In Alford’s telling, the Baltimore team’s work sounded remarkably messy. There were other rumors about Force, too: that years earlier he’d spent time cooling off in rehab after an undercover narcotics investigation. He’d gotten in too deep, the story went, inhabiting the role of the drug dealer he was playing a bit too fully, maybe losing track of which side he was on. Now a lawyer for Bitstamp was warning them that this same DEA agent was cashing out mysterious six-figure bitcoin stashes? Carl Mark Force IV, Gambaryan could see, was worthy of his full attention.
