Just requoting PoMs "Diamond" posting, which includes his emails to Assistant United States Attorney Serrin Turner, where he practically hands himself over to the DOJ. I am sure Thomas Clark has a plan and this story is far from over:
Joined 6 years, 3 months, 4 weeks, 1 day, and 8 hours ago.
Postby Plural of Mongoose » Sun Sep 27, 2015 1:42 pm
"I offer my opponents a bargain: if they will stop telling lies about me, I will stop telling the truth about them."
-- Adlai Stevenson
OK then.
I've had some fun re-telling some adventures from years ago, but I'm afraid that part of this has come to a close. Maybe I'll come back later and finish them, if I have time before I'm incarcerated.
Now it's time to explain what's been going on for the last two years, which hopefully will answer some of the questions that you may have.
Unlike the previous posts here, I'm not going to go out of my way to be witty, funny or entertaining. There will be no poetic license, no facts shaded by presentation because it reads better. OK, mebbe I'll be just a little bit witty, sometimes I can't help myself.
Just the facts, Jack.
TLDR; Right up front here, so you know if you want to keep reading, or not.
This is the story of what I've been doing the last two years. The story of $75,000,000 of pirates treasure in bitcoins. The story of a rogue, highly placed member of the Federal Bureau of Investigation who has been making better than an average of a $1,000,000 a month, committing felonies with wild abandon, just because he can. The story of a bent Federale who has leaked me secret grand jury information in an effort to keep me *out* of the hands of his colleagues. The story of an Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York who, in spite of being made aware of much of this, has chosen to do nothing, likely so as to not embarrass his office and politically minded boss. That hasn't even got me started on the kidnapping and torture plot. Don't worry, I'll get to it, but it's nasty.
*Spoiler alert: There are no innocent people named in this tale, myself included. Maybe a life lesson or two, maybe not.
So, let's wind our calenders back a couple of years to the beginning of October, 2013. I was on a long haul flight on Air China, on my way to, of all places, China. After a brief stop there rushing through the hellhole that is Taipei Airport, I then flew, also on Air China, to Suvarnabhumi Airport in Bangkok, arriving tired as shit in the early in the morning of October 4, local time, after way too many hours in airports and flying. There is no wifi/Internet on Air China, even in business class, so I had no idea what was going on in the outside world, so to speak, for the last couple of days.
Upon arrival, I took a cab to my hotel, and was relaxing in my suite watching the television, when the news of the fall of the Silk Road website came on. Well, golly. You could have knocked me down with a feather. I unpacked my things, took a shower to wash the airline off, and took a well deserved nap. Waking in the late afternoon, I went out to hop bars along the soi at Pat Pong II and get stinking drunk. Not because of the news, mind you; that's what I always did when I got to BKK—got stinking drunk. You'll find that a common theme over the next year. I'm nothing, if not a creature of habit.
Now this is the part where everyone wants to know how I went on the run, etcetera. How did I manage to evade what everyone assumes was the closing grasp and wrath of the United States Department of Justice.
Well, I went back to the hotel, got some sleep, and went out and did the same thing again the next day. And the next. Yes, this is how I apparently 'go on the run'. Pitiful, I know.
I had long since had a flight booked to take me to Phuket for a visit, and then Samui for a month or so. Eventually I flew back through BKK to Trat, and after the usual harrowing songthaew ride to the ferry, ended up on the island that had been my home for close to a year and a half.
I continued to live on the same place on the beach as I had since I had arrived in Thailand. Over the next six months (Just rippin' through my passport real quick like here and checking visas and stamps and dates.) I left the country three or four times, by both air and land border crossings; each time returning to my same little place on the beach. Ah, this is life on the run. If anyone truly wanted to find me, it would have taken about 90 minutes.
In April, Songkran, the Thai New Year was coming up. I'd also recalled from the previous year, that also meant five months of waves up to my front door, no beach, and having everything I owned being wet for five months. My love affair with beachfront living was over. I moved inland, to a nice place in the jungle. No waves. Goddammit, those cicada's are loud, though.
If you dropped onto the island and hit any of, oh, say, all the bars, it would have taken about two bars to find someone that knew me, who I was and where I lived. I mention this because at some point in time I'm going to be accused of being a fugitive, on the run, furtively trying to hide my location and identity.
Nothing could be further from the truth.
And then a funny thing happened, way up in the jungle with shitty cellular reception, and as a result even shittier Internet access.
A new contact popped up on my chat.
It was a person whom I would eventually refer to as 'A highly placed FBI *tergiversator' in an email to Mr. Serrin Turner, Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York. For now, showing a complete lack of imagination, I labeled the contact 'Bob'.
*I often get shit for using a big word, when a more diminutive one would suffice. However in this case, to badly paraphrase Humpty Dumpty; when I use a word, it means exactly what it is defined to mean, neither more nor less. A tergiversator is someone who turns renegade; who uses evasions, subterfuge and the trust of those around him to betray the cause to which he was sworn. Yep, cannot think of a word that better describes the individual known to me as 'Bob'.
Now I didn't have a name for this contact, but as we had various conversations the subject of vanity names for hidden services came up. He liked the name 'Chrysippus', as in Chrysippus of Soli, a Greek Stoic philosopher. Hey, I'm named after a Viverridae, who am I to throw stones. He must have either hired someone or put some hardware to work, because eventually he dropped his old random 16 alphanumeric torchat id, and started to use ZenChrysippus47e. The name was *very* important to him, and he'd get pissed when I wouldn't use it, and continued to just call him Bob, until he finally got so pissed of I relented and started to refer to him as Chrysippus. Dude had issues, and the name was *real* important to him.
Over time, it came out that he was a highly placed member of the FBI.
Yeah, I know, he said it on the Internet, so it must be true, right? It wasn't like that at all. Without going through the whole process, let's just say he more than convinced me. As we go along here, you'll be convinced too, so suspend your disbelief for a while, and read on.
It started out with things like Atlantis. He had, for a princely sum, kept the management of Atlantis updated with documents that eventually led to them shutting the site down, fearing the feds nipping at their heels. Now, there's been rumors about that for a long time, and anyone could claim that after the fact, sure. But this was just the beginning of him laying out his bonafides, and eventually he'd get around to telling me about things before they happened.
But the thing is, he had a btc wallet. A btc wallet with well over 300,000 btc in it, worth about $75,000,000 at current pricing. This wallet was unfortunately encrypted, which is why he was spending all this time wooing me. How it exactly came into his possession was never made clear, just that it came from 'Silk Road'. Whether it was from a laptop or memory stick, the server that was imaged originally, or any of the dozens of tertiary servers that the site made use of, was never clear. What was made clear that nobody else knew that it existed, 'cept of course for me now. And DPR, of course, whose treasure it was he had looted. Wasn't there a record of where he had taken it from? Nope, he was a pro, and covered his tracks.
Let me say here, Chrysippus is wicked fucking smart. A fucking computer genius, a razor sharp mind, and an unbelievable eye for detail and minutiae. I hadn't heard anything about an encrypted wallet with 300k in it, and it was starting to seem plausible that he had in fact managed to gain possession of it without leaving any trace of its existence.
And Chrysippus had a plan; a long-term, well thought out plan, to get access to what was in his mind now his $75,000,000. Did I mention he was patient as all get out too?
The odds were, he and others involved in the investigation and prosecution of Ross Ulbricht figured, that he was going to be sentenced to between forty years and life. Nobody thought it would possibly be any less than that. And as I said, Chrysippus is nothing if not patient. His plan, while long term, was also pretty darned simple.
He was going to patiently wait for Ross to be convicted, and after he was convicted, he would eventually be transferred to a permanent home in a federal prison. Once there, it takes a while to go through intake, move to a temporary wing while being assessed, and it could take six months or more at the prison before he would be placed in what would become his 'permanent' home.
Once Ross was permanently housed, Chrysippus was going to work on getting people inside the facility, convicts and employees alike, to arrange it so he could communicate with Ross. (This isn't near as hard as it sounds. When I was in Max Security Wandsworth Prison at the pleasure of the Queen, one of my celly's had a brand new iPhone 4, and 'cause I was teaching him to grow, I got to make use of it on a regular basis.)
Now, this is where I come in. He figured, for whatever far-flung reason, that I could convince Ross to cough up the pass-phrase he needed. He also had a second theory, and that was that Ross only had 1/2 the pass-phrase, and I had the other 1/2. Either way, I am critical to his plan.
Timeline-wise, we're at about this time last year, mid-September 2014. He wants me to move to Singapore, where he can set up a safe house and know that I'm clear of the clutches of the DOJ.
I tell him he's on fucking crack, I'm not going anywhere under his control.
The guy is getting pissed at me for not toeing the line he's laying out. It's mostly entertainment for me. I have no interest in the millions he's offering me to assist in his plan, and it's also pretty obvious to me that if I did help, he wouldn't need me around after it's completion.
He continues to build up his bonafides for me.
He claims that his machinations have kept anyone from finding me so far. Now, he doesn't know where I am, but that's not because I'm hard to find. It's like him saying he's got a rock that protects me from lions—-I don't see any lions around, do you-—and taking credit for my lion-free existence. Plus, I like lions.
So he feeds me other tidbits, some minor that pan out right away, others major that don't come out for months and months.
In late October, this was before Halloween (I know this because I racked my motorbike into a tree on Halloween, so that date sticks in my mind.), he drops a couple of bombshells on me. First one, nob is a fed. That's no fucking surprise, what's the point. Chrysippus then details for me the antics of United States Drug Enforcement Agency agent Carl Mark Force IV and United States Secret Service agent Shaun Bridges, and the current state of the grand jury investigation into them. OK, I was a little bit gob-smacked. He gave me lots of details, and I gotta say I was impressed. This was one of those things, that when it became public, would pretty much seal Chrysippus as a source of accurate information not available to many, and his claims of being highly placed in the FBI would deserve serious merit.
He also stresses how stupid they were to do anything but just fucking hold onto their ill gotten gains. He proudly informed me that he had earnings of over 4 million dollars from his extra-curricular activities in the last few months alone. *His* long term plans consisted of hoarding his ill-gotten gains. When he had a few hundred million--that was his goal--he'd quietly retire to a tax friendly jurisdiction, and live the life he deserved. Meanwhile, there were so many opportunities for him.
You see, our friend Chrysippus fancied himself something of an Omar Little character, stealing and extorting from those that couldn't turn to the authorities. He was working on either worming or hacking his way into all the major markets. He was running his own little private operations on major DNM dealers, and in general cleaning up, in this, his new wild west.
His credibility lagged for quite a while, as the news of Force and Bridges failed to break. (I don't know for sure, but from what I gather Dratel wasn't even made aware of the grand jury investigation until November, well after I had got the news.) When the Ulbircht court case came along and still nothing, I teased him unmercifully. He was fucking livid, and it showed through in his messages to me.
Now, understand that we weren't chatting in real time, for the most part. I run a modified program that is compatible with torchat. (It doesn't however, log. It's also not Ricochet, I said compatible with torchat, eh.) We'd both leave our chat clients running pretty much 24/7, allowing for bad cellular service, thunder storms, coups, drunks hitting the main power lines for the island, etcetera. So often I'd log on to my computer to receive a [delayed] message or three from him. And sometimes they were rants, assuring me that fucking Force and fucking Bridges were going to be arrested any fucking day, I'd see. Other times, they were bits of information that I could follow up on over the next few weeks, to see he in fact *did* have information that only someone in his position could have.
And one day, he did something weird. I mean weird, even for him. He signed off one one of his rants with:
--cwt
Just like that. Normally, it was Chrysippus, or nothing.
So I waited until we were chatting one time in real time, and sprung that one him. What was with the --cwt? Now, you can tell when someone is flustered, even in text. The cadence of the responses changes, they pontificate on off-topic themes while they think, or try to move the conversation to another topic. I kept bringing it back around.
Finally, he says that it stands for Carat, as in the unit for measuring the weight of diamonds. His code name, is in fact, he tells me, Diamond. From that day on, he used Diamond, dropping the Chrysippus he was so proud of, completely. (He retained the ZenChrysippus47e torchat addy, even to this day.) So there we have it, case solved. I don't think so, hmm.
Chrysippus
--cwt
Diamond
When he is finally uncovered, and dammit I was close for a while there, I'm sure that at least two, and possibly all three, of those tag lines are going to become crystal clear. We'll see.
Many months later, when the Force and Bridges fiasco finally broke, he was fucking ecstatic. See, did I see now, did I? He was insufferably smug. He kept wanting me to follow this link, or that link, or read this article. Now, it may surprise you to know that I had zero interest in following all the DNM crap that's been going on the last two years. Finally I relented and allowed him to send me a few snippets of articles and court filings and whatnot, that confirmed the details of what he had been telling me. Later I did a bit of digging around on my own, and discovered that for all his hubris, Diamond had managed to leave out one of Forces major fuck-ups.
One day, using a fucking work computer, I believe, Force sent a message to Dread Pirate Roberts, and signed off on it...
Carl
Little bells went off in my head. I could see Diamond, as Chrysippus, doing the exact same thing when he was all excited and pissed off I wasn't taking him seriously. No doubt in my mind now. Chrysippus was going to figure in who Diamond was, and so will --cwt. Diamond, I think, was just a quick response the situation, and he insisted on using it exclusively now. Food for thought, for sure.
Now, over the next six months, past the trial and into March 2015, Diamond kept insisting that it was him keeping me safe. He also started to get nastier and nastier, because I refused to cooperate in his planning to obtain the keys to the encrypted wallet. I became inured to his regular threats, but I know he was serious. If I ever fucked up and fell into the hands of the Feds, he had the reach and knew the people, and most importantly had the funds, to have me killed. If I fucked up in SE Asia, whatever country, he'd reach out and have me killed. Basically, if I didn't do exactly what he wanted, or ended up in custody of any authority, he'd have me killed.
During that time, I was in and out of Thailand a few times, with no difficulties whatsoever. In December I obtained a retirement visa, which meant I didn't have to roll over sixty day tourist visa's, which required leaving the country, going to an embassy, and taking a couple of days to get another sixty day visa. (The 'visa runs' in the news they are cracking down on in Thailand are walk over/walk back, get a 15 or 30 day stamp, kinda things, and are kinda dodgy. I obeyed the spirit and letter of the law.) In March 2015 I checked in with immigration and confirmed my address, something you have to do every 90 days on a retirement visa. No problems with the authorities, at all. Hmmm...
In March, Diamond stepped it up a notch. At the beginning of the month, he gave me 30 days to go to a location of his choosing, and stay there until his plan was complete. At that time, that meant a long time. His plan was, and still is I believe (I'll ask him as soon as I post this, and send him a link, eh.) to make his move to contact Ross between Christmas and New Years. He feels that is when Ross would be most vulnerable. He's probably right.
On March 7, Diamond was once again fucking ecstatic. He was working on ripping off all the DNMs, and was often bragging about his skills and abilities. He was in the process of making an over $6,000,000 score in btc! He'd managed to get into one of the DNMs, root the server, and sat in the bush waiting to get an IP for an admin. He'd been successful in that a few weeks earlier, and had bribed/hired some folks to find the location of said admin. He demanded six million+ dollars (lots of jabs about him being the six million dollar man. Dude has a weird ego, man.), which they didn't have sitting around, unless they raped the market for it. But he had them by the fucking short hairs, man. This was a done deal, and I'd heard it from him first. Suck that, eh.
10 days later, Evolution market was no more.
Yeah, his bonafides were racking up, and I was for the first time really worried that this fucker was going to try and force me to do his bidding, or kill me. Or, more accurately, force me to do his bidding and then kill me. Either way, not good.
I made plans to relocate to another country for the usual reasons. You know, so I didn't end up dead.
Meanwhile in March, I started hearing about four men moving about the island, asking about me. These weren't locals, they were farang; rude white men. Two Russians, and two Americans. I doubt they worked for the DOJ. Diamond was getting serious, and I was keeping my head low.
In early April Diamond informed me that there was an Interpol red notice for me, and that officials in SE Asia had been requested to detain me. He insisted I was going to be rounded up any day now, and the only safe place was with him. Coincidentally, he had a team in Thailand right now, who could help me. Oh, joy.
Now, I had a pretty darned good relationship with the figures of authority on the island, to put it mildly. It was time to dust off those relationships, and see what's going on.
I jumped on a borrowed motorcycle (Don't ask about mine, the story still pains me.), and cruised down to a bar, just down from one of the police boxes on the island. Little local stations, consisting of usually about a 200 sq. ft. building, with tables and chairs outside. Casual little places, where the locals go to interact with the local police. I wander over to the police box, and nod at a uniform I know. He wanders over, and I ask him, are you guys looking for me?
No, *we're* not, but immigration is, I think. Yeah, here's the paper. He shows it to me, and sure enough, there's a really shitty copy of one of my visa pictures on there. Well, fuck.
In the interests of community support, I invite the fine gentleman back to the bar for a drink, and maybe he could find out what the immigration police wanted? Sure, he'd love to, so off to the bar we went.
He made a phone call, and about 15 minutes later a pickup truck with a couple of immigration police showed up, they sat down and we ordered a bottle of Sangsom Thai whiskey, and a bucket of ice. This was serious conversation we were having, and called for serious drink.
Yes, they were looking for me, they even had little flyer's in Thai with my picture, and offering a reward. Did I want them to go back to the office to get one? Erm, no thanks, I've already seen one, thank you very much anyways.
We ordered another bottle of Sangsom, that first one went fast.
How much was the reward, I asked.
Twenty thousand Thai baht, I was told. If the long arm of the US DOJ was really behind this, they were going all out. $700 or so. Wow. I left a bundle of 50,000 THB on the table to cover the tab, said good-bye to the smiling officials divvying up the loot, and headed home. Yep, it was definitely time to move on. You know, before the police or immigration folks found me.
I soon informed Diamond that I'm afraid his Russian/American tag-teams had missed me, I was gone gone gone outta the country, and how was his week going?
Well, you'd think I kicked his puppy! He went fucking mental, and started going on about his backup plan. He would kidnap Ross Ulbrichts sister, or mother, or ideally both. Get a video capable phone in front of Ross Ulbricht, and he'd give up that fucking pass phrase, and Diamond would have them tortured until he did. I had his bonafides by now, and knew him well enough to know he was serious about this. Come Christmas, if I wasn't well in position exactly where he wanted me to be, I'd be responsible for the results.
So, I still had some time, but really, what the fuck could I do?
Oh, he was bragging about how he did this, and how he did that, and left me a bit to work with. I've amassed thousand of hours on, and messages from technical irc channels that may be discussing issues he'd be working on/needing to know, and well over 10,000 emails of technical lists relating to the problem at hand. Did I think I could find him and stop him? Eventually, yes, but now he was getting serious about this kidnapping thing, and it was time to bite the bullet.
In this case, biting the bullet was turning myself in, because writing an anonymous postcard wasn't going to cut it. If I was to keep him from kidnapping those two women, which he'd do if I didn't turn myself over to him, I was going to have to turn myself over to the DOJ folks, so they could take the appropriate action to protect those people, and maybe even figure out just who this sick fuck was, and stop him.
Easiest thing in the world, turning yourself in, you'd think.
You'd also be wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
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Subject: Indictment and extradition
Date: Mon, 11 May 2015 16:20:11 -0400
From: "Scott Hoffman" <
[email protected]>
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Subject: Indictment and extradition
Date: 11 May 2015 16:20
From: "Scott Hoffman" <
[email protected]>
To:
[email protected] -----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA256
09 May 2015
Serrin Turner
Assistant United States Attorney
U.S. Attorney's Office
Southern District of New York
1 St. Andrew's Plaza
New York, New York 10007
U.S.A.
by email:
[email protected] Sir,
My name is Thomas Clark.
A highly placed FBI tergiversator who goes by the alias 'Diamond' informed me
{redacted}
{redacted}
As Diamond appears to have access to FBI intelligence at a high level, please govern dissemination of this and future communications accordingly.
{redacted}
Sincerly,
Mr. Clark
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Now, I know that's not exactly the most informative snippet from an email, but bear with me.
And yeah, I used the word 'tergiversator'. I'm sure Mr. Turner got one of the older children, or an adult, to help him use the dictionary to determine its meaning, so it's all good.
The contents of the email informed Mr. Turner that secret grand jury information, and the existence of a sealed indictment had been passed on to me by Diamond. I also touched on the fact that I was aware the authorities in SE Asia had been requested to detain me for extradition (That's the immigration police job in Thailand, btw.) I offered to cooperate with the service of the indictment on me, to wit, turn myself in. Releasing secret grand jury information, or even the existence of a sealed indictment is, I understand, a felony. Now revealing the existence of my *own* sealed indictment likely wouldn't be prosecutable. However, the information from that grand jury likely would be. So that's why that shit is redacted up there. Oh, and also, instructions on how to contact me, and a private PGP key so, you know, we can keep it all private and secure.
OK, then. Let's see how that goes.
I know it was opened and read.
I redoubled my efforts to track down Diamond. He was going to be going after the big markets, hell, the small markets too, as well as the major dealers. I don't have near his assets, or available personnel, so I cross the dealers, and the small markets, off my list, and concentrate on the large markets. He's going to try in get inside them. I'm going to try and get inside them first, and catch him. Oh, this is gonna be fun, eh. Now, I'm no über-hacker, or even a poor coder. I do have a good mind for how things work, and I can follow a flow chart. However, I have problems figuring out how to do a drop shadow in .css, and to me the ultimate html tag is the