pills. It was a small-time drug hustle, and he soon shifted to selling black tar heroin, working with a local man who had a reliable connection and a good price.
Hubbard’s business really took off, however, when he moved onto the Dark Web around 2013. This disguised Internet protocol was quickly helping local dealers like Hubbard become wealthy, international players. And it was enabling tech-savvy teenagers to get potent drugs delivered right to their front door by the mail carrier.
In the past, to obtain illicit drugs, a buyer often had to meet up with a dealer in an alleyway or on a dangerous street corner. But as of the early 2010s one doesn’t even have to leave the bedroom; it’s as easy as booting up a smartphone or laptop. To access the Dark Web, one needs a special browser, such as Tor, which disguises one’s location and identity and makes it possible to load Dark Web sites. Because these sites have hidden IP addresses, it’s almost impossible to figure out who’s running them.
Not everyone on the Dark Web is a criminal. Facebook even has a presence, to circumvent censors in countries where it’s banned, like China. But the Dark Web is best known for its illegal emporiums, which run the gamut from extremely untrustworthy to quite professional, and sell almost every form of vice imaginable: credit card numbers, fake Rolexes, pornography passwords, weapons, and malware. “Make $3,000+ a Month as Fake Uber Driver,” read one recent listing. It’s stunningly easy to buy drugs—and not just traditional drugs like cocaine, ecstasy, and marijuana, but powerful NPS like fentanyl and K2.
The most famous of these markets, Silk Road, was founded by a Libertarian-leaning, magic-mushroom selling, tech autodidact named Ross Ulbricht and rapidly became a billion-dollar enterprise. Using sophisticated programming techniques to cover his tracks, Ulbricht established Silk Road in 2011 and eluded law enforcement for more than two years. (A rogue DEA agent, selling him tips for $50,000 each, helped him evade capture.) Growing increasingly paranoid and allegedly commissioning six murders, Ulbricht was finally arrested at a San Francisco library in 2013 and eventually sentenced to life in prison. In Silk Road’s stead, another Dark Web behemoth called AlphaBay grew to be even bigger, until it too was shut down, in 2017.
But new markets keep sprouting up. They are really not much different from Amazon, right down to the reviews of sellers. Customers select their wares, give an address, and pay by Bitcoin—the cyber currency preferred by these markets because it’s difficult to trace. Their discreetly wrapped items arrive soon after in the mail.
Brandon Hubbard utilized the Dark Web and got rich. At first he sold heroin. His vendor name on Dark Web sites such as Evolution and Agora was “PdxBlack,” referencing Portland’s airport code and his product—black tar heroin, a sticky strain known for its dark impurities and common on the West Coast. Channing Lacey helped him package up the product.
Hubbard prided himself on keeping prices low, and soon orders began pouring in from around the country. He touted his own success on Reddit, a forum commonly used by Internet drug traders, claiming to be on his way to becoming the “BTH King of the Dark Net!”
Fentanyl only upped the ante. Lacey said they first encountered the drug in 2014, when Hubbard received a package from someone he had been chatting with on the website Topix. The drug knocked Lacey and Hubbard on their backs. “I did a pinhead, or maybe a bit more, and I overdosed right away,” she remembered, adding that this only increased its appeal. “In the drug addict’s mindset you’re like, ‘This stuff is fucking amazing,’ because it’s so much stronger than heroin.”
With longtime use, heroin doesn’t continue to make users feel euphoric; it simply eases withdrawal symptoms. Many are drawn to fentanyl because it brings the euphoria back. “Heroin wouldn’t even get me past sick anymore,” said Bree, an addicted user from East Alton, Illinois, who prefers not to use her real name. “But fentanyl would always get me completely off sick, and high, and it always took less.”
For dealers, the appeal of fentanyl is also clear: it is cheaper and more discreet, since it comes in smaller packages than heroin. And so Brandon Hubbard began ordering more. His main source was a distributor named Daniel Vivas Ceron. Originally from Colombia, Ceron had come to Canada as a child, and was now serving time in a Quebec prison for cocaine trafficking and attempted murder. Despite his incarceration, Ceron sold huge quantities of fentanyl over the dark web using a contraband cell phone.
Ceron didn’t touch the fentanyl himself, but using aliases, including Joe Bleau, and acting as a middleman, he ordered fentanyl from China and then paid someone on the outside to complete the transaction. Ceron’s cut from a sale might be $10,000, while his co-conspirator on the outside might get $7,000.
Attempting to cover his tracks, Hubbard had his shipments sent to his friend’s tank cleaning business, and Lacey helped Hubbard bag up the portions and prepare the product for shipment. They cut it with mannitol, a diuretic and laxative that counters the constipation that often comes from opioid use. It also increased their profit margins. The product was a hit, and Hubbard and Ceron were in touch frequently, texting each other using encryption programs that scramble messages and make them harder for law enforcement to read.
The cash began rolling in. Hubbard and Lacey shared an apartment in a trendy Portland neighborhood, and their hipster neighbors had absolutely no idea they were running a massive drug operation. Hubbard’s customers paid in Bitcoin, which he exchanged for hard cash using a special kiosk at the local mall. He was careful not to live too lavishly—he wanted to stay under the radar of law enforcement—but he bought Lacey everything she wanted, and a new Volkswagen GTI for himself.
In November 2014, Hubbard placed an order with Ceron for 750 grams of fentanyl. Since that is less than a kilo, it might not sound like a lot, but considering a pinhead can cause an overdose, it was a colossal shipment, with a street value of $1.5 million. Unfortunately for Hubbard, law enforcement was on to him, having accessed the account of a boy who had purchased fentanyl from him on the Dark Web site Evolution. Growing paranoid and suspecting the police were watching, Hubbard began taking the long way home, driving in circles to try to shake them. The tactic was unsuccessful.
Almost immediately after Bailey Henke and Kain Schwandt returned from their road trip they fell off the wagon. Despite their efforts to quit fentanyl, they couldn’t stay clean long. It didn’t help that the day of their return was New Year’s Eve, and everyone was partying. Henke had some drinks that night and took some Xanax. On January 2, 2015 he went on an even bigger bender.
The new calendar brought brutally cold weather to Grand Forks. The temperature hit fifteen degrees Fahrenheit that day and the next day dropped a full thirty degrees farther. Henke and Schwandt stayed out of the cold and entertained themselves by doing drugs and playing video games. With another friend they went to the house of a local dealer named Ryan Jensen. In his bedroom, they played Call of Duty and smoked fentanyl.
Nineteen-year-old Jensen was under house arrest at the time, having been convicted of drunk driving. Formerly the neighborhood pot dealer, Jensen had become a Dark Web expert himself, procuring substances right off his computer. (To be safe, he had the packages sent to the address of a guy he knew in town.) Using the Dark Web site Evolution, Jensen ordered twelve grams of heroin and one gram of fentanyl from a dealer named PdxBlack—Brandon Hubbard. Of that one gram, he sold a quarter to Henke.
Yet this was different than the pharmaceutical-grade fentanyl Henke usually smoked, the kind extracted from medical patches. This was white powder fentanyl. Since it had been cut with mannitol, it was impossible to know exactly how potent it was. Nonetheless, while playing video games that January 2, Henke was hitting it hard.
Still, he seemed to be OK, and soon afterward Kain Schwandt agreed to drop him off at Tanner Gerszewski’s garden-level apartment, in a squat building with stained green carpeting by a trailer park. Since the days when the teens had smoked K2 together in high
