlings, he would go
for long walks in the nearby parks, or hang out with his old Austin friends and new San Francisco
pals, a nice reprieve from his other worlds.
• • •
Agent Ramirez had worked for the Department of Homeland Security in San Francisco for more than
a decade and was by all accounts a seasoned veteran. He always paid attention to the details and
always knew the right questions to ask the nefarious people who came across his path.
In July 2013 he was working several cases and had just received an e-mail from someone at SFO
Customs and Border Protection about a group of square envelopes they had intercepted from Canada.
The mail, the e-mail said, had all contained fake IDs, or at least what appeared to be fake.
Agent Ramirez knew that most of the time customs officials at SFO simply destroyed packages
with drugs or fake documents; it was just easier than passing them off to Homeland Security agents.
But one of the envelopes had contained nine—nine!—fake IDs. This was a major red flag. Who needs
nine fake IDs? One, sure. Two the agent could understand. But nine? The addressee on the particular
envelope that was supposed to receive the IDs was an “Andrew Ford,” who apparently lived at 2260
Fifteenth Avenue in San Francisco.
While the IDs were perfect copies of driver’s licenses from New York, California, Colorado,
and the United Kingdom, they all appeared to have a variation of the same person’s face on them: a
white man with hazel eyes who stood six feet two inches tall and was born on March 27, 1984. In
some pictures the man had a thick beard that had been Photoshopped on, and in others he was clean
shaven.