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Chapter 67
ROSS LOCKED UP
For the first two weeks after his arrest, inmate number ULW981 was locked up in solitary
confinement at a jail in Oakland, California. His street clothes were taken away, exchanged for
a red prison jumpsuit with ALAMEDA COUNTY JAIL written across the back. His shoes were swapped
out for a pair of socks and flip-flops. His wrists were shackled to a chain around his waist. He was
allowed outside for one hour a day as he waited to be transported to New York City, where he would
hear the charges against him and stand trial.
The news of his arrest was like an atom splitting on the Internet. Thousands of blogs,
newspapers, and TV outlets covered the story of the Boy Scout who had secretly been running a Web
site that, the FBI alleged, had trafficked $1.2 billion in drugs, weapons, and poisons, in just a couple
of years.
For those who knew Ross, the story, and his arrest, just didn’t add up. His friends and family
believed that it was one giant mistake.
When a reporter called his best friend, René, whom Ross had stayed with on Hickory Street in
San Francisco, asking what he knew about Ross’s involvement in the Silk Road, René was so
flabbergasted and confused that he said, “I don’t know how they messed it up and I don’t know how
they got Ross wrapped into this, but I’m sure it’s not him.” When Ross’s family found out, they felt the
same way. There was just no way that Ross could be involved in such a site. Cousins, aunts and
uncles, and his siblings, were sure that he had been framed. That the truth would set him free. On
Facebook elementary-school chums, high school buddies, and old neighbors shared links in disbelief,
shocked by what they read. There’s no way. Not in a million years. Not Ross.
In San Francisco one of the men whom Ross had lived with on Fifteenth Avenue was walking to
work and stopped to pick up a copy of the San Francisco Examiner. On the front page of the paper,
above the fold, there was a picture of Ross smiling next to a screenshot of the Silk Road. The
roommate snapped a photo of the front page with his smartphone and then sent it to the other renter in
the Fifteenth Avenue apartment. “Funny,” he wrote in the text message. “Looks kinda like our
subletter,” Josh.
“Not looks like,” the other roommate replied. “Is.”
“Holy shit . . .”