Sunday, March 03, 2019

American Kingpin by Nick Bilton

American Kingpin by Nick Bilton was an entertaining book about Ross Ulbricht, who went by the name the Dread Pirate Roberts on The Silk Road, a website he founded and ran to sell almost any illegal item, in particular any illegal drug.

There were remarkable characters painted richly in the book, from Ulbricht to his mentor in growing the site, a man who went by the name Variety Jones, to the law enforcement agents after him, including Jared Der-Yeghiayan from Customs and Border Protection, Chris Tarbell from the FBI, and Gary Alford from the IRS.

Ulbricht as a college student became a Libertarian, someone who believes the government should stay out of people's personal lives, and if they want to put something into their bodies, that's up to them. He was then living in Texas and started working on building The Silk Road in 2010, launching it in January 2011, first selling on it his homegrown magic mushrooms, and very shortly after, drugs sold by others.

The site used a combination of the Tor web browser, on which someone's online activity couldn't be tracked, and people paying with untraceable Bitcoin, and after a June 2011 article written about the site by Adrian Chen for Gawker, things picked up dramatically, both in terms of activity on the site and law enforcement interest in stopping it. The opening of the book featured Customs Agent Der-Yeghiayan in October 2011 being alerted to a single ecstasy pill being mailed from the Netherlands to someone in the US. and by the beginning of 2012, Ulbricht was making some $10K a day in commissions from the site, with it eventually becoming a $1.2B business. Ulbricht as the Dread Pirate Roberts both frequently payed extortion demands from people hacking into the site and contracted for murders, which may or may not have ever been done, against people threatening his business.

Ulbricht moved to San Francisco in summer 2012 and in May 2013, IRS Agent Alford found an old drug forum post mentioning The Silk Road the week it opened, and then from the forum learned that the post had been written by someone whose account registration noted a RossUlbricht@gmail address. Then in July 2013 there was a group of fake IDs that Ross had ordered and were intercepted at SFO, with Alford learning of this flag on Ulbricht's name and this along with the forum post and a couple of additional pieces of digital footprint evidence convinced authorities they had found the Dread Pirate Roberts. Ulbricht was arrested in San Francisco in October 2013, found guilty of all charges brought against him and in May 2015 sentenced to life in prison with no possibility of parole.