American Kingpin

by Nick Bilton

  Ross had even written to the judge himself, explaining that he knew now that jail was not an easy place to live in and that, while losing his freedom had been painful, the pain he had inflicted on his family had been catastrophic. He was naive; he regretted his actions; he hadn’t thought through what he was doing when he started the Silk Road. Then, toward the end of his letter, Ross pleaded for leniency. “I’ve had my youth, and I know you must take away my middle years, but please leave me my old age.”

  Courtroom 15A was so full on the afternoon of May 29, 2015, that another spillover courtroom was set up with a live video feed of the proceedings. Metal detectors had been placed outside for added security after an online vigilante had published the judge’s personal information online, including her home address, together with a note that read: “Fuck this stupid bitch and I hope some drug cartel that lost a lot of money with the seizure of silk road will murder this lady and her entire family.”

  The prosecution presented its argument for a sentence longer than twenty years. They had flown out the parents of some of the young teens and adults who had overdosed and died from drugs they had purchased on the Silk Road, including the mother of Preston Bridges, who wept as she told the story of the last time she ever saw her son, the night he went off to his Year 12 Ball in Perth, Australia.

  The defense rebutted with “character witnesses” who had known Ross since he was a child, people who told stories of his altruism and his kindness. And then Ross stood up and spoke himself. “One of the things I have realized about the law is that the laws of nature are much like the laws of man. Gravity doesn’t care if you agree with it—if you jump off a cliff you are still going to get hurt.” He ended with a heartfelt apology.

  “Thank you, Mr. Ulbricht,” the judge said as Ross returned to his seat. Judge Forrest then told the court that they would take a fifteen-minute break.

  • • •

  At first, as Judge Forrest started the delivery of Ross’s sentence, she was calm yet resolute. She explained that she wanted to walk Ross, and the rest of the courtroom, through the exhaustive thinking she had gone through to arrive at this sentence.

  She began explaining that the site was clearly Ross’s creation and that it was not just an experiment, not a lightbulb moment, but something that had been planned for well over a year before it opened for business, that it was meant as an attack on the democracy of the country she had been appointed to protect. “You were captain of the ship, as the Dread Pirate Roberts, and you made your own laws and you enforced those laws in the manner that you saw fit,” she said to Ross as she glared at him. “It was, in fact, a carefully planned life’s work. It was your opus. You wanted it to be your legacy—and it is.”

  The judge noted that the defense had presented research papers that argued that increased drug distribution could be morally better for society by reducing violence and encouraging the sale of better-quality and therefore safer drugs. By this Judge Forrest seemed incensed. It was as if Ross had been arguing that just because he had sold drugs from behind a computer, he was different.

  “No drug dealer from the Bronx selling meth or heroin or crack has ever made these kinds of arguments to the Court,” Judge Forrest said. “It is a privileged argument. You are no better a person than any other drug dealer, and your education does not give you a special place of privilege in our criminal justice system.”

  She talked about the collateral damage of drugs. Ross had argued that drug use takes place in a cocoon and doesn’t harm anyone but the person who takes the drugs. But in her eyes that was not the case. There are often ancillary people who are hurt as the result of dangerous substances that had been sold on the Silk Road, she said. People die. Junkies are created. There are social costs, and in many instances drug addicts lose their ability to care for their children and a generation can grow up neglected.

  She addressed the murders, noting that, sure, no bodies had been found, but that in her mind that did not matter. “Did you commission a murder? Five? Yes,” she scolded. “Did you pay for it? Yes. Did you get photographs relating to what you thought was the result of that murder? Yes.”

  As she came to a close, she looked at Ross and said, “What is clear is that people are very, very complex and you are one of them. There is good in you, Mr. Ulbricht, I have no doubt, but there is also bad, and what you did in connection with Silk Road was terribly destructive to our social fabric.”

  The courtroom fell silent as Judge Forrest asked Ross to rise.

  Thirty-year-old Ross stood and arched his neck upward as he looked at the judge, contemplating what she was about to say. His mother and father sat in the back of the courtroom watching Ross and the judge as she began to speak.

  “Mr. Ulbricht, it is my judgment delivered here, now, on behalf of our country, that on counts two and four you are sentenced to a period of life imprisonment,” the judge declared. She then added another forty years to his sentence for the other counts. Ross stood there, unmoved by the words he was hearing. Behind him, in the benches of the courtroom, all that could be heard was the uninterrupted sound of cries. “In the federal system,” the judge continued, “there is no parole and you shall serve your life in prison.”

  Chapter 71

  THE PLURAL OF MONGOOSE

  It was more than a year after the trial until the last employee was arrested for working on the Silk Road. And yet he was, without question, the site’s most influential. One of the highest-ranking advisers and one of the most prolific dealers, he went by the curious moniker “Variety Jones.”

  For a while it seemed that Jones would actually get away. He had been holed up for more than two years in a small beach town in Thailand. He paid off some local cops, and whenever anyone started to come close, Jones was able to evade the authorities.

  Jones had been sitting in a hotel room in Asia, watching the news, when he discovered that his friend and boss, the Dread Pirate Roberts, had been arrested. Well, you could knock me over with a feather! Jones thought at the time, seeing a picture of Ross Ulbricht on his television.

  Like everyone associated with the site, VJ followed Ross’s trial religiously, getting to know more about the former Boy Scout and physicist he had advised and helped mold into the Dread Pirate Roberts. But unlike others, VJ got to see just how influential he had been to the site’s leader, as the diaries from Ross’s computer were presented as evidence in court. “This was the biggest and strongest willed character I had met through the site thus far,” Ross had written about his friend and consigliere, Variety Jones. “He has helped me better interact with the community around Silk Road, delivering proclamations, handling troublesome characters, running a sale, changing my name, devising rules, and on and on. . . . He’s been a real mentor.”

  There was also another piece of evidence that was talked about in the trial: The Feds had found the folder on Ross’s laptop with the IDs of all of his employees, including a picture of a passport that belonged to a fifty-four-year-old Canadian man whose real name was Roger Thomas Clark. A man whom authorities soon discovered was hiding out in Asia.

  On an early morning in December 2015, through a joint operation of the FBI, DHS, DEA, and local Thai police, VJ was captured in a small room in Thailand. As the cops barged into the hideout, placing him in cuffs, the first thing Clark said was “Call me Mongoose,” referring to a more famous nickname he had used on other drug forums, “The Plural of Mongoose.”

  But while they had captured the man behind Variety Jones, attempts to divine his past revealed a conflicting and complex picture. There were signs that Clark was truly a dangerous criminal, far more dangerous than DPR had ever imagined. But there were other clues online that painted a picture of a broken man who hid behind a computer with one goal: to torment the world.

  Or maybe the Internet allowed him to be both.

  Stories about Clark and his identities go back decades online. Some allege
that Clark was once the most powerful weed dealer in Europe. Others talk about people who crossed him and whom he had sent to jail in a setup. One person alleged that he was multiple people and that the real Roger Thomas Clark died many years ago. Other tales about Clark and his early associates are rife with theft, murder, drug busts, shoot-outs, and international intrigue.

  Clark himself, or at least a version of himself, has claimed in the past that he has multiple sclerosis; that his muscles are wasting away; that he suffers from muscle cramps, spasms, or twitching; and that “any 7 year old kid in a playground could beat the heck out of me, without having to put down their ice cream.” He is believed to have family abroad, in England and Canada, some in Scotland too, none of whom he has spoken to in years.

  By all accounts Clark was someone to be wary of.

  In 2006 a reporter for High Times, a magazine devoted to marijuana, wrote a story about a collection of characters who used to sell weed seeds on online forums, and while the reporter spoke to a number of people for the article, he chose not to interview Clark, whom he thought of as a dangerous puppet master. The man now known as Variety Jones was known to infect people’s computers with viruses and to tell long and elaborate stories, and no one really knew whether they were true—except, of course, for Roger Thomas Clark.

  When Clark was arrested in Thailand, the agents snapped a photo of him with a smartphone, and the message was sent to their counterparts in the United States. In the grainy, low-resolution image a disheveled and broken man peered up at the camera through his droopy eyes. His gaunt, ravaged body looked like it belonged to a man who had been to hell and back and who had loved every moment of the trip.

  Now that man is sitting in the Bangkok Remand Prison. There, a team of lawyers are fighting his extradition to the United States, where he will stand trial for narcotics trafficking and money laundering and could face life in prison.

  Chapter 72

  THE MUSEUM

  Along Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC, there are dozens of museums that tell the story of the history of America. Some of the relics in these buildings go back hundreds of years, like the tattered flag that inspired “The Star-Spangled Banner” and the pistol that was used to kill President Lincoln. And then there are some objects that are more recent but will remain infamous for hundreds of years to come. Some of these newer artifacts sit on the Hubbard Concourse in the contemporary Newseum at 555 Pennsylvania Avenue, a few blocks away from the White House.

  The relics at this museum hail from some of the biggest criminal cases in American history. In one corner of the exhibit there is an old wooden cabin, barely big enough for a man, that belonged to Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. Nearby a pair of thick black sneakers sit, their bases torn open; they were worn by the Shoe Bomber, Richard Reid, when he tried to blow up an American Airlines flight in 2001. And then, farther along in the exhibit, a glass box contains exhibit number 2015.6008.43a, which is a silver Samsung laptop.

  “He called himself Dread Pirate Roberts after a character in The Princess Bride,” the text next to the laptop reads. And then it explains that the computer belonged to Ross Ulbricht, “who ran a $1.2 billion marketplace called the Silk Road.” The text does not, however, tell the story of how that laptop ended up in that glass case or what is still hidden inside its hard drive.

  In the weeks after Ross’s arrest, Tarbell, Thom, and Jared rummaged through the laptop for forensic evidence about the Silk Road. While the FBI forensics team was successful in getting into the side of the computer that Ross used when he was the Dread Pirate Roberts—the side that contained those millions of words of chat logs between DPR and his employees on the Web site and the hackers, hit men, and gun and drug dealers he engaged with—those same FBI agents were unable to get into the other side of the computer, the side of the computer that Ross logged in to when he wanted to be Ross Ulbricht, to message friends, to talk to his family, to live his other life.

  The agents have tried to crack the passwords to that side of the machine, but it would take a computer more than one hundred years to guess the correct pass code. Instead that side of the computer, the Ross side, is locked away forever.

  So is the man who owned that laptop.

  Ross’s days now often begin before the sun rises, with the sounds of keys and the door to each prison cell unlocking. His cell is only a few feet deep and half as wide. The walls of the prison, which are mostly thick orange concrete blocks, are a brooding and formidable sight. Ross wakes up, slips on his prison clothes, and walks out into the general population. The days are tediously regimented, with an hour allocated for breakfast, thirty minutes for lunch, and the same for supper. Meals are served on plastic trays, with divots on the sides for plastic forks or spoons, plastic cups, and pats of margarine. The commissary at the prison sells snacks, drinks, and clothing. Ross, using the money his mother has placed into his account, can sometimes buy candy and sodas or a new pair of sneakers or sweatpants.

  Inmates like Ross, who are well behaved inside, are given an hour outside to walk in circles on the roof of the prison, where a cage encloses the air. In the evening Ross is ushered back into his cell, and the bolts on the doors slam tight. The concrete room is thrust into darkness.

  After Ross was arrested, the Silk Road Web site was promptly shut down. But it took only a few weeks before a new Silk Road 2.0 opened for business, with a new Dread Pirate Roberts at the helm of the ship. When that was subsequently shut down by the Feds, another Silk Road appeared, along with hundreds of other Web sites that anonymously sell drugs online. The people who run these Web sites see themselves as part of a movement, and some believe what they are doing is making the world a safer place. Maybe it’s just a justification; or maybe it’s not.

  In 2015, the year that Ross was sentenced to life in prison, a group of university researchers concluded a 67,000-hour study that involved interviewing 100,000 people around the world about their drug use. One of the questions in the survey asked people how they got their drugs. With that data the researchers noted that the year after the Silk Road opened for business, as many as 20 percent of respondents started to purchase drugs online. When the researchers asked these people why they chose to buy drugs on the Internet and not on the street, the users explained that they were nearly six times more likely to be physically harmed on the street. Clearly Ross had fulfilled the goal that had led him to start the Silk Road, and tens of thousands of people feel safer being able to buy drugs online.

  But as with all technologies, there is a good side and a bad. Also in 2015, another study was released. This one was by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which said that for the first time in recent history, more people had died from heroin- and opioid-related drug overdoses in America than from gun deaths. As news reports noted, sometimes accompanied by chilling videos taken from smartphones, in hundreds of incidents of overdoses, children are left orphaned. One of the reasons for the rise in deaths was due to the ease with which people could now gain access to synthetic opioids, like fentanyl, that are made in labs in China. These drugs are fifty to one hundred times stronger than traditional heroin and users often misjudge how much to inject, which inevitably leads to a fatal overdose. The charts the CDC released along with its report, illustrating the number of people who had died from these synthetic opioids, were not too dissimilar to those showing the profits and revenues from the Silk Road, with an abrupt line pointing upward and off to the right.

  Often when news articles are written about studies related to online drug-buying, the stories mention Ross Ulbricht as the pioneer at the forefront of this new world. The links from the stories will eventually lead readers to an obscure video online that was recorded a few years earlier at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco. In the video Ross is talking to his old friend from high school, René, about their future outlook on life. The video is slightly out of focus, and while the two friends seem to be in the
same conversation, it appears that Ross is talking about someone else.

  “Do you think you’re going to live forever?” René asks.

  There’s a brief contemplative pause, then Ross Ulbricht looks at the camera and answers, “I think it’s a possibility. I honestly do. I think I might live forever in some form.”

  Chapter 73

  THE OTHERS

  A few days after the arrest of Ross, the FBI agents left San Francisco and flew back to New York City to begin corralling evidence and sifting through the Samsung laptop. Chris Tarbell believed that the drama was over, that they had caught the Dread Pirate Roberts.

  He had returned to the office and into the Pit, when his phone rang. “Your shit is online,” Jared had roared into the receiver.

  “What?” Tarbell responded, clueless. “What are you talking about?”

  Jared explained that the online drug bazaar was in shambles. Their leader was gone, and the employees wanted revenge. Their target had become the name on the bottom of Ross Ulbricht’s arrest report: “Christopher Tarbell. Special Agent. The Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

  When Tarbell looked at the link Jared sent, detailing what the lieutenants of DPR had posted online, he saw his home address, his kids’ school address, the home address of his in-laws, Sabrina’s parents, and a slew of messages about the need to get Tarbell and to destroy his family.

  Tarbell immediately stumbled into a panic. He yelled to his coworkers, “They’re coming after my family!” and then frantically called his wife, Sabrina, saying their code word, “Quicksand! Quicksand!”