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opened his laptop too. Then, when DPR logged off the site, the undercovers would confirm that Ross<br />
had closed his laptop. So ensuring Jared was online all the time was imperative to the investigation.<br />
He got off the plane at SFO, his laptop in one hand, his bags in the other, and he set off to the<br />
hotel, utterly exhausted. He hadn’t slept more than a couple of hours at a time since the phone call<br />
three weeks earlier, and there was no sign that was going to let up anytime soon.<br />
Jared checked into his room at the hotel and made plans with Tarbell to meet at the steak<br />
restaurant in the lobby to go over the logistics of the coming days. Tarbell introduced Jared to a large<br />
ex-marine called Brophy, who was a “badass” special agent with the New York FBI and had come<br />
out to San Francisco to assist with the actual arrest. Thom, the computer scientist from the New York<br />
office, whom Jared had met before in New York City, was there too. Thom had one job, which was to<br />
keep Ross’s computer powered on and logged in if they captured him with his hands on the keyboard.<br />
But there was a problem with that part of the operation. As they ordered beers, Tarbell explained that<br />
the local FBI team in San Francisco was going to be responsible for the arrest, as this was in their<br />
jurisdiction (this was standard FBI procedure) and that the local agents wanted to go into Ross<br />
Ulbricht’s house with a SWAT team.<br />
“Oh, fuck.”<br />
“Yeah.”<br />
Tarbell had made this mistake before during his LulzSec bust, and he knew that they could arrest<br />
Ross Ulbricht ten thousand times over, but unless they caught him with his hands on his laptop, they<br />
might not be able to prove that they had captured the Dread Pirate Roberts. All it would take was a<br />
glimpse of a Fed or the sound of a footstep, and Ross could touch his keyboard, encrypting the<br />
evidence on it. Sure, they could tie him to the site with the log-ins from Momi Toby’s café and the<br />
surveillance the Feds and Jared were building together. But a good lawyer could say that was all<br />
coincidence.<br />
“What are we going to do?” Jared asked.<br />
“I’m going down to the local FBI office tomorrow to try to talk them out of going in with SWAT,”<br />
Tarbell replied.<br />
“You think it’ll work?”<br />
“It has to.”<br />
But Tarbell knew it would be a tough sell. As the FBI briefing reports noted, the Dread Pirate<br />
Roberts was dangerous. From what Tarbell and his crew had pulled from the servers, it appeared that<br />
DPR had had people murdered—several people—and that he had ties to the Hells Angels and other<br />
hit men. For all they knew, DPR was going to go down with a fight. Maybe a fight to the death. And<br />
the higher-ups at the Bureau weren’t going to risk losing a single FBI agent if that proved to be true.<br />
To top it off, the director of the FBI had briefed the White House about the sting, which meant the<br />
president of the United States would know if the operation was a success.<br />
Brophy, the gruff agent, interrupted. “I should’ve grabbed him today.”<br />
“Whaddaya mean?” Jared asked.<br />
Earlier that day, Brophy explained, the undercover team had tracked Ross to a nearby coffee<br />
shop, where he sat on his computer for a couple of hours. Brophy walked into the café and sat right<br />
next to him, and while Brophy was big enough that he could have taken him right there and then, there<br />
was a chance that Ross wasn’t logged in to the Silk Road, and they would have captured him simply<br />
checking his e-mail. If Jared had not been on that plane, they might have been able to check if DPR
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