Hello again AlphaBay newsletter subscribers,
This particular installment of our series contains a few of my favorite moments from the AlphaBay story: the Thai cops and US federal agents swinging virtual swords at imagined zombies as a team-building exercise before planning the takedown of their target. The Dutch police leaping to save a crucial laptop from a spilled soda as they worked through the night to secretly hijack the Hansa dark-web market. And the dinner scene where IRS agent Tigran Gambaryan learns of the IP address of the AlphaBay core server and walks out without paying his bill. (I’ll leave the secret “advanced analysis” technique that uncovered the IP address and the reporting challenges and dilemmas it created for a later chapter of this newsletter.)
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But the scene that holds a special place in my heart is the investigators’ bizarre run-in with Alexandre Cazes in the Athenee hotel lobby. I learned about this stranger-than-fiction anecdote early in the process of reporting out the events of Operation Bayonet for my book Tracers in the Dark, and it was one of the first moments I knew this story was truly going to be as dramatic as any I’ve encountered in my career. If you haven’t read the scene yet, to avoid any spoilers please click through below and come back here after you have. |
Now, if you’re ready, here are a few photos of the scene that were actually taken by the Thai police surveillance team tracking Cazes. First, the moment they spotted his white Porsche Panamera parked outside the Athenee, the team’s first sign that something was amiss: |
And then a couple of shots by the Thai team inside the hotel, in which they surreptitiously captured Cazes in the background, sitting with the Israeli businessmen he happened to be meeting with in the Athenee lobby—just one table over from the US agents and prosecutors planning his arrest. |
