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

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

by Nick Bilton

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Crime & Justice

A San Francisco library, 2013, and the FBI finally has the man behind the Silk Road. Nick Bilton traces how it got there from 2011, when 26-year-old libertarian programmer Ross Ulbricht launched a dark-web market he imagined as proof that legal drugs would mean less violence.

Core ideas
  • Dread Pirate Roberts: Under that alias, Ulbricht ran a Tor site selling drugs, hacking tools and forged documents for bitcoin, and came to solicit murders for hire.
  • Rival hunters: The DEA, the FBI and other agencies spent about two years chasing a billion-dollar operation, often competing rather than cooperating.
  • Agents gone bad: Some of the federal agents on the case were later convicted of corruption, including siphoning off Ulbricht's bitcoin, and he was sentenced to life.
Published2017
Pages328
ISBN9781591848141
ReadDec 2022

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