From: Wired
By Kim Zetter
The dramatic takedown of the Silk Road drug market and the arrest of its alleged owner on drug trafficking and murder-for-hire charges last month began in part with an offhand tip to Department of Homeland Security investigators in Maryland in mid-2011.
The informant told DHS investigators in Baltimore about an online drug bazaar where international sales of illicit drugs and other contraband were conducted with impunity and with the ease of buying cocktail stirrers or underwear on Amazon.
“You guys are in law enforcement. You might want to look at this,” the informant told DHS investigators, according to federal law enforcement officials familiar with the case who asked not to be identified.
The informant directed investigators to the site, accessible only through the Tor anonymizing network, and explained how transactions for the sale of heroin, cocaine and LSD went down using the digital currency Bitcoin.
But that wasn’t all Silk Road was selling — there were stolen credit and debit card numbers, fake IDs, counterfeit currencies, hacking tools and login credentials for hacked accounts.
The tip, which arrived about six months after Silk Road was launched and coincided with the emporium’s growing notoriety following a June 2011 Gawker story, spawned a multi-agency task force based in Baltimore — dubbed “Marco Polo” in reference to the drug market’s historical namesake — that eventually included investigators from the FBI, DEA, DHS, the IRS, U.S. Postal Inspection, U.S. Secret Service, and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Simultaneously, other investigations were launching in New York and Chicago. In the wake of the Gawker story, Senators Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Joe Manchin (D- West Virginia) sent a letter to Attorney General Eric Holder and the head of the DEA urging them to crack down on Silk Road and Bitcoin exchangers. The DEA and FBI launched an investigation and task force out of New York, and in Chicago, U.S. postal inspectors and DHS Customs and Border Protection agents were already seizing suspicious packages from an international mail center that they would later tie to Silk Road buyers and sellers, evidence that is now playing a role in cases in New York and other jurisdictions.
WIRED reviewed court documents and spoke with a number of law enforcement officials who say that the investigation so far has led to more than a dozen arrests in multiple countries — and more are in the works.
While investigators in New York focused on gathering evidence around the drug sales, law enforcement in Maryland began mapping the operation. They focused on identifying and nabbing two groups connected to Silk Road: the top 1 percent of sellers and the moderators and system administrators, whose computers and credentials, once seized, could open the door to the site’s private communications and account details.
“Moderators and admins were our main objects,” one law enforcement official says. “We identified some of them. That led to some information to help us understand the inner circle of Silk Road. We also took down drug traffickers and those selling IDs and guns. From there we gained a lot of intelligence about the people involved.”
The real target in their sights, though, was the mysterious Dread Pirate Roberts, the brazen owner and operator of the site who they now say was 29-year-old Ross Ulbricht.
To get to him, they made a number of initial arrests that were kept quiet from the media or handled in ways to prevent co-conspirators from learning of the arrests. They won’t say how they did this, but it’s known that in some of the cases they refrained from filing charges against some suspects until after Ulbricht was arrested in October 2013. Other known law enforcement tactics include sealing documents, eliminating key information from public documents that point to the investigation — for example, the name Silk Road — or filing state charges instead of federal ones to keep a suspect’s records out of the more-easily searched federal court database.
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