'They were still, at the end of the day, drug dealers,' one employee told him, according to the book.Īpparently, Ulbricht vehemently disagreed. Not all of Ulbricht's employees fully bought into the goodness of the mission. 'Let the market decide, not the government,' he said, according to the book.

As Silk Road began to traffic in things way outside of drugs - like guns and body parts - he continually insisted he was doing good work. Through posts on the site, Dread Pirate Roberts declared that the mission was to sell drugs so extensively that the government would somehow be forced into legalizing all drugs. 'It's not the government's right to tell the people what they can and cannot put in their bodies,' Ulbricht said, according to documents admitted as evidence in the case. Ulbricht adopted the code name Dread Pirate Roberts, according to the book, and wrote long motivational posts to his employees about the mission of Silk Road.

Ulbricht created a 'mission driven' company and community He paints a picture of a young libertarian idealist who thoroughly convinced himself he was helping society with his criminal startup - and his slide into becoming an outlaw.Īnd parts of the book made the work of running a criminal enterprise website sound eerily like bootstrapping a tech startup. Other key players of Silk Road were also captured and jailed, including two law-enforcement agents assigned to help capture Ulbricht.Īlthough Bilton didn't interview Ulbricht for the book, he used the enormous catalog of information on the case and interviews with other key sources to get inside Ulbricht's head. The book reads like a novel, and it describes how a young, smart, kind-hearted, and well-educated Ulbricht became the Dread Pirate Roberts, the code name of the man who ran the website, and how multiple law-enforcement agencies chased him down. In May 2015, 31-year-old Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison without parole after being convicted of seven felonies, including trafficking drugs on the internet, narcotics-trafficking conspiracy, running a continuing criminal enterprise, computer hacking, and money laundering.Īlthough he also was accused of trying to commission and pay for more than one murder, the charge was dropped from the indictment, and prosecutors and attorneys have said they never happened. I just finished reading Nick Bilton's ' American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road,' which documents the well-known saga of Ross Ulbricht, aka 'Dread Pirate Roberts,' and Silk Road, the black-market website that sold illegal drugs and other dangerous items. Ross Ulbricht, the founder of Silk Road, who was sentenced to life in prison on May 29, 2015. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.

American kingpin bilton