Ross William Ulbricht (born March 27, 1984) is an American serving life imprisonment for creating and operating the darknet market website Silk Road from 2011 until his arrest in 2013. The site operated as a hidden service on the

Tor network Tor, short for The Onion Router, is free and open-source software for enabling anonymous communication. It directs Internet traffic through a free, worldwide, volunteer overlay network, consisting of more than seven thousand relays, to conc ...

and facilitated the sale of narcotics and other illegal products and services. Ulbricht ran the site under the pseudonym "

Dread Pirate Roberts The Dread Pirate Roberts is the identity assumed by several fictional characters in the novel ''The Princess Bride'' (1973) and its 1987 film adaptation. Various pirates (including Westley, the main protagonist) take on the role of Roberts and us ...

", after the fictional character from ''

The Princess Bride The Princess Bride may refer to: * ''The Princess Bride'' (novel), 1973 fantasy romance novel by American writer William Goldman William Goldman (August 12, 1931 – November 16, 2018) was an American novelist, playwright, and screenwriter. He ...

.'' In 2013, the

Federal Bureau of Investigation The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is the domestic intelligence and security service of the United States and its principal federal law enforcement agency. Operating under the jurisdiction of the United States Department of Justice, ...

(FBI) arrested Ulbricht and Silk Road was taken offline. In 2015, he was convicted of engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, distributing narcotics, distributing narcotics by means of the internet, conspiracy to distribute narcotics, conspiracy to commit money laundering, conspiracy to traffic fraudulent identity documents, and conspiracy to commit

computer hacking A hacker is a person skilled in information technology who uses their technical knowledge to achieve a goal or overcome an obstacle, within a computerized system by non-standard means. Though the term ''hacker'' has become associated in popu ...

. He was sentenced to a double

life sentence Life imprisonment is any sentence of imprisonment for a crime under which convicted people are to remain in prison for the rest of their natural lives or indefinitely until pardoned, paroled, or otherwise commuted to a fixed term. Crimes fo ...

plus 40 years without the possibility of parole. Ulbricht's appeals to the

U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit The United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit (in case citations, 2d Cir.) is one of the thirteen United States Courts of Appeals. Its territory comprises the states of Connecticut, New York and Vermont. The court has appellate juri ...

in 2017 and the

U.S. Supreme Court The Supreme Court of the United States (SCOTUS) is the highest court in the federal judiciary of the United States. It has ultimate appellate jurisdiction over all U.S. federal court cases, and over state court cases that involve a point o ...

in 2018 were unsuccessful. He is incarcerated at the United States Penitentiary in Tucson.

Early life and education

Ulbricht grew up in

Austin, Texas Austin is the capital city of the U.S. state of Texas, as well as the seat and largest city of Travis County, with portions extending into Hays and Williamson counties. Incorporated on December 27, 1839, it is the 11th-most-populous city ...

. He was a Boy Scout, attaining the rank of

Eagle Scout Eagle Scout is the highest achievement or rank attainable in the Scouts BSA program of the Boy Scouts of America (BSA). Since its inception in 1911, only four percent of Scouts have earned this rank after a lengthy review process. The Eagle S ...

.Segal, David.
Eagle Scout. Idealist. Drug Trafficker?
" ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...

''. January 18, 2014. Retrieved on June 10, 2015. He attended West Ridge Middle School and Westlake High School, both near Austin, graduating from high school in 2002.Man with Austin ties charged with running vast underground drugs website

Archive
. '' Austin American-Statesman''. October 2, 2013. Retrieved on June 14, 2015. Ulbricht attended the

University of Texas at Dallas The University of Texas at Dallas (UTD or UT Dallas) is a public research university in Richardson, Texas. It is one of the largest public universities in the Dallas area and the northernmost institution of the University of Texas system. It w ...

on a full academic scholarship, and graduated in 2006 with a bachelor's degree in physics. He then attended Pennsylvania State University, where he was in a master's degree program in materials science and engineering and studied crystallography. By the time Ulbricht graduated, he had become interested in libertarian economic theory; he adhered to the political philosophy of

Ludwig von Mises Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises (; 29 September 1881 – 10 October 1973) was an Austrian School economist, historian, logician, and Sociology, sociologist. Mises wrote and lectured extensively on the societal contributions of classical liberali ...

, supported Ron Paul, promoted agorism, and participated in college debates to discuss his economic views.Dewey, Caitlin.
Everything we know about Ross Ulbricht, the outdoorsy libertarian behind Silk Road
". ''

Washington Post ''The Washington Post'' (also known as the ''Post'' and, informally, ''WaPo'') is an American daily newspaper published in Washington, D.C. It is the most widely circulated newspaper within the Washington metropolitan area and has a large na ...

''. October 3, 2013. Retrieved on June 15, 2015. Ulbricht graduated from Penn State in 2009 and returned to Austin. He tried

day trading Day trading is a form of speculation in securities in which a trader buys and sells a financial instrument within the same trading day, so that all positions are closed before the market closes for the trading day to avoid unmanageable risks a ...

and started a video game company; both ventures failed. He eventually partnered with his friend Donny Palmertree to help build an online used book seller, Good Wagon Books.

Silk Road

Creation and operation of Silk Road

Palmertree, cofounder of Good Wagon Books, eventually moved to

Dallas Dallas () is the List of municipalities in Texas, third largest city in Texas and the largest city in the Dallas–Fort Worth metroplex, the List of metropolitan statistical areas, fourth-largest metropolitan area in the United States at 7.5 ...

, leaving Ulbricht to run the bookseller by himself. Around this time, Ulbricht began planning Silk Road (initially called Underground Brokers). In his personal diary, he outlined his idea for a website "where people could buy anything anonymously, with no trail whatsoever that could lead back to them." Ulbricht's ex-girlfriend said, "I remember when he had the idea ... He said something about ... the Silk Road in Asia ... and what a big network it was ... And that's what he wanted to create, so he thought it was the perfect name." Ulbricht alluded to Silk Road on his public

LinkedIn LinkedIn () is an American business and employment-oriented online service that operates via websites and mobile apps. Launched on May 5, 2003, the platform is primarily used for professional networking and career development, and allows job se ...

page, where he discussed his wish to "use economic theory as a means to abolish the use of coercion and aggression amongst mankind" and claimed, "I am creating an economic simulation to give people a first-hand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force." Silk Road ran as an onion service on the

, which implements data encryption and routes traffic through intermediary servers to anonymize the source and destination

Internet Protocol address An Internet Protocol address (IP address) is a numerical label such as that is connected to a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication.. Updated by . An IP address serves two main functions: network interface ident ...

es. By hosting his market as a Tor site, Ulbricht could conceal the server's IP address and thus its location. Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency, was used for transactions on the site. While all bitcoin transactions were recorded in a public ledger called the blockchain, users who avoided linking their legal names to their

cryptocurrency wallet A cryptocurrency wallet is a device, physical medium, program or a service which stores the public and/or private keys for cryptocurrency transactions. In addition to this basic function of storing the keys, a cryptocurrency wallet more often al ...

s were able to conduct transactions with considerable anonymity. Ulbricht used the "Dread Pirate Roberts" username for Silk Road, although it is disputed whether only he used that account. He attributed his inspiration for creating the Silk Road marketplace to the novel ''

Alongside Night ''Alongside Night'' is a dystopian novel by science fiction writer J. Neil Schulman intended to articulate the principles of Agorism, a political philosophy created by Samuel Edward Konkin III, to whom Schulman dedicated the work. It was first ...

'' and the works of

Samuel Edward Konkin III Samuel Edward Konkin III (8 July 1947 – 23 February 2004), also known as SEK3, was an American libertarian philosopher and Austrian school economist. As the author of the publication '' New Libertarian Manifesto'', he was a proponent of a polit ...

Arrest

Law enforcement broke Silk Road's cover in a number of ways. A drug agency investigator infiltrated the site and became an admin, thereby gaining inside information about the site operations, and finding Ulbricht's chats use to be Pacific time, narrowing down his likely locatio

Law enforcement seized a Silk Road server in Iceland and gained a trove of chat logs, further enriching their knowledg

Ulbricht was connected to "Dread Pirate Roberts" by Gary Alford, an Internal Revenue Service investigator working with the U.S.

Drug Enforcement Administration The Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA; ) is a United States federal law enforcement agency under the U.S. Department of Justice tasked with combating drug trafficking and distribution within the U.S. It is the lead agency for domestic en ...

on the Silk Road case, in mid-2013. The connection was made by linking the username "altoid", used during Silk Road's early days to announce the website, and a forum post in which Ulbricht, posting under the nickname "altoid", asked for programming help and gave his email address, which contained his full name. In October 2013, the

arrested Ulbricht at the Glen Park branch of the

San Francisco Public Library The San Francisco Public Library is the public library system of the city and county of San Francisco. The Main Library is located at Civic Center, at 100 Larkin Street. The library system has won several awards, such as '' Library Journals ...

and accused him of being the "mastermind" behind the site. To prevent Ulbricht from

encrypting In cryptography, encryption is the process of Code, encoding information. This process converts the original representation of the information, known as plaintext, into an alternative form known as ciphertext. Ideally, only authorized parties can ...

or deleting files on the laptop he was using to run the site as he was arrested, two agents pretended to be quarreling lovers. When they had sufficiently distracted him, according to Joshuah Bearman of ''

Wired ''Wired'' (stylized as ''WIRED'') is a monthly American magazine, published in print and online editions, that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics. Owned by Condé Nast, it is headquartered in San ...

'', they quickly moved in to arrest him while a third agent grabbed the laptop and handed it to agent Thomas Kiernan. Kiernan then inserted a flash drive into one of the laptop's USB ports, with software that copied key files. Ulbricht was ordered held without bail.

Trial

On February 4, 2014, Ulbricht was charged with engaging in a continuing criminal enterprise, narcotics conspiracy, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and conspiracy to commit

. On August 21, 2014, a superseding indictment added three additional charges. On February 4, 2015, Ulbricht was convicted on all counts after a jury trial that had taken place in January 2015. On May 29, 2015, he was sentenced to double life imprisonment plus 40 years, without the possibility of parole. Ulbricht was also ordered to pay approximately $183 million in restitution, based on the total sales of illegal drugs and counterfeit IDs through Silk Road.

Murder-for-hire allegations

Federal prosecutors alleged that Ulbricht had paid $730,000 in

murder-for-hire Contract killing is a form of murder or assassination in which one party hires another party to kill a targeted person or persons. It involves an illegal agreement which includes some form of payment, monetary or otherwise. Either party may be ...

deals targeting at least five people, allegedly because they threatened to reveal the Silk Road enterprise.Alan Klasfeld
Silk Road Murder Threat Shown as Case Nears End
,

Courthouse News Service Courthouse News Service is a news service primarily focusing on civil litigation. Its core audience is lawyers and law firms, who subscribe to the service;Courthouse News Service v. Schaefer', Civil Action No. 2:18-cv-39 (E.D. Va. February 20, ...

(January 29, 2015): "Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht is not charged with murder for hire in his New York trial, but federal prosecutors have long accused him of hiring a hit-man to kill those who threatened his underground online drug empire. Minutes before the second week of Ulbricht's trial ended on Thursday, a jury saw email records supporting this allegation." Prosecutors believe no contracted killing actually occurred. Ulbricht was not charged in his trial in New York federal court with murder for hire, but evidence was introduced at trial supporting the allegations. The district court found by a

preponderance of the evidence In a legal dispute, one party has the burden of proof to show that they are correct, while the other party had no such burden and is presumed to be correct. The burden of proof requires a party to produce evidence to establish the truth of facts ...

that Ulbricht did commission the murders. The evidence that Ulbricht had commissioned murders was considered by the judge in sentencing Ulbricht to life, and was a factor in the Second Circuit's decision to affirm the sentence. Ulbricht was separately indicted in federal court in Maryland on a single murder-for-hire charge, alleging that he contracted to kill one of his employees (a former Silk Road moderator). Prosecutors moved to drop this indictment after his New York conviction and sentence became final.

Attempts to reverse the trial outcome

Appeal

Ulbricht appealed his conviction and sentence to the

in January 2016, claiming that the prosecution illegally withheld evidence of DEA agents' malfeasance in the investigation of Silk Road, of which two agents were convicted. Ulbricht also argued his sentence was too harsh.

Oral argument Oral arguments are spoken presentations to a judge or appellate court by a lawyer (or parties when representing themselves) of the legal reasons why they should prevail. Oral argument at the appellate level accompanies written briefs, which also a ...

s were heard in October 2016,
United States v. Ulbricht
'', 858 F.3d 71 (2d. Cir. 2017) and the Second Circuit issued its decision in May 2017, upholding Ulbricht's conviction and sentence in an opinion by Judge Gerard E. Lynch. In a 139-page opinion,Cassye M. Cole & Harry Sandick
A Long Journey Through "Silk Road" Appeal: Second Circuit Affirms Conviction and Life Sentence of Silk Road Mastermind
, Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler LLP, ''Lexology'' (June 8, 2017): "At trial, the government presented evidence that Ulbricht conspired to engage in multiple murders for hire to protect Silk Road's anonymity. Ulbricht was not charged with these offenses. ... At sentencing, in its Pre-Sentence Investigation Report, the U.S. Probation Office referenced the five commissioned murders, as well as six drug-related deaths connected with Silk Road. On May 29, 2015, the district court sentenced Ulbricht to life in prison, pursuant to the guidelines advisory sentence range, and based on the recommendation of the U.S. Probation Office. ... While the Court recognized that a life sentence for selling drugs was rare and could be considered harsh, the facts of this case involved much more than routine drug dealings—namely that Ulbricht commissioned at least five murders for hire and did not challenge those murders on appeal." the court affirmed the district court's denial of Ulbricht's

motion to suppress Suppression of evidence is a term used in the United States legal system to describe the lawful or unlawful act of preventing evidence from being shown in a trial. This could happen for several reasons. For example, if a judge believes that the ...

certain evidence, affirmed the district court's decisions on discovery and the admission of expert testimony, and rejected Ulbricht's argument that a life sentence was procedurally or substantively unreasonable. In December 2017, Ulbricht filed a petition for a ''certiorari'' with the United States Supreme Court, asking the Court to hear his appeal on evidentiary and sentencing issues. Ulbricht's petition asked whether the warrantless seizure of an individual's internet traffic information, without probable cause, violated the Fourth Amendment, and whether the Sixth Amendment permits judges to find facts necessary to support an otherwise unreasonable sentence. Twenty-one amici filed five '' amicus curiae'' briefs in support of Ulbricht, including the

National Lawyers Guild The National Lawyers Guild (NLG) is a progressive public interest association of lawyers, law students, paralegals, jailhouse lawyers, law collective members, and other activist legal workers, in the United States. The group was founded in 19 ...

, American Black Cross,

Reason Foundation The Reason Foundation is an American libertarian think tank that was founded in 1978. The foundation publishes the magazine ''Reason''. Based in Los Angeles, California, it is a nonprofit, tax-exempt organization. According to its web site, the f ...

Drug Policy Alliance The Drug Policy Alliance (DPA) is a New York City–based nonprofit organization that seeks to advance policies that “reduce the harms of both drug use and drug prohibition, and to promote the sovereignty of individuals over their minds and b ...

, and

Downsize DC Foundation The Downsize DC Foundation, formerly known as the American Liberty Foundation, is a policy advocacy organization which aims to limit the size of government in the United States through awareness and petitioning. Though it claims to be non-partisan ...

. The U.S. government filed a response in opposition to Ulbricht's petition. On June 28, 2018, the Supreme Court denied the petition, declining to consider Ulbricht's appeal.

Motion to vacate or reduce the sentence

In 2019, Ulbricht attempted to vacate his life sentence based on a claim of

ineffective assistance of counsel In United States law, ineffective assistance of counsel (IAC) is a claim raised by a convicted criminal defendant asserting that the defendant's legal counsel performed so ineffectively that it deprived the defendant of the constitutional right gua ...

by his defense lawyers. This attempt was initially rejected in August 2019 due to a procedural error, but the motion was refiled. The motion was denied in June 2022. In a 2020 '' Vanity Fair'' article,

Nick Bilton Nick Bilton is a British-American journalist, author, and filmmaker. He is currently a special correspondent at ''Vanity Fair''. Life and career Bilton was born in Darlington, UK, and grew up in Leeds. He attended Marjory Stoneman Douglas H ...

wrote that, according to investigators and attorneys involved in the case, Ulbricht had been offered a plea deal that would likely have given him a 10-year sentence, but turned it down. In response to the article, assistant U.S. Attorney Timothy Howard, who was co-responsible for prosecuting the case, testified that no such plea offer existed. He further testified that the only plea offer had been made before Ulbricht's indictment. The plea offer had required Ulbricht to plead guilty to charges "carrying a mandatory minimum sentence of ten years and a maximum sentence of life imprisonment, with a recommended United States Sentencing Guidelines range of life imprisonment".

After the conviction

Incarceration

During his trial, Ulbricht was incarcerated at the

Metropolitan Correctional Center, New York The Metropolitan Correctional Center, New York (MCC New York) is a United States federal administrative detention facility in the Civic Center of Lower Manhattan, New York City, located on Park Row behind the Thurgood Marshall United State ...

. Starting in July 2017, he was held at

USP Florence High The United States Penitentiary, Florence High (USP Florence High) is a high-security United States federal prison for male inmates in Colorado. It is operated by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, a division of the United States United States Departm ...

. His mother, Lyn, moved to Colorado so she could visit him regularly. Ulbricht has since been transferred to USP Tucson.

Restitution paid from seized assets

In 2021, Ulbricht's prosecutors and defense agreed that Ulbricht would relinquish any ownership of a newly discovered fund of 50,676 Bitcoin (worth nearly $3.4 billion in 2021) seized from a hacker in November 2021. The Bitcoins had been stolen from Silk Road in 2013. Ulbricht had been unsuccessful in getting them back. The U.S. government traced and seized the stolen bitcoin. Ulbricht and the government agreed the fund would be used to pay off Ulbricht's $183 million debt in his criminal case, while the Department of Justice would take custody of the bitcoins.

Documentaries and films

''Deep Web'' is a 2015 documentary film chronicling events surrounding Silk Road, bitcoin, and the politics of the dark web, including Ulbricht's trial. ''Silk Road—Drugs, Death and the Dark Web'' is a documentary covering the FBI operation to track down Ulbricht and close Silk Road. The documentary was shown on UK television in 2017 in the BBC ''Storyville'' documentary series. The film '' Silk Road'' was released on February 19, 2021. Directed by Tiller Russell, it follows Ulbricht's creation of the website and the FBI and DEA investigations. Ulbricht is portrayed by American actor Nick Robinson.

NFT sale

Ulbricht's family raised money for efforts to release him from jail via the decentralized autonomous organization ''FreeRossDAO'', which accepted donations from the public. In December 2021 the family auctioned a collection of his writings and artwork as an NFT, which FreeRossDAO bought for 1,442

Ethereum Ethereum is a decentralized, open-source blockchain with smart contract functionality. Ether (Abbreviation: ETH; sign: Ξ) is the native cryptocurrency of the platform. Among cryptocurrencies, ether is second only to bitcoin in market capita ...

, about $6.27 million at the time.