Is it any wonder that the Coen brothers are reportedly working on a screenplay?
Ulbricht’s target, a Mormon 47-year-old grandfather in Utah, had to fake his death by pouring a can of Campbell’s Tomato Soup on his face to look like blood. The hit man for the first murder that Ulbricht allegedly commissioned was an undercover D.E.A. The weird details of the Silk Road bust and the contrast of the drugs and violence with Ulbricht’s wholesome past and G-rated vocabulary (his preferred expletives include “heck” and “fudge”) have proved irresistible to storytellers. Evidence unearthed by federal agents included his journal, along with nearly two million words of chat logs between Dread Pirate Roberts and his underlings detailing the operations of the site. Ulbricht is currently appealing a life sentence for seven convictions, including narcotics, money laundering and the kingpin statute, more typically applied to Mafia bosses or cartel leaders. The obsessive, dizzying manhunt to apprehend him involved a slew of government agencies and ended with a neck-breaking plot twist: double agents and hundreds of thousands of dollars in missing Bitcoin.
Ulbricht, a former Boy Scout, had tried to commission five murders as the Dread Pirate Roberts, the pseudonym under which he ruled the site. Ulbricht taught himself to code and he began by selling mushrooms that he grew himself.īy the time Ulbricht was arrested two years later, the Silk Road was an estimated $1.2 billion business that expanded into heroin, guns, hacking tools, counterfeit cash and cyanide. Using an anonymizing browser like Tor and the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, people could discreetly buy and sell drugs. But with the Silk Road he was able to marry his business ambitions and anti-authoritarian philosophy he envisioned it as a powerful way to defy what he perceived to be the state’s irrational drug policies. exam and was unable to find a buyer for his seasteading gaming simulation. For all his lofty ambitions, he felt like a failure.
When Ross Ulbricht created the Silk Road, a clandestine online drug bazaar hidden on the deep web, he was a 26-year-old libertarian idealist living in Austin, Tex., talking his girlfriend’s ear off about Austrian economics and seasteading experiments - the idea of creating communities in the middle of the sea, free from government regulations. AMERICAN KINGPIN The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road By Nick Bilton Illustrated.
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