Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
Due to the graphic nature of this episode, listener discretion is advised. This episode includes discussions of murder and substance abuse. Consider this when deciding how and when you'll listen. Not far from our studio here in downtown Los Angeles, there's a dispensary where you can pick up any number of recreational cannabis products.
Depending on where you live, you might take your cannabis home and get comfy on the couch and see social media ads for at-home ketamine treatment. Outside of LA, several international cities have decriminalized psilocybin-containing mushrooms, and it seems like that could be the next previously controlled substance available in stores. Meanwhile, over 100,000 Americans are currently serving prison time for selling or possessing drugs.
Among them is the man at the center of today's story: Ross Ulbricht. If Ulbricht serves his entire sentence, he'll die in prison. But whether or not he should is up for debate. Those who want Ulbricht freed argue that he's demonstrated remorse and his family has started a charity for harm reduction from substance misuse.
They say he's a non-violent offender who doesn't belong behind bars. Those who disagree say Ross Ulbricht's crimes are much greater than your average drug dealers. He didn't just facilitate local drug sales. He created The Silk Road, an online marketplace for illicit substances that helped move illicit drugs and guns around the world.
And in creating the Silk Road, he inflamed the demand for drugs and guns. In critics' eyes, Ross Ulbricht is no more deserving of clemency than any other criminal, especially considering his privilege and college education. The one thing we're sure of is that Ross Ulbricht was part of a criminal conspiracy. For a few years, he was the king of the dark web.
ruling a shadow world while the rest of us spent our time online rewatching "Gongnam Style." So today, we'll look at Ulbricht's shadow world, the Silk Road, and how his online secret society brought him head to head with the US government.
Welcome to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. I'm Carter Roy. You can find us here every Wednesday. And be sure to check us out on Instagram at The Conspiracy Pod. And we would love to hear from you. So if you're listening on the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts. For the next two weeks, we'll be digging into the Silk Road.
A digital black market for everything from cocaine and cyanide to AK-47s and Uzis. And we'll look at its founder, a man who spent years living an online secret identity while raking in millions of dollars all the while. Stay with us.
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Hello there, I'm Mike Flanagan, and welcome to Spectre Vision Radio's production of Director's Commentary. Director's Commentary is a deep dive into a film through the eyes of the filmmaker or filmmakers who made it. It combines an in-depth interview format with a classic Director's Commentary track, the likes of which used to be common on physical media releases, but sadly are becoming more and more rare these days. Filmmakers talking about film with filmmakers. For people who love film.
and filmmakers. Before we get into this story, amongst the many sources we used, we found Joshua Barrowman's reporting for Wired Magazine and Nick Bilton's book American Kingpin extremely helpful to our research. The audiobook edition of American Kingpin is available for Spotify Premium subscribers in our audiobook catalog, where you can check it out after listening to this episode.
By 2012, just a year after its launch, the Silk Road boasted over $500,000 a month in black market sales. In every sale, a percentage went to the site's developer, Ross Ulbricht. While most 27-year-olds were struggling to repay student loans in the wake of the '08 recession, Ulbricht was swiftly becoming a millionaire.
But despite the money he was raking in, he lived out of two garbage bags, one for clean clothes and one for dirty. His style was minimalist. His clothes, even his socks, were hand-me-downs. Ulbricht didn't create the Silk Road to make himself rich. He created it to send a message.
Every day, as the admin of the site, he educated his users. He posted about libertarian politics, economic theory, and the dangers of an overreaching government. He explained the importance of maintaining this free market where anyone could buy anything without leaving a trace.
He made sure that his kingdom was run with a conscience, guided by the Golden Rule and a succinct moral code. Nothing stolen, fraudulent, or expressly meant to harm. The Silk Road community was responsive to his thoughtful benevolence and likened their admin to a freedom fighter for the digital age. As he sat in a hostel in Hanoi, Vietnam one night in early February,
Ulbricht crafted his next post. He'd recently decided that he needed a new screen name. Simply calling himself Admin was too stiff, too cold, too establishment. He tossed around the idea with an online friend known only as their screen name, Variety Jones. The conversation took place over Messenger, encrypted, of course. Variety Jones typed, "Have you ever seen the Princess Bride?"
Ulbricht remembered the movie vaguely. He hadn't seen it since he was a kid. Variety Jones continued: "So, you know the history of the Dread Pirate Roberts?" Again, Ulbricht was fuzzy. Variety Jones filled in the blanks. Dread Pirate Roberts was only a title passed down over the years. As each Dread Pirate Roberts retired, a new man assumed the name and the fearsome reputation that went along with it.
And with each bearer of the name, the legend only grew. Bridie Jones urged Ulbricht, "Start the legend now." Immediately, Ulbricht understood the genius. He could mask himself behind the reference, laying the groundwork for plausible deniability if he were ever caught. After all, only two other people in the entire world knew that Ross Ulbricht had created the Silk Road a year earlier.
But they also believed that he'd sold it. Calling himself Dread Pirate Roberts only bolstered that lie. People would assume there were multiple men behind the site, just like in the movie. He'd type back in the encrypted chat, "Oh, that's good. That's really good." When Ulbricht announced his new handle on the site, the positive response was overwhelming.
He was their pirate king, their captain, and they were his loyal crew of dark web bandits. Nick Bilton described the response in his book American Kingpin, writing, "...it gave an identity to someone who, until now, had no selfhood. One minute, he was an anonymous, elusive figure behind a keyboard."
The next, he was a feared pirate who was going to lead them into battle with the US government. In addition to rallying his troops, assuming the identity of Dread Pirate Roberts, or DPR, allowed Ulbricht to better compartmentalize his life. In the real world, he could function guilt-free as the kind down-to-earth Ross Ulbricht, telling people he was a day trader or video game creator.
All his online crimes belonged to DPR, Cyber Kingpin. This distinction became more and more important as the Silk Road grew. Anyone who actually knew Ross Ulbricht unilaterally described him as one of the smartest, kindest people they'd ever met.
Ross Ulbricht was the last person anyone would expect to mastermind a digital drug empire. Ross Ulbricht was a boy scout from the suburbs of Austin. Ross Ulbricht was an avid surfer who perfected his skills summering in Costa Rica as a kid in the 90s. Ross Ulbricht got a scholarship to UT Dallas, but even as a teen, Ross had his secrets.
The Eagle Scout was an active cannabis smoker, which in Texas in the 2000s was technically illegal. But he kept that hobby undercover, moving to Penn State for graduate school. Studying materials science and engineering, Ulbricht spent his days in a lab, precipitating new crystalline structures out of thin air. Though he did well in the program initially, Ulbricht was left wanting.
He didn't really want to spend the rest of his life indoors in a white coat. He wanted to do something with more of an impact on the world. Ulbricht found some purpose in a political club. He'd always been interested in politics, but while he was at Penn State, he discovered the college's Libertarians Club,
In the simplest terms, libertarianism advocates for individual freedom and the right to autonomy. Ulbricht started to apply these ideas to his own life. In particular,
Ulbricht felt that the government had no business telling people what they could and couldn't do with their lives. He was a grown adult. If he wanted to smoke pot or drop acid, the state shouldn't be able to tell him he couldn't. He argued that plenty of substances known to be deadly, like alcohol and fast food, were perfectly legal just because the government had arbitrarily decided they should be.
It shouldn't be up to the government to decide which dangerous substances are worth the risk. Everyone should have a right to choose for themselves. Ulbricht's interest in politics eventually overshadowed his lab performance. In 2009, he failed to qualify for a PhD candidacy.
Accepting that his heart wasn't in the work, he left Penn State and returned home to Austin to figure out what was next. He wanted to do something true to his libertarian values. Something that had an impact. He found inspiration in Paul Rosenberg's 2007 science fiction novel, A Lodging of Wayfaring Men. It detailed the establishment of an independent virtual society.
It had its own digital currency, no laws, and no possibility of government oversight. In the novel, the virtual world skyrocketed in popularity, threatening the existing government. They panicked over the anarchist threat. To protect their own power, they launched an assault on the virtual world, bringing it down. The story resonated with Ulbricht.
As did the words of economist Ludwig von Mises, who believed in the necessity of economic freedom to be truly free. As the internet further ingrained itself into all aspects of daily life,
Ulbricht saw that the digital age came with a cost. Corporations had the means to passively observe anyone who logged on. Every Google search, every purchase, every click, every keystroke was tracked, data mined, and sold to the highest bidder. And if the government wanted information on you, they simply demanded that data for free. Ulbricht liked to refer to them as the thieves.
So, in the summer of 2010, the 26-year-old idealist started working on his own free market website, one where users could buy and sell whatever they wanted completely anonymously. He called it the Silk Road, after the ancient network of trade routes connecting Asia and Europe. Ulbricht wasn't an experienced coder, but he was smart enough to teach himself what he needed on the fly.
His vision was made possible by two key pieces of cryptographic technology: Tor and Bitcoin. Tor is an open-source web browser that conceals your online activity and location. Bitcoins are a digital cryptocurrency. In 2010, they were believed to be totally untraceable. Once purchased, Bitcoins are treated like cash and traded directly from buyer to seller without leaving a paper trail.
With this combination of incognito browser and anonymous transactions, Ulbricht had exactly what he needed to manifest his vision. It took months to code, with plenty of trial and error.
Then, once the site was built, he needed merchandise. Though he wanted users to be able to sell anything they wanted, he knew that the most popular products would be drugs. Ideally, once the Silk Road caught on, other vendors would join him, but to get his drug market off the ground, he needed drugs. As he created his first batch of inventory, Ulbricht had his first close call with the law.
In the middle of an extreme heat wave in Austin, Ulbricht's apartment flooded. When his landlord called, Ulbricht wasn't worried about his personal belongings. In fact, he didn't even live in that apartment. But tens of thousands of dollars worth of illegal substances did.
The apartment was his grow house. For the last few months, he'd cultivated thousands of magic mushroom spores. Now, by January of 2011, he had roughly 100 pounds of high-quality hallucinogens. With that one phone call, Ulbricht realized it could all be lost. When he got to the apartment, Ross saw his landlord's car already parked in the lot.
He sprinted up the steps, bargaining with the universe. "Please don't let him go into the bedroom. Please!" The door to his unit stood ajar. The only items inside, boxes of chemicals, fertilizer, and growing supplies were ransacked, their contents dumped on the floor. And the door to the bedroom stood wide open.
Suddenly, the landlord appeared holding a white plastic tray full of sprouting mushrooms. He told Ulbricht that he was calling the police. Ulbricht lunged past the landlord into the bedroom and slammed the door shut. He grabbed all the drugs he could and ran. As he drove away, Ulbricht's mind was probably racing. If he got arrested, he'd never fulfill his mission to change the world. But Ulbricht
didn't get arrested. And he still had his product. Later that month, the Silk Road went live. By the summer, all kinds of products were available for purchase from hundreds of vendors. The site was blowing up. And it wasn't just transactional. Ulbricht was surprised and delighted by the like-minded community that naturally developed.
Everyone felt like they had a stake in Ross' fight against the thieves. Comrades in arms, fighting a holy war. They felt completely secure in their black market. No government agency would be able to track them through Tor, the encrypted anonymous software. So, users had free and open communication. Some posted detailed guides for safe drug use and other wellness issues.
Others were brutally honest in their vendor reviews. Ulbricht implemented a karma rating system for vendors, making sellers more accountable, cutting down on scammers, and rewarding those that provided good service and product. Soon, the Silk Road crossed into the mainstream.
On June 1st, 2011, several months after the launch, Gawker published an article written by journalist Adrian Chen. Interviewing an anonymous Silk Road user he called Mark, Chen wrote, "About three weeks ago, the U.S. Postal Service delivered an ordinary envelope to Mark's door. Mark, a software developer, had ordered 100 micrograms of acid through a listing on the online marketplace Silk Road.
He found a seller with lots of good feedback who seemed to know what he was talking about, added the acid to his digital shopping cart, and hit check out. The day the article came out, the site saw a massive uptick in traffic, and an even bigger one the day after that. And that. Holbrook was both ecstatic and petrified. He'd actually done it.
He'd finally dealt a serious blow to the thieves. But a few days later, the thieves struck back. In June 2011, United States Senator Chuck Schumer held a televised news conference. He'd recently discovered the drug trafficking website, The Silk Road.
In front of reporters and news cameras, he called on the DEA and the Department of Justice to shut down this one-stop shop for illegal drugs. Ross Ulbricht watched the broadcast on his laptop, utterly numb. He realized how short-sighted he'd been. He thought the Gawker article was simply good publicity. He never imagined government officials would read it.
But as Ulbricht watched Schumer summon the dogs, calling for his hasty demise, his fear hardened into determination. Instead of shuttering the sight, Ulbricht set about shoring up its defenses. If this was war, he would fight every day until the end.
Over the past few months, just as the general public had trafficked the site, so had more experienced dark web users. On a few different occasions, hackers had struck and Ulbricht had scrambled to regain control of the Silk Road. With the number of users rapidly increasing and the eyes of the thieves upon him, Ulbricht decided that he needed a dedicated cyber security staff. He simply couldn't patch all the weak spots by himself anymore.
He recruited good Samaritan users from the Silk Road website, people who'd previously pointed out security holes. They had already volunteered. Now Ulbricht offered to pay them. Just like that, his million-dollar drug business had employees. There were just a handful of them, identified only by their usernames, but it was an important step for Ulbricht.
Not only could he redistribute some of the responsibilities of running the service, but it also gave him an outlet to talk about his work. To the rest of the world, Ross Ulbricht was a day trader. No one in his real life knew the pressure he felt, both as a business owner and as a criminal overlord.
Now he had people to confide in. People who really understood what he was trying to do. Perhaps his most important new confidant was a 45-year-old with the username Variety Jones. When Variety Jones first heard about the site, he assumed it was a scam set up by the DEA. So he hacked it, finding a backdoor all too easily.
Once he concluded the Silk Road wasn't a government mousetrap, he offered his security services to Ulbricht in late 2011 via TorChat, an encrypted messenger. Jones believed in the mission and wanted to help. Given how easy it was for Variety Jones to penetrate Ulbricht's code, the first order of business was a crash course in encryption.
Jones helped Ulbricht bolster his security protocols and install a kill switch on his laptop. It was a last option safeguard. If Ulbricht executed the designated keystroke, his hard drive instantly wiped. If the FBI came to arrest him, the laptop would be reduced to a paperweight.
In addition to being a hacker, Variety Jones was a weed seed dealer. Even in the early days of the Silk Road, he developed a sterling reputation among buyers. He was so knowledgeable about his product, he could identify a seed strain just by looking at a picture.
His years in the IRL drug trade meant he had more knowledge and understanding of a criminal enterprise than Ulbricht did. Soon, their conversations about the site's security grew to larger discussions about how to be a successful kingpin. Variety Jones respected that Ulbricht had a benevolent vision for the Silk Road, but he warned him about coming off as too nice.
It was only a matter of time before someone took advantage of his kindness. Jones wrote, "There isn't anyone who knows me even a little bit that would ever dream of crossing me. If they did dream of it, they would wake up to call and apologize."
Shortly after this conversation, Jones suggested that Ulbricht assume the character of the Dread Pirate Roberts or DPR. Not only would it help give Ulbricht plausible deniability, but it would help him embrace a stronger, tougher part of himself.
To enforce this separation, Ulbricht partitioned his laptop hard drive. Now he could run two different computers from the same machine, one for personal use and one for DPR. Jones stressed that Ulbricht's most crucial security measure was maintaining his anonymity. All it would take was one slip-up, one missed post from the wrong account with his real name attached, and he would be outed to the world.
Through these conversations, a true friendship developed between Ulbricht and Jones. One day, after several months of correspondence, Ulbricht asked Jones over TorChat to describe his strengths and weaknesses. Jones typed back that Ulbricht's main weakness was "your inability to discern between a garter snake and a copperhead, recognizing something as dangerous when you think it's harmless."
In January 2012, the Silk Road's business had grown to $500,000 in transactions a month. By late March, the number had ballooned to $500,000 a week, and it was only going up. Ross Ulbricht was making over $10,000 a day in sales commissions.
His Bitcoin holdings would be worth close to $100 million by the end of the year, and that was the conservative estimate. If he were running a true Silicon Valley startup, Ulbricht would be preparing to take the Silk Road public or actively shopping for the highest bidder. Instead, he was fending off blackmailing hackers and worrying about the feds.
Luckily, Senator Schumer's demands for action had gone mostly unfulfilled, which was very good for Ulbricht because the Silk Road was moving beyond drug deals.
As Nick Bilton detailed in his book on Ross Ulbricht, there were digital goods, including key loggers, spy software, and other similar tools to hack someone's email or webcam, forged documents, including passports, fake IDs, and even counterfeit cash. But by far the most extreme wares were listed under the heading "weapons." Guns, grenades, bullets, even rocket launchers.
Ulbricht loved the progression. It was exactly what he wanted for his free market paradise. But to some users, it was a bridge too far.
Libertarianism was one thing, Uzis on aisle 6 was another, and Variety Jones agreed. He typed in a message: "Guns will scare off a lot of mainstream clients." He encouraged getting the guns out, quote: "So grandma can come here for her cheap Canadian pharma meds and not trip over a Glock 9mm."
But Ulbricht refused to ban firearms from the Silk Road. That kind of regulation went against everything the site stood for. It tainted the mission. Variety Jones couldn't help but laugh at his moral righteousness. After all, at the end of the day, they were criminals. Drug dealers. Now, they were arms dealers. Ulbricht further rationalized.
As long as we don't cross the line in our pursuit, then we are only doing good. They weren't hurting people. They weren't lying, cheating, or stealing. They were only criminals by the government's arbitrary definition. Eventually, Ulbricht and Jones compromised. They built a sister site called the Armory to redirect all of the gun traffic on the Silk Road.
The gun issue was the first major disagreement between Ulbricht and Variety Jones. It made the latter realize that he felt a great deal of ownership over the success and failure of the Silk Road, but technically he was still just a lackey. So a few weeks after the launch of the Armory in 2012, Variety Jones approached Ulbricht on Torchette with a demand. He wanted to formalize their partnership.
He brought just as much to the Silk Road as Ulbricht did, and he deserved a steak. Ulbricht was shocked when he heard Jones' terms. "I do well two ways. Option one: 50/50. Option two: me having it all. I don't do second fiddle very well." Jones' aggressiveness immediately sent Ulbricht on the defensive.
Silk Road belonged to him, and it would always belong to him. He recognized that Variety Jones helped with the business, but that didn't mean he deserved partial ownership. Was this why he'd been so helpful in the first place? Jones had warned Ulbricht that someone would take advantage of him for being too nice. Was this what he meant? Their conversation ended without resolution.
Taking some time to reevaluate their relationship, Ulbricht avoided Jones' messages. They reconciled after a few days, but it marked a distinct change in their relationship. Ulbricht kept his guard up with Jones from that point on. He wouldn't be fooled twice. In the fallout, he grew closer with another anonymous user, Knob.
They first met online in April of 2012 when Knob sent an email. It read, I am a great admirer of your work. Brilliant. Utterly brilliant. I will keep this short and to the point. I want to buy the site. I've been in the business for over 20 years. Silk Road is the future of trafficking. Out of sheer curiosity, Ulbricht responded with a list price.
$1 billion. Knob balked at the figure and sales talks quickly broke down, but the two men remained in regular communication. Knob liked Ulbricht's ideas and genuinely wanted to be in business with him. So he came up with an idea. Instead of buying the Silk Road, what if Ulbricht built another sister site? Knob would front him an investment to build it in return for a 20% stake.
He wanted to call it "Masters of the Silk Road." It would only deal in wholesale product, like a Costco for drugs. Like Variety Jones, Knob claimed to be a kingpin in the real world. He mainly dealt in cocaine and heroin, but dabbled in money laundering and hired hits.
He trafficked $25 million worth of drugs from the Dominican Republic to the US every year. He had kilos of product ready to move. Ulbricht thought it over and struck a deal. Knob sent Ulbricht $2 million in seed money to build the website. It would be more complicated to set up than the armory. To safely move such high volumes of drugs, security had to be airtight.
As they worked on the cartel market, Knob and Ulbricht developed a rapport. In the wake of his rift with Variety Jones, Ulbricht found a new consigliere. While Jones was the master of weed strains, Knob educated Ulbricht about the heroin trade. He knew about smuggling routes and buyers all over the world. He had ideas on how to set up a dead drop system, avoiding the risk of mailing packages altogether.
He also advised Ulbricht on more concrete contingency plans. He told him to apply for citizenship in a country that wouldn't extradite him to the US. If the feds ever moved on him, Ulbricht needed a secondary passport to flee the country with his millions and live out the rest of his days on a beach. Ulbricht was grateful to have someone else other than Variety Jones he could confide in.
Soon, he and Knob talked shop on TorChat basically every day. Unfortunately for Ulbricht, Knob was not the kingpin he pretended to be. He'd never trafficked kilos of heroin. He was the copperhead that Jones had warned Ulbricht about months before. The pit viper posing as a garter snake. Knob's real name was Carl Force. Agent Carl Force.
of the DEA. Agent Carl Force first heard about the Silk Road in the fall of 2011, soon after Senator Chuck Schumer tasked the federal government with shutting down the website. Now in his mid-40s, Force had spent the last 13 years in the DEA. Based in the Baltimore office, Force cut his teeth working undercover on the streets, infiltrating the ranks of drug dealers.
To be more readily accepted in the criminal underworld, he took on the persona entirely, growing out his hair and covering his body in tattoos. Force was like a method actor, thinking out every detail of his character's backstory and adjusting his behavior accordingly. When his targets went out for a night of partying, Force got drunk right alongside them. And eventually he lost himself in the part,
The line blurred between Carl Force DEA agent and Carl Force undercover criminal. Force was eventually arrested for a DUI. With the support of his family, he managed to get sober and keep his job at the DEA, though he strictly worked at a desk now. In the face of his current drudgery, it was easy to daydream about his old life. When the Silk Road case came up,
Four saw it as a chance to get back in the undercover game without having to leave his desk.
The FBI, DEA, Homeland Security, and even the IRS had all been trying to shut down the Silk Road for months. But it was slow going. They'd managed to pick up some drug shipments and even a few dealers, but they weren't able to leverage those busts into high-level arrests. How could they? Everyone on the site went by anonymous handles and used encrypted Tor messages.
There were no leads, no IP addresses to follow. Dread Pirate Roberts was clearly the operator of the Silk Road, but none of the dealers they'd busted knew his real name. None of their inquiries ever got off the ground, even with the pressure from Schumer. Carl Force stewed over the predicament. In a minefield of aliases, who knew how many other people they'd have to flip before they got lucky and found a perp who actually knew the guy they wanted?
The only person who was 100% guaranteed to know DPR's true identity was DPR. So, just as he'd done in his street-busting days, Forrest crafted a detailed new persona, Eladio Guzman, a smuggler from the Dominican Republic. For an added flourish, Guzman was blind in one eye and wore a black eyepatch.
In April of 2012, he created an account for Guzman on the Silk Road with the username "Nob". Force even snapped a profile picture, patch and all, to make himself look more legit. Then, for his opening move, he reached out to DPR directly with an audacious request: buying the website.
Force wasn't prepared for the sticker shock of $1 billion, but it definitely made him more intrigued. Either the Silk Road was bigger than anyone at the agency imagined, or DPR had a sentimental attachment to anonymous drug deals. As it turned out, Force had chosen the perfect time to make contact. Ulbricht and Jones were on the outs, and Ulbricht was looking for a new digital confidant.
Over the next few months, Knob slowly built a rapport with DPR until they were chatting almost every day. According to Joshua Behrman's report in Wired Magazine, they talked about everything. The business, plans for the future, even DPR's paleo diet. Force hoped that in one of these chats, DPR would slip up.
Either he would reveal something too personal, something that identified him, or he would be gullible enough to willingly trust Knob and out himself. But for months, DPR kept all personal details under wraps. Force had a good sense of who DPR was, his personality, sense of humor, his moral code, but was no closer to figuring out his name or location.
Surprisingly, Force realized he really liked DPR. Force had seen the devastating violence of the war on drugs firsthand. DPR was trying to end that with the Silk Road. He didn't seem like a drug dealer. He felt like a friend. When Force handed in a proposal to his superiors on how to bust DPR in late 2012, he almost regretted it. Almost.
To put the plan in motion, Knob pinged DPR. He was looking to sell a kilo of cocaine as soon as possible. Could DPR help him find a buyer? Of course he could. Was he or was he not running the Amazon of drugs? Within a few days, the deal was set. Because this was a large amount of drugs and Knob wasn't personally familiar with the buyer, he asked DPR to arrange for a trusted middleman to broker the deal.
Knob would ship the keel of cocaine to DPR's middleman, an employee of his named Chronic Payne. Chronic Payne would only ship the drugs to their final destination once the buyer transferred payment into an escrow account. However, Force was just using this as a ruse to get an address. The DEA planned to raid Chronic Payne's house and arrest him the moment the package hit his front porch.
Chronic Pain was one of DPR's direct reports, way more likely to know his boss's true identity than any of the lower-level dealers they'd caught. And even if not, Chronic Pain still had valuable information about the inner workings of the site. They might not get DPR immediately, but they'd be much closer than they were right now. But this made the bust more of a risk.
The arrest of one of his lieutenants could spook DPR and send him underground. In his role as Knob, Force had given DPR several real tips on how to avoid punishment in hiding, like going to a non-extradition country. If DPR decided to pull the ripcord, they may never get another shot.
Even with these risks, in mid-January of 2013, DEA agent Carl Force arranged to ship a kilo of cocaine to Chronic Pain. Through the deal, he learned that Chronic Pain was actually Curtis Green. He was a Mormon family man in his late 40s who lived in Spanish Fork, Utah, 50 miles south of Salt Lake City.
On the morning of the scheduled bust, Force parked on Chronic Pain's suburban street in an unmarked white van. He watched the front door through the window, waiting for a very special delivery. Just after 11 a.m., an agent dressed as a postal worker casually approached Chronic Pain's house and rang the doorbell. He was supposed to get Chronic Pain's signature accepting the package of drugs, airtight evidence for the criminal charges, but...
No one answered the door. The agent called out, "Anybody home?" Force sat in the van, watching his plans unravel. He quickly grabbed a walkie and told the agent to just leave the package on the doorstep, forget the signature. The agent did as instructed, leaning the shipping box against the front door, then walking away. Force held his breath.
He'd broken protocol and potentially forfeited $27,000 worth of the DEA's cocaine. He needed this to work. Come on, Curtis. Take the bait. Then, a heavyset man shuffled onto the front porch, supporting himself with a pink cane. He picked up the small package. Then he looked up, staring directly at the unmarked white van. Carl Force nearly ducked in his seat.
That was it. They'd been made. Sure enough, the man, seemingly chronic pain, hobbled over to one of his garbage bins and tossed the keel of cocaine inside. Then he went back into his house. The mission was a failure. Force and the other agents scrambled. What do they do now? They couldn't just leave the agency's drugs sitting in a trash can.
But in the middle of this panic discussion, the man suddenly re-emerged. Even though the unmarked van was still parked in plain sight, Force watched as he limped back over to the bins and fished out the small box of cocaine. Force couldn't believe his luck and honestly didn't care what changed Chronic Pain's mind. The mission was back on.
As soon as he disappeared back inside with the kilo, force ordered the standby agents to move in. A swarm of DEA and SWAT agents descended on the house. They found Chronic Pain, aka Curtis Green, in his kitchen, a pair of scissors in one hand, the freshly opened kilo in the other, white powder smeared across his face.
As the agents searched Curtis Green's suburban home, they found $23,000 in cash, a computer open to the Silk Road website, and two obnoxious chihuahuas. Agents handcuffed Curtis and sat him down. The cocaine was in full effect as he answered their questions, talking a mile a minute.
He had no idea where the kilo had come from. He thought the box was a package of NBOM, a hallucinogenic marketed as legal LSD. This was all a misunderstanding. Curtis pleaded with the agents: "Don't take me to jail. DPR knows everything about me. He knows everything about me. This guy's got millions. He could have me killed." Meanwhile, only hours after the bust,
Ross Ulbricht realized something fishy was going on with a man he knew as Chronic Pain. He'd already sent him several messages throughout the day, all unanswered. Finally, Ulbricht wrote, "Why aren't you clearing out your accounts? Get back to me. ASAP." Two more days went by in radio silence. Then came another blow. $350,000 in Bitcoin disappeared from several different Silk Road users' accounts.
One of the Silk Road employees traced the withdrawals on the back end. He found that the money was swiped using Chronic Pain's admin credentials. In truth, Chronic Pain hadn't stolen anything. One of the DE agents in the raid had, using his login. But the real kicker came less than a week later.
A Google alert on Chronic Pain's real name, which Ulbricht had demanded as a condition of employment, forwarded an article about the DEA's arrest of Curtis Green. Worse, the Silk Road was mentioned in the article. Not only was Chronic Pain a thief, but now he might bring the entire Silk Road down to save his own skin.
To figure out his next move, Ulbricht chatted with his newest confidant, Knob. At this time, Ulbricht still had no idea that his consigliere was really Karl Forst, the agent responsible for Chronic Pain's arrest. And together, they chewed over the options. What was more important for Ulbricht? Getting his money back or sending a message? Knob knew plenty of people for either outcome. Ulbricht typed to Knob,
I'd like to beat him up, then force him to send the bitcoins he stole back. Like sit him down at his computer and make him do it." The theft really pissed Ulbricht off, but not because of the financial loss. Honestly, $350,000 was small potatoes for Ulbricht those days. He was more upset that, once again, Variety Jones' prophecy had been fulfilled. As Ulbricht saw it, he had shown chronic pain kindness
and once again been taken advantage of. As he sat stewing, waiting for Nob to make the arrangements, Ulbricht lamented to Variety Jones, who was still a friend. This was the first time he'd had to call in his muscle, and he didn't like doing it. But Jones thought he was looking at it entirely wrong. This was the criminal underworld, and he was a kingpin.
Chronic pain had disrespected him. Ulbricht needed to send a message. Jones said, "At what point in time do we decide we've had enough of someone's shit and terminate them?" Ulbricht considered the question for a full 24 hours. Was he being too soft? Again? The next time he spoke with Variety Jones, he admitted, "I would have no problem wasting this guy." Ulbricht was done being nice. He reached back out to Nob.
He needed to modify his request. He typed into the chat window, "Okay, so can you change the order to 'execute' rather than 'torture'?" Agent Carl Force gleefully typed back that a contract killing was no problem at all. He knew a guy who could do it for $80,000. As they hammered out the details, Ulbricht reassured himself. He wrote, "Never killed a man or had one killed before.
But it is the right move in this case. He was on the inside for a while, and now that he's been arrested, I'm afraid he'll give up info. Knob was all too happy to soothe Ulbricht's conscience. It was all in the name of business. After he logged off, Agent Carl Force started drafting his next mission proposal. Faking an assassination.
Thank you for listening to Conspiracy Theories, a Spotify podcast. We're here with a new episode every Wednesday. Be sure to check us out on Instagram at The Conspiracy Pod. And we would love to hear from you. So if you're listening to the Spotify app, swipe up and give us your thoughts. Do you have a personal relationship to the stories we tell? Email us at conspiracystoriesatspotify.com. Until next time, remember...
The truth isn't always the best story. And the official story isn't always the truth.
Conspiracy Theories is a Spotify podcast. This episode was written by Abigail Cannon with writing assistance from Julian Boisreau, edited by Maggie Admire, fact-checked by Laurie Siegel, and sound designed by Alex Button. Our head of programming is Julian Boisreau. Our head of production is Nick Johnson, and Spencer Howard is our post-production supervisor. I'm your host, Carter Roy.
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