34856893457934

Chapter 24
CARL, ELADIO, AND NOB
For a DEA agent, going undercover was one of the most exciting, and equally nerve-racking,
aspects of the job. If you did it right, you could catch some unscrupulous people; if you did it
wrong, those people could catch you.
Carl Force had learned this lesson the hard way, as a newbie DEA agent almost fourteen years
earlier, when one of his first assignments was on a case in the small town of Alamosa, Colorado.
Carl had ended up there after arresting and then turning an informant, who promised to help
facilitate some drug buys with the local dealers. The town was just north of the New Mexico border,
so it was a perfect smuggling port to get coke and meth into the country.
The informant set up a few meetings to get the initial operation off the ground, but things went
haywire almost immediately. Whenever Carl would show up for an undercover drug buy, the
informant would spin into a panic, frantically telling Carl that he looked too much like a cop and, as a
result, was putting the entire operation (and possibly both of their lives) in serious danger.
Carl didn’t like to be told what to do, but upon peering into a mirror he realized the informant
was right; he looked exactly like a cop. So Carl decided to go through a mini physical transformation.
He got his ears pierced with golden hoops, grew his hair out, and started to dress less like a DEA
agent and more like someone who sold drugs for a living.
To ensure he couldn’t be fingered as a Fed, he also took on a made-up persona that had an
elaborate backstory. This taught Carl the crucial lesson that you don’t just show up to an undercover
operation and simply say you work in the world of organized crime. You have to show someone that
you do.
A decade later, as he sat in the DEA office in Baltimore, staring at the user registration page for
the Silk Road Web site, he was about to apply that lesson again.
Carl had done his homework, prepping for this very moment. But before he could sign up for an
account on the site, he had to figure out who he was going to be on the Silk Road. Unlike in his reallife
undercover work, this time he would be hidden behind a keyboard, which meant he could be
whoever, or whatever, he wanted. He could be black, white, Spanish, or Chinese. Male or female, or
something in between. The online world was his stage; he just needed to decide who would come out
from behind the curtain.