Alexandre Cazes, the alleged operator of darkweb marketplace AlphaBay, was a keeper of many secrets. And we’ll never know all of them.
Cazes reportedly committed suicide in a Thai jail on July 12 while awaiting extradition to the U.S., where he faced charges of racketeering, conspiracy, and money laundering. Authorities say the trafficking portal he ran was the largest in history, selling many times more illegal drugs, guns, and stolen credit cards than the Silk Road site it mimicked.
In online posts made over several years, Cazes, who was married, also portrayed himself as a proud “professional cheater” who believed feminism “poisoned” women living in the West, and described Muslim immigrants to Canada as “breeding like bedbugs.”
The posts, linked to Cazes in U.S. Court documents and unearthed by Canada’s Globe and Mail, were made in the “pickup artist” forum Roosh V under the username “Rawmeo.”
Cazes wrote that he moved from Quebec to Thailand to hunt for a wife, saying he “left a broken society to live in a traditional one.” He used his wealth to buy sports cars and houses, writing that “Thai girls love supercars.”
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Once he married, though, Cazes claimed to have become a serial philanderer, writing on the Roosh V forum that “despite having a live-in wife, I have a secondary residence that no one knows about – and that’s where I bring girls.”
Even Cazes’ parents seem to have been entirely unaware of their son’s lifestyle, attitudes, and alleged criminal enterprise. In an interview with tech news site Ars Technica, his stepmother said Cazes was a “good boy”, and his father described him to a Montreal newspaper as “an extraordinary young man” and “a little genius” with no criminal record.
Cazes’ parents have questioned both the charges against him, and the reports of his jailhouse suicide. “Let’s see if we can really kill ourselves with a towel attached to a door handle,” his stepmother wrote on Facebook in French. “Try it and see... It’s impossible.”
