In fact, there were still agents, in his cousin's house, who listened to the call, which she had done in their instruction.
Akasha told his cousin that he should not talk to the police – not knowing that she already had it – and promised to pay her lawyer. He advised her to remove any communication they had ever had. Then he hurriedly put Shimshai in “Holiday mode” on all dark web markets. “We are closed,” he wrote later on the profile pages. “Hurry up and leave before the AI gets you.”
Shortly thereafter he received a phone call from Puzzles, who had driven his bike to a Verizon store to get a new phone and to have the telephone career remotely erased that the FBI seized. Both men were deeply anxious, in the claim for damages mode. But it was just bark, right, right? No actual DMT. And maybe they told each other, the agents had bought the story of puzzles.
They didn't have that bought it. In reality they were years after the Akasha.
Homeland Security, court documents would be shown later, had learned the name Shimshai for the first time in a tip that was shared with the desk in 2017. The source, which has never been revealed, went so far that that secret handle was linked to a mailbox in the Netherlands, Colorado, which was connected to the address where Akasha, his housemates and Oliver The Ring-Tailed Lemur had lived.
For the department, a Upstart DMT dealer was less priority than the suppliers of the Dark Web of Cocaine, Fentanyl and Heroin. But after that tip, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) created a warning for the name Akasha number. Four years later, in the fall of 2021, when José accidentally shipped a kilogram of Brazil from Brazil to a customer in Brooklyn with the telephone number of Akasha on it, the warning was activated – just as it would be six months later when José sent the shipping to Akasha's Cousin.
Those warnings were sufficient to convince Kevin Vassighi, a researcher who came to HSI's Denver Field Office in 2020, to view the Shimshai accounts on the Dark Web. Vassighi, a central casting federal agent with a square jaw, square shoulders and a high and tight hairstyle, was surprised by the variety and scale of the psychedelic sale of Shimshai. He noted that the dealer sometimes the Aap of Rafiki, the monkey of used The Lion KingAnd connected that image with local news articles about the Maki of Akasha. Vassighi was particularly disturbed to see Shimsi offering DMT Vape Pens. Vapes, in the spirit of Vassighi, were for teenagers. “That indicated that he sold to a younger audience,” says Vassighi. “We try to protect children.”
By the spring of 2022, HSI followed the location of Akasha's phone and followed him as he rode his new Tesla around Boulder and his house looked from a camera on a nearby telephone pole. Agents had dug Akasha's waste and found Shimshai's characteristic DMT packaging, the logo of a head with a rainbow that flowed out. And despite the alleged attempts from Akasha to money laundering, they had traced his cryptocurrency to show what they thought were indirectly that flowed into the account of Akasha on the crypto payment service Bitpay of half a dozen dark-web markets.
“He has a crispy atmosphere. He has a lot of money. He doesn't seem to work,” Vassighi recalls. “Many things point us to Joseph Clements” – enough that they had obtained an order in June of that year to search his house.
When Akasha heard Banging on the door, he just sat in his bedroom to eat some pad Thai and view Netflix. He and Joules had fought, so they only decompered upstairs. She ran to the first floor to see who made such a commotion.
By that time Akasha had an idea of exactly who had come. He looked at the bank and considered the two long, flat safes underneath: one was full of money. The other was full of drugs. He took it full of drugs and quickly ran into the unfinished space over the garage. He hurries hurried the safe under the isolation there. Inside was Changa, DMT powder and vapepen men, ketamine, LSD, MDMA and mushrooms.
