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

There are references to suicide. You can call the suicide and crisis hotline.

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 Cazes lived was filled with flowers. There were no sounds other than the rustle of banana trees and the chatter of birds. On the morning of July 5, that street would have been crowded.

An electrician was working on a wiring box next to a gardener who was trimming foliage. There is a model home and sales office for Private House's real estate development firm at the dead end of the street. The driver was sitting in the car. A car with two women in it was looking lost after it took a wrong turn.

The characters in this scene were all undercover agents. Thailand's Drug Enforcement Administration equivalent had assembled an entire theatrical production's worth of actors around the target, busily performing their roles and waiting for a signal for the operation to finally start.

There was only one non-Thai player in the show. He pretended to be a wealthy foreign buyer with a Thai wife while standing inside a real estate spec house. The plan was to allow the agent to play his wife in order to get a good look at Cazes' house and driveway.

The entire team gathered at the home of the team leader, Colonel Pisal Erb-Arb, who lived a few miles away. A group of uniformed officers and Pisal parked near Cazes' house. A group of people, including Rabenn and Hemesath, were gathered in a conference room with portraits of the Thai royal family on one wall.

The war-room monitors had video feeds from the cul-de-sac, a nearby security camera, and the car where the driver was waiting.

Rabenn remembers the atmosphere of that war room being sweaty and tense. It was a longshot that he could achieve a Ross Ulbricht–style arrest and seizure of Cazes' laptop. Rabenn was expecting their plan to fail even after all their international meetings and calls.

Cazes was at his keyboard when she confirmed to the group that he was online and active. The time had come.

There was a voice on the conference phone. It said oh God. "We stopped it."

The team was inLithuania. The AlphaBay server was crashed by the agents before they could complete their work. Cazes was tipped off that AlphaBay was down by someone. The game was over if he closed his laptop.

The agents were told to arrest Cazes immediately by the team in the conference room.

Pisal radioed to the two female agents in the gray Toyota Camry at the mouth of the cul-de- sac. The postal delivery plan was scrapped the day before. Cazes' wife would often come to the door instead of him, and the local post office warned them. They had to come up with a new idea. Nueng, who sat in the driver's seat, whispered Buddhist prayers to herself to slow her heartbeat.

A loud clang and metal grinding on concrete could be heard a few seconds later. The Camry had just rammed its rear fender into the fence of Cazes' two-story home, bending the front gate, and creating a clamor that ripped through the quiet of an otherwise peaceful morning.

The security guard at the end of the street yelled at Nueng. Didn't he just tell her to back out? Nueng apologized and explained to the security guard that she was still learning to drive as she stood on the street. At that moment, a vertical shutter opened partially on a second-floor window in the front of the house, sending a wave of excitement through the war room.

They knew that this was the master bedroom when they got the layout of the home. Cazes was on his computer.

Sunisa Thapsuwan came out from the front door and poked her head around the gate. Nueng was reassured by the pregnant Thai woman that she and her friend could leave. Nueng shouted that she needed to pay for the damage so that Cazes could hear her.

She said she wanted to pay for it. I don't want to pay for it in the future. The poor person who owes something to a rich person was the one who felt the most anxious.

Nueng heard Cazes say something to his wife that she couldn't pick up. Maybe your husband would come down here to look at the damage? Nueng said it was helpful.

Cazes came out a second later. He was shirtless and barefoot, looking pale and soft, wearing nothing but a pair of baggy gym shorts, and had bragged on Roosh V that he liked to work out in the morning. He had his phone in his hands.

Nueng let herself celebrate quietly. She thought she'd gotten him.

Cazes, for a dark-web administrator whose site had just dropped offline and who was now dealing with a traffic accident at his front driveway, looked unperturbed. His emails showed that he had been messaging his hosting provider about his server's problem. Pisal chose the two women for their roles because he thought Cazes' sexism would prevent him from imagining they were undercover agents. As Cazes walked towards them, Nueng and her partner got back in the car and went to the model home's driveway to get it out of the way.

Cazes tucked his phone into the elastic band of his shorts as he looked for a way to get it back onto the rails. A middle-aged undercover agent known as "Pong" walked over to the driver of the car. He stood next to Cazes to see if he could help.

As Cazes pulled on the gate, Pong reached over and plucked the phone out of Cazes' waist. Pong took Cazes by the arm and asked him to step aside for a moment. Cazes seemed confused as he walked with him outside.

The events suddenly increased in speed. A young man with an athletic build who went by M emerged from the back of the car and hid. The phone was behind Cazes' back as he passed them. Cazes was away from his home at the time of the handoff. He saw a police officer with a vest running towards him.

Cazes tried desperately to get to his front door. The two men grabbed Cazes and fought with him for a short time. An officer picked up the phone after it hit the ground. Cazes was grabbed by another police officer. Next one. They pinned Cazes' arms behind his back, and held him in a headlock as M ran through the gate.

It was time for M's make or break assignment. Cazes' wife stood frozen in the living room and up the stairs as he raced into the house. M decided that Cazes' home office should be across the upstairs hall from the master bedroom. There were two foreigners asleep in the guest bedroom when he burst through the door.

M said sorry quickly. The man ran across the hall into the bedroom. Cazes' laptop, a black PC with an external monitor, and red-highlighted A, S, D, and W gaming keys were found at the far end of the room.

It wasn't closed.

He reached out and placed a finger on the keyboard. After sitting down in Cazes' desk chair, he kept his hand on the computer's mouse.

M's voice could be heard over the radio. He spoke in Thai. The computer isn't locked.

Someone announced over the phone that they had a laptop in the war room.

The room erupted in cheers. Jen jumped up, stood in front of the screens, and pumped her fist in the air. Rabenn and Hemesath were happy to hug 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.

The phone was still being asked. As Pong and two other Thai cops wrestled Cazes to his knees and handcuffed him, the real estate agent behind them was left confused. In Thailand, when a person takes off his shoes to go into a model home, he stands in the street in his socks.

The police officer handed the phone to the man and he looked at it in disbelief. It wasn't open.

Cazes screamed his wife's name as the police held him down. She and her father, who lived across the street, stood over him as he was handcuffed.

Pisal arrived on the scene wearing a gray polo shirt and a navy cap, but he didn't have his uniform on. Police radio told him that the phone was locked.

Cazes was pulled to his feet by the officers. Cazes was introduced by the police colonel and given a knowing look. He asked the panicked young man to follow him so that they could speak quietly.

Cazes' expression got a bit softer. Police arresting someone for running the world's biggest online drug market didn't seem to be the way to go. Cazes and Pisal were walking under the shade of a mango tree.

Pisal told them that they knew about Cazes' sexual encounter with the woman two nights before. The woman was saying that she had been raped. They need to work this out.

Cazes could see that the wealthy foreigner was paying the price for flaunting his car. He looked worried but rational after his panic subsided. He could handle this situation.

Pisal said that the man wanted to speak on the phone. Cazes might not press charges if he gave the man something.

Cazes was led into a Toyota Camry by the police. Pisal gave Cazes a locked phone and told him to call it.

Cazes unlocked the device. A voice on the other end of the line was playing the role of the husband. Cazes offered to drop the charges in exchange for 100,000 baht. The man demanded a lot. Cazes was quick to agree. Cazes was told by the husband to give the phone to the police.

Pisal stepped out of the car and handed the phone to the FBI agent who was on the scene.

Cazes was the first person to hear 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, cuffed in front of him. The first foreigner Cazes had seen since the raid of his home began was a man who said he was a member of the Drug Enforcement Agency.

The FBI agents and analysts were assigned to forensically examine Cazes' devices after Robert Miller arrived. The person who confirmed Cazes' identity as Alpha02 walked through the gate and past his cars for the first time.

She thought that the car was the Aventador. The car is called the Panamera.

The FBI's team of computer specialists began looking at his laptop in the master bedroom. He was the administrator of Alpha Bay. Similar to Ross Ulbricht, they found a text file on the computer's desktop. Cazes counted more than $12.50 million in assets, including houses and cars, as well as more than $3.3 million in cash, and more than $7.5 million incryptocurrencies.

When Ali was given a chance to look at the machine, she immediately began looking at its wallet. She excitedly picked up her phone and called her colleague at the FBI, who was sitting an hour away in the war room.

Without preamble, she shouted, 'Tunafish!' The key link in the chain of digital payments that had first connected Cazes to AlphaBay was shouted out by her as a secret nickname for her and her partner.

I'm going to need more context from you, that's what I'm going to say.

Ali said it was here. The key is in my possession.

There was a specific pot of gold that confirmed the identity of Alpha03. The rainbow had traced halfway around the world into Cazes' home in Thailand.

Cazes lived in a kind of purgatory after he was arrested.

The Thais kept him on the same eighth floor of their headquarters building where they had been for a while. Cazes slept on a couch under the watch of the police. 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 refused to answer until he spoke to a lawyer. He received mostly local takeout or French food from the fast-food restaurant chain Paul.

Cazes' relatively gentle treatment was designed to convince him to consent to two key forms of cooperation. Rabenn, Hemesath, andMarion wanted to get him to sign an agreement that would allow them to deport him from Thailand to California. The Americans wanted him to work with them as a confidential source.

It would be an incredible coup to flip the market to Team USA. The prosecutors had no idea what kind of information Cazes would be able to give them about his AlphaBay coconspirators. What kind of traps could they set with his assistance?

He was given the job of persuading Cazes to agree to be extradited to the United States. The dark-web crime lord's misogynistic alter ego had once triggered her revulsion, but after his arrest, she had had a different reaction to him. She was proud of her ability to convert suspects into spies, a skill that required persuasion and personability. She tried to take an almost maternal approach to doing the same with Cazes. She felt sympathetic and contempt for Cazes after seeing him captive before her, despite her hard-charging comments to Miller.

Cazes didn't have the authority to ask for anything in exchange for his cooperation. She tried to help him by showing him kindness. He inquired about his unborn child. He was reassured by her that they were safe, even though his wife had been arrested as well.

She said she was going to take care of Cazes. He didn't seem to be convinced.

The Americans continued their work in the war room on the same floor as where Cazes was held. His phone turned out to have only personal information and nothing related to AlphaBay, after all they were concerned about hidden Bitcoins and the way Pisal unlocked it. TheLithuanian server was useless to them at first, but after crashing, it was back to normal. They only succeeded in cracking the machine months later.

The laptop contained a lot of evidence. The computer had keys for all of Cazes' other cryptocurrencies, as well as the incriminating net-worth file, and it was logging in to AlphaBay that gave it that. Rabenn remembers watching the two FBI analysts, Ali andErin, in the war room as they transferred money into their own bank accounts. Rabenn says it was the best thing he's ever seen.

Rabenn and Hemesath met with Cazes for the first time after he was arrested. He was accompanied by a Thai police chaperone and two Thai lawyers, who were hired by Cazes to help with his defense. Rabenn had hunted Cazes for the better part of a year and sharing a room with him still felt strange. Cazes didn't know either of the prosecutors from sitting next to them in the Athenee.

Rabenn warned Cazes not to waste their time or lie to them. The two Americans agreed that Hemesath would be the leader. Hemesath spoke about the crimes they knew Cazes had committed, the indictment against him, and the potential consequences if he were convicted. Cazes' laptop and phone were included in the evidence that Hemesath laid out. Cazes might spend the rest of his life in prison if he did not cooperate with them.

The sentence could be reduced if he made the right decisions. Cazes might be able to meet his child one day if he cooperated.

Cazes asked if they would charge him with the "kingpin statute".

His voice was a sort of middle pitch with a noticeable French accent. They were more impressed by his expression.

The prosecutors were surprised. The nickname for a "continuing criminal enterprise" charge was the "kingpin statute". He might have been asking about the charge out of fear. They didn't plan to charge him under that statute, which may have left them less room to maneuver if he cooperated.

Cazes' tone made them pause. They wondered if he was comparing himself to the Silk Road's Ross Ulbricht. Cazes may have seen the "kingpin" label as a status symbol that would cement his place in the dark web pantheon.

Rabenn was afraid. He says that it wasn't that Cazes had a cold demeanor. He seemed to be taking the conversation lightly. He remembers thinking that the man facing a life sentence or the death penalty in Thailand was playing a game.

Rabenn tried to get the attention of the people. He told Cazes that this was not a joke. Unless you help us, we cannot help you. The rest of Cazes' life was at stake. Cazes heard the admonishment and became a bit more somber.

Cazes was asked if he would waive his rights so that he could be tried in the US instead of Thailand. Cazes said he was going to look at it. He wanted to speak to a more permanent lawyer who could take on his case first. The meeting had ended.

She heard someone scream in Thai as she walked through the door. Alex isn't saying anything. She ran into a trail.

Cazes spoke for the first time to his lawyer, a young American named Roger Bonakdar. Bonakdar was in his office, a block from Rabenn's, when he received the call about Cazes. He agreed to speak to Cazes after learning of the magnitude of the case.

Rabenn and Hemesath had different impressions of the young man on the other end of the phone. Cazes was pleasant and articulate, but also stressed and worried for his safety. Bonakdar remembers that Cazes was scared that any negotiation with the prosecution could endanger him and his family and that he could be seen as an agent of the prosecution. He was sensitive to the idea that he was cooperating. He was not.

Cazes had few, if any, legal protections in Thai custody and Bonakdar needed to get him out of the NSB headquarters and into the Canadian embassy. Bonakdar was scrambling to find a way to get him. Cazes was told that he would fly to Thailand to meet him.

Cazes had been on the eighth floor of the office for a few days. The prosecutors didn't make much headway in getting him to cooperate. They allowed the Thais to take him to the jail on the first floor. He was locked behind steel bars in a dingy white cell with a thin blue mattress and a rudimentary toilet that sat behind a 3-foot high wall.

After Cazes' arrest, Rabenn and Hemesath flew back to the US, and Hemesath went to Thailand to check out the villa Cazes owned there.

The man remained in Thailand. Cazes was taken out of the lockup for occasional chats with her after he was handcuffed. Together they would deal with more paperwork, or she would give him a phone to talk to his attorneys or his wife, who would come to visit him daily.

Cazes shifted into a more assertive relationship with the agent after a few interactions. She thought he was ready to talk to someone. Cazes agreed to sign the waivers that would allow him to be extradited to the US without a lengthy legal battle.

The question of AlphaBay's morality was brought up by Cazes during their conversation. What was wrong with a website that sold drugs? He was asked about the sales of Fentanyl. Cazes offered no defense in her version of the discussion.

On July 11, six days after his arrest, Cazes informed her that a helicopter gunship was going to break him out and that he was going to escape.

Alex replied with a smile. I don't want to play those games with you.

She told him that he was going to be a great source of information for the American government. She said she would try to get him a computer, and that he would do amazing things once he was in the US. She said she would look after him.

She left at 2 am to go home.

After just a few hours of sleep, Cazes was due to be taken to the main justice center in Thailand for a hearing at 8 am the next day. She arrived at the police station a few minutes late and went straight into the ground floor lockup. She heard someone screaming in Thai as soon as she entered the building. Alex isn't saying anything.

She ran into a trail. Cazes said the night before that he was going to escape. As she ran through the station, she exclaimed, "Oh my God, that mother!" Somebody has to bring him up.

The cell seemed to be empty when she arrived. She saw that the Thai officers were looking over the wall. Cazes' body lay in the bathroom area of the cell behind the wall.

Her recollection is that his corpse was bluish and face down. His arms and legs looked bruised. He had a navy-blue towel tied around his neck and draped over his shoulders.

She was overcome with shock, sadness, disappointment, and anger, but not as much as she had feared. She wished that he had done so. She thought it would have been a better outcome than the one she saw.

She thought that she was motherfuck. I promised you I would take care of you.

On the day before Cazes' death, Paul Hemesath was staying at a new hotel in the vicinity of the NSB headquarters. After one of the biggest victories of his career, he walked to the station the next morning and was in a great mood. He remembered that the sun was shining in Thailand. The things are going well. This is absolutely amazing.

Hemesath was told from the window of the FBI agent's car that Cazes had died in his cell. Hemesath thought to himself that he must have taken a nap. But as he walked into the lockup, he was confronted by the police and they said that the person he was with was dead.

Hemesath didn't know what to think. After nine months of chasing Cazes and arranging around the case, he realized that it had been torn apart without warning.

Cazes' wife and her parents walked into the jail carrying food for him. One of the police officers from Thailand explained to Hemesath what had happened. Thapsuwan was eight months pregnant and stood in the hallway quietly. Her mother started to cry.

Hemesath called Rabenn moments later. He picked up his child from day care across the street from the courthouse and answered from his car. He saw Hemesath's face on his screen and cried. Hemesath told Grant that he was dead. The man is dead.

Rabenn sat in his car and felt a crushing wave of disappointment. A treasure hunter who had traveled across the world and obtained a precious relic was about to bring it home when someone casually smashed it into a thousand pieces. He thought the most important case of his career was over.

Rabenn didn't feel sympathy for Cazes after the initial shock. He and Hemesath had identified a few deaths that had been caused by AlphaBay's sales. A police officer in Luxembourg killed his sister and her husband with a poison he bought on the site. In the US, an 18-year-old woman in Portland, Oregon, and two boys in Utah died from taking synthetic opioids purchased on AlphaBay. Rabenn says it's hard to feel bad about the dead children that are attributed to the site that he was making millions of dollars off of.

Rabenn has come up with a lot of his own explanations for why Cazes chose to end his life. Rabenn says that he played his life like a video game, seeking power, money, and sexual conquests. Rabenn thought he could see it in Cazes' expression when they met.

Rabenn says it's similar to playing a first-person game. You hit the reset button when something doesn't go according to plan.

Cazes' apparent decision to end his own life was a reflection 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.

He wanted to be the shot caller. He was able to achieve that. The sun was touching him. And passed away.

Roger Bonakdar was different.

Cazes' defense attorney got a call from Rabenn telling him that Cazes had died. He was going to Thailand on his flight. He had been looking at his records. Bonakdar snapped his fingers as he described the moment that he was gone.

Bonakdar told Rabenn that he doubted the story that his client had killed himself. Bonakdar had never seen a client die by suicide, but he had heard people think of it as a last resort. Bonakdar knows a person who is on the edge when he speaks to them. I didn't get the feeling that Cazes was a dead man because he didn't feel all was lost.

Bonakdar requested video footage of Cazes' cell at the time of his death. He didn't get either. Several clips of video from inside Cazes' cell were requested and received by me. 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 he vanished behind the cell's bathroom door. The next clip, which starts more than half an hour later, shows guards rushing in, followed by Jennchez, and looking over the bathroom wall, seemingly at his corpse.

The Thai police told me that they didn't save the video because it showed the empty part of Cazes' cell with no one in it. The circumstances of Cazes' death are more suspicious because of the gap in the footage.

According to Bonakdar, the physical explanation of Cazes' suicide is very questionable. He doesn't understand how Cazes could have killed himself. When your body is not suspended, how do you crush your arteries? How far off the ground is it?

She described to me how Cazes put a towel around his neck and then hung it from the wall of his bathroom. He sat down and used his body weight to pull a towel around his neck. She says that he did not check out. Cazes' cause of death was listed as "suffocation" in a Thai police report, and there were no signs of a fight.

According to the medical research on hanging deaths, self-asphyxiations happen without someone suspending their full body. The two men told me that they believed Cazes had looked for ways to kill himself online. Thapsuwan is believed to know that Cazes was planning his death. Thapsuwan told staff at Cazes' villa in Thailand that he would rather die than be deported to the US. Thapsuwan received a royal pardon after serving four years in prison for money-laundering for her association with Cazes. She didn't want to be questioned.

Bonakdar still isn't convinced, despite dismissing the secondhand account. He admits that he doesn't know who would have killed Cazes, but he insists that his client's suicide is not proven. Cazes might inform on the coconspirator. Police officers in Thailand are trying to cover up their corruption. He doesn't think he'll be able to tell the truth.

Danielle Héroux doesn't agree with the story of her son's death. He was blamed for his death by the American government. Heroux wrote in a text message that Alex did not kill himself. The FBI took no action to protect their trophy while he was waiting to be extradited to the US. Alex was assassinated because they wanted him not to speak.

She didn't elaborate or give any evidence of her claim. She defended her child. Alex is not the person depicted in the media. He is an extraordinary being.

Cazes' mother shared a picture of the two of them together, a picture she took with Cazes in the back of a car. He's smiling, a bit half-hearted, the same innocent openness to his expression that he had in the LinkedIn profile photo that put prosecutors on his trail.

She said that he was her whole life.

With AlphaBay shut down, the final phase of Bayonet will be to drive the site's refugees into a giant trap in an attempt to destroy the entire dark web.

Doubleday has an excerpt from the book Tracers in the Dark: The Global Hunt for the Crime Lords of Cryptocurrencies.

We might earn a commission if you buy something using links. Our journalism is supported by this. You can learn more.

Reymundo Perez III is the author of the chapter illustrations.

The photo was obtained from the same source as the one pictured.

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