What does it take to become a major drug dealer on the dark web? Not as much as you might think. Computer savvy, sure. Some friends in low places. A couple of pill presses from eBay. And ingredients to fill those machines, also sourced online: some of them legal, like chemical binders and dyes; others, like fentanyl, decidedly not. Set up a storefront, get some glowing customer reviews, and watch the bitcoins roll in. That's what Alaa Allawi was doing in 2017, when he was one of the top vendors on AlphaBay, the world's biggest dark-web market at the time. He sold millions of dollars' worth of drugs and counterfeit pills that he and a handful of associates manufactured and packaged out of their backyards in Texas, with devastating results. Many of the pills were laced with fentanyl, a synthetic opioid that is 50 times more powerful than heroin and by far the leading cause of drug overdose deaths in the US. Today Allawi is serving a 30-year sentence in federal prison, which is where writer Benoît Morenne struck up a correspondence with him a few years ago. The resulting story follows Allawi from Iraq, where he was a translator for the US military and a bit of a hacker, to his attempt at a new life in Texas that went horribly wrong. Morenne also takes you inside the investigation that brought Allawi down, featuring a DEA office that had been more focused on cartels than cryptocurrency and a campus cop on his first dark-web sting. It's a fascinating look at a case investigators say was just a prelude to the fentanyl crisis roiling the US today. Allawi, one DEA agent said, was "a pioneer." —Caitlin Kelly | Features Editor |
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