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Chapter 25
JARED’S CHICAGO VERSUS CARL’S
BALTIMORE
Jared’s tiny HSI office was starting to look less like an office and more like an extension of the
mail center at Chicago O’Hare. Circling the room along the walls were dozens of tubs piled as
high as a small child, all filled to the brim with envelopes—around five hundred in all. These
packages all had one thing in common: they had at one point contained drugs purchased on the Silk
Road.
Above those piles of mail, the office walls were decorated with printouts and photos of the
different drugs—pills, baggies, rocks—that had once been inside those envelopes.
It was clear that Jared, who didn’t take no for an answer, had fallen deep into the Silk Road case
with his stubborn obsessiveness.
He had been working on a system to try to figure out which envelopes (and drugs) came from
which vendors on the site. When a package was discovered by the customs officials, no matter what
time of the day or night, Jared would get in the Pervert Car and drive to the airport, pick up the
narcotics, snap pictures, and fill out seizure documents before returning everything to his office. Then
it was off to the Web site to look through every single picture of the drugs for sale and try to figure out
where the package had come from.
Given that the Silk Road now had thousands of dealers, it was not an easy task. But Jared was
always up for a laborious and all-consuming challenge. He reasoned that when (or at this rate, if) they
finally caught the leader of the Silk Road, Jared would have hundreds of pounds of evidence tying the
site to actual drugs.
He had learned a lot by purchasing his own drugs on the site, figuring out who was selling what
and learning how drugs coming from differing countries might look different from one another. (Some
used puffy envelopes; other drugs were hidden in everyday objects like CD cases. Some dealers put
them in hollowed-out dead batteries; others stuck tabs of LSD to the backs of photos.) Yet with all of
this information coming together, he had also learned something else rather disturbing. The site was
growing too quickly for anyone to catch up to it.