{"id":15231,"date":"2025-05-22T10:20:48","date_gmt":"2025-05-22T10:20:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/topat10.com\/?p=15231"},"modified":"2025-05-22T10:20:48","modified_gmt":"2025-05-22T10:20:48","slug":"the-epic-rise-and-fall-of-a-dark-web-psychedelics-kingpin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/topat10.com\/?p=15231","title":{"rendered":"The Epic Rise and Fall of a Dark-Web Psychedelics Kingpin"},"content":{"rendered":"


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In fact, agents were still there, in his cousin\u2019s home, listening in on the call, which she had made at their instruction.<\/p>\n

Akasha told his cousin not to talk to the cops\u2014not knowing she already had\u2014and promised to pay for her lawyer. He advised her to delete every communication they had ever had. Then he hurriedly put Shimshai into \u201cvacation mode\u201d across all the dark web markets. \u201cWe are closed,\u201d he later wrote on the profile pages. \u201cHurry and leave before the AI gets you.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\u2019t it? Not actual DMT. And maybe, they told each other, the agents had bought Puzzles\u2019 story.<\/p>\n

They had not<\/span> bought it. In reality, they had been closing in on Akasha for years.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

For the department, an upstart DMT dealer was less of a priority than the dark web\u2019s 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 Jos\u00e9 mistakenly shipped a kilogram of bark from Brazil to a customer in Brooklyn with Akasha\u2019s phone number on it, the alert was triggered\u2014just as it would be again six months later when Jos\u00e9 sent the shipment to Akasha\u2019s cousin.<\/p>\n

Those alerts were enough to persuade Kevin Vassighi, an investigator who had joined HSI\u2019s Denver field office in 2020, to check out Shimshai\u2019s 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\u2019s psychedelic sales. He noted that the dealer sometimes used the avatar of Rafiki, the monkey from The Lion King<\/em>, and connected that image with local news articles about Akasha\u2019s lemur. Vassighi was particularly disturbed to see Shimshai offering DMT vape pens. Vapes, in Vassighi\u2019s mind, were for teenagers. \u201cThat indicated to me that he was selling to a more youthful audience,\u201d Vassighi says. \u201cWe\u2019re trying to protect kids.\u201d<\/p>\n

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