The Rise and Fall of Alphabay, Part 2: Into the Trap

The stunning culmination of a worldwide quest to capture the dark web's biggest kingpin-and destroy the underworld economy he ruled.

- By Andy Greenberg

ON THE MORNING

Of July 5, 2017, a loud clang rang out across a suburban Bangkok cul-de-sac, followed by the sound of metal grinding on concrete. A gray Toyota Camry had just plowed its rear fender into the fence of a two-story home there, bending the front gate, dragging it off its rails, and creating a clamor that ripped through the quiet of an otherwise peaceful morning on the outskirts of the Thai capital.

A security guard at the end of the cul-de-sac immediately began shouting at the driver. Hadn't he just told her to back straight out instead of attempting a three-point turn? Two Thai women stepped out of the vehicle. One, the driver, haplessly apologized and explained that she had gotten lost and was still learning to drive.

At that moment, a vertical shutter opened partway on a second-floor window of the house whose gate had just been mangled-a flicker of motion that sent a wave of excitement through a conference room 16 miles away. There, on the eighth floor of the headquarters of the Thai police's Narcotics Suppression Bureau, a rapt crowd of agents, analysts, and prosecutors was monitoring the scene through multiple hidden cameras. Behind that shutter, they suspected, was a young French Canadian man named Alexandre Cazes. They believed that Cazes, also known as Alpha02, was running the largest dark-web drug market in history, AlphaBay, from a computer in that house. Thai agents had sketched out the layout of Cazes' residence on an earlier trip to a similar model home on the same street. They knew the shutter that had just opened was in the master bedroom. They'd gained the attention of their target.