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The agent asked again. “Andrew Ford?” This time holding up a photo of nine fake IDs, each of
which had a picture of Ross Ulbricht on the front. “Is there an Andrew Ford who lives here?”
“No!” the Asian man vehemently responded, quickly closing the door in his face. “Now go
away!”
• • •
Just as Ross didn’t talk to his roommates, he chose not to talk to his neighbors, either. He just stayed
in his room working on his laptop. If he had talked to the people who lived next to him on Fifteenth
Avenue, he would have heard the horror stories about packages getting muddled up in the mail. He
might have even heard the tale about the history of the street he lived on: the story about how in the
late spring of 1909, the mayor of San Francisco had set up a commission to renumber the houses and
roads of the city after years of confusion over the similarity between the streets and avenues. While
the commission was started with noble goals, it set entire neighborhoods into feuds with one another,
with residents arguing over which streets would be renamed and which would not.
In the end the numbered streets and the numbered avenues remained unchanged.
As a result, packages that were being sent to Fifteenth Avenue sometimes ended up at addresses
on Fifteenth Street, and envelopes that were mailed to people on Fifteenth Street sometimes ended up
at homes along Fifteenth Avenue.
And in mid-July 2013 an agent from the Department of Homeland Security ended up at the wrong
address too, accidentally searching for the man who had purchased nine fake IDs at 2260 Fifteenth
Street instead of the address that had been written on the envelope: 2260 Fifteenth Avenue. The
address where Ross Ulbricht lived.