This book tells the absolutely fascinating story of the young man from Texas, Ross Ulbricht, who created the Silk Road, the dark-web site that sold drugs around the world. He was a brilliant physicist with a strong libertarian belief that drugs should be legalized. He created the Silk Road website on his own, and in 2011, he was off and running. Soon, the site was selling every conceivable kind of drug, weapons and was growing exponentially. It was gaining notoriety and attracting law enforcement's attention.. A young federal Homeland Security Investigations agent in Chicago and a seasoned DEA vet in Baltimore were soon trying to crack the site. Ulbricht adopted the nom de guerre of Dread Pirate Roberts (DPR) and his main security henchman and number two was Variety Jones. The expansion led to Ulbricht's commissions generating millions in Bitcoin, a currency that increased in value. The wealth was accumulating and the hackers and the government were after the site and him.
The government's first success was when a DEA team captured one of the site's administrators at his home in Utah. When DPR ascertained what had transpired, he authorized a hit on Curtis Greene, his recently captured employee. Unfortunately for DPR, the man he hired to arrange the hit was the undercover DEA agent who had made the arrest and had spent months electronically befriending DPR. At the same time, a NYC based Task Force headed by the FBI and assisted by the IRS took on the case. One of the members of the team was an IRS agent named Gary Alford. He remembered that in 1977, the year he was born, the NYPD found the Son of Sam killer through parking tickets incurred near the murder sites. Alford went looking for the equivalent of parking tickets. He dug back into the history of Silk Road and, intrigued by a post, he investigated the email address behind the ID of a blogger - RossUlbricht@gmail.com. He had found his parking ticket. In the summer of 2013, the FBI began to close in. Alford found a few more clues about Ulbricht and shared them with the FBI. The FBI confirmed that DPR had used an email name similar to one Alford had found on a server they had captured. They then learned that DHS had spoken to Ulbricht at his San Francisco apartment because he had ordered 9 fake ID's that DHS had confiscated. The apartment happened to be right around the corner from an internet cafe that the FBI believed DPR used.
The FBI tailed him for 2 weeks as the appropriate team assembled in San Francisco. It was necessary to catch him with the computer open and him logged onto the site as the 'Mastermind'. On the 1st of October, 2013, Ross settled into the local public library and logged in. As they had cracked the site, they knew when he was logged in and two FBI agents, posing a a couple, had a particularly loud argument right in front of him. As he looked away from his computer, one agent grabbed the device and a second agent grabbed Ulbright. He was tried in NYC in a federal court. His lawyer failed in an attempt to convince the jury that he was not DPR. He had been tried under a 'Kingpin' statue designed to capture and penalize mob bosses. Thus, the verdict was severe: two life sentences, plus 40 years and no chance for parole. His Samsung laptop is on public display in the Smithsonian. Thanks to Wendell for this recommendation.
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