*Update 2/10/13: As news breaks that Silk Road has been seized by the FBI, revisit GQ's feature from the February 2013 issue on the underground drug market and its mysterious founder. *
On a chilly April morning in 2011, in the Dutch city of Lelystad, Marc Willems was sitting at home on his computer, surfing the web, when the police burst in and seized him. At that moment, more than 5,000 miles away at El Dorado airport in Bogotá, Colombia, migration officials and agents from America's Drug Enforcement Administration were arresting another man, Michael Evron, as he was attempting to board a flight to Buenos Aires.
Within 24 hours, agents across America had rounded up six more men - in Iowa, Michigan, Georgia, New York, New Jersey and Florida.
By the end of the day, the US Department of Justice was hailing Operation "Adam Bomb" as the first of its kind. They released a 66-page court indictment, compiled over two years and listing numerous charges, but it boiled down to one thing: the men, they alleged, had been operating a website, the Farmer's Market, that acted as an online narcotics marketplace - an illicit eBay, if you like - where drug dealers could peddle their wares to customers in 34 countries. But the Farmer's Market wasn't your average website - for one, the address didn't work in a regular web browser. It belonged to the "dark web": a growing number of sites hidden from Google and the prying eyes of law-enforcement agencies, using anonymity technology. In a written statement, Briane M Grey, the acting special agent in charge of the operation, issued a warning: "Today's action should send a clear message to organisations that are using technology to conduct criminal activity, that the DEA and our law-enforcement partners will track them down and bring them to justice."