The Rise and Fall of Pharma-Master: Here's an interesting article into the demise of the popular AlphaBay vendor
[1 Points] None:
[56 Points] hentaikushdragon:
Shamo certainly didn’t look like a drug dealer. Clean-cut and fastidious about his diet
what the fuck does this even mean? obviously, anyone can be a fucking drug dealer. journalists need to stop typing this stigmatized bullshit
[19 Points] None:
Back then, when Shamo was in college, he’d started something called Bitcoin mining. When people asked how he made money, he told them he traded in Bitcoins, the online currency. Most people didn’t know what Bitcoins were and so the questions usually stopped there.
That morning, a pale winter haze hung over the valley. It was about 10 a.m. and Shamo was in his basement playing a video game called “Battlefield 1”. He planned to fly to San Antonio for Thanksgiving with his girlfriend the next day to surprise his family. He wanted to get married soon, move to California and start a new life, away from Utah.
And yet, something felt off. He’d noticed someone following him the other day, running three red lights to stay on his tail.
Suddenly, he heard a loud crash above him. He dropped his Xbox controller and rushed upstairs. And then he froze, too stunned to move. A battering ram had busted his front door off its hinges. SWAT officers in riot gear and black masks stood in the doorway, staring him down. Shamo felt his body go numb.
“Freeze,” one of the SWAT officers said from behind a shield, pointing what looked like a machine gun. Two DEA agents flashed their badges.
“Careful with these guys,” one of them said. “They’re a little trigger happy.”
They took him upstairs and cuffed him.
“Don’t try to run,” one of them said.
Later, this would strike Shamo as almost funny, in a tragic kind of way.
Where would he run?
He was trapped, and no matter what happened from here, his life would never be the same.
A modern plague
Six months later, on May 31 of this year, U.S. Attorney for Utah John Huber gathered in downtown Salt Lake City with agents from the DEA and Homeland Security to announce the dismantling of an international drug ring.
For months, Huber had been talking about the rising rate of opioid overdoses in Utah, and how the illicit drug trade was undergoing a seismic shift. Drug Enforcement Administration agents had once given his office cases built on meth busts and marijuana seizures, but now the cartels had moved on to something more profitable, lethal and much easier to ship: heroin. Using the same distribution routes they had established to traffic meth, they were now flooding Salt Lake City’s streets and suburbs with black tar heroin processed in Sinaloa.
Today, though, Huber was standing before the press to announce a new front in the drug war: a multimillion dollar drug trafficking ring comprised of a handful of 20-somethings living in the Salt Lake suburbs. The head of that ring, he said, was Aaron Shamo.
A year before, the DEA had warned Huber they were beginning to seize a new opioid called fentanyl in places like Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Up to 100 times more powerful than morphine, it had been developed in the 1960s to treat extreme cancer pain, but now drug dealers were lacing it into pills designed to look like prescription strength oxycodone.
Some users craved the more potent high. Others, thinking they were taking a dosage of oxycodone their body could handle, overdosed and died. The DEA warned Huber that it was just a matter of time before fentanyl got to Salt Lake City. To Huber, Shamo represented its arrival.
For as much attention as the opioid epidemic has generated over the past two years, Huber worried its scope and reach is something the public has still not fully come to grips with.
Drug overdoses are now the leading cause of death among Americans under 50. When the data comes in for 2016, overdose deaths are expected to exceed 59,000, the largest annual jump ever recorded in the United States. Huber and others on the front lines of the drug war trace much of this to the rise of fentanyl.
“Think of Dodger Stadium, seats more people than just about anybody,” said Rusty Payne, the spokesman for the DEA. “Fill that whole place, pack it with people. We lost more people to drug overdoses than you can squeeze into Dodger Stadium, in 50 states in one year. That is extraordinary.”
To put those numbers in perspective, consider the following: peak car crash deaths in 1972 (before seat belts) were 54,589. Peak HIV deaths in 1995 hovered around 50,000. And the most people who ever died from guns, in 1993, was 39,595. What we’re seeing is a modern plague.
[15 Points] Spy_v_Spy_Freakshow:
"Shamo certainly didn’t look like a drug dealer. Clean-cut and fastidious about his diet, he loved working out and reading motivational books, like "The Secret," learning how to “manifest” his goals."
This dude is a grade A douche, the Secret?
[13 Points] BigOlBarb087:
He must of been doing a lot of business. 1.2 mil seized and still has enough to fight his case. Wish him the best
[12 Points] None:
Holy shit this is mind blowing ! What an interesting article. I can't believe this little Mormon kid was americas biggest fent dealer.
[13 Points] Darknetflixandshill:
Dude had it all but couldn't figure out how to get away with it.
[7 Points] WhoDaNeighbours11:
Good read. Confidential informants, sloppiness... his operation was destined for failure from the very start.
[8 Points] Zathras_listens:
Kid was making bank and only gave his drops $300? There's the leak. Give em $500 at least if not a grand if you want them to keep their mouths shut. Dude got big and sloppy.
[5 Points] vhs_________tapes:
he had that alibaba set up lmao
[6 Points] None:
[deleted]
[4 Points] Udaypbuh:
Interesting read. Also to everyone Monday morning quarterbacking this guy's operation, you faggots wouldn't of done any better so sit the fuck down lmao.
[2 Points] God_and_Country:
That was a fantastic read. Thanks for sharing.
[2 Points] ciphersexual:
Anyone familiar with "The Block" in Salt Lake City? I never would have guessed there was a skid row in Mormon country.
"210 S Rio Grande St, Salt Lake City, Utah" on Google maps/street view.
[2 Points] None:
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[2 Points] AllahHatesFags:
Bad OPSEC, gets you every time.
[1 Points] janustrap:
great article
[1 Points] kameerem:
RIP
[1 Points] ft770:
Can anyone get a full size map or the data base of those zip codes his sales went to?!
[1 Points] THE_DEEP_MOB_CONNECT:
Shame
For weeks, Aaron Shamo had felt a sense of foreboding. He didn't know how to describe it really. But sitting in his basement, playing Xbox, it was a feeling he just couldn't shake.
It was two days before Thanksgiving, and outside his split-level home in Cottonwood Heights it looked like the first big storm of winter was on its way. It was a little unusual for a 26-year-old to be able to afford to live in a neighborhood like this, where houses went for half a million dollars and the neighbor across the street had a koi pond and a big cream-colored boat, but there was nothing about Shamo that gave anyone pause. An Eagle Scout, he’d been a deacon in the Mormon church as a kid, passing the sacrament on Sundays. But these days he didn’t go to church much.
Neighbors noticed he slept in and seemed to go to bed late, but that wasn’t really weird either, even for a 26-year-old. They’d see him pulling out of his driveway in his black BMW, or wearing a tank top to show off his ripped physique. Shamo would wave, maybe say hi, but he mostly kept to himself.
A photo of Aaron Shamo's home in Cottonwood Heights, Utah. (Parker Atkinson, Deseret News) No one who lived on Titian Way would ever guess the DEA considered him one of the most successful drug dealers in Utah, a kingpin of something called the darknet. And no one would ever suspect he had $1.2 million in cash tucked away in his basement.
The DEA believed Shamo ran a global operation based largely on a synthetic opioid known as fentanyl, which is 50 times more powerful than heroin and linked to overdose deaths across the country. If they were right, he represented the rise of a new kind of drug dealer and an alarming shift in the way Americans were getting illicit narcotics.
Traditionally, drug trafficking organizations had operated like sophisticated corporations, employing hundreds, if not thousands of people to move loads of marijuana, cocaine, and methamphetamine from the fields and super labs of the Mexican states of Sinaloa and Michoacan to the street corners of Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. It was a complex and efficiently organized logistics system that relied on everything from tractor-trailers with hidden compartments to fishing boats that unloaded on remote beaches along the northern coast of California.
But now, just as it had done with countless other industries, the internet was disrupting the drug game. Darknet dealers didn’t need anything other than a laptop, a rudimentary understanding of the internet and a mailing address. Shamo, it seemed, had perfected this new method of drug distribution.
Shamo certainly didn’t look like a drug dealer. Clean-cut and fastidious about his diet, he loved working out and reading motivational books, like "The Secret," learning how to “manifest” his goals. Always smiling, he punctuated nearly every sentence with a little laugh.
He knew that when people met him, saw the Beemer and the gleaming white smile, they might dismiss him as a guy who’d dropped out of Utah Valley University, interested mostly in girls, partying and making a lot of money.
But if Shamo had to describe himself, he’d say he was a “closet nerd.” That’s what he told girls when they met him, just so they wouldn’t freak out when they walked into his apartment and saw what looked like an IT closet in his bedroom, with stacks of servers and black cords snaking across the carpet.