Why Would You Pardon Ross William Ulbrecht?
The Founder of "Silk Road" the Largest Online Marketplace for Drugs, Sex, Hit Men, and anything Criminal was Pardoned by Trump
At one point, Ross William Ulbrecht was the biggest criminal mastermind in the world. Al Capone? That’s small potatoes. Ulbrecht was the single largest facilitator of organized crime in the world, all over the world. For two years, he was the biggest drug dealer, the biggest sex trafficker, the biggest arms dealer, the biggest contractor for violence, etc. He was the biggest criminal mastermind of the 21st Century so far. Yet most people had never heard of him.
And this week Donald Trump pardoned him.
You read that right. Donald Trump, the guy who wanted to be known as the “law and order” President, pardoned the biggest criminal of the 21st Century. Why? Because a bunch of libertarian computer nerds hold Ulbrecht up as the guy they aspire to be, and Trump wants in with this crowd. But first, let’s backtrack a bit to why Ulbrecht was sentenced for life in jail with no possibility for parole in the first place.
The Silk Road and “Dread Pirate Roberts"
Back in 2011, Ulbrecht concocted the idea of the “Silk Road” marketplace. It would be a place you could go to largely to purchase drugs or any kind of illicit items, pay with bitcoin, and conduct business through mail to protect identities. Ulbrecht initially sold some mushrooms on the site under the name “Dread Pirate Roberts,”1 and began conducting business. It didn’t take long for business to boom, and as word spread, the money started to come in. Technically, Ulbrecht and Silk Road acted as a facilitator; the provided the meeting place for buyer and seller to meet, and for that they took an added percentage fee. Gone were the days of the red light district or the drug dealer selling on the corner; here came a 21st century solution where they just posted on Silk Road, and expanded the network nationwide. Ulbrecht became a bitcoin millionaire overnight. Under the terms of the site, only things that could be considered harmful or intended to defraud were prohibited.2 It offered over 24,000+ different items for sale
In may 2013, the web magazine Gawker published an article about the Silk Road, calling it the “Amazon of Everything Illegal.” Traffic for the site spiked and over the summer hit a fever pitch. Pressure was now also mounting on the FBI to capture the people behind Silk Road, but as of yet, they had zero idea who he was. In two years, it was generating $1.2 billion in bitcoin sales, and over $80 million in commissions. 3 During the summer of 2013, Silk Road was getting as much web traffic as all but the top 20 websites on the web; this is more impressive considering you needed to access it through a BitTorrent web browser, as most commercially available web browsers would block the content. That’s A LOT of criminal activity he was facilitating, and in that two years, he had become the biggest Criminal Kingpin the country had ever seen.
Law enforcement broke Silk Road's cover in a number of ways. A drug agency investigator infiltrated the site and became an admin, thereby gaining inside information about the site operations, and finding Ulbricht's chats showed Pacific time, narrowing down his likely location. Law enforcement seized a Silk Road server in Iceland and gained a trove of chat logs, further enriching their knowledge. Ulbricht was connected to "Dread Pirate Roberts" by Gary Alford, an Internal Revenue Service investigator working with the Drug Enforcement Administration on the Silk Road case, in mid-2013. The connection was made by linking the username "altoid", used during Silk Road's early days to announce the website, and a forum post in which Ulbricht, posting under the nickname "altoid", asked for programming help and gave his email address, which contained his full name. On October 1, 2013, the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Ulbricht at the Glen Park branch of the San Francisco Public Library and accused him of being the "mastermind" behind the site.
To prevent Ulbricht from encrypting or deleting files on the laptop he was using to run the site as he was arrested, two agents pretended to be quarreling lovers. When they had sufficiently distracted him, according to Joshuah Bearman of Wired, they quickly moved in to arrest him while a third agent grabbed the laptop and handed it to agent Thomas Kiernan. Kiernan then inserted a flash drive into one of the laptop's USB ports, with software that copied key files. Ulbricht was ordered held without bail.
Among many of the crimes he was accused of, which included engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, narcotics conspiracy, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and conspiracy to commit computer hacking, it was also considered whether to charge him with several “murder for hire” deals but he was not charged with them as it could not be ascertained if the hits had actually taken place, given the anonymity on Silk Road. At the conclusion of the trial, he was easily convicted (the computer contained all the logs, chats, and his activity managing the site) and sentenced to two life sentences without the possibility of parole.
Ross Ulbrecht Since Then
The former Dread Pirate Roberts has been in prison, shuttled around to different penitentiaries around the United States in the past 10 years. However, he became this kind of cause celebre for many tech bros out there. Why? Because the Silk Road was the single biggest contributor to Bitcoin early adoption, and the value has increased significantly since then. Always a libertarian, Ulbrecht was supported by the Libertarian Party and various Libertarian outlets for a pardon. During the campaigns, both RFK Jr, and Donald Trump both said that if elected they would pardon Ulbrecht.
And on Tuesday, Trump did just that.
Ulbrecht always knew what he was doing was wrong and illegal. That’s why he used the Tor network, BitTorrent, and Bitcoin to begin with; so that it would be anonymous. He just didn’t care. As a result, he conducted a criminal enterprise on such a wide scale that it would rival the mob or a cartel. The FBI arrested him, the DOJ brought the charges and he was convicted and given a proper sentence. Without the rule of law, if everything Ulbrecht had done was not worth the effort, then the door to that level of criminality is wide open again. There is no rule of law. Imagine what an enterprising person could do NOW. It may not be Ulbrecht, but someone else can just pick it up and run with it again. They’ll be the next Dread Pirate Roberts.
PurpleAmerica’s Recommended Stories
A fantastic book about the rise of Silk Road and the FBI’s hunt for Ulbrecht is the Nick Bilton True Crime novel, “American Kingpin.” Highly recommended.
PurpleAmerica’s Obscure Fact of the Day
Given that Trump’s pardons of the January 6th Insurrectionists were utterly appalling, of the 1500+ pardoned, only a handful hadn’t yet served their time and of those that were still in jail, less than 35 were particularly of note for the level of their engagement.
To me, this pardon is far worse. I get that those people attempted a coup that day, and should be held responsible. Most were to an extent. But Ulbrecht’s conviction was of the biggest criminal mastermind of the past 40 years. It’s like pardoning John Gotti or Carlos “The Jackal.” It’s like turning a blind eye to the Unabomber.
When you let the worst criminals free, what good is law and order?
PurpleAmerica’s Final Word on the Subject
Every day, it feels like America is going a little more upside down.
LIKE WHAT YOU SEE? MAKE SURE TO SUBSCRIBE AND SHARE!!!
Footnotes and Fun Stuff
The Dread Pirate Roberts is a character from The Princess Bride. Someone only plays the dread pirate for awhile, and then when they want to retire, they groom a successor who takes on the name and mantle. This way, it can go on conceivably forever without a person’s characteristics giving them away.
Such as child pornography or computer malware. The thing is though, prostitution and weapons sales were also rampant on the site, which resulted in sex trafficking and gun crimes. In an attempt to distance Silk Road with the guns, they even created another site, “the Armoury” to try and move it there, but why move when it was already entrenched?
When the FBI captured Ulbrecht, they found that the total revenue from the site was over 9,519,644 bitcoins. As the price of Bitcoin currently is over $100,000 per bitcoin, that amounts to revenue of $951,964,400,000, almost a trillion dollars, putting it on par with Apple’s net worth over two years.