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Then there was the challenge of buying the Bitcoins. He was allocated $1,001 for his shopping
excursion. So he took the cash, deposited it in a bank, then went to a Bitcoin exchange Web site where
he could swap the dollars for Bitcoins. It wasn’t as easy as picking up drugs with cash on the street or
finding a used bicycle on Craigslist, but it was still surprisingly painless considering what he was
buying.
During his first expedition to the Silk Road, Jared had three goals. The first was to trace drugs
back to their dealers. The second was to match listings on the Web site to actual physical drugs and
packaging, enabling him to build a profile of what mail from the Silk Road looked like, as he had
done with the khat back at Customs and Border Protection. And finally, Jared wanted to perform a
small but important test.
He knew that the postal workers at ports across the United States were finding drugs in the mail
system, but—and this was a big “but”—no one had any idea what percentage of drugs were not being
found; how many pills and bags of powder were just swimming past officials. As far as Jared knew,
the Silk Road could be a site peddling a few thousand dollars a year of narcotics, or it could be
vending tens of millions of dollars in illegal contraband a month. Nobody knew which it was. But
Jared had a hunch he could figure it out.
First Jared filled his shopping cart on the Silk Road, picking up a few pills of ecstasy, some
opium “tea,” some synthetic weed, and a miscellany of stimulants from more than half a dozen
countries around the world. In all he purchased from eighteen different dealers on the site and
directed them to send his narcotics to a secret PO box at O’Hare.
Besides Mike, who had discovered that first luminous pink pill, and a few higher-ups at HSI, no
one knew anything about his orders—or that they would be arriving today, on a mid-January morning
in 2012.
As Jared sat up from the couch and rubbed his weary eyes, a plane was flying through the air
35,000 feet above him, getting ready to touch down at Chicago O’Hare International Airport with a
few envelopes on board, destined for that secret PO box. Despite his exhaustion, Jared was
invigorated. This was exactly the meaningful work he craved. For years, indeed, he had felt like that
pink pill: a tiny droplet in a giant ocean. Now he was afforded the chance to have an impact. Maybe
even make a name for himself.
He rolled off the couch and sluggishly wandered upstairs to help his wife get their son, Tyrus,
ready for day care. There were kisses good-bye, a couple of giggles from Tyrus. Then it was out to
the Pervert Car to work.
His day began like any other, at HSI as he worked on other cases, then by nightfall it was back to
the airport to look for drugs. As evening came, so did the cold. Jared felt it as he walked up to the
colossal mail center at the edge of the airport, trudging across the frozen ground toward the back door
of the mail unit and stepping inside the land of halogen lights.
Mike was waiting for him in the seizure room, gleeful. He had a surprise for Jared: a couple of
four-by-eight white envelopes from the same dealer with Jared’s PO box address on the front. “I
found your drugs!” Mike said proudly.
But that would be the only package Mike would find that day, or any other. Of the eighteen orders
that Jared had placed on the Silk Road, one was lost en route, and the other sixteen arrived in his PO
box unnoticed by anyone in the federal government. It didn’t bode well for the new war on drugs.