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Ross interacted with dozens of different people on the Silk Road each day, including vendors,
customers, and a couple of new libertarian part-time employees who helped with the site’s various
programming problems. They all went by pseudonyms to hide who they really were, names like
SameSameButDifferent, NomadBloodbath, and SumYunGai. (Ross’s own nickname was simply Silk
Road or Admin.) But one of the people Ross had recently started talking to on the site, a man who
operated under the nom de plume Variety Jones, seemed almost immediately to be different from
everyone else.
He sold weed seeds, but he wasn’t just any weed seed dealer. Variety Jones was a sommelier,
someone capable of telling you a seed’s variety—its viticulture—along with the strain, just by
looking at a picture of it. And unlike the hordes of impatient and pushy drug dealers on the Silk Road,
Variety Jones, or “VJ” as he was known in the forums, was guileful and intelligent. He (assuming he
really was a “he”) knew everything about everyone, on the site and off—even the creator of the site.
Just two days after the menacing serpent-and-centipede dream, Ross and VJ started chatting on
TorChat, a messaging platform that promised privacy for those using it. “I want to talk to you about
security stuff,” Variety Jones wrote in one of their earliest correspondences. “Lots of security stuff.”
Ross was eager to hear, now fully aware that he was no longer just being targeted by the U.S.
government but was very likely being hunted by authorities in dozens of countries. Given that real
money was now flowing into the site too, with Ross pulling in tens of thousands of dollars a week in
revenue for the sale of drugs and guns, there would surely be more authorities hunting him soon. The
only way to hide from the cops was to build better security into the site. Ross was a gifted coder,
sure, with a quixotic vision of the future, but he knew better than anyone that he was out of his depth
when it came to fixing the site’s vulnerabilities.
Yet the more he chatted with Variety Jones, the more Ross realized he was interacting with a very
able complement—someone whose strength seemed to be the very area in which Ross was weakest.
Perhaps most important, Jones quickly indicated that he could be the perfect lieutenant—a proverbial
bad cop to a kinder boss. “There isn’t anyone who knows me even a little bit that would ever dream
of crossing me,” VJ warned Ross. “If they did dream of it, [they] would wake up and call to
apologize.”
Variety Jones said that he was forty-five years old and from Canada but now lived in England,
and it was apparent by his answers to Ross’s programming questions that he knew what he was doing.
He told Ross that a few months earlier, shortly after the Gawker article had been published, VJ and an
associate had found a secret back door into the Silk Road servers. Late one night, like a couple of
burglars breaking into someone’s home just to look around, VJ had rummaged through the site’s files
to make sure it wasn’t being run by law enforcement. (Hearing this obviously scared the shit out of
Ross. Who else might have been sniffing around in there?)
When VJ believed that the mastermind behind the Silk Road was legitimately trying to end the
war on drugs and wasn’t an undercover DEA agent trying to arrest poor unsuspecting citizens, Variety
Jones wanted to help the cause (after all, if the site grew, VJ could make more money by selling more
drugs). And here he was. Advice at the ready.
But first VJ wanted to ensure that the creator of the site knew what was at stake here. “Not to be
a downer or anything,” he wrote to Ross, but “understand that what we are doing falls under U.S.
Drug Kingpin laws, which provides a maximum penalty of death upon conviction . . . the mandatory
minimum is life.”