The Epic Rise and Fall of a Dark-Web Psychedelics Kingpin
In fact, agents were still there, in his cousin’s home, listening in on the call, which she had made at their instruction.
Akasha told his cousin not to talk to the cops—not knowing she already had—and promised to pay for her lawyer. He advised her to delete every communication they had ever had. Then he hurriedly put Shimshai into “vacation mode” across all the dark web markets. “We are closed,” he later wrote on the profile pages. “Hurry and leave before the AI gets you.”
Soon after, he got a call from Puzzles, who had ridden his bicycle to a Verizon store to get a new phone and to have the phone carrier remotely wipe the one seized by the feds. Both men were deeply anxious, in damage control mode. But it was just bark, after all, wasn’t it? Not actual DMT. And maybe, they told each other, the agents had bought Puzzles’ story.
They had not bought it. In reality, they had been closing in on Akasha for years.
Homeland Security, court documents would later show, had first learned the name Shimshai in a tip shared with the agency in 2017. The source, who has never been revealed, went as far as linking that secret handle to a PO Box in Nederland, Colorado, which was connected to the address where Akasha, his housemates, and Oliver the ring-tailed lemur had lived.
For the department, an upstart DMT dealer was less of a priority than the dark web’s purveyors of cocaine, fentanyl, and heroin. But after that tip, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI) created an alert for the name Akasha Song. Four years later, in the fall of 2021, when José mistakenly shipped a kilogram of bark from Brazil to a customer in Brooklyn with Akasha’s phone number on it, the alert was triggered—just as it would be again six months later when José sent the shipment to Akasha’s cousin.
Those alerts were enough to persuade Kevin Vassighi, an investigator who had joined HSI’s Denver field office in 2020, to check out Shimshai’s accounts on the dark web. Vassighi, a central-casting federal agent with a square jaw, square shoulders, and a high-and-tight haircut, was surprised by the variety and scale of Shimshai’s psychedelic sales. He noted that the dealer sometimes used the avatar of Rafiki, the monkey from The Lion King, and connected that image with local news articles about Akasha’s lemur. Vassighi was particularly disturbed to see Shimshai offering DMT vape pens. Vapes, in Vassighi’s mind, were for teenagers. “That indicated to me that he was selling to a more youthful audience,” Vassighi says. “We’re trying to protect kids.”
By the spring of 2022, HSI was tracking the location of Akasha’s phone, following him as he drove his new Tesla around Boulder, and watching his home from a camera on a nearby telephone pole. Agents had dug through Akasha’s trash and found Shimshai’s trademark DMT packaging, the logo of a head with a rainbow pouring out of it. And despite Akasha’s alleged attempts at money laundering, they had traced his cryptocurrency to show what they believed to be transactions indirectly flowing into Akasha’s account on the crypto payment service BitPay from half a dozen dark-web markets.
“He has a crunchy vibe. He has a lot of money. He doesn’t seem to go to work,” Vassighi recalls thinking. “A lot of stuff was pointing us in the direction of Joseph Clements”—enough that by June of that year they’d obtained a warrant to search his home.
When Akasha heard the banging on the door, he was just sitting down in his bedroom to eat some pad thai and watch Netflix. He and Joules had been fighting, so she was decompressing alone upstairs. She ran down to the first floor to see who was making such a commotion.
By then, Akasha had a sense of exactly who had come knocking. He looked over to the couch and considered the two long, flat safes under it: One was full of money. The other was full of drugs. He grabbed the one full of drugs and quickly ran into the unfinished space over the garage. He hurriedly hid the safe under the insulation there. Inside was changa, DMT powder and vape pens, ketamine, LSD, MDMA, and mushrooms.