http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/micwright/100011070/exit-nod-the-apple-of-silk-road-heroin-dealers-we-could-be-about-to-meet-a-real-life-walter-white/ Credit where credit’s due: "Nod" is a great pseudonym for a heroin dealer. That’s a defining characteristic of the smackhead – the nod. Shot up and blissful, they nod out, the world a gauzy background to the high. Nod was the most popular heroin seller on Silk Road, the semi-hidden online market for illicit substances and criminal contract jobs which has been smashed by US law enforcement.
The US Department for Homeland Security believes it knows who “the man who nods” was. In an extensive indictment it has pegged the name Nod to Steve Lloyd Sadler, 40, from Bellevue, Washington. The agency says Sadler was behind a digital empire that stretched across the Pacific Northwest. Breaking Bad’s Walter White is consigned to eternity in boxed sets and Netflix; Nod, though neutered, lives on.
The digital history of the Silk Road – whose founder I wrote about here – lays open the irresistible rise of Nod. He appeared in the community on June 14 2012 and began selling almost immediately. He touted himself as supplying the kind of the black-tar heroin that users crave, and on a promise that he would be different to the internet dealers who took dopeheads’ cash, then disappeared. Nod was the Apple of online drug dealers, boasting of “top-notch customer service”.
Nod’s notices were excellent. The reviews flowed in fast. It was said that his heroin “tasted delicious”. This was an artisanal product for the discerning smack connoisseur, too good for the average junkie. Reviewers on the Silk Road spoke of his heroin in the tones usually reserved for Michelin-starred restaurants:
… it still retains its potency and the initial surge of vinegar on the inhale but once its in your mouth … it just tastes very sweet.
The customer service had a slight wobble when it came to packaging. Unwisely, Nod told customers openly how he packaged his shipments. Obsessed with his method of triple-wrapping a vacuum-sealed wax paper and plastic package, a method designed to foil Postal Service attempts to discover drugs, he made it too hard for heroin addicts to actually get at their fix. Some consumers had to contact Nod to ask for assistance in breaking in to their freshly delivered heroin. Nod, like any smart businessman, refined his product based on this unintentional market research. In late June 2013, he redid the packets to make them less difficult to deal with.
The combination of responsive customer service and top quality product shot Nod to the top of the pile at the Silk Road. By September 2012 he was the biggest heroin dealer in the market place. Hubris was about to enter his system. A slackness entered Nod’s practices and two packages were caught by Postal Office inspection dogs in September 2012. They discovered heroin stuffed into a Christmas card surrounded with scented markers to mask the tang of the black tar. Two further packages were intercepted a week later.
Nod hit shipping problems. He apologised to customers. People were unsettled. Yet the heroin kept being shipped even as the man sending it went quiet. The Postal Service was beginning a relentless investigation of the packages. It tracked one down to a post office box in a UPS store. It was owned by a man called Edward Harlow who had a network of rented boxes at UPS stores in the same area. He shared those boxes with a gentleman called Aaron Thompson.
Thompson was a weak link. In November 2012, local police intercepted a package from Pakistan addressed to him and containing 900 tablets. They resealed the package in the hope of luring someone to pick it up. They didn’t show. The next clue was repeated sightings of a blonde woman dropping off similar packages for some time. And here’s where Steven Sadler comes in – the woman’s car was leased to him. The first connection between Sadler and the smack had been established.
Now the weakness of the Silk Road became apparent. The technology can keep its mouth shut if you use it right, but human beings can be scared into garrulousness. Another package was intercepted and the recipient spilled the beans – he’d purchased his drugs from a dude called Nod on the Silk Road. As this was happening, Nod was wracked with supply problems, fighting with partners and no longer shipping in decent quantity or even remotely reliably. His customers were jumping ship.
Then something changed. In early 2013, after a short hiatus, Nod was back. And, like all good business people, he had diversified. Where once Nod had a single brand, now he had a series of sub-brands offering coke, meth and his signature dish: the black-tar heroin.
The Silk Road forums went crazy. It was as if a fashion designer had launched a new collection. Nod was known for quality now he’d bought his eye for a great product to some new chemical formulas. From his tasty tar heroin, he’d jumped to even more moreish meth and deliciously pure cocaine. His meth was even described as having “a wonderful taste of bubblegum”. Nod even inspired tribute acts on Silk Road. Nod4Less purchased large quantities of heroin from the man himself at wholesale and resold it at lower prices thanks to Nod’s huge profit margins.
Nod sold at premium prices but gave his eager and aching clients a top-quality product. Boasting to online rivals, he claimed he was racking in $20,000 a month in cocaine sales alone and that his profit margin was so high that he made three times as much money as his Silk Road rivals.
Another characteristic – besides allegedly buying a BMW for his girlfriend and an Audi for himself – that Nod shared with hard-nosed city types was a taste for monopolies and price-fixing. In March 2013 the market was riven with conflict as it was revealed that Nod had tried to establish a cartel to set cocaine prices on Silk Road. “There’s a ton more money to be made cooperating than by competing,” was his message. It was Nod’s “Dylan goes electric” moment. His old fans were disgusted. This was not what made Nod.
Dread Pirate Roberts, the owner of Silk Road – now apparently unmasked as Ross William Ulbricht – acted to damp down the controversy. The messages sent by Nod and revealed in the public forums came from a secret forum reserved for dealers and admins alone. The “Dread Pirate” didn’t want information from that forum spread everywhere and argued strongly that cartels are not morally wrong.
But the time spent scheming about Silk Road internal politics could have been better spent on evading the authorities. In March 2013, investigators ordered heroin and cocaine from Nod to the address of the overly talkative Alaskan customer. The police traced the package and found it had been shipped from a post office in Kenmore, Washington.
The police then received a warrant to install GPS tracking devices in the Audi and BMW cars owned by Sadler and his girlfriend. They discovered that the cars had been driven to 38 different post offices in the greater Seattle area. And one of those post offices was in Kenmore, Washington.
In June, the authorities stepped up their efforts with an order for 3.5g of cocaine. They watched to see where the cars moved to. They didn’t. They stayed put in the driveway. Nod was on the move. He messaged that he was “sending from the road”. Nod sent the package from a location in West Hollywood. He emailed again on June 17 letting the ‘customer’ know that he was back home again.
Nod’s messages suggested he was getting worried:
Other areas of business have kept my head down but I’m up and breathing for air. Fingers crossed that things stay calm.
They had not and they were about to get a lot worse. Police believed they had nailed Nod to Sadler. They examined his vendor page on Silk Road and picked apart every review posted. The data was hugely helpful. They found from 1,400 reviews that Nod had sold more than 2000g of cocaine, more than 500g of heroin and 105g of methamphetamine in four months.
They believed they had the case locked down by July 2013 but could not push the criminal complaint through until October 2 when the man allegedly behind the entire Silk Road aka Dread Pirate Roberts was arrested. With Ulbricht in custody the time had come to swoop in on Nod.
Sadler and his girlfriend face charges of conspiracy to distribute heroin, cocaine and methamphetamine. They were released on bond and made subject to supervision on October 3 and now await trial. Four other alleged Silk Road dealers have been arrested in the UK and a further two have been lifted in Sweden. British police sources say further Silk Road arrests are guaranteed over the next month.
In Breaking Bad, Walter White was a suburban crime boss, obsessed with the quality of his merchandise. He was an incredible artistic creation. It seemed that only in fiction could a seemingly ordinary man transform into a drug kingpin and immerse himself into the criminal world.
The truth is that fiction and reality are much closer than we think. As the Silk Road prosecutions pick up speed, it looks as if we’re about to meet a whole army of real-life Walter Whites.
