Ross Ulbricht, sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for creating the Silk Road darknet market, is free.
Ulbricht is a freedom fighter to some and a dangerous criminal to others. The former know Ulbricht as described in Forbes“a principled libertarian and cypherpunk in the same vein as WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange and Bitcoin creator Satoshi Nakamoto.”
Ulbricht had a theory: that violent drug cartels would have no chance of sustaining themselves in a free market environment where the state did not control substance use, since nonviolent operations would simply outnumber violent ones based on demand. .
However, most who believe the latter often base their opinion on claims that Ulbricht allegedly attempted to hire a hitman for a former Silk Road administrator, who was accused of embezzling bitcoins from the site. While Ulbricht’s supporters celebrate, critics wonder: why would an online community so vehemently defend an assassination attempt?
Therefore, the controversies and open corruption that surrounded Ulbricht’s prosecution should not be forgotten.
The charges against Ulbricht
On February 5, 2015, a jury in the Southern District of New York found Ulbricht guilty of exclusively non-violent crimes, including several counts of narcotics distribution, computer hacking, conspiracy to run a criminal enterprise and conspiracy to commit money laundering.
The judge sentenced Ulbricht to two life sentences plus 40 years without the possibility of parole, almost double the sentence of the violent leader of the Sinaloa cartel, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán.
Charges of alleged murder for hire emerged from a different casefiled in May 2013 in Maryland. The indictment alleged that, based on chat logs obtained from the Silk Road site, Ulbricht attempted to murder Curtis Green for stealing bitcoins from the project.
As the chat logs read according to the indictment, Dread Pirate Roberts (DPR), the pseudonym attributed to Ulbricht, wrote to another Silk Road user, whom he believed to be a drug trafficker capable of ordering a hitman:
“I’d like to beat him up, [sic] He was then forced to return the bitcoins he stole. [sic] like sitting him down in front of his computer and making him do it.”
A day later, according to the indictment, the DPR allegedly changed his mind and wrote: “Can the order be changed to execute instead of torture?”
According to the indictment, the DPR claimed that Green “was inside for a while, and now that he has been arrested, I am afraid he will give information,” and allegedly added that “he had never killed a man before, but This is the decision correct in this case.”
A few days later, $40,000 was transferred to the hitman’s account and the DPR requested “proof of death” via video or images to send the rest of the payment.
On February 21, 2013, the kingpin informed the RPD that Green was dead: “they killed him this weekend,” he wrote, telling him that he had died of asphyxiation and that the body was completely destroyed to eliminate evidence.
Except the boss wasn’t a boss. It was DEA agent Carl Force who, it was later learned, liked to participate in a small criminal enterprise when given the opportunity.
A real robbery and a fake murder
During the course of the investigation, Green had been cooperating with authorities, giving DEA agent Carl Force and Secret Service agent Shaun Bridges access to the Silk Road site.
During one of the Silk Road law enforcement sessions, a series of “major thefts” occurred at the site, which would later be traced back to Bridges, who plead guilty of stealing $350,000 in bitcoins at the time of the theft, or $800,000 at the time of his guilty plea.
The account in question, operated by Bridges and in consultation with Force, had received “no less than 20,000 bitcoins,” according to the complaint. Force, posing as drug lord “Nob”, then orchestrated the fake hit and, along with Bridges, faked Green’s death.
Force went on to create the fake identity “Death from Above” to extort $250,000 from the DPR, stating: “I know you had something to do with [Green’s] disappearance and death. I just wanted to let you know that I’ll come for you. […] You are a dead man. Don’t think you can elude me.”
Bridges was sentenced to 24 months in prison to be served consecutively to a 71-month sentence he received for a similar offense in 2015, while Force was sentenced to 78 months in prison. Information about the corrupt agents was never available to be used in Ulbricht’s defense.
Who is the fearsome pirate Roberts?
Dread Pirate Roberts, the pseudonym attributed to Ulbricht, is taken from the 1973 novel “The Princess Bride” by William Goldman and represents an identity assumed by several characters. The Dread Pirate Roberts identity, written by Goldman, is shared among pirates to intimidate opponents and passed on secretly.
In the course of the public proceedings of the case, evidence accumulated that the Silk Road DPR was not operated solely by Ulbricht. In conversation with his former friend Richard Bates, who helped Ulbricht establish the Silk Road site, Ulbricht responded with “I’m glad that’s not my problem anymore” when I heard about news coverage about the site.
During the trial, prosecutors attempted stop defense to question another law enforcement officer, Special Agent Jared Der-Yeghiayan of the Department of Homeland Security, who believed that the DPR was actually Mark Kapeles, the former executive director of Mt. Gox, who was later convicted of falsifying records of Mt. Gox and inflate the exchange value. supply in tens of millions.
Der-Yeghiayan referred to an exclusive interview with the DPR in Forbes, in which the pseudonymous Silk Road operator stated that he “had not actually created the Silk Road, but rather had befriended its creator.” and then he had acquired the site.”
According to Der-Yeghiayan, the DPR’s handwriting sounded very similar to that of their suspect, Mark Kapeles – and Der-Yeghiayan is not the only one who alleges that the DPR sounded like someone else. As former Dark Wallet developer Amir Taaki fixed:
“Years ago, when I sent a message to the Silk Road, I had a conversation with the DPR, a very personal conversation in which he was [talking] about how one day he hopes to be out there fighting for freedom together. You know, not having to hide your identity. one year [or] two years later when I texted him, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the same one. The tone was completely different. He had no recollection of the events that happened before, and his attitude towards me was in stark contrast to the exuberant and verbose RPD of the early days.”
This argument was further supported by a pseudonymous Silk Road seller, who stated that “there were ‘at least two other people, if not three,’ who ran Silk Road.” Der-Yeghiayan corroborates this belief in an email ten days before Ulbricht’s arrest, stating that “We helped the other two administrators escape.”
Silk Road employee Andrew Jones, who had established a “secret handshake” with Ulbricht in 2012 to confirm his identity, also did not believe that the deceased DPR was Ulbricht.
According to court documents, Jones would ask DPR for a book recommendation, to which the correct response would be “anything by Rothbard,” an answer that DPR did not provide when asked a year later.
To add intellectual insult to operational damage, someone had logged in to DPR account Six weeks after the arrest of Ulbricht, who was in federal custody at the time, it could have been the corrupt agents, who had administrative access to the site, or another DPR altogether.
As declared by Green himself: “and for everyone who says ‘there were multiple DPRs’, there absolutely were: I was a DPR once. So if I was, who else was?”
Regarding the murder-for-hire charges, Declared green that he did not believe that Ulbricht had ordered him killed. As Green stated in 2017:
“Ross Ulbricht got a raw deal. There’s a lot more to the history of the Silk Road than people know, and I can’t talk about it yet. I don’t think Ross is dangerous or that it’s in his character to order a hit.” “. about anyone. “I should never have received that horrible sentence.”
To cut to the chase: yes, Ross Ulbricht operated Silk Road. No, Ross Ulbricht probably wasn’t the only person with access to the DPR account. Ross Ulbricht was never convicted of murder-for-hire charges. The case was dismissed in 2018 with prejudice, meaning it could never be brought again.
For all we know, we are all the fearsome pirate Roberts.
