American Kingpin: Catching the Billion-Dollar Baron of the Dark Web

by Nick Bilton

No man, for any considerable period, can wear one face to himself and another to the multitude, without finally getting bewildered as to which may be the true.

I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And I was really … I was alive.

He wanted so badly to have an impact. To do something or build something that was bigger than a nine-to-five.

For inspiration, Arto suggested that Ross should read a relatively unknown novel titled A Lodging of Wayfaring Men.

If this became just another line on Ross Ulbricht’s résumé of failures, he would be destroyed. By himself he had essentially done the work of a twelve-person start-up, acting as the front-end programmer, back-end developer, database guy, Tor consultant, Bitcoin analyst, project manager, guerrilla marketing strategist, CEO, and lead investor. Not to mention the in-house fungiculturist.

MOST PEOPLE GO through life thinking that tomorrow they’re going to do something great. Tomorrow will be the day that they wake up and discover what they were put on this earth to do. But then tomorrow comes—and goes. As does the next day. Before long, they realize that there aren’t that many tomorrows left.

Carl walked out of his supervisor’s office unaware that with the single word—“sure”—he was about to enter an underground world so dark and full of avarice that it would drag him in headfirst, and that as a result of the temptations of the Silk Road, Carl Force was going to lose everything that mattered to him.

“Just always remember Life magazine,” VJ proffered. “So successful, they had to shut it down.”

If Cuba had Che Guevara and Ireland had Michael Collins, then the war on drugs would have the Dread Pirate Roberts.

Over time he learned that the way to have a leg up on everyone else was to anticipate something before it happened and then have the answer to it.

They looked at the world around them and saw that the government was a ball of wasteful red tape; that the taxi industry treated customers like shit; hotels overcharged and overtaxed; health care was a sham, driven by the needs of the insurance agencies, not the sick; oil-dependent cars had helped to justify an eternal war in the Middle East; and illegal drugs were only illegal because the government wanted to control the people.

While these decisions were still difficult for Ross to make, the line where Ross ended and DPR began was beginning to blur. And just like other ambitious CEOs who ran other start-ups around San Francisco, he was unable to see how a single decision, made from behind a computer, could trickle down and affect an untold number of real, living human beings.

Gambler’s Ruin problem,” a theory that no matter how much money you have in a betting scenario, the casino (or house) has an infinite amount of money, and therefore, if you keep making bets, the house will eventually win. Gary reasoned that the same theory was true for DPR and the Silk Road. The U.S. government was the casino; DPR was the gambler. Eventually, Gary believed, because the Dread Pirate Roberts wouldn’t stop playing, he would lose.

While he didn’t know it at the time, Gary had just discovered the equivalent of a parking ticket on the Son of Sam’s car. Except this one was on an obscure post left on a forum on the Internet.

He continued walking through the sprawling construction site, growing more emotional with each step, still thinking about how a single pill might have saved so many lives. That every single person can have a sweeping and massive impact on the world they live in. Some choose to have a positive effect, others a negative; some don’t know the difference. But most people think their role in this big, big world is meaningless. Just a job.

As the plane landed at Chicago O’Hare International Airport, the same place the pink pill had touched down almost four years earlier, Jared got a text message from Tarbell. The jury had deliberated for a mere three and a half hours. “Guilty on all counts.” Jared smiled as he walked to his Pervert Car and drove back toward his house, where he walked inside and was gleefully greeted by his son, who asked, “Did you catch the pirate, Daddy?” “Yes, we did,” Jared said as they fell onto the couch to play video games together. “We caught the pirate.”

“No drug dealer from the Bronx selling meth or heroin or crack has ever made these kinds of arguments to the Court,” Judge Forrest said. “It is a privileged argument. You are no better a person than any other drug dealer, and your education does not give you a special place of privilege in our criminal justice system.”