34856893457934

She turned back to her computer and continued. In addition to the Fifteenth Avenue address, it
appeared that Ross had lived on Hickory Street in the center of San Francisco. And then she began
reading the report Dylan had written, verbatim. “Ulbricht generally refused to answer any questions
pertaining to the purchase of this or other counterfeit identity documents,” she read. And then, like
some sort of practical joke, she read the following sentence: “However‚ Ulbricht volunteered that
hypothetically anyone could go onto a Web site named ‘Silk Road’ on ‘Tor’ and purchase any drugs or
IDs.”
Gary’s heart began thudding in his ears. It didn’t add up. This was all too much for it to be a
coincidence. Gary immediately charged toward his supervisor’s office and burst into the room,
adrenaline coursing through his veins.
“It’s him!” Gary bellowed. “It’s him!”
The supervisor told him to calm down and then listened to Gary make the case for why it was
Ross Ulbricht—a case that was now more convincing than before, yet the supervisor cautioned that
there were still many details that didn’t make sense. Still, Gary was told to take a deep breath and to
call the U.S. Attorney’s Office to explain.
• • •
When Serrin Turner answered the phone, he didn’t expect to hear an agitated IRS agent on the other
end of the line. “Slow down,” he said as Gary jumped right into his tirade. “Which guy are you
talking about?”
“The guy who I think has been running the site,” Gary said.
“What about him?”
Gary began a convoluted speech, laying out everything from the Google search results to the
travel to Dominica—all of which he’d mentioned to Serrin a few weeks earlier while Gary had gone
through a list of other potential suspects, but this time he added the details from the DHS report,
noting the story of the fake IDs, the phony name “Josh,” and the mention of the Silk Road Web site.
Serrin wasn’t sold by the evidence Gary had just delivered, but he was intrigued. “And this guy
lives in San Francisco?” Serrin asked. “What’s his address?”
As Gary read the address from the DHS report, Serrin began typing it into Google Maps. The
map on his screen zoomed across the United States into the jagged protrusion of San Francisco, then
down to Hickory Street, which sat almost in the middle of the seven-mile-square city. As Gary spoke
in the background, Serrin clicked on the address on the map and then entered the only other piece of
evidence that tied the Silk Road Web site to a person or place: Momi Toby’s café on Laguna Street in
San Francisco.
“Holy shit!” Serrin blurted aloud. “It’s around the fucking corner from Momi Toby’s café, where
we found the IP address.”
Gary leaned back in his chair as Serrin leaned forward in his.
To Serrin it made no sense that a kid with no programming background, whose Facebook photos
were mostly moments of him camping, kite-boarding with suburban friends, and hugging his mother,
was responsible for creating what authorities now believed was a multibillion-dollar drug empire.
And what made even less sense was that this kid had ordered the cold-blooded murders of almost
half a dozen people. Nope. It simply didn’t add up. But it also didn’t add up that this kid lived a block