The Hunt for the Dark Web’s Biggest Kingpin, Part 5: Takedown

Content Warning: This story includes references to suicide. If you need help, call the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline by dialing 988.

CHAPTER 4

****ALPHA’S OMEGA****

On a typical day, the Private House Buddhamonthon development on the western edge of Bangkok offers a quiet respite from the traffic jams and diesel fumes of the city’s central neighborhoods. The cul-de-sac where Alexandre Cazes lived in that semi-suburban enclave was dotted with yellow trumpetbush blossoms. The only sounds were of palm fronds and banana trees rustling in the breeze and the chatter of tropical birds. But on the morning of July 5, that street would have seemed unusually busy to anyone paying attention.

At one end, a gardener was trimming the foliage, and an electrician was busy with a nearby wiring box. Inside the house at the street’s dead end, a model home and sales office for Private House’s real estate development firm, a man and woman were getting a tour of the property and inquiring about moving into the neighborhood. Their driver sat waiting in a car outside. Another car with two women in it was slowly pulling into the cul-de-sac, looking lost after taking an apparent wrong turn.

In fact, every one of the characters in this bustling scene was an undercover agent. Thailand’s DEA equivalent, the Narcotics Suppression Bureau, had assembled an entire theatrical production’s worth of actors around the unwitting target, busily performing their roles and waiting for a signal for Operation Bayonet’s takedown to finally begin.

The only non-Thai player in this pantomime was the DEA’s Wilfredo Guzman. He stood inside the real estate spec house at the end of the cul-de-sac wearing a Red Hot Chili Peppers T-shirt and jeans, posing as a wealthy foreign buyer with a Thai wife. Guzman’s primary job that morning was to distract the polite real estate agent, straining the limits of his Thai vocabulary to bombard her with questions about the layout of the spec house, the number of bedrooms, the size of the garage, and every other domestic detail he could think of. All of this was designed to allow the agent playing his wife to venture to an upstairs window and get eyes on Cazes’ house and driveway next door, in anticipation of the action set to unfold there.

Another group of NSB officers, along with the DEA’s Miller and a group of FBI agents and analysts, was at the home of the NSB team leader, Colonel Pisal Erb-Arb, where the entire team had gathered that morning; the colonel happened to live a few miles away from Cazes’ residence. Pisal himself and a group of uniformed officers had now parked several blocks from Cazes’ house. Nearly an hour’s drive to the northeast, on the eighth floor of NSB headquarters, yet another group, including Rabenn, Hemesath, Marion, and Sanchez, were assembled in a conference room, with portraits of the Thai royal family on one wall and a collection of screens mounted on another.

The war-room monitors showed videofeeds of the cul-de-sac, pulled from a nearby security camera and the dashcam of the car where Guzman’s “driver” was waiting. At the center of the long table was a conference phone connected to both the Thai team on the ground and another team of agents in Lithuania, tasked with imaging the AlphaBay server—taking a snapshot of its contents and then, after Cazes’ arrest, pulling it offline.

Rabenn remembers the atmosphere of that war room as more dead silence and sweaty, anxious tension than eagerness or anticipation. He knew the possibility of achieving a Ross Ulbricht–style arrest and seizing Cazes’ laptop in a live, logged-in state—not to mention his phone—was a long shot at best. Even after all their international meetings and planning calls over the past months, and in spite of his usual hard-driving enthusiasm, Rabenn found himself quietly expecting their plan to fail.

Across the table, Sanchez was logged in to Roosh V. She checked Rawmeo’s profile and confirmed to the group that he was online and active: Cazes was at his keyboard. It was time.

Then, moments later, a voice piped up from the conference phone on the table. “Oh God,” it said. “We shut it down.”

It was the team in Lithuania. Somehow, the agents there had accidentally crashed the AlphaBay server before they could finish imaging it. In a matter of moments, Cazes would be tipped off that AlphaBay was down, possibly due to foul play. All he would need to do was close his laptop and the game would be over.

There was no choice: The team in the conference room frantically told the agents on the ground that they needed to arrest Cazes and do it now.

Pisal gave a cue via police radio to the two female agents in the gray Toyota Camry at the mouth of the cul-de-sac. Just the day before, the NSB colonel and his team had scrapped the postal delivery plan. The local post office had warned them that Cazes never signed for packages himself, that his wife often came to the door instead. So they’d had to think up a last-minute alternative. Their plan B now centered on that inconspicuous Toyota and Nueng, who sat in the driver’s seat, whispering Buddhist prayers to herself to slow her racing heartbeat.

A few seconds later, a loud clang rang out across the cul-de-sac, followed by the sound of metal grinding on concrete. The Camry had just plowed its rear fender into the fence of Cazes’ two-story home, 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.

The security guard at the end of the cul-de-sac began shouting in exasperation at Nueng. Hadn’t he just told her to back straight out? Nueng and the other agent in her car stepped out of the vehicle, and Nueng stood on the street, scratching her head in a display of haplessness, apologizing and explaining to the security guard that she was still learning to drive. At that moment, a vertical shutter opened partially on a second-floor window on the front of the house—a detail, visible on the surveillance video feed, that sent a wave of excitement through the war room at NSB headquarters.

They had gotten the layout of the home on an earlier trip to the spec house, and they knew that this was the master bedroom. Had Cazes stepped away from his computer?

A moment later, Cazes’s wife, Sunisa Thapsuwan, came out from the house’s front door and poked her head around the bent gate. The petite Thai woman, wearing a long nightshirt over her pregnant belly, kindly reassured Nueng that it was fine, that she and her friend could leave. But Nueng, doggedly playing her part, shouted—as loudly as possible, trying to project so that Cazes could hear inside the house—that she needed to pay for the damage.

“I want to pay for it!” she pleaded. “I don’t want to pay for it in the next life!” Her hands shook as she channeled her adrenaline into the anxiety of a poor person who owes something to a rich person.

Thapsuwan looked up to the open window, and Nueng heard Cazes say something to his wife that she couldn’t pick up. “Maybe your husband could come down here to assess the damage?” Nueng suggested helpfully.

A moment later, Cazes emerged. He was shirtless and barefoot, looking pale and soft, wearing nothing but a pair of baggy gym shorts; he had bragged on Roosh V that he liked to go “commando” when working out in the morning, and apparently hadn’t changed since beginning work that day. He had his iPhone in one hand.

Nueng allowed herself a moment of silent internal celebration. “I got you,” she thought.

She remembers that Cazes, for a dark-web administrator whose site had just dropped offline and who was now dealing with a minor traffic accident at his front driveway, looked relatively unperturbed. His emails would later reveal that seconds earlier he’d been repeatedly messaging his Lithuanian hosting provider about his server’s unexplained outage. But he seemed to suspect nothing about the scene at the gate; Pisal had chosen the two women for their role in part because he’d guessed that Cazes’ misogyny would prevent him from imagining they could possibly be undercover agents. As Cazes walked toward them, Nueng and her partner got back in the car and drove it onto the model home’s driveway at the end of the cul-de-sac, ostensibly to get it out of the way.

Cazes turned to the gate to see if he could pull it back onto its rails, tucking his phone into the elastic band of his shorts. At this point, the driver of Guzman’s car, a middle-aged undercover agent nicknamed Pong, walked over. He stood next to Cazes as if to help appraise the situation.

Then, as Cazes yanked on the gate, Pong reached over and plucked the iPhone out of Cazes’ waistband, seemingly to prevent it from falling. As Cazes looked over to him, perhaps to thank him, Pong took Cazes by the arm and motioned for him to step aside for a moment. Cazes, seeming confused, walked with him out into the street.

Events suddenly accelerated. Another agent, a younger, compact man with an athletic build who went by M, had emerged from Pong and Guzman’s car, where he had been hiding in the back seat. As he walked past them, Pong handed M the phone behind Cazes’ back. At the exact moment of that handoff, Cazes looked down the street, away from his home. He saw another police officer—the electrician, now wearing a police vest—sprinting straight toward him.

Cazes spun around, instantly in fight-or-flight mode, trying desperately to run for his front door. Pong and M grabbed Cazes and struggled with him for a fraction of a second. The iPhone clattered to the ground and another officer picked it up. Soon another cop had grabbed Cazes. Then another. They joined Pong in pinning Cazes’ arms behind his back and holding him in a headlock as M wrenched free from the melee and ran through the gate.

The moment for M’s make-or-break assignment had arrived. He raced into the house, past Cazes’ wife, who by now stood frozen in the living room, and up the stairs, taking them two at a time. From studying the layout of the spec house, M had determined that Cazes’ home office must be across the upstairs hall from the master bedroom. He burst through the door there and found a pair of young foreigners asleep in a guest bedroom—unexpected guests of Cazes’ visiting from Quebec.

M shouted a quick “Sorry! Sorry!” then whirled around and ran across the hall into the master bedroom. At the far end of the room, there it was, on a cheap white desk: Cazes’ laptop, a black Asus PC with an external monitor, revealing red-highlighted A, S, D, and W gaming keys.

It was open.

He practically leaped across the room, reached out, and placed a finger on its touchpad. Then he sat down in Cazes’ desk chair, keeping one hand on the computer’s mouse, finally catching his breath.

A moment later, M’s voice crackled over the police radio. “Officers, officers,” he said in Thai. “The computer is unlocked.”

In the NSB office war room, someone announced over the phone that they had the laptop, open and alive.

The room’s tension broke into an eruption of cheers. Jen Sanchez leaped up, standing in front of the video screens, pumping her fist in the air. Rabenn and Hemesath gleefully hugged each other. Four years after the arrest of the Silk Road’s Ross Ulbricht with his open laptop at the Glen Park Public Library in San Francisco, it seemed they had pulled off a dead-to-rights dark-web bust of their own.

But there was still the question of the phone. As Pong and two other Thai cops had wrestled Cazes to his knees and handcuffed him, the DEA’s Guzman had run out of the spec house, leaving the bewildered real estate agent behind. As was customary in Thailand, Guzman had taken off his shoes to go into the model home and hadn’t had time to put them back on, so he stood in the street in his socks.

A Thai police officer handed Guzman Cazes’ iPhone, and he looked down at it in dismay. It was locked.

As the Thai police held Cazes on the ground, he screamed his wife’s name. She and her father, who lived with the rest of Cazes’ in-laws across the street, came outside and stood over him helplessly as he was handcuffed.

At that moment, Pisal arrived on the scene, wearing a gray polo shirt and a kind of naval cap; the hat wasn’t part of his uniform, but he believed it brought him luck. He had already been told by police radio that the phone was locked.

Pisal bent over Cazes, and the officers pulled him to his feet. The police colonel introduced himself, put a paternal hand on Cazes’ shoulder, and gave him a knowing look. He asked the shirtless, panicked young man to please follow him for a moment so that they could speak privately.

Cazes’ expression eased slightly. This didn’t seem to be the behavior of police arresting someone for running the world’s biggest online drug market. Cazes walked with Pisal and the cops holding him across the street, under the shade of a mango tree.

When they were out of earshot of Cazes’ wife, Pisal explained in a discreet tone that they knew about Cazes’ sexual encounter with a woman two evenings prior. Now that woman was alleging sexual assault. They needed to work this out.

Cazes could see that this must be some sort of shakedown: He, a wealthy foreigner, had flaunted his Lamborghini and now was paying the price. He looked concerned but rational again, his moment of panic subsiding. This was a situation he might be able to handle.

Pisal explained that the woman’s husband wanted to speak on the phone. Perhaps if Cazes offered the man something, he wouldn’t press charges.

The cops led Cazes into the same Toyota Camry that had pulled into the cul-de-sac. Pisal sat down next to Cazes and handed him the locked phone Guzman had given him, telling him the number to call.

Cazes unlocked the phone and dialed. The voice on the other end of the line, another undercover agent, played the role of the cuckolded husband. Cazes, nervously speaking in Thai, offered him 100,000 baht to drop the charges, around $3,000. The man demanded 10 times that amount. Cazes quickly agreed. When they had finished negotiating, the husband instructed Cazes to hand the phone to the police, and Cazes did as he was told.

Pisal stepped out of the car, the unlocked phone in his hand, and gave it to an FBI agent who had just arrived on the scene.

Guzman was the first to finally tell Cazes the truth. After the AlphaBay founder had been allowed to go back into his home and get dressed, the agent sat next to him on the couch of his living room, where Cazes now rested, his hands cuffed in front of him, wearing a worried expression. Guzman, the first foreigner Cazes had seen since the raid of his home began, explained that he was with the DEA and that the United States had issued a warrant for his arrest.

Around the same time, the DEA’s Robert Miller arrived, along with a team of FBI agents and analysts assigned to forensically examine Cazes’ devices. Ali, the cryptocurrency tracer who had confirmed Cazes’ identity as Alpha02 so many months earlier, walked through the gate and past his luxury cars, her first time seeing corporeal results of the digital wealth she’d so obsessively tracked.

“That’s the Aventador,” she thought to herself. “That’s the Panamera.”

In the master bedroom—which they now knew doubled as Cazes’ home office—the FBI’s team of computer specialists began exploring his laptop. They found that he was logged in to AlphaBay as its administrator. On the computer’s desktop, they found a text file where, just like Ross Ulbricht, he had tracked his net worth. Cazes had counted more than $12.5 million in assets, including houses and cars; $3.3 million in cash; and more than $7.5 million in cryptocurrency, a fortune totaling more than $23.3 million.

When Ali was given her turn on the machine, she immediately began examining its cryptocurrency wallets and the addresses associated with them. As she did, she excitedly picked up her phone and called her fellow crypto-tracing FBI analyst, Erin, who was sitting an hour away in the NSB war room with Rabenn, Hemesath, Marion, and Sanchez.

“Tunafish!” she shouted without preamble. Or rather, she shouted out her and Erin’s secret nickname for a Bitcoin address that they had obsessed over for months, the key link in the chain of digital payments that had first connected Cazes to AlphaBay.

“I’m going to need more context,” Erin responded drily.

“It’s here,” Ali said. “I’ve got the key for it.”

She could see before her the one, very specific pot of gold that had confirmed the identity of Alpha02. It had appeared exactly where the blockchain’s rainbow had pointed, arcing halfway around the world into Alexandre Cazes’ Bangkok home.

CHAPTER 5

****CAPTIVITY****

For several days after his arrest, Cazes lived in a kind of comfortable purgatory.

The Thais kept him on the same eighth floor of their Bangkok NSB headquarters building where they had, over the previous months, engineered his surveillance and takedown. Cazes spent his nights sleeping on a couch there, constantly under the watchful eye of the police. During the day he was shuttled back and forth between a black leather massage chair and conference room tables—where he was subjected to paperwork and questions that he almost entirely refused to answer until he could speak to a lawyer. He was fed whatever he requested: mostly local takeout or, on some occasions, French food from the fast-food bistro chain Paul.

Cazes’ relatively gentle treatment—at least compared with what he’d receive in a typical Thai jail—was designed to persuade him to consent to two key forms of cooperation. Rabenn, Hemesath, and Marion hoped to persuade him to sign an extradition agreement, allowing them to deport him from Bangkok to Fresno without a lengthy legal battle. And more ambitiously, the Americans hoped he might agree to work with them as an informant.

Flipping the kingpin of the world’s biggest dark-web market to “Team USA,” as Jen Sanchez put it, would be an incredible coup. There was no telling, the prosecutors imagined, what sort of gold mine of information Cazes might be able to share with them about his AlphaBay coconspirators or others in the online underground where he’d been such a key player. What sorts of traps could they set with his help?

Among the DEA agents, Sanchez was given the job of speaking with Cazes and persuading him to agree to extradition. After his arrest, Sanchez had experienced a complication in her feelings toward the dark-web crime lord, whose opioid sales and misogynistic alter ego had once triggered her revulsion. In her prior postings in Mexico and Texas, she’d taken pride in her ability to convert suspects into informants, a skill that required persuasion and personability. To do the same with Cazes, she tried taking an almost maternal approach—one that wasn’t entirely feigned. Despite her hard-charging comments to Miller about sending Alpha02 to supermax prison earlier that year, she felt some warmth and even empathy mixed in with her contempt for Cazes, now that she saw him captive before her.

Sanchez didn’t have the authority to offer much to Cazes in exchange for his cooperation or to make promises about his future. But she says she tried to show him kindness, to help him keep his spirits up. He asked her about his wife and his unborn child. She reassured him that they were safe; his wife had been arrested, too, but quickly released.

“I’m gonna take care of you,” she repeatedly told Cazes. He seemed unconvinced.

In their war room on the same floor of the NSB office, just a few walls away from where Cazes was held, the Americans continued their work scouring his computers for evidence. His iPhone, after all their concerns about hidden Bitcoin keys and the trickery Pisal had employed to unlock it, turned out to have only personal information and nothing related to AlphaBay. The Lithuanian server, too, was initially useless to them; after crashing, it had rebooted in an encrypted state. They were denied its secrets and would only manage to decrypt the machine months later.

The laptop, on the other hand, was a gold mine of evidence. Aside from being logged in to AlphaBay and containing that incriminating net-worth file, the computer had keys for all of Cazes’ various wallets, containing not only Bitcoin but also other, newer cryptocurrencies: Ethereum, Monero, Zcash. Rabenn remembers watching the two FBI analysts, Ali and Erin, in the war room as they siphoned that money into wallets under FBI control, announcing every time they had transferred another multimillion-dollar stash. “It was the coolest thing I have ever seen,” Rabenn says.

On the evening after the arrest, Rabenn and Hemesath met with Cazes for the first time. He sat in a conference room of the NSB office—accompanied, for the moment, only by a Thai police chaperone and two Thai lawyers, whom Cazes had hired to temporarily oversee his defense. For Rabenn, who had hunted Cazes for the better part of a year across the digital world, sharing a room with his target still felt surreal. Cazes didn’t recognize either of the prosecutors, whom he had sat down next to in the Athenee just a few days earlier by sheer chance.

Rabenn began by warning Cazes not to waste their time or lie to them, his standard opening to criminal defendants. But the two Americans had agreed that Hemesath, the more experienced orator, would take the lead. In his usual analytic tone, Hemesath launched into a short speech about the crimes they knew Cazes had committed, the indictment against him, and the potential consequences if he were convicted. Hemesath laid out the evidence they possessed, which now included not only archived social media clues and blockchain evidence but Cazes’ own unencrypted laptop and phone. He explained that if Cazes didn’t cooperate with them, he might very well spend the rest of his life in prison.

That sentence, however, could still be reduced if he made the right decisions. If he cooperated, Hemesath concluded, Cazes might still be able to meet his child as a free man someday.

After a moment’s hesitation, Cazes answered this extended soliloquy with a single question: Were they going to charge him with the “kingpin statute”?

His voice, which neither prosecutor had heard before, was a sort of middle pitch, inflected with a noticeable French accent. But they were struck more by his expression: a slight smile.

Both prosecutors were caught off guard. The kingpin statute was a common nickname for a “continuing criminal enterprise” charge, often used against organized crime bosses and cartel leaders. Was he asking about the kingpin charge out of fear of the severe sentence that it promised? In fact, they didn’t plan to charge him under that statute, which might have left them less room to maneuver if he eventually cooperated.

But it was Cazes’ glib tone that gave them pause. They wondered if he was in fact comparing himself to the Silk Road’s Ross Ulbricht, who had been convicted under that same charge. Did Cazes see the “kingpin” label as a status symbol, one that would cement his place in the dark-web pantheon?

Rabenn was unnerved. It wasn’t that Cazes had the manner of a cold sociopath, he says. But nor did he seem to be taking the conversation seriously. He remembers thinking that their defendant, facing a potential life sentence or even the death penalty if he was tried in Thailand, was treating this encounter like some sort of game.

Rabenn tried to drive home the gravity of the situation. “This is not a joke,” he remembers telling Cazes. “We can’t help you unless you help us.” He reiterated that the rest of Cazes’ life hung in the balance. Cazes seemed to hear that admonishment and became slightly more somber.

The two prosecutors finally asked Cazes if he would be willing to waive his extradition rights so that he could be tried—and likely incarcerated—in the United States rather than Thailand. Cazes said he would consider it. But he insisted that he still wanted to speak to a more permanent lawyer who could take on his case before any real negotiation. Their meeting was over.

A couple of days later, Cazes did speak for the first time to his lawyer of choice, a young American defense attorney named Roger Bonakdar. Bonakdar was in his office, just a block from Rabenn’s in downtown Fresno, when he got the call about Cazes from the federal defenders’ office for the city. Learning of the magnitude of the case—easily the biggest of its kind to ever occur in the state of California, to say nothing of Fresno—he immediately agreed to speak to Cazes.

Bonakdar’s impression of the young man on the other end of the phone contrasted sharply with Rabenn and Hemesath’s. He says he found Cazes to be “pleasant and articulate” but also deeply stressed and concerned for his safety. Cazes was particularly scared, Bonakdar remembers, that any negotiation with the prosecution could endanger him and his family—that he could be seen as an informant and any arrests that followed his own might lead to reprisals against him. “He was sensitive to the perception that he was cooperating,” Bonakdar says. “Which he wasn’t.”

They agreed that Cazes had few, if any, real legal protections in Thai custody and that Bonakdar needed to get him out of the NSB headquarters as quickly as possible and into the Canadian embassy. “I was in a scramble to find a way to secure him,” Bonakdar says. He told Cazes he would fly to Bangkok as soon as possible to meet with him.

By this time, however, Cazes had spent the better part of a week on the eighth floor of the NSB office. The prosecutors had made no real progress toward getting him to cooperate. So they agreed to let the Thais move him into the jail on the first floor of the building. He was locked behind steel bars in a dingy white cell with a thin blue mattress and a rudimentary toilet that offered almost no privacy—it sat behind a 3-foot-high wall with a swinging wooden door.

A few days after Cazes’ arrest, with the crux of their work complete, Rabenn had flown back to the United States, and Hemesath had taken a brief trip to Phuket to check out the villa Cazes owned there, which the Thai government planned to seize.

But Sanchez remained in Bangkok. After Cazes was moved to the NSB lockup, he would be brought out—handcuffed, slightly disheveled, with a week of stubble—for occasional chats with her. Together they would deal with yet more paperwork, or she would hand him a phone to speak with his attorneys or his wife, who also came to visit Cazes daily and spoke privately to him through the bars of his cell.

After a few interactions with Sanchez, Cazes shifted into a more conversational, if somewhat defiant, relationship with the DEA agent. She suspected he was bored, lonely, and ready to talk to anyone. After two days in lockup, Cazes also agreed to sign the waiver Sanchez put in front of him, allowing him to be extradited to the United States without a lengthy legal battle.

During one of their conversations, Sanchez says Cazes brought up with her, apropos of nothing, the question of AlphaBay’s morality. What was so wrong, Sanchez remembers him musing in hypothetical terms, with a website that sold marijuana? Sanchez answered by asking him about AlphaBay’s sales of fentanyl. In her retelling of the discussion, at least, Cazes lowered his head and offered no defense.

During another late-night visit, this one on July 11, six days after his arrest, Sanchez remembers Cazes informing her, in a kind of deadpan, that he planned to escape—that a helicopter gunship was coming to break him out.

“Cut your shit, Alex,” Sanchez responded with a wry smile. “Don’t play those games with me.”

She reminded him that he was going to be an incredibly valuable informant for the American government—a “superstar,” as she put it. Sanchez said she would try to get him a computer and that he would do “amazing things” once they had him set up in the United States. She repeated that she would take care of him.

At 2 am, she wished him a good night and went home.

The next morning, after just a few hours of sleep, Sanchez left her apartment and headed back to the NSB headquarters, where Cazes was due at 8 that morning to be taken to Bangkok’s main justice center for a hearing. After getting snarled in Bangkok’s notorious traffic, and then waylaid by her cab driver’s wrong turn, she arrived at the police station a few minutes late and headed straight into the ground-floor lockup. As soon as she walked through the door, she heard someone screaming in Thai, again and again, “He’s not talking! Alex isn’t talking!”

She broke into a run. Her mind immediately flashed back to Cazes’ comment the night before that he planned to escape. “Oh my God, that mother—,” Sanchez thought as she ran through the station, furious. “He got somebody to spring him.”

As she arrived at Cazes’ cell, it seemed to be empty. Then she saw that Thai officers were peering over the cell’s internal 3-foot wall. She walked in and looked down: Cazes’ body, hidden behind that wall, was sprawled across the length of the cell’s bathroom area.

His corpse was facedown and bluish, she remembers. The flesh of his arms and legs looked darkened, almost bruised. A navy-blue towel was tied around his neck, with one end now draped over his shoulders.

She was momentarily overcome with shock, sadness, disappointment, and anger—albeit a different pitch of anger than she’d felt just a moment before, when she feared he’d escaped. She found herself wishing that he had. It would have been a better outcome, she felt, than the scene she saw before her.

“You motherfucker,” she thought. “I told you I was going to take care of you.”

CHAPTER 6

****ICARUS****

The day before Cazes’ death, Paul Hemesath had returned to Bangkok from Phuket and was staying at a new hotel close to NSB headquarters. As he walked toward the station the next morning, past the lush gardens of the Royal Thai Police Sports Club, he was in a spectacular mood, still feeling the afterglow of one of the biggest victories of his career. “Here I am in Bangkok, the sun is shining,” he remembers thinking. “Things are going great. This is incredible.”

As he approached the station, an FBI agent drove alongside him in a car and told Hemesath from the window that Cazes had been found unresponsive in his cell. Must be taking a nap, Hemesath thought to himself, perhaps in a state of denial. But as he walked into the lockup, Sanchez and Thai police intercepted him and stated it more plainly: Their defendant was dead.

Hemesath’s mind went blank. He began to rewind through the nine months he’d spent chasing Cazes, then fast-forward through all his plans for the next year that he had arranged around the case, a case that had now been torn apart without warning.

At that moment, Cazes’ wife and her parents walked into the jail, carrying food for Cazes in plastic bags. Hemesath watched one of the Thai police officers explain to them what had happened. He remembers Thapsuwan standing in the hallway, eight months pregnant, stone-faced, silently absorbing the news. Her mother immediately began to wail in sorrow.

Moments later, Rabenn got a FaceTime call from Hemesath. He answered from his car in downtown Fresno, where he was picking up his child from day care across the street from the city’s courthouse. He found Hemesath’s face on his screen with tears in his eyes. “He’s dead, Grant,” Hemesath said. “He’s dead.”

Fifteen time zones away, Rabenn sat in his car, overwhelmed by a sudden, crushing wave of disappointment. He compares the feeling to that of a treasure hunter who had traveled across the world, obtained a precious relic, and was about to bring it home, only to have someone casually smash it into a thousand pieces. He felt a sense of premature finality: The most important case of his career was over.

After the initial shock passed, Rabenn admits, he felt little sympathy for Cazes. To prepare for a trial, he and Hemesath had identified a handful of individual deaths that had resulted directly from AlphaBay’s sales. In Luxembourg, a police officer had murdered his sister and her husband with potassium cyanide purchased on the site. In the US, an 18-year-old woman in Portland, Oregon, and two boys in Utah—just 13 years old—had all died from taking synthetic opioids bought on AlphaBay. “When I think about the dead kids that are directly attributed to the site that he was making millions of dollars off of, it’s hard to feel bad about him killing himself,” Rabenn says.

In the years since, Rabenn says, he has come up with plenty of his own explanations for why Cazes would choose to die by suicide. He was a gamer, Rabenn points out, and he played his life like a video game: He sought power, money, and sexual conquests like points on a leaderboard. Rabenn felt he could see it in Cazes’ expression during their first meeting—the sense of detachment from consequences, the disregard for his future.

“It’s like when you’re playing a first-person game,” Rabenn says. “When something goes wrong, you hit the reset button.”

Rabenn saw in Cazes’ apparent decision to end his own life a kind of reflection, too, of the hip-hop ideals of his teenage years and the “alpha” mentality of his twenties: a desire for status, for respect, and for a certain kind of fame above all else—high-risk, high-reward values that were incompatible with quietly serving decades in prison or becoming a federal informant.

“He was the kid who wanted to be the shot caller,” Rabenn says. “He achieved that. He touched the sun. And died.”

Roger Bonakdar saw things differently.

When Cazes’ Fresno-based defense attorney got the call from Rabenn informing him of Cazes’ death, he went through the same paroxysm of shock. His flight had been booked for Thailand. He’d been checking on his vaccine records. “We were planning our next steps, and then”—Bonakdar snaps his fingers as he recounts the moment—“he was gone.”

But unlike Rabenn, Hemesath, or Sanchez, Bonakdar immediately doubted the story that his client had killed himself, and he told Rabenn as much. Bonakdar had never experienced a client dying by suicide, but he’d heard defendants consider it in moments of despair. “I know someone who’s on the edge when I speak to them,” Bonakdar says. “I just never got the sense from Cazes that he felt all was lost, that there was no recovering from this, that he was a dead man.”

Over the months that followed, Bonakdar says, he asked US prosecutors and the Thai government for video footage of Cazes’ cell at the time of his death. He received neither. I did, years later, request and receive several clips of video from inside Cazes’ cell. One clip shows Cazes looking up and down the jail hallway through the cell’s bars, then doing something with his towel just off-screen before disappearing behind the cell’s bathroom door. The next clip, which starts more than half an hour later, shows guards rushing in, followed by Jen Sanchez, and looking over the bathroom wall, apparently at his corpse.

The Thai police explained to me that they hadn’t saved the video between those before-and-after moments because it simply showed the empty part of Cazes’ cell with no movement and no one entering. But Bonakdar contends that this gap in the footage only makes the circumstances of Cazes’ death more suspicious.

Bonakdar argues that the physical explanation of Cazes’ suicide alone strikes him as “biomechanically dubious.” He can’t imagine how Cazes could have hanged himself from a makeshift, waist-high gallows. “How do you place enough force to crush your carotid artery when your body’s not suspended?” he asks. “From 3 feet off the ground?”

Sanchez described to me in detail how she believes Cazes asphyxiated: He tied one end of the towel around his throat and closed another section of the towel in the hinge of his 3-foot-tall bathroom wall, essentially fashioning a noose that suspended his neck from the top of that half-wall. Then he simply sat down and used his body weight to pull the towel tight around his neck, cutting off his breathing and blood flow. “He willfully checked out,” she says. A Thai police coroner’s report lists Cazes’ cause of death as simply “suffocation” and notes no signs of a struggle, pointing out that no one else’s DNA was found under his fingernails.

Looking into the medical research on hanging deaths reveals that self-asphyxiations often occur without someone suspending their full body. Sanchez and Rabenn both told me, based on his apparent means of suicide, that they believe Cazes had searched for methods of killing himself online. Sanchez also believes Cazes’ wife, Thapsuwan, knew he was planning his death. Sanchez heard from Thai police that Thapsuwan had told staff at Cazes’ Phuket villa that he would rather die than be extradited to the United States. (Thapsuwan would later herself be convicted of money laundering by the Thai government for her association with Cazes’ crimes and served four years in prison before receiving a royal pardon. She declined to be interviewed.)

But Bonakdar dismisses Sanchez’s secondhand account and remains unconvinced. He maintains, at the very least, that his client’s suicide is far from proven, though he admits he doesn’t know who would have killed Cazes—or had him killed. A coconspirator afraid that Cazes might inform on him? Thai police officers on the take, seeking to cover up their corruption? He doesn’t expect he’ll ever know the truth.

Danielle Héroux, Cazes’ mother, who still lives in Quebec, also rejects the story of her son’s suicide. She laid the blame for his death at the feet of the American government. “Alex didn’t kill himself,” Héroux wrote in a text message in French. “Why did the FBI take no action to protect ‘their trophy’ while awaiting his extradition to the USA? Surely they wanted Alex not to speak, and his assassination was ordered.”

Héroux declined to be interviewed and didn’t elaborate or share any evidence of her claim. But she did defend her son. “Alex is not at all the person portrayed in the media,” she wrote. “I raised him alone and he is an extraordinary being.”

Cazes’ mother shared a photo of the two of them together, a selfie she’d taken with Cazes in the back of a car. He’s smiling, a bit half-heartedly, the same innocent openness to his expression that he’d had in the LinkedIn profile photo that first put prosecutors on his trail.

She added one more message: “He was my entire life.”

Continued next week: With AlphaBay shuttered, Operation Bayonet enters its audacious final phase: driving the site’s refugees into a giant trap in an attempt to deal a paralyzing blow to the entire dark web.

This story is excerpted from the book Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrency, now available from Doubleday.

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Chapter Illustrations: Reymundo Perez III

Photo source: Getty Images

This article appears in the December 2022/January 2023 issue. Subscribe now.

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