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

Bone marrow, for example, sold for as much as $23,000 a gram (compared with $60 a gram for cocaine).

he did it with such beauty and so adroitly that, to him at least, the very sin was absolved by the manner in which it was carried out.

She knew exactly what those things were, and she knew she couldn’t stop him from doing them. He would just keep eating, and eating, and eating.

Amazon had begun as a virtual bookstore before becoming our everything supermarket. And Google, which had started as a search engine, was trying to build cars that could drive themselves.

The Silk Road wasn’t just a digital drug cartel. It was a highly lucrative start-up with a lot of optionality.

The metamorphosis from rash young newbie to jaded old-timer had happened slowly.

The first clue: all of the smugglers had booked reservations the day before a flight. Second, the couriers used only Gmail or Yahoo! e-mail accounts. And third, they had (obviously fake) phone numbers that used a shared formula.

The online world was his stage; he just needed to decide who would come out from behind the curtain.

There were two main aspects of the LulzSec arrests the Feds needed to pull off for the takedown to work properly. First, it was imperative that they capture every suspect at the exact same time, even though they were all in different states and countries. They had to ensure that the hackers didn’t alert anyone else about their arrests, or the entir

“I think a man is his own God and can decide for himself what’s right and wrong,” Ross said. “As a man, I decide for myself.”