Hello WIRED readers! Thanks for signing up for this newsletter about my series on the story of AlphaBay—perhaps the most epic detective story I've ever covered in my career as a reporter. |
That story began for me in July of 2017, when I was blindsided by the news that AlphaBay, the biggest dark-web drug market in history, had been torn offline in a secret law enforcement operation. Days later, the US Department of Justice announced that it hadn't only captured the kingpin of AlphaBay known as Alpha02—revealed to be Alexandre Cazes, who then died mysteriously in a Thai jail cell—and destroyed his black market for fraud and narcotics. Undercover Dutch police had also simultaneously taken control of the second-biggest dark-web market ever, Hansa, surveilling and identifying thousands of AlphaBay's refugees. It was a stunning revelation, and one that threw into chaos the dark-web black markets that I'd been covering for years. I knew that behind this sting, known as Operation Bayonet, was an incredible untold story. It would take me another five years of reporting to finally tell it. |
I've always been fascinated with the dark web and the cryptocurrency-fueled contraband markets it's given rise to, from the moment I first spotted the now-legendary Silk Road black market online in 2011. Two years later, I finally convinced Silk Road's pseudonymous administrator, the Dread Pirate Roberts, to let me interview him—the only interview he ever gave before he was arrested just months later and revealed to be a 29-year-old Texan named Ross Ulbricht. My natural inclination as a reporter has always been to tell these stories from the perspective of the dark web's inhabitants themselves. I'd always figured that the paranoid drug dealers, hubristic kingpins, and radical crypto-libertarians of that world would be far more interesting than the federal agents who spend their days hunting them from behind a laptop. But in the case of AlphaBay, that perspective seemed to be cut off: The kingpin himself was dead. |
A gray Toyota Camry driven by undercover Thai police crashes into the front gate of the house of Alexandre Cazes, the creator of the biggest dark-web drug market in history. |
By the time of the AlphaBay bust, I'd read the incredible work of Joshuah Bearman, whose two-part magazine feature on Silk Road in WIRED had shifted my thinking: While I had been writing letters to Ross Ulbricht in prison and met with his mother and tight-lipped defense attorney, Bearman had instead developed source relationships with the FBI agents who had tracked Ulbricht down and captured him. In the process, Bearman had also gotten access to Ulbricht's secret journal, seized from his laptop—and was able to tell a much richer story than I'd ever thought possible. |
So I flipped my approach. By 2018, I'd cornered a pair of Dutch cybercrime cops at a conference on the Caribbean island of Saint Martin and gotten them to tell me their side of Operation Bayonet. By 2020, I'd sent out enough feelers to agents and prosecutors at the FBI, the Drug Enforcement Administration, and the Department of Justice that I began to hear back from a few who were ready to tell their parts of the story, both on and off the record, with each source leading me to the next. By then, I was beginning to see that there was an even larger narrative arc, bigger than AlphaBay, about how the advent of cryptocurrency tracing had revolutionized cybercriminal investigations over the past decade: the decade-long saga that would become my book Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency. But I could see, too, that AlphaBay was the centerpiece of that story. |
So just as pandemic travel restrictions eased, I began to travel from Fresno to the Netherlands, piecing together the full AlphaBay tale. By the end of 2021, I'd made it to Bangkok, where I met the Thai police who had surveilled, arrested, and jailed Cazes in the final days of his life—and even obtained a video of that arrest. A still from that video, shown above, captures the fateful moment when a gray Toyota Camry crashed into Cazes' gate, the carefully planned diversion that would lead to his downfall. The resulting story, excerpted from my book Tracers in the Dark and now serialized for WIRED in six parts, begins with that scene. I hope you'll read it at the link below, and check out the full book here. |
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حبيبي ليس يعدله حبيب *** ولا لسواه في قلبي نصيب حبيب غاب عن بصري وسمعي *** ولكن في فؤادي ما يغيب يا حبيب ...
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