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Carl started with what he knew, plucking stories from his time down south, and he settled on the
character of a smuggler from the Dominican Republic who siphoned $25 million of mostly coke and
heroin into the United States each year. He gave this character the name Eladio Guzman, notably
adapting the surname of the world’s most famous analog drug lord, El Chapo Guzmán, the head of
Mexico’s Sinaloa Cartel. He then created an elaborate history for his Guzman, saying that he knew
people all over South America to traffic drugs, launder money, or have people killed. Oh, and he was
blind in one eye and wore an eye patch as a result.
To ensure everything about him seemed real, Carl had a fake driver’s license created by the DEA
with his real photo and his new made-up name.
But on the Silk Road people wouldn’t use their real name, even if it was fake. So, in the same
way that the leader of the site called himself the Dread Pirate Roberts, Carl would need to create a
moniker for his made-up persona. Again, he decided to pick his nickname from something else he
knew well: the Bible. Call it a gut feeling, years on the job, or overconfidence, but he wanted the
nickname he chose to illustrate what was going to happen as a result of his work on the Silk Road.
And so he chose a name from the Bible of a city that was destroyed by a king: the town of Nob.
So Carl Force would become Eladio Guzman, the Dominican drug smuggler, who would go by
the online nickname Nob.
He went home and told his twelve-year-old daughter he needed her help. He grabbed a piece of
white paper and with a black marker aggressively scribbled “ALL HAIL NOB.” He then placed an
eye patch over his fake blind eye, pulled a dark hoodie over his bald head, and held up the piece of
paper as his daughter snapped a picture of him.
Then he signed up for an account as Nob.
For the past month Carl had been meeting with the Baltimore agents to discuss a strategy for their
probe. The plan wasn’t too different from Jared’s. They would try to build up a case (obviously a
competing one, as they knew Jared was already working his own Silk Road investigation out of
Chicago) by arresting dealers and then working their way up the ladder. There had been countless
meetings to discuss this strategy, though Carl thought such a path would be too laborious.
Or Carl could just say “fuck it” and try to knock on the big boss’s door.
He chose the latter. On Thursday, April 21, at around noon, Carl sat at his computer, transformed
himself into his new drug smuggler identity, and wrote an e-mail to the Dread Pirate Roberts. “Mr.
Silk Road,” he began. “I am a great admirer of your work.” This accolade was followed by a brief
explanation that Nob was a man of “considerable means” who had been in the drug business for more
than twenty years. He noted quite frankly that he saw the Silk Road as the future of drug trafficking
and that, most important, he had a proposal: “I want to buy the site.” He hit “send” and waited for a
reply.
When the HSI team in Baltimore found out what Carl had done, they were irate. This wasn’t part
of the plan. Carl had gone rogue before they had even decided what they were going to do. There
were calls from supervisors to the assistant special agent in charge, or ASAC, whose main job was to
ensure that people like Carl didn’t go rogue. But Carl didn’t really care. He just kept looking at his e-
mail, waiting for a reply from the Dread Pirate Roberts.
He checked that afternoon—no reply. The following morning: still nothing. Tomorrow, he
reasoned. The Dread Pirate Roberts will reply tomorrow.