The American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road

The American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road by Nick Bilton is exactly what the title suggests. This is nonfiction story about the hunt and eventual capture of Ross Ulbrict, a.k.a. Dread Pirate Roberts, who is from Austin, graduated from University of Texas Dallas with a degree in physics, and headed to Penn State as a physics doctoral candidate. Ross was not really a political activist, but he was a radical libertarian who was against government regulation/intervention is all things. That’s what led him to start selling magic mushroom seeds on the Dark Web. Ross thought people should have what they wanted and the laws preventing that were unreasonable. On his own, he figured out how to program and create his own website, The Silk Road, how to use the Dark Web browser Tor, and how to be paid in bitcoins. That allowed him total anonymity.

Given his libertarian beliefs, he thought it was reasonable, as long as he got a cut of the action, for others to use his website to sell whatever they wanted to sell, other drugs, guns, kidneys. Really. His website went live in 2011, and it took four years to bring him down and sentence him to life in prison. He went from making a few dollars a month to millions per month. It was a story about The Silk Road in Gawker that really brought Ulbrict fame, but that also brought the attention of a team of Feds who did not share his libertarian viewpoint. Jared Der-Yeghiayan from the Department of Homeland Security in Chicago, Carol Force from the DEA in Baltimore, Chris Tarbell from the FBI in New York City, and Gary Alford from the IRS in New York were the key players in bringing Ulbrict down. Of course, given the millions of dollars that were flowing into his website, there were other crooks who were able to steal money from Ulbrict – and when they cheated him, he hired killers to take them out.

Bilton wrote, “The site was making more money than he knew what to do with. He had tens of millions of dollars on thumb drives scatter around his apartment. The problems, though abounding, had simply become daily work obstacles for Ross. When he wrote in his diary that he had loaned a dealer half a million dollars, or had Variety Jones [his chief associate] deploy one of his soldiers to deal with another problems, or paid hackers or informants $100,000 apiece, it was just a day in the office for Ross. Murders, extortion, reprisals, and attacks had all just become the job. Sure it was stressful at times, but in Ross’s alternative universe he was king.”

This just goes to show that even the brightest man in the battle, along with his team of helpers, probably can’t win against a team of determined agents with unlimited time and resources. Of course, the team was also lucky and Ulbrict did make some critical mistakes that led to his government foes finally identifying him.

This was a captivating read, and it gets my strong recommendation.