That time I visited Roger Clark, aka Mongoose, aka Variety Jones

The man alleged to be Silk Road’s Variety Jones, Roger Thomas Clark, has finally been extradited from Thailand, where he has spent 2 1/2 years in Bangkok Remand, to face trial in the USA.

The pic the prison guard took with my phone

Variety Jones was basically unheard of until the trial of Ross Ulbricht, where he was revealed as a sort of behind-the-scenes puppet master, a Svengali-type figure who, according to the chat logs found on Ulbricht’s computer, was the first to suggest murder as a solution to a problem staff member.

I visited Clark (aka Plural of Mongoose) in Klong Phem Prison several times when researching The Darkest Web. Here’s a taster of what happened:

‘The last thing you fucking want is my undivided attention’. The warning plays through my head as I wait on an uncomfortable wooden stool. There’s a telephone on the bench in front of me and I pick up the receiver as he takes his seat on the other side of the thick Perspex wall, which has been reinforced with steel bars.

‘I want to call you “Mongoose”,’ I blurt out before he can say anything. Before he wound up here, in this bleak and notoriously violent prison, we had conversed online, in private messages on a drugs appreciation forum where he often held court with his outrageous antics and tall tales. He had used the name Mongoose then and, reportedly, when armed police officers stormed his home to arrest him on a slew of charges, he had calmly commanded them ‘Call me “Mongoose”’.

The author of an article recounting some of Mongoose’s older crimes had elected not to interview him, because when people dealt with Mongoose bad things happened: ‘business transactions fell apart, people retired nicknames and dropped from view… [Mongoose] deposited things on people’s PCs via e-mail that gave him access to their personal desktops and files. Frankly, [Mongoose] scared me, and I didn’t consider him a reliable source of information anyway. So why feed his fire?’

‘Please do,’ Mongoose responds politely to my outburst. He looks surprisingly well for a man who has spent nearly two years on remand in Bangkok’s notorious Klong Prem Central Prison. He is fighting extradition to the United States, where he faces charges of being the second mastermind behind the world’s most notorious online drugs market, Silk Road. The other mastermind, his alleged protégé, has already been sentenced to two consecutive life sentences without possibility of parole.

Mongoose used to sign his posts with an explicit threat:The last thing you fucking want is my undivided attention. Right now, the man dubbed the Megabyte Megalomaniac by High Times magazine, aka Mongoose, is indeed giving me his undivided attention.

I hope I don’t come to regret it.

(extracted from The Darkest Web)

 

 

 

6 Responses

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Subscribe to my mailing list

… and receive an exclusive, FREE copy of a true crime story in ebook format.
You can unsubscribe anytime.

You may also like...

The Little Texas Hit that Wasn’t

  The hack of dark web “murder-for-hire” outfit Besa Mafia, which I wrote about a couple of days ago. has provided a treasure trove of stories of people who are prepared to go to extreme measures to be rid of someone in their lives. Most never got further than the initial enquiries. A few parted with tens of thousands of

Read More »

Meet Jess, the escort who takes Bitcoin

Warning: all links in this article are NSFW! Open at your peril When clients book a good time with Jess, they get more than their pick of her available services. For the past couple of months, they have also been receiving a lesson in Bitcoin. ‘I am the only escort who takes Bitcoin’ Jess claims in her soft accent over

Read More »

Waiting in the Red Room

“There will be bacon” It started, as these things are wont to do, on 4Chan or Reddit. A couple of days ago; anonymous people posting anonymously “WHOA! Is this Real??” They gave no explanation, just an onion (i.e. dark web) link. The curious, of course, clicked. And they were greeted with a message: It went on to say the site

Read More »

This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website.