Daar is 'n boeiende verhaal in
vandag se NYT van 'n 29-jarige man wat in Amerika in hegtenis geneem is omdat
hy verdink word dat hy een van die grootste smokkelbedrywe in dwelms op die
internet bedryf het.
Wat die verhaal so boeiend maak is
dat die man in sy daaglikse lewe 'n sensitiewe, ordentlike en vriendelike mens
was. Origens was hy 'n diep denker wat op indringende filosofiese manier oor
die lewe kon nadink. Mense wat hom goed geken het, kon nie glo dat hy vir so 'n
ernstige en korrupte lewe gevang is nie.
Trouens, in 'n belangrike paragraaf
in die baie lang berig, word vertel hoedat hy op 'n stadium homself in die
mistiek verdiep het.
Onvoorstelbaar, sou 'n mens dink.
Hoe kan iemand in die mistiek tuis raak en dan só lewe? Dit beteken eenvoudig
dat hy nie regtig weet wat mistiek is nie.
Nou sou 'n mens n.a.v. die berig kon
redeneer dat 'n mens mistiek eers ernstig kan opneem wanneer dit met 'n etiese
lewenswyse verbind word. In nadenke oor mistiek, beklemtoon Waaijman
byvoorbeeld dat mistiek 'n konstruktiewe, transformatiewe uitwerking het. Egte mistiek, m.a.w., word aan sy vrugte geken.
Maar die berig beklemtoon dat
hierdie vroom man met sy onvoorstelbare korrupte en destruktiewe optrede, 'n
sterk etiese bewussyn het. Om jouself in die mistiek te verloor en om 'n
"goeie" mens te wees, waarborg niks nie. Alle rede om steeds weer nederig te bly wanneer 'n mens met die verborgene besig is. Die kwaad het 'n inherente neiging om op die goeie te teer.
Hier is dele van die berig. Die
hele een kan gelees word by:
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/business/eagle-scout-idealist-drug-trafficker.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20140119
Ross Ulbricht’s last moments as a
free man were noisy enough to draw a crowd. Employees at the Glen Park branch
of the San Francisco library heard a crashing sound and rushed to the science
fiction section, expecting to find a patron had hit the floor. Instead, they
found a handful of federal agents surrounding a slender 29-year-old man with
light brown hair and wearing a T-shirt and jeans.
The goal of the arrest, at 3:15
p.m. on Oct. 1, 2013, was not simply to apprehend Mr. Ulbricht, but also to
prevent him from performing the most mundane of tasks: closing his laptop. That
computer, according to the F.B.I., was the command center of Silk Road, the
world’s largest and most notorious black market for drugs. In just two and a
half years, the government says, Silk Road had become a hub for more than $1.2
billion worth of transactions, many of them in cocaine, heroin and LSD.
The site was like an eBay for the
illicit, celebrated by drug enthusiasts, denounced by United States senators and
stalked by four federal agencies. But because it was run on Tor, an encrypted
Internet network, and because it merely connected buyers and sellers — rather
than warehousing any products — it seemed to operate in a vaporous cloud. It
was a business without infrastructure, other than a few servers and that
laptop, which on 3:14 that October afternoon sat on a library desk, open.
Had Mr. Ulbricht seen the F.B.I.
coming, and simply closed the laptop, password protections probably would have
kicked in, turning the hard drive into what Nicholas Weaver, a researcher at
the International Computer Science Institute, called “an encrypted lump” that
would have been “tougher to break into than Fort Knox.”
Whatever tactics were used — the
F.B.I. would not comment — they worked. Mr. Ulbricht was administering Silk
Road when he was grabbed, the bureau said in a criminal complaint, and working
under an alias, Dread Pirate Roberts, the name of a swashbuckling character
from the novel and film “The Princess Bride.”
The government later released
screen photographs showing that Mr. Ulbricht was logged into a page titled
“mastermind.” According to the government, operational files were found,
including ledgers that tallied personal revenue of 600,000 Bitcoins, the
crypto-currency used for every Silk Road transaction, a stash that, at the
time, was worth $80 million.
A criminal complaint laid out the
charges, which included narcotics trafficking, computer hacking and money
laundering. An indictment in a parallel but separate investigation, run out of
Baltimore, included this startling detail: Some of Dread Pirate Roberts’s booty
was spent to commission killings — six killings in total, to be done by hit men
whose targets were deemed by Dread Pirate Roberts to threaten Silk Road.
None of the orders resulted in
actual deaths, the authorities said. One, in fact, was an elaborate fiction
concocted by a federal agent posing as a drug dealer. In a scene that sounds as
if it were lifted from “Breaking Bad,” federal agents traveled to Utah to fake
a beating and execution, sending the evidently grisly photographs to D.P.R., as
the government calls him in its complaint.
“What’s done is done,” D.P.R. would
later write to the putative dealer.
News of Mr. Ulbricht’s arrest, and
the particulars of the crimes with which he was charged, elicited the
inevitable chorus of “They’ve got the wrong guy” from friends and relatives, an
almost clichéd feature of double-life cases. But this chorus was different.
Sure, Mr. Ulbricht took his share of drugs growing up in Austin, Tex. And a
high school buddy, Thomas Haney, said he could sort of imagine Ross buying
from Silk Road. But running it? Ordering killings? No way.
“It’d be like they accused my
mother of trying to kill someone,” said Mr. Haney, who now lives in Boise,
Idaho. “He’s one of the most guileless and nonaggressive people I’ve ever met.”
A man who shared a house with Mr.
Ulbricht in San Francisco for two months remembers how he rushed to help an
elderly homeless woman in a wheelchair. “We were standing outside a restaurant,
and he just handed me the leash to my dogs, ran into the street and said, ‘Can
I help you?’ ” said the man, who, like many people interviewed for this
article, spoke on the condition of anonymity because he did not want his name
in an article about this case. “And he didn’t wait for an answer.”
Far from the bloodless kingpin
portrayed by the government, Ross Ulbricht, by the accounts of friends and
relatives, was soulful and sensitive. In a conversation
with his childhood friend Rene Pinnell, recorded in 2012 through StoryCorps, a
national oral history project, and still posted on YouTube, Mr. Ulbricht said
that in college he initially refused to sleep with the woman he described as
his first love, for fear that he would wind up heartsick.
“We didn’t have sex for like three
months,” he said. “But we’d make out, and really, like, get close but never go
there. And when we finally did, it was amazing.”
It seems nearly impossible to
reconcile the government’s version of Mr. Ulbricht with the warm, compassionate
person that others describe. Which leaves at least three possibilities.
One, that the government has, in
fact, collared the wrong man.
Two, that Mr. Ulbricht is a
sociopath who concealed a dark side from everyone for years.
Three, that Mr. Ulbricht is Dread
Pirate Roberts — and that the two are not really that different.
A Trusted Emporium
By relying on Bitcoin and an
encrypted Internet network, Silk Road created an anonymous bazaar where drugs
could be bought from the comfort of home. No more drives to seedy parts of
town, no more face-to-face encounters with shady dealers. Instead, transactions
would be conducted through the mail, and, in what many academics regard as the
linchpin to the business-model innovation, Dread Pirate Roberts devised a
system to ensure that nobody got fleeced.
The site acted as an intermediary,
hosting the online market and holding money in escrow until buyers confirmed
that products had arrived. D.P.R. would then release the payment to the seller,
keeping 8 to 15 percent of the transaction.
“He had basically commoditized
security,” says Nicolas Christin, an assistant research professor at Carnegie
Mellon University who has studied Silk Road. “It was a system that allowed
people to buy drugs without fear that they would be ripped off.”
Within months of its start in
January 2011, the site was thriving. Sellers posted photographs and
descriptions of their products, like “10 x 10mg OxyContin” and “5G Pure Cocaine
Cristal.” A guide offered tips for newcomers. Vacuum-sealed packages were
recommended for anyone mailing narcotics to avoid detection by “canine or
electronic sniffers,” and post office boxes were urged for buyers. Reviews were
posted, just like on eBay.
“Perfect stealth and perfect dope
to match,” gushed a customer of a merchant known as “gotsitall,” who sold what
was billed as high-quality heroin. “Got product in less than 24 hours! Thanks
again.”
A small staff was hired to respond
to users and settle disputes. These employees, none of whom knew the identity
of Dread Pirate Roberts, were paid between $1,000 and $2,000 a week in
Bitcoins.
By June 2011, the site was
attracting enough buzz to merit a post on Gawker, which called it “the
underground website where you can buy any drug imaginable.” Soon, Senators
Charles E. Schumer of New York and Joe Manchin III of West Virginia were
demanding that the Justice Department close Silk Road. But the site had only
begun to catch on. An inventory taken by the F.B.I. one day last September
found 13,000 listings for controlled substances, in categories that included
opioids, psychedelics and ecstasy. A “services” section with 159 offerings
included a tutorial on hacking automated teller machines. More than 800
listings offered “digital goods,” such as hacked Netflix accounts, and 169
listings in “forgeries,” including driver’s licenses and car insurance records.
Anyone with minimal computer
literacy could access this superstore of criminal mischief. Users needed only
to install software for Tor, a network that hides I.P. addresses and bundles
communications in layers of encryption. Type in Silk Road’s ungainly address,
silkroadvb5piz3r.onion, and you entered the market. Acquire Bitcoins, through
exchanges such as Mt.Gox, and you could start shopping.
‘Execute Rather Than Torture’
The system made D.P.R. a
cybermultimillionaire. But accumulating that wealth came with its share of
management migraines. One of the biggest involved an employee named Curtis
Clark Green, a burly man whose colorful past includes a stint as a semipro
poker player and charges of prescription fraud. From his home in Spanish Fork,
Utah, the government said, he sold drugs on Silk Road under the name
“chronicpain,” and eventually he built enough trust with D.P.R. to become one
of his lieutenants.
In early December 2012, D.P.R.
needed Mr. Green for a special task. A dealer who operated under the alias
“nob” had complained that Silk Road transactions were too small to be worth his
time. Mr. Green was to find someone willing to play in the same league.
“Hey, I think we have a buyer for
you,” D.P.R. subsequently wrote to nob. “One of my staff is sending details.”
Nob, however, was not a dealer. He
was a member of Operation Marco Polo, a task force based in Baltimore that was
named for the explorer who followed the Silk Road and that included agents from
the Drug Enforcement Administration and Homeland Security Investigations. (No
one from any of the investigating agencies would comment on the case.) When Mr.
Green helped nob arrange the sale of a kilogram of cocaine, in early 2012, he
did something that is hard to explain: he offered to act as a conduit and have
the cocaine sent to his house. Mr. Green was soon arrested. He was quickly
released and the kilogram was sent, as planned, to the buyer, presumably to
prevent D.P.R. from realizing that one of his underlings had been caught.
Dread Pirate Roberts did somehow
learn of the arrest, but he still didn’t realize he was communicating with a
federal agent who had arranged it. He was soon fuming to nob that Mr. Green had
absconded with Bitcoins, and D.P.R. asked for help.
“I’d like him beat up, then forced
to send the Bitcoins he stole back,” D.P.R. wrote. “Like sit him down at his
computer and make him do it.” Soon, D.P.R. had a change of heart. “Can you
change the order to execute rather than torture?” he asked nob, explaining,
“I’m afraid he’ll give up info.”
Nob told D.P.R. that he knew “pros”
who could get the job done. The cost was $40,000 in Bitcoins up front, and
$40,000 after the killing.
Dread Pirate Roberts agreed to the
price but wanted “proof of death,” asking nob to instruct the killers to send a
video, “and if they can’t do that, then pictures” of the deceased.
Only the broad outlines are known
of what must have been a highly cinematic dumb show of violence. What is clear
from the criminal complaint is that by Feb. 21, nob sent photos of Mr. Green
doing a fine impression of a corpse. Mr. Green had “died of asphyxiation/heart
rupture” while being tortured, nob explained. Dread Pirate Roberts replied that
he found the images disturbing, but that he did not have any other choice.
“I just wish more people had some
integrity,” D.P.R. wrote.
In the months that followed, D.P.R.
would pay a supposed hit man named “redandwhite” $150,000 in Bitcoins to whack
a blackmailer who was threatening to release the identities of Silk Road users,
and later a seller who appears to have scammed buyers en masse. When
redandwhite noted that the scammer lived with three roommates, D.P.R. was
persuaded to kill all four of them, at a cost of $500,000.
The government contends that the
whole enterprise was likely a swindle. Whether these targets were in cahoots
with redandwhite, or were the creation of redandwhite, is not clear. But
authorities in Canada, where all five killings were supposed to have taken
place, found no trace of crimes that matched redandwhite’s descriptions,
according to federal prosecutors.
Nonetheless, D.P.R.’s willingness
to underwrite killings would become an argument against bail, which was presented
in November by prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, where Ross
Ulbricht was transferred soon after his arrest. (The F.B.I. ran its case out of
Manhattan.) Today, Mr. Ulbricht awaits trial in the Metropolitan Detention
Center in Brooklyn.
The Forgiving Kind
Lyn Ulbricht, Mr. Ulbricht’s
mother, sat one recent morning in the downtown Manhattan office of her son’s
lawyer. She had flown in from Austin a few days earlier, to look for a place
where she and her husband could live to be close to their son.
“I can’t be somewhere else while
he’s in jail,” she said. “We want to visit him. We believe in him, so that’s
what we’re going to do.”
Ross Ulbricht grew up in a suburb
of Austin that his mother described as the poorest neighborhood in a good
school district. She and her husband, Kirk, earn most of their income renting
four beachside vacation houses they own in Costa Rica. Ross is remembered by
friends as bright, though not whiz-kid bright, part of a circle that mostly
avoided the football culture that dominated high school.
“He was outdoorsy,” said James
McFarland, who met Mr. Ulbricht in a physics class. “We played a lot of
ultimate Frisbee, hiking, swimming, that sort of thing.”
Mr. McFarland and others say he was
shy around girls, sweet-natured, loyal to friends and a fan of intense
philosophical conversations. He was also an unusual combination of rule
follower and rule breaker. He did a lot of drugs, as he explained in that
StoryCorps conversation, likening his intake to a guy who jumped into the deep
end of a pool and stayed underwater for as long as he could hold his breath. At
the same time, he collected enough merit badges to become that emblem of
teenage all-Americanness, an Eagle Scout.
By the time he went to the
University of Texas at Dallas, on a full academic scholarship, he was 6-foot-2,
a lean, good-looking guy who could have fronted an indie rock band. But he was
the opposite of a Lothario. He was vulnerable and eager to find a soul mate,
and fell hard for that college girlfriend. The two were engaged, according to
Thomas Haney, but it ended when Ross learned that she had cheated with one of
his closest buddies.
“I’d have killed the guy, but Ross
completely forgave him within a year of it happening,” Mr. Haney said. That was
Ross’s style, not just willing to forgive, but empathetic to the point of
mushy. At a bachelor party held in the woods two years ago for a friend named
Daniel, Mr. Haney said, everyone was sitting around, kind of stumped about what
to do.
“Then Ross pipes up,” Mr. Haney
said, “and he said, ‘Let’s go around in a circle and say why we love
Daniel.’ ”
After graduating in 2006 with a
degree in physics, Mr. Ulbricht headed to Penn State, where he earned a
master’s degree in material sciences and engineering. His thesis,
“Growth of EuO Thin Films by Molecular Beam Epitaxy,” is still available at the
school’s online archives.
He later returned to Austin and was
a co-founder of Good Wagon Books, which collected used books from around the
city and sold them online, donating 10 percent of profits to charities. But the
venture failed, and Mr. Ulbricht started what he described to acquaintances as
a hedge fund, trading stocks and currencies, including Bitcoin. Friends had the
impression that it was not going well, especially after other people started to
give him money to invest, which made him overly cautious.
At the invitation of Mr. Pinnell,
Mr. Ulbricht relocated to San Francisco in 2012. When Mr. Pinnell became
engaged, Mr. Ulbricht moved into a group house, where he told roommates that
his name was Joshua Terrey, according to an article in Forbes. In August, two months
before he was arrested, he abruptly left that house for another, without
explanation.
His new accommodations were hardly
those of a drug lord. He paid $1,100 a month for a 12-by-14-foot room, sharing
a house with three roommates. One of those roommates said that they knew him by
his real name and that he told them he earned a living by building and managing
websites.
Nothing about him seemed out of the
ordinary, until he was arrested. That day, his roommates returned to their
house to find a search warrant left by the F.B.I. on the coffee table in the
living room.
“The F.B.I. came back a bunch of
times and asked questions for hours,” the roommate said. “We were in shock. It
really was about a week before I felt normal.”
Nine Fake IDs
How did the F.B.I. connect Dread
Pirate Roberts to Ross Ulbricht? That is still a mystery. Mr. Ulbricht
certainly left more than a few digital crumbs, according to the government’s
complaint and a variety of online rubberneckers who followed the case. The
first mention of Silk Road online, in January 2011, by someone called “altoid,”
was followed a few months later by a user with the same alias on a Bitcoin Talk
forum. This person was searching for an I.T. pro for hire. Applicants were
asked to email “rossulbricht at gmail dot com.”
But this was only enough to make
Mr. Ulbricht a person of interest. In July 2013, Customs and Border Protection
intercepted a package from Canada bound for his address. The package contained nine fake IDs, each bearing a photograph of
Mr. Ulbricht and a different name, with addresses in a variety of states and
countries.
On July 26, agents of Homeland
Security Investigations knocked on the door of Mr. Ulbricht’s group house.
“Josh,” as he then was calling himself, refused to answer most of the agents’
questions, the government would say later.
Though Mr. Ulbricht did not take
the opportunity to skedaddle, he apparently had considered it. The government
would say later that his laptop contained a filled-out application for
“economic citizenship” in Dominica, a Caribbean island. The price was a
one-time donation of $75,000 to the country’s government.
The crucial breakthrough in the
case occurred a few weeks after that fake ID package was intercepted. The
F.B.I. located and copied the contents of Silk Road’s main servers, the
computers that powered the site’s operations and stored its data.
It is here that the government’s
otherwise detailed account gets fuzzy. The F.B.I. has stated only that the main
server was found in “a certain foreign country,” one that has a mutual legal
assistance treaty with the United States. Through the treaty, the F.B.I. was
given a copy of the server — a “mirror” of it, in tech terms — on July 23. The
site continued to operate, so D.P.R. would not be spooked.
Most grasped that he’d long been a
searcher, a restless mind rummaging around for a philosophy. For years, he was
fascinated by Eastern mysticism, and briefly was an advocate of the Landmark
Forum, a three-day seminar intended to give participants “the power to make
what you’re committed to into a reality,” as the company’s website says.
