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That evening Jared, Mike, and another mail-room worker grabbed all of the drugs, slipped on protective blue rubber gloves, and splayed everything out on the conference room table at the mail center, taking pictures, tagging what they had found, and marking every mundane detail as evidence. By midnight Jared would begin his hour-long drive home, and as he made it back to the couch and Antiques Roadshow, his mind was filled with a single thought: who were the leaders of the Silk Road, and what could Jared do to capture them?
Chapter 20 THE DREAD PIRATE ROBERTS Fireworks exploded in front of Ross from every direction, and with them came the ferocious sounds from above. Boom! Boom! Boom! Reds and greens and pinks reflected across the lake. He watched in awe as he brushed up against his new friend Laura and her sister to stay warm. He had landed in Vietnam a couple of days earlier, after spending the night on a bench in Singapore’s airport —an accommodation more befitting the old Amazing Race Ross than the millionaire he was now on his way to becoming. The Silk Road, which he had started only a year earlier, had just crossed a line of $500,000 a month in drug sales, which would subsequently turn into hundreds of thousands of dollars in commissions that flowed right into Ross’s pocket. Still, to Ross money wasn’t something that was meant to be spent on ostentatious things, so when he landed in Hanoi, the American kingpin settled into his hostel and was elated to find he made it just in time to celebrate the Lunar New Year and see the divine fireworks show. The Lunar New Year was the perfect revelatory moment for Ross. It was a signal of a new beginning. A time, as Ross had read, when it was okay to forget about the troubles of the past year and to hope for a better year to come. More important, this cultural celebration was a reinvention of sorts, which was exactly what Ross had been through over the past week. A few days earlier he had been working on the Silk Road when his new confidant and friend, Variety Jones, had messaged him with a bizarre question. “Have you even seen The Princess Bride?” VJ asked. It was a completely random query, even for Variety Jones. And even more bizarre given that a few minutes earlier Ross had been talking to VJ about coding problems and drug sales. The movie he had asked about, The Princess Bride, was a cult dark comedy from the mideighties about a farmhand who becomes a pirate and has to save Princess Buttercup from a fire swamp. A very random question from VJ, indeed. But often the conversations between the two men would veer in any number of directions. Over the past few weeks they had chatted for several hours a day about a medley of different topics. Since they had become friends, there was barely an hour that went by without Ross and Variety Jones checking in with each other.
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Portfolio/Penguin An imprint of Pen
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No man, for any considerable period
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20. The Dread Pirate Roberts 21. Ca
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Author’s Note My mother, who pass
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PART I
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look for anything out of the ordina
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pills that had been arriving, week
Page 17 and 18:
Five Years Earlier
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hand in marriage (Say yes, please s
Page 21 and 22: Chapter 3 JULIA VIE Julia Vie’s f
Page 23 and 24: “Oh, no, no, no,” Julia said as
Page 25 and 26: American drug laws. “Take your se
Page 27 and 28: His hope was that this gig would le
Page 29 and 30: Chapter 6 THE BONFIRE Ross swerved
Page 31 and 32: As they joined the group around the
Page 33 and 34: Chapter 7 THE SILK ROAD Stuff, to R
Page 35 and 36: computer screen, he daydreamed that
Page 37 and 38: to push Ross’s intelligence, with
Page 39 and 40: “We should go,” he said to Juli
Page 41 and 42: at the University of Texas, and ask
Page 43 and 44: Chapter 10 WHAT GOES UP MUST COME D
Page 45 and 46: Now, rather than split his time amo
Page 47 and 48: enough, someone was. You could buy
Page 49 and 50: Chapter 12 A BULL’S-EYE ON MY BAC
Page 51 and 52: transaction. This would require rew
Page 53 and 54: libertarian theory. When the tête-
Page 55 and 56: Chapter 14 WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?! Tea
Page 57 and 58: Chapter 15 JARED AND THE FIFTY-TON
Page 59 and 60: themselves. The issue, Jared reiter
Page 61 and 62: A few days before he left for Austr
Page 63 and 64: Chapter 17 CARL FORCE’S TOMORROW
Page 65 and 66: Carl thought about it for a moment.
Page 67 and 68: Ross interacted with dozens of diff
Page 69 and 70: caught up in the conversation to se
Page 71: Then there was the challenge of buy
Page 75 and 76: What a brilliant idea. Ross loved i
Page 77 and 78: He soon realized that this site cou
Page 79 and 80: people, the risk was worth the rewa
Page 81 and 82: Ross’s cut from the commission fe
Page 83 and 84: Chapter 24 CARL, ELADIO, AND NOB Fo
Page 85 and 86: Chapter 25 JARED’S CHICAGO VERSUS
Page 87 and 88: The Baltimore attorney then explain
Page 89 and 90: commission,” Ross wrote in a lett
Page 91 and 92: world businesses when a CEO is oust
Page 93 and 94: Nope. Not going to happen. Carl had
Page 95 and 96: This place was special to Ross for
Page 97 and 98: Chapter 29 VARIETY JONES GOES TO SC
Page 99 and 100: him break a drug dependency, and en
Page 101 and 102: But if Ross wanted to keep growing
Page 103 and 104: Chapter 31 ROSS SILENCES JULIA Ross
Page 105 and 106: away. Heading into the darkness, al
Page 107 and 108: Chapter 32 CHRIS TARBELL, FBI A que
Page 109 and 110: took his SATs in high school he did
Page 111 and 112: After breakfast each morning, while
Page 113 and 114: other start-up in the city would ha
Page 115 and 116: There were two main aspects of the
Page 117 and 118: Chapter 35 BATTEN DOWN THE HATCHES!
Page 119 and 120: For the backup plan to the backup p
Page 121 and 122: the site had grown, DPR’s message
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This wasn’t a vacation. It was hi
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When his new friends asked Ross wha
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Chapter 38 CARL LIKES DPR On paper
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are safe from the laws of your nati
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Chapter 39 KIDNEY FOR SALE! Ross st
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On the black market a person’s ki
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Chapter 40 THE WHITE HOUSE IN UTAH
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pup, tried to bite another agent’
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Chihuahuas. Green went on like a sc
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Chapter 42 THE FIRST MURDER Ross ha
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started to wonder if he might not h
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usts with physical drugs, not digit
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Portland, looked like she was going
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into the hospital room as they wept
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Chapter 45 GARY ALFORD, IRS The sid
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He started with the Gawker article,
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It was, after all, his legacy, the
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Chapter 47 GARY’S BIG CHANGE Ever
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to go and feed a parking meter. So
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you were only giving them half of y
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“Let me tell you a little parable
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your side” capacity—tried to wa
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Chapter 50 A PARKING TICKET ON THE
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Another search showed that Ross Ulb
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unclear what, if anything, was on t
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Chapter 52
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take a few breaks to watch Louis C.
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The agent asked again. “Andrew Fo
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Chris Tarbell had decided he wouldn
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By the end of Jared’s presentatio
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Chapter 54 JARED BECOMES CIRRUS Whe
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plastic. When the woman from Texas
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Chapter 55 JULIA IS SAVED! HALLELUJ
Page 189 and 190:
Chapter 56
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Dylan waited for Ross to respond, b
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Chapter 57 ONWARD TO FEDERAL PLAZA
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Angels to have people killed, and h
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Chapter 58 JULIA COMES TO SAN FRANC
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She nonchalantly came up the stairs
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“We’re going to read from the T
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Chapter 60 THE PHONE CALL Gary sat
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She turned back to her computer and
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Dread Pirate Roberts was a twenty-n
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caught in a tree in the park and ha
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Chapter 62 THE PINK SUNSET Pink. Th
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was logged in to the site and arres
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even stop crossing the line, Carl d
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Even if anyone had noticed the SUV
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laptop and find a spot in a cafe wh
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“Sure,” DPR wrote. “Let me lo
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“I am Special Agent Chris Tarbell
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Thom and the other agent started ch
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And then there was Julia, who had p
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Chapter 68 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
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The defense knew an insurmountable
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He continued walking through the sp
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man. Gravity doesn’t care if you
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Chapter 71 THE PLURAL OF MONGOOSE I
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Chapter 72 THE MUSEUM Along Pennsyl
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high school, René, about their fut
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the perils lovingly and yet resolut
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For over a year after the Silk Road
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Young Ross in elementary school in
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Ross with his parents, Lyn and Kirk
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The NOMMO Club at Penn State Univer
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The Silk Road Web site, which offer
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Jared Der-Yeghiayan of the Departme
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Force disguised as Nob, his online
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Chris Tarbell of the Federal Bureau
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Curtis Green, known on the Silk Roa
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Curtis Green’s staged murder, an
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Notes on Reporting Each and every d
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Acknowledgments I’d like to start
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Bibliography Bauer, Alex. “My Roo
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