Fentanyl, Inc.. Ben Westhoff
new markets keep sprouting up. They are really not much different from Amazon, right down to the reviews of sellers. Customers select their wares, give an address, and pay by Bitcoin—the cyber currency preferred by these markets because it’s difficult to trace. Their discreetly wrapped items arrive soon after in the mail.
Brandon Hubbard utilized the Dark Web and got rich. At first he sold heroin. His vendor name on Dark Web sites such as Evolution and Agora was “PdxBlack,” referencing Portland’s airport code and his product—black tar heroin, a sticky strain known for its dark impurities and common on the West Coast. Channing Lacey helped him package up the product.
Hubbard prided himself on keeping prices low, and soon orders began pouring in from around the country. He touted his own success on Reddit, a forum commonly used by Internet drug traders, claiming to be on his way to becoming the “BTH King of the Dark Net!”
Fentanyl only upped the ante. Lacey said they first encountered the drug in 2014, when Hubbard received a package from someone he had been chatting with on the website Topix. The drug knocked Lacey and Hubbard on their backs. “I did a pinhead, or maybe a bit more, and I overdosed right away,” she remembered, adding that this only increased its appeal. “In the drug addict’s mindset you’re like, ‘This stuff is fucking amazing,’ because it’s so much stronger than heroin.”
With longtime use, heroin doesn’t continue to make users feel euphoric; it simply eases withdrawal symptoms. Many are drawn to fentanyl because it brings the euphoria back. “Heroin wouldn’t even get me past sick anymore,” said Bree, an addicted user from East Alton, Illinois, who prefers not to use her real name. “But fentanyl would always get me completely off sick, and high, and it always took less.”
For dealers, the appeal of fentanyl is also clear: it is cheaper and more discreet, since it comes in smaller packages than heroin. And so Brandon Hubbard began ordering more. His main source was a distributor named Daniel Vivas Ceron. Originally from Colombia, Ceron had come to Canada as a child, and was now serving time in a Quebec prison for cocaine trafficking and attempted murder. Despite his incarceration, Ceron sold huge quantities of fentanyl over the dark web using a contraband cell phone.
Ceron didn’t touch the fentanyl himself, but using aliases, including Joe Bleau, and acting as a middleman, he ordered fentanyl from China and then paid someone on the outside to complete the transaction. Ceron’s cut from a sale might be $10,000, while his co-conspirator on the outside might get $7,000.
Attempting to cover his tracks, Hubbard had his shipments sent to his friend’s tank cleaning business, and Lacey helped Hubbard bag up the portions and prepare the product for shipment. They cut it with mannitol, a diuretic and laxative that counters the constipation that often comes from opioid use. It also increased their profit margins. The product was a hit, and Hubbard and Ceron were in touch frequently, texting each other using encryption programs that scramble messages and make them harder for law enforcement to read.
The cash began rolling in. Hubbard and Lacey shared an apartment in a trendy Portland neighborhood, and their hipster neighbors had absolutely no idea they were running a massive drug operation. Hubbard’s customers paid in Bitcoin, which he exchanged for hard cash using a special kiosk at the local mall. He was careful not to live too lavishly—he wanted to stay under the radar of law enforcement—but he bought Lacey everything she wanted, and a new Volkswagen GTI for himself.
In November 2014, Hubbard placed an order with Ceron for 750 grams of fentanyl. Since that is less than a kilo, it might not sound like a lot, but considering a pinhead can cause an overdose, it was a colossal shipment, with a street value of $1.5 million. Unfortunately for Hubbard, law enforcement was on to him, having accessed the account of a boy who had purchased fentanyl from him on the Dark Web site Evolution. Growing paranoid and suspecting the police were watching, Hubbard began taking the long way home, driving in circles to try to shake them. The tactic was unsuccessful.
Almost immediately after Bailey Henke and Kain Schwandt returned from their road trip they fell off the wagon. Despite their efforts to quit fentanyl, they couldn’t stay clean long. It didn’t help that the day of their return was New Year’s Eve, and everyone was partying. Henke had some drinks that night and took some Xanax. On January 2, 2015 he went on an even bigger bender.
The new calendar brought brutally cold weather to Grand Forks. The temperature hit fifteen degrees Fahrenheit that day and the next day dropped a full thirty degrees farther. Henke and Schwandt stayed out of the cold and entertained themselves by doing drugs and playing video games. With another friend they went to the house of a local dealer named Ryan Jensen. In his bedroom, they played Call of Duty and smoked fentanyl.
Nineteen-year-old Jensen was under house arrest at the time, having been convicted of drunk driving. Formerly the neighborhood pot dealer, Jensen had become a Dark Web expert himself, procuring substances right off his computer. (To be safe, he had the packages sent to the address of a guy he knew in town.) Using the Dark Web site Evolution, Jensen ordered twelve grams of heroin and one gram of fentanyl from a dealer named PdxBlack—Brandon Hubbard. Of that one gram, he sold a quarter to Henke.
Yet this was different than the pharmaceutical-grade fentanyl Henke usually smoked, the kind extracted from medical patches. This was white powder fentanyl. Since it had been cut with mannitol, it was impossible to know exactly how potent it was. Nonetheless, while playing video games that January 2, Henke was hitting it hard.
Still, he seemed to be OK, and soon afterward Kain Schwandt agreed to drop him off at Tanner Gerszewski’s garden-level apartment, in a squat building with stained green carpeting by a trailer park. Since the days when the teens had smoked K2 together in high school, Gerszewski’s drug habit had grown worse as well. Though he maintained a job as a plumber, he was hooked on heroin and had already smoked some by the time Henke arrived, in addition to drinking and dropping acid. Still, Henke seemed to be even more intoxicated than his friend, and he threw up immediately upon walking in the door.
Henke was clearly affected, but this didn’t especially faze Gerszewski. “He seemed high, but he didn’t seem in bad shape,” he said. “Me and him had seen each other all through high school in very bad states—fucked up, throwing up.”
They dipped into the fentanyl Henke had bought from Jensen, and powered up the Xbox to play a mixed martial arts video game. A few other people Gerszewski knew were there too, but they left at some point, leaving the two friends alone with their drugs. As midnight approached, Henke’s energy flagged. In the midst of their game, Gerszewski noticed that Henke’s avatar had stopped moving. His friend looked like he was nodding off.
Henke insisted he was fine. They continued playing until, again, Henke’s avatar stopped moving. “I’m just a little tired,” Henke said.
When his character froze again, Gerszewski saw that Henke’s eyes were shut and he was growing pale. He tapped him, and then nudged him, getting no response. Gerszewski feared Henke had overdosed, but was so high himself that he had a hard time reading the situation. Was this a dream? Was Henke faking it? He grabbed and shook him.
Now realizing the depth of the problem, Gerszewski made a mistake. Instead of immediately calling 911, he called Schwandt, who came over and attempted CPR. When an ambulance finally arrived, it was too late.
Just after midnight, Bailey Henke was pronounced dead. About three hours later a police officer knocked on his parents’ door in Minot. He told them the bad news, but Laura and Jason Henke couldn’t get to Grand Forks until the next evening to begin the mourning process. Another big snowstorm had closed down the highway.
On January 22, 2015, police raided Brandon Hubbard and Channing Lacey’s Portland apartment, seizing all of the drugs inside. Bailey Henke’s death had triggered what became the widest-ranging fentanyl investigation in history. Known as Operation Denial, it’s an international endeavor begun in 2015 and still ongoing, involving agencies from the local Grand Forks police department to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police to the US DEA working in China. It has tracked down people from every step in the fentanyl supply chain that killed Henke, and charged thirty-two.
These include Ryan Jensen, who in 2016 received a prison sentence