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Reckoning with Ross

I’d like to take you on a journey this week, about the story of Ross Ulbricht and how I’ve followed its ups and downs over the years. Ulbricht created the online black-market bazaar Silk Road in 2011, where Bitcoin could buy you drugs, fake ids and other illicit stuff. Ulbricht also arranged for competitors to be murdered, which we’ll get to in a sec. He got busted hard and was serving a double life sentence plus forty years without the possibility of parole. Then on the second day of the Abomination2.0 administration, Ulbricht received an unconditional pardon.

When Silk Road was shut down in 2013 I wasn’t paying attention to crypto yet, I was more focused on the aftermath of the financial crisis while a reporter at Bloomberg News. But then I read a story in Wired that blew me away, “The Rise & Fall of Silk Road.” It’s incredibly well-written, vivid and full of the level of detail sure to arouse any reporter. Second, and related to the first point, Joshuah Bearman achieves that level of detail by having spoken to everyone involved in the story, and I mean everyone. He read journals and transcripts, watched video, he’s seen it all. And thirdly, the story did a masterful job of using Ulbricht’s own words to convict him.

There has been a lot of confusion and possibly willful ignorance on the part of people who have advocated for Ulbricht’s release over the years. The murder-for-hire plots Ulbricht paid for are disturbing. The way Bearman described them stayed with me for years. And, ultimately, they are very damning as to what the Silk Road mastermind was willing to do to protect his empire.

So this is a tough character flaw to abstract away, right? I don’t know about you, but I’ve been in some tough work situations and not once did I resort to murder for hire.

After believing he’d successfully paid $80,000 to have one of his employees killed, Ulbricht, who used the moniker Dread Pirate Roberts as his Silk Road persona, was in the market for more. As Wired reported,

Then it quotes this chat,

As it turns out, no one on Ross’s shit list was actually killed, which is sometimes used to dismiss what he was trying to do. One of the hits didn’t happen because Ulbricht unknowingly hired the undercover DEA agent who was chasing to him to carry out the killing. Whoops.

I’ve thought about this a lot over the past few weeks since the pardon, and I often side with the opinion that Ulbricht’s sentence was too harsh. Why no chance of parole? And two lifetimes, really? I wish Silk Road had only been a way for adults to get the drugs they were choosing to use. I don’t have a problem with that. But I can’t get behind the guy when he’s hiring assassins to protect his business, like a blockchain don. I mean, fuck, Ulbricht listed that the guy he wanted killed had a wife and three kids.

The murder-for-hire allegations weren’t part of Ulbricht’s trial – prosecutors didn’t include them in the charges – so I understand the argument from Ulbricht’s defenders that the allegations were never proven. Part of the reason prosecutors dropped the charges was because two federal agents – Carl Force and Shaun Bridges – were later convicted of fraud, money laundering and stealing Bitcoin during their time investigating Silk Road and Ulbricht. The U.S. Court of Appeals touched on the choice to leave out charges for the planned hits in its decision to uphold Ulbricht’s sentence:

What I’ve found most disturbing in the last several years is how Ulbricht’s defenders have forgotten or dismissed the actions of the man they’re backing. Simply because the murder for hire charges were never introduced at trial doesn’t mean Ulbricht didn’t think he was paying to kill people. No one that I’ve seen is saying the chat transcripts, the journal entries, the journalism or the conversations with undercover federal agents are fake. This is not hearsay; I’d bet the feds knew they had Ulbricht nailed on serious drug and money laundering charges and didn’t need to try him for the alleged attempted assassinations.  

And they’re not even any good at it. The FreeRoss.org web site has been the focal point of getting Ulbricht sprung, and it lays out many reasons why it feels Ross should be free. Like, let’s look at the page titled “Smeared With False Allegations of Murder-for-Hire.” It says the unproven allegations were used to smear him in the press, deny him bail and led to his harsh sentence. Then it goes on, “At his bail hearing in NYC, prosecutors alleged that Ross planned murder-for-hire on six people he had never met and claimed that he was too dangerous to be granted bail. Yet, when Ross was indicted a few months later in early 2014, the allegations were absent from the indictment” (emphasis added).

So I go to read the indictment, using the link the FreeRoss web site provides, and in the fourth paragraph you get this, Ulbricht “pursued violent means, including soliciting the murder-for-hire of several individuals he believed posed a threat to that enterprise.” I went and googled the indictment and got the same document as the link, because I was like, really? Can this be right?

On page 5 the indictment says, “the defendant, in connection with operating the Silk Road web site, solicited a Silk Road employee to execute a murder-for-hire of another Silk Road user, who was threatening to release the identities of thousands of users of the site.”

There is a strong bond between Ulbricht and early adopter libertarians, which is why he’s lionized in crypto circles. He gave Bitcoin an early and obvious use and helped set the first cryptocurrency on a path where it’s now trading around $100,000.

Crypto is all in for Ulbricht, no matter the unresolved murdery stuff, and as I believe libertarians to be a bit naïve, it doesn’t surprise me too much. I only wish the record was straight on what happened during the downfall of Silk Road and Ulbricht’s responsibility for it. And I wish the crypto world cared a bit more about who it gets into bed with.  — Matthew Leising, editor in chief, Decential Media

Have you read the definitive history of Ethereum? No? Well then get your copy of Out of the Ether while you can.