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

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

“As long as we don’t cross [a] line in our pursuit,” DPR wrote to Variety Jones, “then we are only doing good.” “Ha, dude, we’re criminal drug dealers,” VJ responded. “What line shouldn’t we cross?” “Murder, theft, cheating, lying; hurting people,” DPR replied, resentful of the question. “That line. We are drawing a new line I guess you could say.

She peered at men in the grocery store and wondered if they were undercover cops who knew that she lived with the man who had started the Silk Road.

How quickly life changes. One minute you’re making $300 a week as a college researcher. You’re sleeping in a basement and your only belongings are two black garbage bags, one full of clean clothes, the other dirty, and your biggest worry in the world is whether the pretty girl with the black curly hair whom you just met at the drum circle will call

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.

Sometimes he listened to Hope 89.1, a local Christian radio station that would whisper the Lord’s Prayer into his ear, promising that if Carl followed the ways of the Bible and did the right thing, he would be granted the life he had always wanted.

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.

“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.”

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