Uncover - S24 E2: Rude Awakening | "Hunting Warhead"

Episode Date: February 5, 2024

All Gordon wants for his birthday is to travel to Washington, D.C., to visit museums and see the opera. He’s completely unaware that his companion on this trip has very different plans. His friend has an alter ego, Warhead, and it turns out police are not far behind. For transcripts of this series, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/podcastnews/hunting-warehead-transcripts-listen-1.5346693

In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news, so I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with Season 3 of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy.

On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. The following episode contains difficult subject matter. Listener discretion is advised. What do you want to go by for the purpose of this? Gordon, 100%. Just Gordon? No last name? Absolutely.

Okay. What do you want to go by for the purpose of this? Gordon 100%. Just Gordon, no last name? Absolutely. Okay. Monday, October 3rd started with a fairly rude awakening, right? Yes. I woke up probably before 7 a.m. to a sound of a crash

that would later turn out to be the sound of a rod banging in the front door of this house. Just sort of one loud bang, then all I could hear were dogs barking and people just screaming in terror. I originally thought that everyone in the house was just dead. What? Well, they would say there's two bodies in here, there's two bodies on the floor,

and logically I keep hearing about bodies, and I said, oh, it looks like everyone's dead. What were you doing during this time? I was getting out of bed, looking out the window. It was just sort of like a very narrow driveway through the woods there. And it was just clogged with big black vehicles, police cars, FBI vans and whatnot. So what did you do? Well, I put my pants on, thank God. And I opened the door into this hallway.

And there was a lot of dust in the air because I guess these guys, they had really banged up the place. And it had all kind of gone in the air. The sun was reflecting off. It was difficult to see. And there was a gentleman standing at the top of the stairs at the end of the hallway. And I was at the other end coming out of the door. And he was holding this big gun. It's big. It took two hands. And he looked at me. gun. It's big.

It took two hands. And he looked at me, and I looked at him, and we both seemed very surprised to see each other. And he said, put your hands in the air, and I put my hands in the air, and he pointed this gun at me, and he directed me towards the wall beside him. They handcuffed me.

They took me downstairs, and they handcuffed me to a chair. And I sat there, and I'm looking around, handcuffed me. They took me downstairs and they handcuffed me to a chair. And I sat there and I'm looking around and there's 15 to 20 police officers going throughout the building looking at everything. It was a very, very busy place.

And this female officer comes in she walks in the door and looks at me and says how are you doing, Sonny? And I looked up to her and I said oh boy, Mondays. And what was her reaction? She said, you're going to need that sense of humor, kid.

I'm Damon Fairless and this is Hunting Warhead. It's January 2017. Håkon Heutel, the Norwegian journalist, is sitting in a restaurant in Brisbane, Australia. So, finally they ask me why I'm here. Why do I want to talk to them? He's with John Rouse and Paul Griffiths.

They're police. They run an investigative unit that fights online child abuse. It's called Task Force Argos. Haken has just dropped a bomb on them. I tell them that I know that they're the ones who are running the largest child abuse website on the darknet. Haken had uncovered a major undercover operation. And the cops, the cops were not happy.

Paul, he just turns purple and quiet. And John turns completely white and gets real stiff and upright and stern. stiff and upright and stern. The next day, I meet them at the police headquarter in Brisbane. So I've been talking to my editors. John Rouse and Paul Griffiths have been making some calls too. They'd been talking to their police colleagues here in Norway. They had looked into some of the work that Ainar and I had done earlier.

So they knew that we were treating this matter seriously. That we were not some journalists who are going to do this one story and then go do something else. So I got the sense that they could talk openly with us.

And they urged us to not publish anything at that time. They told me that it would have serious implications. I mean, we would possibly ruin the entire undercover operation, the entire police operation, if we were to publish anything before they shut down the website. The abusers would have been alerted by our article, and they would have been able to delete the evidence

from their computers. Håkon and his editors at VG decide to hold off publishing, mainly to protect the undercover operation, but also in the hopes of ending up with a bigger story. They were running this website undercover to be able to gather as much information about the users as possible. They were not only interested in every user, they were interested in the users who were producing new material. The producers, they're the abusers who are recording their abuse.

So, Håkon comes to an understanding with Task Force Argos. The agreement was that we would be able to communicate with them during the operation and that we would be able to publish the article as soon as the website was shut down. Which sounded great on paper. In the meeting, they told me that they would share information with us, but that's not really what they did. When I came back to Norway after our meetings, it was really hard keeping up the communication with them.

Either they were not answering or they were saying, nothing's going on or it's a lot going on, so we'll have to talk later. They're putting you off. Yes. I mean, it was a problem, obviously, because I was hoping to get more information from them. But still, because of the system that Einar had created, we were able to sort of track the operation in real time

because we could follow all the messages that they were posting. Håkon's colleague Einar had done some amazing work. He had hacked his way to the location of the Child's Play server, but he'd also made a series of programs to monitor user activity on the site. Now we knew that Warhead, the administrator who calls himself Warhead, he's the police. And most probably also other users are police officers who are going there undercover. So we could track this operation from our computers sitting here in Norway. But the police didn't create the site.

Einar is pouring over the information he's gathered about Child's Play and its users. And something stands out to him. I could see from the statistics that I gathered from the different sites that Child's Play had been operated consistently

since its beginning in April that year. April 2016. That's when Warhead, the real Warhead, first brings Child's Play online. It had a short period of time when it was completely unavailable around the 15th of October. So those few hours, no user would be able to make a new posting. So my posting frequency statistics would hit the floor and then go back up shortly thereafter. There didn't seem to be enough of an outage that people were scared of the site.

So unless you knew what to look for, you wouldn't really be able to place that on a police operation. But Einar knew what to look for. He suspected that the sudden drop in traffic on October 15th indicated exactly when police had moved Child's Play to their server in Australia, which meant that police had probably gained access shortly before that, most likely when they had arrested the real warhead. But who did they arrest? Who was warhead? We didn't really get far until some months later. We got some extra information from some sources.

There were three clues that we had got, which was that before the arrest of the original warhead, from some sources. There were three clues that we had got, which was that before the arrest of the original Warhead, another guy had been arrested. Clue number two was that Warhead was arrested together with at least one other guy. And the third clue was that one of these guys was from the US and one of these guys was not. And these clues were enough

for Einar to locate who Warhead was. So what he did now was to search for news articles elsewhere in the US about a man being arrested for child abuse or child abuse images. So that's when he found one article about three men charged in Virginia. And that article named? Benjamin Faulkner from Canada and Patrick Fawlty from the US.

There was also a third man arrested. Yeah, we quickly focused on Faulkner and Fawlty and went online just to find out as much information about them as possible. So we found out who they are, both in their mid-twenties at that time, small town boys, both interested in technology. Hulken and Einar compared what they had found out about Faulkner and Fawlty on the clear net with what they knew

of the administrators of Child's Play. It was enough that they could take a stab at who was who. They assumed Patrick Fawlty, the American, a native of Tennessee, was probably the Child's Play administrator who went by the handle Crazy Monk, which meant Warhead, the American, a native of Tennessee, was probably the Child's Play administrator who went by the handle Crazy Monk, which meant Warhead, the man who created Child's Play, was the Canadian, Benjamin Faulkner. So then I asked Child's Play for us, Argos. They wouldn't directly confirm

that Faulkner was Warhead, but at least they weren't interested in saying that he wasn't. So that's how we understood that he was Warhead. Okay, the other thing I wanted to, kind of before we really get into the interview, is what do you want to go by for the purpose of this? Gordon, 100%. Just Gordon, no last name? Absolutely.

Before the arrest, Benjamin Faulkner was living in a basement apartment in Guelph, Ontario. It's a small city about an hour's drive west of Toronto. And Faulkner didn't live there alone. So why don't you just start by saying just your relationship with Ben. My name is Gordon, and I lived with Ben. And I was his friend for several months leading up to his arrest. Gordon and Benjamin Faulkner grew up in the same place, North Bay, Ontario. They went to the same high school, but they weren't really close back then,

mainly because Faulkner was a couple years older. A few years later, though, when Gordon was an undergrad at the University of Guelph, a mutual friend introduced him to Faulkner. We drove to pick up Ben, who had taken a bus in, and immediately we were making jokes. Very nice guy. He wasn't a big partier, wasn't a big drinker. He was the kind of guy who would go to these parties and kind of blend into the background. Gordon and Faulkner started spending a lot of time together. He was into Dungeons and Dragons. We played that once.

I wasn't very good at it. Other than being a little nerdy, Gordon describes Ben Faulkner as being completely ordinary. He never really stuck out. He was, and I guess probably is still sort of thin, not super tall. Kind of looks like a nerd, like a guy who plays a lot of video games. What do you mean? Like what's a, Oh, like a guy who, you know, his entire wardrobe is just like black t-shirts and jeans. You know, he eats like one giant burrito a day

and that's it. Or like just drinks Mountain Dew or something, you know? Okay. I get the picture. Ultimately we ended up living together. Uh, he really kept to himself. It wasn't noisy, had a lot of stuff. He didn't make a mess that often, but no, overall pleasant guy to live with. What was his daily schedule like? Did he have one? Well, he, at that time he was working very late.

If I remember correctly, he would get up at like noon and he would sit in the living room and code or do something on his computer, play some video games up until the time that he had to go work. Then he would drive to work. He'd come back at like 7am, crash and repeat. So he was on his laptop a lot?

All the time. All the time. Okay. And what, what was your sense of what he was doing on his laptop a lot? All the time. All the time. Okay. And what was your sense of what he was doing on that laptop? He made it clear that he was like, A, making money on the internet. I remember he once just had like a wad of like a thousand dollars just kind of sitting there one day, which was suspicious. We had the impression that what he was doing was illegal in some way, nefarious.

And whatever he was doing, he was very, very good at it. What gave you the impression it was nefarious? I think he said it. Like what did he say? He said things like, the less you know about what I do, the better. Or I could go to jail. He was, I think, cognizant that he could be going to prison for this. He was aware of that.

So what did you make of that at the time? Well, I had no idea. I was convinced he was like hacking Capital One or something. Or running a Nigerian print scheme. Capital One or something, or running a Nigerian print scheme. I knew that he had hacking skills of some description. It sounds like he was fairly evasive. Would he ever tell you specifically like I'm a good hacker or no, no, other than he once had a problem with his computer said, I'm trying to build

something to do something else. I remember us walking down the street and he was kind of describing what he was doing and it got to the part it's like and then what's that final product that you're you're making or whatever and he said ah ha ha not telling you that try to get me Gordon I'm not telling you. And when did you make of that? I was kind of dismissive because people do say things, you know. It could either be really boring or just a lie. And so I was like, whatever.

And I remember we had a friend who just spent the whole day sitting on the couch playing video games and watching Ben Code. So he could see his entire screen. And it just looked like, to us, just garble. During the summer, we were driving to North Bay and I made a joke. It was something, it was something like that. It was like, uh, ha ha ha, what are you doing? Creating child porn? Hopefully more clever than that. And he, he says, Gordon, that's, that's really, that's just messed up. Yeah. I yeah I feel really uncomfortable as someone who's worked with kids I care about kids quite deeply and I would really really prefer it if you just tried not to call me a pedophile and in my mind at that time I said well I think that's fair so what does

it want to be called a pedophile I think that's a reasonable request from anyone. And so I didn't really think anything of it. And so at that point, you had no suspicions that he was actually in a child porn? Absolutely not, no. Although, yeah, in retrospect, what else would a child pornography producer say? By now, Child's Play was a thriving community on the dark web, already one of the go-to places for child abusers. In the summer of 2016, Faulkner makes a suggestion. He said, you know, Gordon, we should go to Washington, DC.

It was kind of out of the blue. And I said, oh my God, I would love to go to Washington, DC because I was studying political science. And I mean, I've always my whole life been a traveler so the opportunity to go somewhere new is I was excited so we started immediately to make plans the white house and the capitol building the Smithsonian museum I was very interested because I had been a choir concert nerd in high school I was very excited about seeing the marriage of Figaro

at the Kennedy Center. I went out and I got some tickets to the opera. Did Ben also get tickets for the opera? Yes. Okay. He did not go. Yeah. He was up to other things.

At the time, Benjamin Faulkner had a job in computer forensics and IT security. He'd also worked as something called a penetration tester. Basically, that's a hacker who tests the vulnerability and security of websites. So if anyone ought to have been able to operate undetected on the darknet, it's a guy like Ben Faulkner. Except everyone makes a mistake once in a while. At the time, Faulkner was also a co-administrator for another child abuse site. This one was called the Gift Box Exchange.

And Faulkner had a technical problem with the site, so he looked for advice online. He goes to a forum for programmers, a clear net forum, and posts a screenshot of some of the code that's giving him trouble. But there's a group of Homeland Security investigators in Boston, part of an international team that's been trying to figure out who Warhead is. And they've also noticed the technical problem with the gift box exchange. So on a hunch, they start combing the web. They're looking for people who are looking for help with that problem.

And they find Faulkner's question. And they trace it back to his IP address. By September 2016, then, Benjamin Faulkner is being monitored by police in Canada, Australia, and the United States. And so when he crosses the border, a series of alerts go off. We crossed the border of Buffalo and there was no trouble getting into America. The sun was coming up and it was just a beautiful road trip. Listening to a lot of bare naked ladies. Every time I got in the car with Ben, we always had that song on. If I had a million dollars. If I had a million

dollars. Asked me to memorize every word of this song so that we could sing it over and over again. What else did you listen to in the car? John Denver, which I thought was really cliche, like two guys on a road trip. It's a road trip. It's supposed to be cliche. You're supposed to eat fast food and listen to John Denver and. Yeah. I guess. Thelma and Louise at the end.

Have you? No. I'm just kidding. Yeah, almost. Kind of. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Then we stopped in at this little diner in like the hills of Pennsylvania. He told me this is the farthest anyone has ever joined me on one of these trips while I go to do whatever it is I do. Because he always took trips out of town for business or whatever else. Ben had never told Gordon where he was going during any of these trips or why or who he was meeting with. But now as they're nearing Washington, Ben turns to Gordon and says, Well, I'm meeting up with my friend Patrick.

Did you know about a friend named Patrick? Had Ben ever mentioned him before? No, I don't think so. Gordon didn't know about Patrick, but the police did. As I mentioned earlier, Faulkner was discovered through his connection to a forum called the Gift Box Exchange. He joined that site in the fall of 2015. And at that time, one of the main administrators of the site went by the username Crazy Monk. The police had figured out that Crazy Monk had paid to host this site using Bitcoin, which, of course, is the virtual currency that's supposed to be impossible to track. But Crazy Monk had also made a mistake.

Homeland Security investigated the Bitcoin payment and found that Crazy Monk had registered his Bitcoin wallet to a personal email address, which they traced to a 27-year-old man from Tennessee, a guy named Patrick Fawlty. They also discovered that Warhead and crazy monk, Faulkner and Fawlty, knew one another, and that they'd sometimes meet up in person. So when Faulkner crossed from Canada into the U.S., the Homeland Security officers checked in on Fawlty.

They'd attached a tracking device to his car. Fawlty was on the move, on his way to Washington, D.C. Ben and Gordon get into Washington late in the afternoon on Friday, September 30th. It's too late for museums, but they're just in time to meet up with Patrick Fawlty. What did he look like? White, short hair, taller than Ben, kind of thin. You know how some people in their face, they look arrogant?

Yeah. Just naturally. I think he had that about him. How did it make you feel? I mean, he seemed more suspicious than Ben right off the bat, I guess. And he seemed perhaps a little less friendly. And then we got into the car and we drove south into Virginia. Gordon has some elderly relatives a couple hours away who've offered him and his friends a place to sleep.

But it was like very far in the woods, very beautiful. They had a lot of land and there was trees surrounding the property. After a full day on the road, Gordon, Ben and Patrick head to bed. Outside, Homeland Security agents have tracked Fawlty's car to the house. They realize Faulkner's car is there too. And so they put in a request for a search warrant. For the moment though, they're just watching. Watching and waiting. In 2017, it felt like drugs were everywhere in the news.

So I started a podcast called On Drugs. We covered a lot of ground over two seasons, but there are still so many more stories to tell. I'm Jeff Turner, and I'm back with season three of On Drugs. And this time, it's going to get personal. I don't know who Sober Jeff is. I don't even know if I like that guy. On Drugs is available now wherever you get your podcasts.

I remember we got in the car pretty early. It's over an hour between this place in Virginia and Washington, D.C. The next morning, Saturday, October 1st, 2016, it's Gordon's 22nd birthday. And Gordon's eager to get a start. He's got a lot of plans, museums, historical sites, those tickets to the opera. Patrick wasn't overly talkative. He's just kind of, well, he was driving.

And then Ben turned to me and he told me that him and Patrick had to go off and do something and they wouldn't be available until the following day in the afternoon. And he gave me a bunch of money. He's like, I hope you have a good birthday. He hands me like a lot of cash. How much cash? 300 bucks. I had a lot of friends in university. I don't think any of them gave me 300 bucks ever. What were you thinking? I was amped. I had 300 bucks. I could do anything I wanted. University student. Why not?

I think he felt bad. I would hope he felt bad about ditching me on my birthday and not going to the opera. So I thought he was just being generous or whatever. So Faulkner and Fawlty head off and Gordon, well, Gordon has a pretty good time. Oh, I went to the Capitol building. I went to all these museums.

I just lazed around in my hotel room. It was an awesome day. And I went to the opera, Mercefigura, which was astounding, beautiful opera at the Kennedy center, which is an amazing building is probably one of my best birthdays, the day itself. All this time, Homeland Security is watching Faulkner and Fawlty. The tracking device shows Fawlty's car moving south again around midday. It stops at a hotel in the town of Manassas, Virginia.

Homeland security agents watch Faulkner and Fawlty leave the hotel in Fawlty's car to get some dinner. Later that evening, electronic surveillance places Fawlty's car outside a private residence in Manassas. The next morning, Sunday, October 2nd, Homeland Security agents watch as Faulkner and Fawlty check out of their hotel and make their way north again, where they reconnect with Gordon. I met Ben and Patrick outside of the National Air and Space Museum, and then we all started touring the museums.

Eventually, you know, we were done with the museum stuff. I'd gotten all these tacky souvenirs. And we sort of just walked down near the reflecting pool. And tourists would stop us and, you know, we'd take their pictures for them. We walked up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. And I would tell them facts about American history that they had no interest in whatsoever. When you were watching them interact, Patrick and Ben, did you have any thoughts about the nature of their friendship? Anything like that?

They certainly seemed in tune. Um, well, especially looking back on it now, I guess it's almost as though they were both, I don't want to sound melodramatic, but if they were both putting on a performance. What do you mean? Well, living with Ben throughout our relationship, anything very specific about what he was doing, he would evade that question. It kind of had like a style of evasion. And Patrick did the exact same thing

when I asked about these sort of specific things that they were doing online. Gordon asked them this while the three of them were having dinner in downtown DC. I think it would be like I would try to guess what it was that they were doing. So I'd say like, hey, you guys hacking Capital One? They both say, yep, absolutely what I'm doing. Or I'd say like, Hey, you guys, are

you WikiLeaks? Yes, I'm WikiLeaks. They would just say, yeah, yeah, yeah. But they would say in such a way, like sort of sarcastically, like, yeah, I'm WikiLeaks. And I guess the way it was done, it was diffusing of the conversation. They did a good job. But I do remember at one point in the Natural Air and Space Museum, like I just met up with them and I was wondering like, what if I were to call the cops on these guys right now? Because I'm pretty sure they've done something. It's their last night together.

The next morning, Gordon and Ben are supposed to head north to Canada. Patrick's going back to Tennessee. The three of them drive back to Gordon's relative's house deep in the Virginia woods. And along the way, Ben and Gordon start playing a game. I think everyone's played it. Would you rather have, you know, legs for arms or arms for legs? This kind of thing. And we go through all these stupid scenarios that made no sense. And at one point, Ben says to me, Gordon, if you could, would you switch your life for mine right now? Would you, you live my life, I live your life right now. And I thought about it and I said, no, no. And then I asked him back and I said, Ben, would you, uh, if you could snap a finger right now, would you switch your life from mine? And, you know, he thought for

a second, he said, you know, no, I, I don't think I would. I got some problems in my life. Sure. But I think everything's going to be okay. I think this is all, all going to work out in the end. The following day is Monday, October 3rd, 2016, the morning of Gordon's rude awakening. The front door comes crashing down. Homeland security agents flood the house. Well, I mean, at the very beginning, it was just pure shock. I had no idea what was going on. Gordon's out of bed. He pulls on his pants, opens the door, and comes face to face with that officer with the gun that takes two hands to hold. And while I'm having my hands in the air, and I'm going towards this wall, I look into Ben's room.

And all I can see is Ben, face down on the floor. He looked like he was getting crunched by this big police officer who was on top of him, restraining him. And that was the last time I ever saw Ben. Gordon's hustled downstairs, handcuffed to the chair. I had no idea what was going to happen. I thought at first that this was some kind of coup d'etat taking over America, and they were just raiding random houses or something like this. As it turns out, Homeland Security was as confused by Gordon's presence as he was by theirs.

They actually had no idea who I was, the officers. Nobody, I guess I was a complete surprise to them. It didn't take that long to figure out that they were looking for Ben and Patrick. And then they said, hey, you know, you're not actually under arrest, just so you know. And I asked him, if I'm not under arrest, but I can't leave legally, what is this? And he said, well, I guess it would be investigative detention. So, I had been in there for a few hours. They were also interrogating Ben and Patrick separately upstairs. Eventually, I was taken out of this one room and I was put into another room where,

you know, police officers were working on the case. They kind of like set up all their laptops and stuff. And the one officer comes up to me. She asked me, why did you come down to Washington? I said, it was my birthday. I was wanting to watch the opera. What was Ben doing? I don't know. Did he ever tell you what he was doing online? No, and I told her that Ben had made a point of not telling me what he was doing online. And I told her that while I had an inkling that what he was doing was illegal, I had no real idea about what he was doing online. She told me that there were ramifications with withholding information from the police,

that if I was lying or if I was trying to protect Ben, that I could face some very serious penalties. I told her that I'm not withholding any information. I'm being very forthcoming. I'm telling her everything that I know. And then, um, they asked me if I had a computer if I had the internet I said yes I have the internet he asked me if I had ever watched pornography in my life and I said yes I had then they asked me if I had ever watched child pornography and I said no absolutely not and what was going through your head when they asked that question? At that point, it had become clear what Ben, the area of Ben's activities at this point. Again, it was shock.

I knew that this was an area that he was involved in now. She finally asked, seriously tell me if you know what Ben was doing the night you were at the opera. And I said, I honestly don't know what Ben was doing the night you were at the opera. And I said, I honestly don't know what Ben was doing. And she said, Gordon, on Saturday night, Ben raped a four-year-old girl. During their search, Homeland Security agents found a video camera Faulkner had brought with him from Canada. And on his laptop,

a series of pictures and videos of a four-year-old girl being sexually abused. When he's questioned, Faulkner admits to the abuse. And he identifies himself in at least one of those images. This is what he and Fawlty had been doing in that house in Manassas, Virginia. The father of the four-year-old was eventually arrested too. He'd been operating the camera. And Fawlty and Faulkner admit to more,

including the fact that Fawlty had been visiting the girl and her father for nearly two years, and that Fawlty eventually suggested they include Faulkner. Everyone in the room had already known this. These were officers. They knew all about, you know, I guess they had been investigating the entire time, and everyone else went about their business. This officer got up and left me alone. And so while everything for them was going on normally,

it was like the walls were falling for me. Like the floor was falling out. I mean, it's just the entire perception of this guy had changed. Like every conversation we had ever had now had a new context to it. That this is what he was doing. this is why he had wanted to go to Washington DC in the first place. And that conversation we had where he didn't want to be called a child pornography producer, that had a whole new meaning to it as well. Yeah, it was a punch to the stomach really.

They were waiting for, I guess, both of them to confess. And they were interrogating them upstairs, which took a very long time. It concluded when the leader of the investigation came down and said, you know, you're free to go. By now, Faulkner and Fawlty had been taken away by the Homeland Security agents. They took my contact information, if they ever wanted to reach me for questions. And then all the officers who interrogated me or um, pointed guns at me, they all came down and shook my hand and they were very gracious.

How were you feeling at the end of that? I was shocked and terrified, especially because I didn't know how my relatives would react to how this all happened. After eight hours, I finally came out of this little room and one of them walks up to me, having been also detained in their house for a very long time. And I was sure that they were going to be just over the moon with anger at me. And they said, you know, Gordon, you look very hungry. You must be hungry. Would you like a sandwich?

And it was the best thing I've ever heard in my life. Gordon and his relatives get their bearings and they start tidying up. On the floor, I guess leading out of the house, there were bits of shoelaces all over the floor. Gordon's relative notices this too. She picks them up and says, oh, these are the shoelaces. See, they cut off the shoelaces so that when Ben and Patrick are in jail, they can't kill themselves. Gordon's trip back home from Washington was exhausting. I bought a ticket for Toronto the next day.

And when I showed up at the airport, I had lost my passport. Somewhere, in the raid or in the hotel. So I spent the next six hours at the embassy in Washington, D.C. with all my bags. I got an emergency travel document and I was able to fly back that night. I remember I got there and the door was locked and my key wasn't working. And there was sort of like over the key hole or like, um, I don't know if you've ever banged down a door before with a rod. I can't say I have, no. Okay. Well, they bang out the, like the doorknob and the lock.

And it was this area that was now covered with a big? I can't say I have, no. Oh, okay. Well, they bang out the doorknob and the lock. And it was this area that was now covered with a big metal sheet. And there was a note on the door saying to call the landlord because the locks had been reinstalled because they had broken down the door the same way they'd done in Virginia at the same time. The Toronto police had executed a search warrant at the same time Homeland Security was arresting Fawlty and Faulkner in Virginia. The arrest had been just one arm of a much larger operation. So I'm standing here with all these bags and I just wanted to get in my apartment, but the door was locked and I go outside and I can look in the window. It was a basement apartment. So you can see the whole apartment from just outside. I can see that the place has been trashed and I can't get into it.

Luckily, I reached into my mailbox and I found a key in there that the landlord had left. So I get in and they had flipped over. We had this big sectional that they had turned over and they cut giant holes into the bottom of it, looking for things inside the couch. They had taken any video game consoles that we had. It was funny. They didn't touch my room. I guess they had walked in. They saw that all I had was like a guitar case and some pot. And on our dining room table, there was a search warrant for the house. And it was like seven pages long. And it had outlined what Ben had, what they were investigating, the charges he was facing.

Which were? Accessing child pornography in Toronto on some date in 2015 and the distribution, something like this. I'm not entirely sure. And then they had outlined everything that they were looking for that they had taken. Things with a hard drive, anything that was like a camera, like pieces of identification. They were looking for pictures of children's feet, which, you know, to hear that's the kind of thing that's in your home is not very good.

What is going through your mind? Well, I bawled. I stood there, and I just bawled. I stood there and I just bawled. Is it difficult for you to reconcile the two Bens? Like you knew Ben as a guy who was, you know, nice and polite and funny and social and nerdy, whatever, but you know, a normal, nice guy. And then you suddenly had Ben appear as a, as a rapist and a pedophile.

What's it like to reconcile those things? I don't think I ever did. I think what ended up happening for me was Ben, when he got taken away for all of this, I just purged Ben from my life as much as I could, like sort of a natural reaction for me. So we've talked about the fact that you might go visit him. Yeah. I never really got closure with all this, I think. And he, there was a time certainly where if I were to have gone and visited him, it would have just been, it would have been over instantly because I would have lost my mind with rage and violence. But

I think, I don't know. People, people ask me, cause I've told people, people in my life, I think, I don't know. People, people ask me, cause I've told people, people in my life, I say, you know, I think I'd be interested in talking to him one more time. And people say, why would you do that? He's a monster. He's a sicko. And I don't know.

I don't know why I want to do it. I think it'd be quite the trip. I think it'd be quite the trip. If Ben Faulkner had been arrested in Canada instead of the United States, his sentence would have been comparatively lenient. One criminal defense lawyer I spoke with suggested that Faulkner would have gotten 14 years at most. But he was now facing life in prison. Online, as warhead,

Faulkner had talked tough about what he'd do if he were ever arrested, how he'd taken every possible measure to keep police from accessing information about Child's Play and its members. But when it came down to it, in that early morning raid, Ben Faulkner gave up all the information the police were looking for almost immediately.

Within minutes, he gave Homeland Security usernames, passwords, and encryption keys. And on the other side of the world, Paul Griffiths and the rest of Task Force Argos was waiting. We were on standby waiting for any information that would come out of that. Because our job then is to make sure that any information that's being received is accurate. Roedden ni ar y llawr, yn aros am unrhyw wybodaeth a fyddai'n dod allan o hynny. Oherwydd ein swydd yna yw sicrhau bod unrhyw wybodaeth sy'n cael ei gael yn dda. Ac mae angen i ni ddewis bod yn iawn, gallwn ni gweithredu fel hynny, gallwn ni fod yn hynny. Felly roedd yn sicr yna lawer o ffantigrwydd o ddwy-o-dwy-o-dwy gyda chyfweliadau telephonol a chyflwyno adnoddau o bethau fel cyfrifiadau ac arweinyddiaethau, er mwyn i ni allu testio a oedd hynny wedi gweithio ac nid oedd yn gweithio bob amser. with telephone calls and passing details of things like accounts and passwords so that we could test whether or not that worked, and it didn't always work.

But eventually I think we got to the point where we could establish that the information we were being given was valid information. Task Force Argos had found a way into Child's Play. Their plan was to use the site as a hunting ground, a way of finding and arresting other users. So the next few hours and days were critical. If Warhead was away from Child's Play for too long, the site's users would grow suspicious. They'd flee and fall away again into the dark. Paul Griffiths and his colleagues

were working their way through vast amounts of information, all of Benjamin Faulkner's previous posts. They had to get inside Warhead's mind. They had to learn to write like him, to think like him. They had to become Warhead. I'm going to go. produced by Chris Oak and me, Damon Fairless. The series is co-produced by Halkin Hoytel and associate producer Mikhail Arana. Sound design by Cecil Fernandez. Emily Cannell is our digital producer. Original music by Olivia Pasquarelli.

The senior producer of CBC Podcasts is Tanya Springer and our executive producer is Arif Noorani. Hunting Warhead is a co-production of CBC Podcasts and the Norwegian newspaper VG. Coming up on Hunting Warhead. They had security measures in place that would prevent law enforcement taking over their accounts.

All we know is that it's growing, it's exploding, and it's a volcano of abuse that's out there. We didn't make it. They made it. So what we've done is we've infiltrated it, we've taken it over, and we're now going to destroy it. For more CBC Podcasts, go to cbc.ca slash podcasts.