Original subtitles

In this episode of American Greed, Silk Road is an online illegal drug bazaar

where millions of dollars change hands.

And its mastermind is a shadowy figure hiding within a secret part of the

internet called the Deep Web.

If the creator was known and if it was above board, the guy would have been on

the cover of Forbes.

This webmaster claims to be an intellectual with high principles.

But in reality, there's no honored among thieves.

Scattered amongst all those mundane entries were his criminal activities,

including ordering the killings of six different people.

Ultimately, it's not only the leader of Silk Road who loses his way.

It's the law enforcement officers sworn to bring him to justice.

The DEA agents and the Secret Service guys who were ripping off at Silk Road

were just in it for the money.

You want heroin, opium, cannabis, ecstasy, psychedelics, stimulants,

And here they are. They're all listed in the light of day. It's unbelievable

because this whole thing makes you scratch your head and wonder.

The website New York Senator Charles Schumer is describing is called Silk

an elaborate online drug marketplace available to anyone with an Internet

connection.

You can see that it was just like eBay or Etsy or something.

This was an easily usable and inviting kind of e -commerce site.

Andy Greenberg is a senior head writer for Wired magazine, who follows Silk

Road's development since shortly after its launch in 2011.

There were precursors of MDMA and all kinds of marijuana and stimulants and

acid.

When Senator Schumer calls for law enforcement to shut down Silk Road in

2011, it's much more easily said than done.

As Greenberg describes, the difference between Silk Road and eBay, besides the

products being sold, is that Silk Road can't be accessed through a Google

or a typical Internet browser.

Silk Road lives on a hidden part of the Internet.

often called the deep web, and can only be found using a particular type of

browser called Tor, which is specifically designed to hide the user's

This is the regular web via Chrome, and then this is the Tor browser.

It's almost identical.

The only difference is you can see that I think I'm in Germany.

Tor used to stand for the onion router, and it uses this process called onion

routing,

bundled up in layers of encryption, three layers in fact, and then bounced

around through three computers in this network of volunteer nodes all around

world.

And that's what the Silk Road did. This was something that you could only visit

using Tor, but the Silk Road itself also ran Tor so that nobody knew who ran the

site. The IP address of anyone buying or selling on Silk Road and the person

running it is completely disguised by Tor's system, making it almost

for law enforcement to trace.

The only method of payment accepted on Silk Road is the digital currency

Bitcoin, which uses long alphanumeric keys to make transactions.

No usernames or identification are required, keeping the buyers and sellers

anonymous.

It puts law enforcement in a quandary.

This isn't a typical investigation of a narcotics ring.

Joshua Behrman is a journalist who writes a feature on Silk Road for Wired

magazine, and he notes that Silk Road is both open to the world, yet closed to

the scrutiny of law enforcement.

So it's out in the open, but yet invisible. It would be sort of like if

a drug deal.

on the corner, and it turns out they're a hologram and invisible, and you can't

actually put your hands on them. So then on a grand scale, that's sort of what

the company was, too. It was out in the open, and its creator was very vocal,

but was unknown.

He writes, I am Silk Road. The market, the person, the enterprise.

Everything. I need a name.

Drumroll, please. My name is Dread Pirate Roberts.

The name refers to the book and film The Princess Bride.

I know who you are. Your cruelty reveals everything.

You're the Dread Pirate Roberts. Admit it. We're fried.

In the film, the name is passed from one person to the next, and the idea behind

the name means more than the person using it.

And to users of Silk Road, the meaning behind the name is everything.

The Silk Road was not some sort of cyber criminal scheme.

It wasn't a kind of drug cartel or just a mere money -making narco market. It

was a political movement.

The Dread Pirate Roberts was this ideological figurehead who talked about

embarking on this new era of human freedom. And I think that the people on

site really bought into that.

He was a hero for this community. He was a kind of leader of a revolution to

them. Some people have said that they came for the drug and they stayed for

revolution. It's a well -funded revolution.

The government estimates the site exchanges as much as $214 million worth

Bitcoin in just more than two years.

But former U .S. prosecutor Thomas Brown doesn't see the nobility.

I think the idea of calling Silk Road a revolution, I think, vastly overstates.

What was actually going on? It was effectively a criminal speakeasy, really

lowered the barriers to entry for illegal activity.

You could be a 12 -year -old, download the necessary software, go access Silk

Road and go buy yourself some heroin, which I don't really regard as a

worthwhile revolution, but that's just me.

But Brown's opinion is going to matter greatly as law enforcement's primary

becomes finding Mr.

Dread Pirate Roberts.

Theoretically, he could be anywhere in the world.

Little do they know, he's right here in the USA.

When American Greed returns,

Silk Road may say it stands against the drug war, but it ultimately can't avoid

cartel -style violence.

As with so many revolutionaries, he became a tyrant very quickly.

We have to oppose the tyranny of the government.

And then here he is.

A year later, saying, well, we've got to kill this guy.

Silk Road traffics hundreds of millions of dollars a year in the sale of

narcotics and other contraband.

Yet its leader is entirely unknown to the general public.

Achieve scale with no marketing, you know, with just word of mouth and the

quality of the service, which in fact was quite good.

If the creator was known and if it was above board, the guy would have been

like, you know, on the cover of Forbes.

Strangely enough, in September 2013, he is.

I became really determined to not to figure out who he was.

I didn't think I could do that, but just to talk to him.

Writing a piece for Forbes magazine, Greenberg gets his wish.

The man law enforcement can't find spends five hours with Greenberg on an

encrypted chat.

He struck me as a very intelligent and highly idealistic guy who didn't seem to

care too much about money but was incredibly ambitious in terms of what he

building. We know he was making millions of dollars now, but he didn't change

his lifestyle at all. And he told me that...

He had very simple tastes.

He enjoyed smoking a bowl of very nice marijuana at the end of a long work day,

but he wasn't living in a mansion.

Then DPR drops a bombshell.

He told me a story that he wasn't the creator of the Silk Road. The Dread

Roberts I was speaking to had acquired it from the Silk Road's actual creator.

It fits the Dread Pirate Roberts mythology perfectly.

that one DPR passes the title to the next.

But is it true?

The person Greenberg chats with seems to think he'll always be one step ahead of

law enforcement.

He totally felt that he was invincible. He, at least to me, said that he was

very confident that all of the three -letter agencies hunting him weren't

any progress.

Or so he wishes.

A task force in Baltimore is determined to get Dread Pirate Robert's hands off

the keyboard and into cuffs.

And to do so, they resort to a familiar tactic in investigating drug rings.

The undercover agent.

The DEA had an agent on the Silk Road, undercover.

His name was Carl Forrest. He was out of the Baltimore office.

And he creates this identity as a sort of fictional cartel

middleman. whose identity on Silk Road was called Knob.

As Knob, Special Agent Force makes an offer.

Mr. Silk Road, I am a great admirer of your work.

Brilliant, utterly brilliant.

I will keep this short and to the point.

I want to buy the site.

JPR rejects Knob's offer, but the two begin to communicate almost daily.

And Knob's next offer, DPR accepts.

Knob tells DPR that he wants to unload a large quantity of cocaine.

DPR arranges a sale that will be shipped through one of Silk Road's

administrators, Curtis Clark Green, who goes by the username Flush.

When the drugs are delivered, Special Agent Force will be ready to pounce.

When the drugs were delivered, there the Baltimore task force was waiting to go

in with a SWAT team, and they arrested Curtis Clark Green, and Curtis Clark

Green immediately indicated that he wanted to cooperate with law

Katherine Hahn is an assistant U .S. attorney in San Francisco and lectures

the Stanford University School of Law on cybercrime and cybercurrencies.

And she says things are about to get worse for Green.

A week after his arrest, he has a proper session with Special Agent Carl Force

and other members of the Baltimore Task Force.

That night, 20 ,000 bitcoins suddenly go missing from accounts on Silk Road.

DPR solicits the help of a Silk Road lieutenant to find out how.

Quickly, the two of them concluded it was Curtis Clark Green because it was

Curtis Clark Green's username, credentials, and password that had been

target each one of these vendors.

So Green is now not only a potential snitch, he's a potential snitch who

to have stolen $350 ,000 worth of Bitcoin.

DPR wants an associate to make Green pay the ultimate price.

He asked them to locate him, beat him up, try to get the money back.

But that eventually turned into, I want you to find him and assassinate him.

But in a twist that may save Green's life,

DPR is asking the wrong guy to carry out the hit.

Ironically, very ironically, I would say, he reached out to Knob, who, of

course, was Karl Mark Forth.

In reality, an undercover DEA agent.

With Green and Carl Force's custody, the DEA agent sees an opportunity and

decides to play along.

Apparently at Curtis Clark Green's home, they staged the hit.

Special Agent Force, acting as Knob, sends gruesome pictures to DPR.

Apparently satisfied, DPR pays Knob $80 ,000 for the murder.

It's a turning point for DPR.

The peaceful revolution of a utopian marketplace appears to be over.

He was getting hit by hackers.

The site was getting taken down by hackers. He was being extorted for

People were threatening to identify him, to identify his users.

And he was constantly fighting off both them and the threat of every law

enforcement agency in the world.

was also hunting him and ready to put him in prison.

According to the government, DPR orders as many as five other murders, though it

appears none of them ever actually occur.

Despite their descent into violence, DPR seems to be out of reach of law

enforcement.

They know he runs an online drug marketplace, and they know he's

ordered the murder of one of his employees.

What they don't know is who in the world this person actually is.

In the spring of 2013, New York's cybercrime unit gets involved.

Instead of tracking the drugs like traditional narcotics investigations,

track the site.

Even though the website was hiding in plain sight, it still had to be hosted

a physical server. So that physical server was located somewhere in the

And someone has to maintain the server.

Find the server the cybercrime unit believes, and they can find who operates

When American Greed returns, law enforcement gets a lead on the dreaded

Pirate Roberts.

But could a fun -loving surfer and pacifist...

really be the guy?

When it was revealed that he was this 29 -year -old, good -looking Texan kid, it

was pretty shocking to me.

In an anonymous online community, sellers, buyers, and even Silk Road's

mastermind could be anyone, anywhere.

But while most agencies are looking for a person, the FBI Cybercrime Unit in New

York is looking for a machine.

The idea was if you find the server, you can hopefully find the person operating

it. Hopefully the person who's operating it is the same person who owns it,

which would be DPR.

Even though Silk Road operates through the labyrinth of Tor, there are rumors

that the site's IP address sometimes leads and is visible to those who know

they're looking for.

And at some point...

The cybercrime unit catches a break.

They located the server in Iceland, were able to go to Iceland and seize that

server. With all of its communications, they could see every transaction that

had ever happened, every message that had ever been sent through the Silk

messaging system.

One of the most crucial puzzle pieces the cybercrime unit lifts from the

is the name of the computer DPR uses to access the site.

There is a DRIP department out there.

who uses the username Frosty on a computer that he named Frosty. All the

communications from the server are still referenced by anonymous usernames, but

one key piece of information gives the FBI its best lead yet on a possible

location. One of the servers that we conducted a search on ended up giving an

IP address that a user connected from San Francisco area.

The IP address is from a cafe in Glen Park, San Francisco.

So they know at some point DPR connected to the Silk Road server as Frosty at

Frosty from this particular cafe.

But that's all they know.

Tom Kiernan is a former computer scientist with the FBI's Cyber Crime

And he says even a cyber investigation can use an old -fashioned bulletin

It was the picture of DPR from The Princess Bride.

That was our top of it. You know, a little picture on the computer with the

Frosty on it, pointing to DPR. We had the internet cafe with another hand

line to DPR.

Every lead that came in, we'd take a little snapshot of it and throw it up.

But of course, there's still one piece missing from this puzzle.

Who is Dread Pirate Roberts?

In the end, maybe Tor's anonymity leads to illumination.

After all, even a hidden website needs a map.

Somewhere on the real web, someone has to give you that Tor name. The idea was

you're going to find it on the real web, somebody mentioning it in a post or

another chat site or a blog.

Sure enough.

An IRS agent runs a simple Google search and finds someone advertising a new

dark web drug marketplace in 2011.

He had posted to try to drum up business for the site, to create buzz.

Oh, look at this interesting site where drugs are for sale.

The post is under the username Altoid.

Searching other posts by Altoid, the agent finds that Altoid once went by the

name Frosty.

It appears Altoid and Frosty are the same person.

And if this is the same Frosty accessing Silk Road, that person is Dread Pirate

Roberts.

Continuing to search, the agent finds a possible real -world lead.

In a post by Altoid looking for programming advice, he asks that any

be sent to the email address rossulbrick at gmail dot com.

That was a key piece that allowed us to make that connection or jump from a

virtual computer world to a physical world.

Initial looks at Ross Ulbricht himself, however, make it hard to believe he

could be the guy behind a murderous drug empire.

Ross grew up in Texas and was always a smart kid, super personable, was a

and was pretty built and was sexy and stuff.

So he was like a well -liked guy.

It may not seem like the typical profile of a drug kingpin, but the CEO of an

Internet startup?

Maybe. In a way, he is, in fact, just like all of the other young

millennial...

very sort of educated millennials, especially from kind of the sciences,

are kind of using their abilities and smarts to go try to make a billion

in Silicon Valley.

I did line up from the beginning that he fit the criteria. His LinkedIn page had

the same kind of lofty libertarian rhetoric that he was saying to me and

on the Silk Road forums.

The things that we found on the real net.

and then some of the stuff that we found on the database to the server. Just

enough to say, yeah, this looks pretty good. This is the same thought process.

He has the same ideology about things, that this could be the right guy.

The best news?

Ross Ulbricht's last known address is in San Francisco, California.

Once they had a name and a location, it was, let's get our plans together.

We're flying out to San Fran.

sit on the house and see if we can get enough to actually make this arrest.

When American Greed returns, it appears to be an open and shut case.

But if Ulbricht is able to shut his laptop, law enforcement's case could be

locked in a virtual nightmare.

As simple as hitting a key that would encrypt the entire hard drive and make

very, very difficult, if not impossible, for law enforcement to ever recover

evidence.

The FBI has a strong case linking Ross Ulbricht to Dread Pirate Roberts, but

ultimately it's circumstantial.

To prove the case beyond a reasonable doubt, they need to catch Ulbricht red

-handed.

We want to see him logged in as DPR, not Frosty or any of these other names. He

wanted him as DPR, as Dread Pirate Roberts.

And we wanted to see that screen with his hand, you know, right on that

to say, hey, this is him, this is the guy.

Fortunately, they have a way of knowing when Ulbricht is logged in.

A high -level administrator on Silk Road with the username Siris has been

arrested by Homeland Security.

And Special Agent Jared Duryagian has taken over Siris' account.

Acting as Siris, he chats online with DPR almost daily.

We wanted Special Agent Jerry Yegan to get into a conversation with DPR like he

had in the past hundreds of times and make him actually log into the Silk Road

site so we could see him at the keyboard with the screen there. I mean, it's

crazy thinking at the time, but we wanted the screen there and the chat.

that was the goal from the moment that we got off the plane.

When the FBI sees DPR logged in with Yegan, they could simply bust down

Ulbrich's door and take the laptop.

But in cyber cases, it's not that simple.

As soon as the bureau comes in the morning, we're pretty loud when we come

the place.

You know something's happening, and the laptop's closed. We believe that the

laptop's going to be encrypted.

It's going to be a brick, and not going to be able to get any information off

it.

But from the Silk Road server, they know that DPR often logs in using Wi -Fi

from a cafe in Glen Park.

If they can make the arrest in public...

They may be able to get the laptop before it can be encrypted.

On October 1, 2013, they get their chance.

We gathered by the cafe.

We finally get a call that Ross is leaving his residence, and he's got his

backpack on. He pokes his head in one of the cafes, and then there's no place to

sit down or anything, and then continues on right next door to the library.

Ulbricht sits down at a table in the science fiction section and opens his

laptop.

Agent Juergen logs in, he starts a chat with DPR, and he gets him to open up his

browser to the actual site, and that's when, you know, everything just went in

little bit of slow motion there for a couple of seconds.

Two undercover agents walk behind Ulbricht and fake a domestic dispute.

They start yelling at each other, cursing at each other, and Ross is like,

know, just looking, turns around real quick to see what's going on.

And that's when I have a special agent on the other side of him on the same

table that grabbed the laptop.

That's when I came out from my little position and walked around and grabbed

laptop from her.

But I'm watching on the corner of my eyes as one of the New York agents that

were down there with actually put hands on. And Ross, he didn't fight. I think

he knew what was going on after that.

The first thing Kiernan sees on the laptop, the name Frosty.

This appears to be the laptop that's been running Silk Road for more than two

years. In a computer crime case, you're 99 .99 % sure. But once you have that

last piece there, this is him. There's no way it's anybody else.

This is the guy that they've been after for two years.

Perhaps most importantly, they have the laptop and all the information it

contains, including chats and a diary that Ulbricht allegedly kept, detailing

every step of creating and maintaining Silk Road.

That laptop that Ross Ulbricht had was a treasure trove of information.

I don't know if you've ever seen the television show The Wire, but there's a

famous quote from that, never keep notes on a conspiracy.

And Russell Albrecht kept notes on everything, including ordering the

of six different people. I mean, there are organized crime figures who don't go

that far.

There was certainly an element of pride in keeping this journal and logbook. I

mean, he wrote in one entry that he thought that his story would be told

someday, and he wanted it to be comprehensive to include his thoughts.

throughout the whole narrative.

But that's generally not a good idea, to keep this detailed log of everything

you're doing when you're running this massive illegal conspiracy.

But the conspiracy contained within Ulbricht's laptop isn't limited to just

much to law enforcement's surprise.

I was in the middle of an investigation of another case.

And I had a lawyer representing a third -party witness in. And at the conclusion

of our meeting, he pulled me aside and said that he thought that we had a rogue

agent, I believe were the words he used, on our payroll.

The lawyer represents a Bitcoin currency exchange in Europe. And he tells Hahn

that this agent has some wires crossed.

I've been a federal prosecutor for over a decade, and I consider the federal

agents I work with heroes, quite literally.

But I felt like we could do a really quick check, and it would be easily put

bed, mostly really for the agent. I was thinking, I don't want to have this

guy's name being smeared around, so let's put this to bed so that we can

this attorney you've got it wrong.

But the attorney doesn't have it wrong. The agent in question, DEA Special Agent

Carl Mark Forth.

a .k .a. Knob.

And Force has been using his undercover identity to his own advantage.

In one gambit, Knob claims to have an insider in the Department of Justice who

is willing to sell information on the Silk Road investigation.

According to Force's official reports, DPR never accepts the offer, and payment

is never made.

But DPR's chats tell a different story.

One of the messages that DPR sent to Carl said, hey, I sent you the money you

asked for, the 525 coins.

What I ended up doing, as IRS agents do, is I started following the money.

Back then, criminals were operating under the impression that Bitcoin was an

untraceable currency and law enforcement would never be able to figure this out.

Well, when you fast forward to 2014, 2015, I was no longer the kid.

Typically, even with the new technology, law enforcement still wouldn't be able

to discover the person behind a Bitcoin wallet or key.

But it can trace transactions from one Bitcoin wallet to the next.

And thanks to the whistleblowing attorney, Gambarian knows that the final

account is controlled by Carl Force.

We could see these four transactions come out of Russell Briggs' account, DPR

account on Silk Road.

And then...

Old movement you see right here, that's actually Carl laundering those Bitcoins.

But at the end of the day, it still gets deposited into pretty much one unique

deposit into his account for 525 Bitcoin.

At the time, 525 Bitcoin is worth about $50 ,000.

But little does law enforcement know, they're only scratching the surface.

When American Greed returns, agent Karl Mark Force gets creative.

And he's not the only one.

In the end, the greediest people in this story, I don't think, are the Dread

Pirate Roberts or the administrators of Silk Road, but the law enforcement

agents who saw the Silk Road as an ATM.

Assistant U .S. Attorney Catherine Hahn and IRS Special Agent Tigran Gambarian

know that DEA agent Karl Mark Force has squeezed DPR for money once.

Maybe he's done it before.

Looking through Silk Road's chat logs, Gambarian finds a remarkable clue. A

mistake made under the username FrenchMaid, offering information to DPR

price. I went back on Silk Road and read through the chat logs and saw that

French made contact to DPR and tried to provide him some information.

And sure enough, the first message is signed Carl.

As much as you try to be careful, even when you're trying to commit crime,

sometimes you slip.

I would like to think I would never have done that if I was in that situation,

but you never know.

Tracking the Bitcoin, they end up in a familiar place.

Indeed, we saw from the Silk Road servers there was an approximately $100

payment from Silk Road servers to accounts we associated with Karl

And it was like, boom, that's the cherry on top.

Really, what more do you need at that point?

Eventually, Hahn and Gamberian linked force to multiple extortion efforts on

and other thefts.

and track more than $700 ,000 from Silk Road paid into Force's accounts.

Then a new thought occurs to them.

Force is part of the team that arrests Silk Road administrator Curtis Clark

Green in January of 2013, who was almost immediately accused of stealing 20

,000 Bitcoin from Silk Road vendors. Could Force have been involved in that

well? Curtis Clark Green had throughout the entire time maintained his

innocence. He had insisted that he did not steal those Bitcoins. Now, I've been

in a number of proffers where criminal defendants lie, so it was not

inconceivable, I'm sure, that Curtis Clark Green was simply not telling the

truth, and he really had taken those Bitcoins.

But Hahn and Gamberian have their doubts.

The proper session lasted two days in Utah, and so day one was on January

and this was back in 2013.

The theft occurred that evening, January 25th. It just did not make sense to me

that as much law enforcement attention as was on Green at the time, that Green

was the one who stole that money. If it's not Green and his account was used

the theft, then who?

The inclination is to believe that Carl Force is responsible, but the facts

don't seem to bear it out.

A lot of people on our task force just assumed if there was money missing from

the Silk Road, I'm sure it was Karl Mark Force who took it because he's done all

of these other things.

But I have to say that, in particular, Special Agent Tigran Gambarian really

came to me and said, this is a different pattern that we're seeing here because

it doesn't match the pattern that we know Force was using.

Hahn calls an expert on digital currency at the Secret Service named Sean

Bridges to see what she can learn.

But she doesn't get the response she expects.

His immediate reaction was, why are you in San Francisco looking into this

internal matter unique to Baltimore?

It was very much a kind of this is none of your business type feeling that I was

getting from him.

I would have expected a response such as, oh, my gosh, these are kind of crazy

things. We could get to the bottom of this.

I certainly didn't expect a response of, essentially, this is none of your

business.

Hahn decides to take a closer look at Bridges.

Well, who is this Secret Service agent? Oh, that's interesting. He's also in

Baltimore. And I later found out, well, he's on the same task force.

Not only is Bridges on the same task force as Carl Force.

He is part of the proper session where Green explains how to use his account to

reset usernames and passwords.

It's the exact method that was used to break into vendors' accounts and steal

the 20 ,000 Bitcoin.

Once again, Gambarian tracks the money.

Stolen money goes out, goes to the Bitcoin account, and then deposited into

account that Sean Bridges controlled through an LLC.

For IRS agents like Gambarian, it's a typical money laundering investigation.

I don't know if he read a money laundering book or something and figured

that I should use LFB on laundering money, but it wasn't very hard to kind

link him to Sean's actual identity.

You know, he's a great undercover agent, great cyber agent, but not very good at

money laundering.

On May 4, 2014, Forrest resigns from the DEA.

And March 18, 2015...

Bridges resigns from the Secret Service.

But breaking the law seems to have its own kind of addiction.

When American Greed returns, Sean Bridges knows he's caught.

But that doesn't mean he'll go down willingly.

Sean Bridges had been attempting several times not only to change his name, but

also to procure a new social security number.

was incredibly concerning to us.

In January 2015, the trial of Ross Ulbricht begins.

He pleads not guilty of being the mastermind of Silk Road.

But on the first day of trial, his defense makes a startling admission.

On the very first day, His defense admitted that he had created the Silk

but that it had been just this kind of economic experiment that he quickly sold

off to the real Dread Pirate Roberts.

It was a remarkable defense because the Dread Pirate Roberts had laid the

groundwork for it with his name as the thing that can be passed off and

inherited. So it did fit together in this really intriguing way, but it just

still wasn't quite believable because the evidence was... kind of

incontrovertible. I mean, they had just got everything on him from the Silk Road

server, from his communications, to the stuff that he just stored on his laptop,

including a journal and a logbook of his daily activities running the site.

The jury agrees.

In just a single afternoon, they come back with a verdict.

The jury did not take long. It was a matter of hours before they came back

with... completely guilty on every count. The counts include conspiracy to

distribute narcotics, conspiracy to commit or aid and abet computer hacking,

perhaps most importantly, continuing a criminal enterprise.

This kingpin charge, as people call it, it's usually something that is used

against mafia bosses and drug cartel leaders.

It was about as harsh as anybody could have thought.

When it comes time for sentencing, Judge Catherine B. Forrest has a daunting

challenge.

She had been presented with all these different Ross Ulbrichts, like the

says he's this wonderful, nice guy, and the FBI says, well, here he is kind of

becoming a murderer. His own diary is a different account, right, and different.

And the diary at different stages say different things about the person. So

everybody offered a different version of this guy, and she said, I don't really

know which is which.

One thing not charged is the murder -for -hire plots that the prosecution

alleges DPR executed.

They include it in their narrative, but are never required to prove it to the

jury.

Nevertheless, Greenberg believes that the judge unfairly takes the evidence

consideration.

when assessing a judgment.

The prosecution asked for a sentence that was significantly beyond the

minimums.

They did not ask for a life sentence.

It was the judge who took it upon herself to put him in prison for life,

in part on trying to set an example. She was very explicit about the fact that

she didn't want to see people following his footsteps.

And then based in part on these accusations of violence that he was

actually charged with.

It seemed to me that it was this kind of tricky thing where he was charged with

nonviolent crimes and then sentenced for a violent one.

That's not how the system is supposed to work.

And I also think it's unfair that anybody pays the price for some

future criminal copycat.

You're supposed to pay the price for what you do. And I don't think it was

necessary to put Ross Ulbricht in prison for life.

Bull Brick has appealed his case and the results are pending.

But former prosecutor Tom Brown believes the assessment of the danger of Silk

Road is warranted.

There's a narrative out there that says that Silk Road was simply, was a benign

force on the internet.

But the evidence of the trial showed that was conclusively false.

You had children purchasing drugs from the website.

You had murders that were ordered out.

Of course, it appeared from the evidence of trial that DPR himself was being

defrauded and the murders never actually occurred, but he thought they did. And

the evidence of trial showed that he thought he was ordering people killed.

So I think it's beyond a stretch to say that Silk Road was simply a benign

website that didn't really cause any harm.

According to Greenberg, if the judge thinks the sentence has discouraged

copycats, she is severely mistaken.

AlphaBay is the most recent one.

You can see that it has 80 ,000 drug listings, which is about

four times more than the Silk Road ever had.

This whole crypto market world has deteriorated in many ways, not in terms

how much money is getting passed around there. It's still probably more than

$100 million a year in revenue, but simply in terms of the morality of it,

ideals are gone.

Everybody's ripping off everybody else. There's no sense of a kind of

libertarian revolution.

It's all just kind of replication of the dirty world of the offline drug

industry.

Agent Karl Mark Forrest and Sean Bridges are part of this dirty world. They both

plead guilty to taking more than $1 .5 million from Silk Road Combined through

theft and extortion.

Upon his guilty plea, Carl Forrest is remanded into custody and is ultimately

sentenced to six and a half years.

But at Bridges' plea hearing, he is allowed to turn himself in at a later

The prosecution adamantly objects.

Sean Bridges had been attempting several times over the summer.

After he had agreed on a plea agreement with the government, both to not only to

change his name, but also to procure an additional, a new social security

number. And that information was incredibly concerning to us. We alerted

judge to it that day at the change of plea.

And on that basis, sought his remand into custody. We considered him

flight risk, but he was not placed into custody.

Bridges is asked to turn himself in in late January 2016 to serve a 71 -month

sentence. But a day before his surrender date, law enforcement raids Bridges'

apartment in Baltimore under suspicion that he may be trying to flee.

I had a bulletproof vest that I found in this thing, numerous documents for

offshore facility, Apple laptop with the serial number scratched off.

Kind of a go -back which had all the stuff in there and prepaid debit cards

whatnot for him ready to go and, you know, potentially flee the country.

After Bridges' arrest, he won't breathe free air for a long time.

In fact, he may be facing more than his original 71 -month sentence.

As the public filing has stated, Sean Bridges is being investigated for

additional crimes.

Perhaps the Silk Road began as a utopian libertarian dream.

But in a criminal enterprise, greed always rears its ugly head.

The Silk Road case in the end, it showed some incredibly effective law

enforcement investigation techniques at the same time as it showed just like a

bizarre, comical, corrupt side of the federal government and its agents.

These guys who just clearly had no principles about what they were doing

also just weren't very good at getting away with crime.

The Dread Pirate Roberts, at least, was a criminal with some principles.

The DEA agents and the Secret Service guys who were ripping off the Silk Roads

were just in it for the money.

Some of the best inventions never made. Get a second chance.

Holy cow. This is your choice now. The defining moment of our life.

Make Me a Millionaire Inventor, season premiere next Thursday at 10.

CNBC, get yours.

From executive producer LeBron James, Stephen Hustle, premiere episodes

Wednesday.