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He was now running a real business. He had almost a dozen employees rewriting code, monitoring the forums, and dealing with support issues. Variety Jones was by his side helping to steer the ship, and Ross was starting to comprehend that the Silk Road was going to be bigger than anything he had ever imagined. More important, Ross had recently had an epiphany that this—this Web site, which had begun as a tiny dream—would be his life’s work. And what a magnum opus it was turning into. Still, Ross reasoned, it couldn’t hurt to reply to this Nob character, whoever he was, and see what he was willing to pay for the site. If this were a start-up in Silicon Valley, a financial offer would be one way to gauge its worth. After all, what was the worst that could happen? He could receive a lowball offer from Nob, and that would be the end of the conversation. Ross clicked the “reply” button on his computer, typed a very short eleven-word response, and hit “send.” “I’m open to the idea,” the e-mail said. “What did you have in mind?” As he waited for word from VJ about the mutiny, Ross went about his day, preparing for a camping trip he was about to go on with his old buddies from high school. Ross had returned to Texas a couple of weeks earlier. As he had promised Variety Jones, he was meditating in the early mornings or late afternoons, then working for a few hours on the site. To keep his sanity, and to keep his fears of law enforcement in check, he would socialize after work like any other normal programmer with a nine-to-five job. He went on hikes in the forest just outside Austin. He smoked some weed with his high school friends and went rock climbing with others. And he had, thankfully, avoided running into Julia since he’d returned to the Lone Star State. A few days went by before Ross heard back from Nob. But the e-mail was perplexing. Nob said that in order to make an official offer to buy the Silk Road, he would need to see financials, including “monthly gross sales from the site, net sales, percentage charged to sellers, total sellers, total buyers, site maintenance and upgrade costs (?), salaries for the administrator and monitors.” Ha! That’s never going to happen! There were only two people on earth who had seen those numbers; one was named Dread Pirate Roberts and the other was Ross Ulbricht. Even Variety Jones didn’t know all those details. DPR politely declined to share the numbers with Nob, citing the risk that such sensitive information could easily fall into the hands of law enforcement. But still, he decided to throw out a potential sale price for the site to see if the buyer was even remotely interested in an acquisition. At the very least, it was titillating to ponder the value of his creation. Facebook was now being valued at around $80 billion; Twitter was worth some $10 billion, and that place was run like a clown car. Surely the Silk Road offered something that, if not quite at their value (yet), was at least in the range for the right buyer. “I think an offer for the entire operation would need to be 9 figures for me to consider it,” Ross wrote to Nob. As this conversation continued, Variety Jones returned with whispers in his ear and reports ready for the Dread Pirate Roberts. It seemed the rumors about the mutiny were indeed correct. A group of dealers on the site weren’t happy with the new commission fees and they were weighing what to do next. Option one for these mutineers, Ross learned, would be to jump ship to a new, much smaller competing Web site that had recently come on the scene called Black Market. Then there was option two: for those behind the rebellion to go off and literally build a competing drug site that had much lower fees. Or finally, the worst-case scenario was not too dissimilar to what happens daily in real-
world businesses when a CEO is ousted by the board. In this scenario the dealers were talking about hacking into the site (given its massive security vulnerabilities) and commandeering the Silk Road. But more disconcerting than any of these options was the other piece of intelligence that Variety Jones had discovered during his reconnaissance mission. The problem, as VJ explained to DPR, wasn’t just that people were upset about the high commission fees on the site. There was a much bigger issue looming. One that Ross could never have envisioned when he had the idea for the Silk Road years earlier.
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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
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Five Years Earlier
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hand in marriage (Say yes, please s
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Chapter 3 JULIA VIE Julia Vie’s f
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“Oh, no, no, no,” Julia said as
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American drug laws. “Take your se
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His hope was that this gig would le
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Chapter 6 THE BONFIRE Ross swerved
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As they joined the group around the
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Chapter 7 THE SILK ROAD Stuff, to R
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computer screen, he daydreamed that
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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 and 72: Then there was the challenge of buy
Page 73 and 74: Chapter 20 THE DREAD PIRATE ROBERTS
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: commission,” Ross wrote in a lett
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
Page 123 and 124: This wasn’t a vacation. It was hi
Page 125 and 126: When his new friends asked Ross wha
Page 127 and 128: Chapter 38 CARL LIKES DPR On paper
Page 129 and 130: are safe from the laws of your nati
Page 131 and 132: Chapter 39 KIDNEY FOR SALE! Ross st
Page 133 and 134: On the black market a person’s ki
Page 135 and 136: Chapter 40 THE WHITE HOUSE IN UTAH
Page 137 and 138: pup, tried to bite another agent’
Page 139 and 140: 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
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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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