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Evan Ratliff

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Evan Ratliff
Born1975 (age 49–50)
United States
OccupationJournalist
Notable credit(s)Atavist Magazine, Wired, The New Yorker

Evan Ratliff (born c. 1975)[1] is an American journalist, author, and podcast host. Ratliff is a contributor to Wired, Bloomberg Businessweek, and The New Yorker. He has written one book, The Mastermind, and hosted multiple podcasts, including Shell Game, Persona: The French Deception, and Longform. He is the former CEO and co-founder of The Atavist Magazine, a media and software company,[1] and the co-founder of Pop-Up Magazine.

Career

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Ratliff is one of the co-authors of Safe: the Race to Protect Ourselves in a Newly Dangerous World.[2] His article "The Zombie Hunters: On the Trail of Cyberextortionists", written for The New Yorker in 2005,[3] was featured in The Best of Technology Writing 2006.[4] He is also the author of the book The Mastermind: Drugs. Empire. Murder. Betrayal, which profiles the criminal Paul Le Roux.[5]

He is the writer and host of the podcasts Shell Game, in which he documents his experiments with an AI-generated voice clone,[6] and Persona: The French Deception, an investigation into the French–Israeli scammer Gilbert Chikli.[7] He was a co-host and founder of the podcast Longform.[8]

"Vanishing" experiment

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In August 2009, Ratliff and Wired magazine conducted an experiment, wherein Ratliff "vanished" as far as knowledge of his whereabouts.[9] Wired offered a $5,000 reward for anyone who could find him before a month had passed.[10] During the experiment, Ratliff remained "on the grid", communicating with his followers on Twitter.[11] The Google Wave development group proposed using the exercise as a test case for the new technology pushing the frontier of real-time web activity.[12] NewsCloud set up its Facebook application community technology[13] to report on the story and enhance community behind the #vanish hash tag.[14] Ratliff used a specially created blog to taunt his "hunters"[15] and Facebook groups emerged to team up and find him,[16] while other groups formed to help him remain at large.[17] He eventually was tracked and found on September 8, 2009, in New Orleans by @vanishteam, a group participating in the challenge to find him.[18]

Ratliff left a coded message[19] — FaLiLV/tRD:aN/HA:aSaTS; TW—tRS/tEKAA/tBotV; FSF—TItN/tGG/tCCoBB; JC—LJ/HoD/aOoP; JM—JGS/MWS/tBotH — which has been translated to be the authors and titles of a variety of books.[20]

The Mastermind

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Ratliff's first book, The Mastermind: Drugs. Empire. Murder. Betrayal, was published in 2019.[21] Based on the seven-part serialized 2016 story "The Mastermind" in The Atavist Magazine,[22] the book explores the rise and fall of cartel boss Paul Calder Le Roux. Ratliff writes in detail about Le Roux's evolution from encryption programmer and the author of E4M disk encryption software, to creator of an online pill empire selling painkillers to customers in the United States, to large-scale drug trafficker, arms dealer, and murderer. The Mastermind was optioned for television by the producers the Russo Brothers and the writer and producer Noah Hawley.[23]

After the book was published, speculation arose around whether Le Roux could be the pseudonymous creator of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto. The theory initially arose around a fake passport of Le Roux's, published by Ratliff, in which Le Roux used the fake name "Paul Solotshi Calder Le Roux."[24] In a subsequent article in Wired magazine, Ratliff detailed the evidence that Le Roux could be Satoshi, but concluded that the parallels between the two lacked a "single fact that couldn’t be explained away by coincidence."[25]

References

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  1. ^ a b Gillette, Felix. "Innovator: Evan Ratliff, Bloomberg Businessweek (Jan. 20, 2011).
  2. ^ Martha Baer; Katrina Heron; Oliver Morton; Evan Ratliff (2005), Safe: the race to protect ourselves in a newly dangerous world, HarperCollins, ISBN 978-0-06-057715-5
  3. ^ Ratliff, Evan (October 3, 2005). "The Zombie Hunters". The New Yorker. ISSN 0028-792X. Retrieved August 26, 2019.
  4. ^ Brendan I. Koerner, ed. (2006), The best of technology writing 2006, University of Michigan Press, p. 264, ISBN 978-0-472-03195-5
  5. ^ Evan Ratliff (January 29, 2019). The Mastermind. Random House Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-399-59041-2.
  6. ^ Lim, Louisa (September 28, 2024). "Shell Game probes the perils of AI". The Saturday Paper. Retrieved October 9, 2024.
  7. ^ Sawyer, Miranda (June 11, 2022). "The week in audio: Persona: The French Deception; Swindler. Saviour. Mobster. Spy?; Londongrad". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved October 9, 2024.
  8. ^ Locker, Melissa (September 3, 2015). "Longform: the podcast about writing that uncovers the story behind the headlines". The Guardian. ISSN 0261-3077. Retrieved October 9, 2024.
  9. ^ "Wired.com/vanish". Archived from the original on March 14, 2014. Retrieved March 6, 2017.
  10. ^ Catch This Writer If You Can and Win $5k ABC News, Aug. 26, 2009
  11. ^ @ev_rat (Evan Ratliff's Twitter account)
  12. ^ Google Wave API group post
  13. ^ VanishTeam [dead link]
  14. ^ "Newscould Launches Quick Response VanishTeam Facebook Application to Find Evan Ratliff in Wired's Vanishing Experiment," Newscloud blog (August 2009). Archived 2009-09-13 at the Wayback Machine
  15. ^ EvanOffGrid Blog
  16. ^ The Search for Evan Ratliff
  17. ^ Run, Evan, Run!
  18. ^ Thompson, Nicholas (September 8, 2009). "Evan Ratliff Is Caught!". Wired.
  19. ^ @evansvanished
  20. ^ "vanish.team". Archived from the original on July 17, 2011. Retrieved May 10, 2019.
  21. ^ Ratliff, Evan (January 29, 2019). The Mastermind: Drugs, Empire, Murder, Betrayal (1st ed.). New York: Random House. ISBN 978-0-399-59041-2.
  22. ^ Ratliff, Evan (March 2016). "The Mastermind". The Atavist Magazine. Archived from the original on May 1, 2021. Retrieved April 28, 2025.
  23. ^ Petski, Denise (December 23, 2019). "'Mastermind' Crime Drama Produced By Noah Hawley, Russo Brothers & Skybound In Works At Amazon". Deadline.com. Retrieved April 28, 2025.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  24. ^ Feuer, Alan (March 5, 2019). "Guns, Drugs and Money: Taking Down the Drug Kingpin Paul Le Roux". The New York Times. Retrieved April 28, 2025.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
  25. ^ Ratliff, Evan (July 16, 2019). "Was Bitcoin Created by This International Drug Dealer? Maybe!". Wired. Retrieved April 28, 2025.{{cite news}}: CS1 maint: url-status (link)
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