34856893457934

him break a drug dependency, and encourage him to not start, but I would never physically bar him
from it if he didn’t ask me to.”
Variety Jones contemplated how hard he should press the issue. He had been doing his best to
counsel the Dread Pirate Roberts, but sometimes DPR’s ego got in the way. On more than one
occasion VJ had lost his patience. “You should be acting like Steve Jobs, not Larry the Cable Guy,”
he had written to DPR about a previous debate. “Leaders lead, they don’t throw out things willy nilly,
and wait to see who follows what.”
Often Dread would try to defend his ideas, but there was no grappling with Variety Jones; a
maestro on the keyboard, he was a master debater, a true contender who could have stood up to Ross
on any topic—and often did.
The conversation about H dragged on for a while, but there was no sign that DPR was ever going
to relent. So, while sitting in that dark Glasgow hotel room, VJ ultimately decided to let DPR win the
discussion about heroin.
There were two reasons, though. The first harkened back to the last time he had let a
disagreement like this cause a rift between him and a business partner, years earlier when VJ co-ran a
Web forum that sold weed seeds online. That dispute had destroyed that enterprise and, according to
Jones, had ended in a shoot-out in Texas.
But more important, Variety Jones decided to let the issue go because he had much bigger plans
for his involvement in the Silk Road. While the Dread Pirate Roberts didn’t know this yet, VJ didn’t
want to just be an employee; he wanted to be co-captain of the ship.