34856893457934

The ground rules of the meeting, Dembosky explained, were that everyone needed to be open and
honest about where they were in their investigation. Then the DOJ would decide who got to lead the
case going forward.
“Shall we begin?” Dembosky said, looking directly at the Baltimore investigators in the room.
A woman from the Baltimore task force stood up, introduced herself, and began presenting the
evidence the Marco Polo task force had gathered over the past year and a half. She read off a few
bullet points that were mostly negligible about a couple of informants the team had arrested and then
wrapped up almost as soon as she had begun.
“What about the undercover account you have?” Luke Dembosky asked, referring to the
undercover drug smuggler persona Nob, which Carl Force from the DEA (a man who was, curiously,
not present at this meeting) had been managing for the past year and everyone at the DOJ was very
aware of.
“We can’t talk about that,” she replied. Then she said, “That’s 6E.”
People in the room looked around in shock. Every member of government there knew that “6E”
meant part of a current grand jury hearing, which was a way of keeping the investigation sealed. But it
made no sense to pull 6E in a meeting with the DOJ.
“The whole purpose of this meeting is to put your cards on the table,” Dembosky declared when
he heard this.
“It’s 6E,” the woman said again, nervous yet defiant. She didn’t want to talk about the case, not
because she was protecting someone in that grand jury investigation but because she didn’t want the
other people in the room to steal any of Baltimore’s work.
In a matter of minutes a screaming match erupted, with the DOJ attorneys demanding information
on the Baltimore investigation and the Baltimore task force petulantly reiterating “6E” over and over.
Dembosky, losing his patience, said it was time to take a break.
When everyone returned to the room, it was Jared’s turn to speak. He was anxious. While he had
walked into the room that morning determined that he wouldn’t share much about his investigation,
fearing the FBI would steal all the work he had done, Jared had just changed his mind. After that
debacle he had just witnessed, with Luke Dembosky telling the Baltimore task force that their
behavior was “completely improper,” Jared decided he was going to take a chance and tell the room
everything.
He stood up and spoke for more than forty minutes, explaining that he had seized almost 3,500
packages of drugs. He shared the techniques he had developed to spot this incoming mail and how he
knew which drugs had been purchased from the Silk Road by matching package contents to photos
and locations on the site. He talked about dealers he had arrested or questioned, including people
from the Netherlands, and others from all over the United States. He described the vendor accounts he
had taken over on the site, and he explained the inner workings of the Silk Road, with charts and
illustrations showing who was whom. Finally he talked about a recent account he had commandeered
that had belonged to a high-level employee on the Silk Road and showed how the account had
allowed Jared to be a fly on the wall in the meetings DPR held with his underlings.
Back in New York, in the middle of Jared’s presentation, Tarbell looked at the lead attorney
sitting next to him and said, “I want to work with that guy.” The attorney nodded his head in complete
agreement.