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kicking in a door or two, yelling at some big-time dealers or low-level meth heads to “freeze!” and
“get the fuck on the floor!”
It was as exciting a job as anyone could wish for. But over time the early mornings started to
strain. The door kicks were less exciting. When one dealer went to jail, another filled his seat on the
street.
The metamorphosis from rash young newbie to jaded old-timer had happened slowly. At first
Carl couldn’t find good cases on his own. Then he had trouble making busts. There was also the high
pressure of undercover work, where you have to catch someone or they’ll catch you. His downward
trajectory was compounded by the fact that he’d secretly developed his own substance abuse
problem. Finally, all the strain had been too much, and Carl was eventually arrested for a DUI while
he was an agent, which led to a mental breakdown four years later. He almost lost it all—the family,
the job, the cat. But the Lord had stepped in, and Carl had been offered amnesty with this desk job as
a solar agent. Since then there hadn’t been many opportunities arriving at his cubicle.
But on a late-January day in 2012, that was about to change.
He was sitting at his desk waiting for another day to pass when his supervisor, Nick, yelled for
Carl to come into his office. These moments came often: a shriek from Nick and some sort of order to
take on cases that most agents thought were ridiculous. This included the regular request to go and do
“jump-outs,” the name given to the act of driving around Baltimore, pulling up to a street corner,
jumping out of the car, and grabbing low-level dealers. Most agents thought this was a pathetic way of
trying to beat the drug problem, as opposed to going after the big bosses, where they believed they
could actually have an impact.
Still, when Nick called, you went. Nick’s office was dark, as usual. While Carl’s supervisor was
lucky enough to have a window with a paltry view of frozen and barren Baltimore, he always kept the
blinds drawn, blocking out even the tiniest pinprick of light. Adding to the darkness, Nick had pinned
posters of Iron Maiden and Metallica all over his office walls.
“So,” Nick said to Carl, “I just got a call about the Silk Road Web site.”
Carl perked up. He had heard about this strange Web site a month earlier at a law enforcement
meeting when an investigator with the U.S. Postal Service had given a brief presentation on it. There
was a new phenomenon, the postal inspector had said, that was starting to infect mail ports all across
the United States, and lots of people were sending small amounts of drugs through the system. The
inspector had explained that the connection point for these dealers and buyers was called “the Silk
Road.”
Later, intrigued by what the postal inspector had said, Carl searched online and read a few
articles, including Adrian Chen’s piece on Gawker. He then thought about the implications, which
were momentous. You couldn’t do jump-outs online, he reasoned. But given that Carl had no
knowledge of computer forensics, it wasn’t a case he would have even thought of being assigned to.
That was, until Nick called Carl into his office and asked if he wanted to assist a group of HSI agents
in Baltimore. “They’ve picked up an informant who says he can lead them to the owner of the site,”
Nick told Carl.
When Carl asked why he was being asked to join the case, Nick explained: The HSI group in
Baltimore was not a drug team and usually tracked counterfeit stuff or, as Nick put it, “fake Louis
Vuitton bags and shit like that.” So if the Baltimore group wanted to go after drugs, they needed a
DEA agent on the team. “You want in?” Nick asked.