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Chapter 71
THE PLURAL OF MONGOOSE
It was more than a year after the trial until the last employee was arrested for working on the Silk
Road. And yet he was, without question, the site’s most influential. One of the highest-ranking
advisers and one of the most prolific dealers, he went by the curious moniker “Variety Jones.”
For a while it seemed that Jones would actually get away. He had been holed up for more than
two years in a small beach town in Thailand. He paid off some local cops, and whenever anyone
started to come close, Jones was able to evade the authorities.
Jones had been sitting in a hotel room in Asia, watching the news, when he discovered that his
friend and boss, the Dread Pirate Roberts, had been arrested. Well, you could knock me over with a
feather! Jones thought at the time, seeing a picture of Ross Ulbricht on his television.
Like everyone associated with the site, VJ followed Ross’s trial religiously, getting to know
more about the former Boy Scout and physicist he had advised and helped mold into the Dread Pirate
Roberts. But unlike others, VJ got to see just how influential he had been to the site’s leader, as the
diaries from Ross’s computer were presented as evidence in court. “This was the biggest and
strongest willed character I had met through the site thus far,” Ross had written about his friend and
consigliere, Variety Jones. “He has helped me better interact with the community around Silk Road,
delivering proclamations, handling troublesome characters, running a sale, changing my name,
devising rules, and on and on. . . . He’s been a real mentor.”
There was also another piece of evidence that was talked about in the trial: The Feds had found
the folder on Ross’s laptop with the IDs of all of his employees, including a picture of a passport that
belonged to a fifty-four-year-old Canadian man whose real name was Roger Thomas Clark. A man
whom authorities soon discovered was hiding out in Asia.
On an early morning in December 2015, through a joint operation of the FBI, DHS, DEA, and
local Thai police, VJ was captured in a small room in Thailand. As the cops barged into the hideout,
placing him in cuffs, the first thing Clark said was “Call me Mongoose,” referring to a more famous
nickname he had used on other drug forums, “The Plural of Mongoose.”
But while they had captured the man behind Variety Jones, attempts to divine his past revealed a
conflicting and complex picture. There were signs that Clark was truly a dangerous criminal, far more