Courtroom 15A was so full on the afternoon of May 29, 2015, that another spillover courtroom was set up with a live video feed of the proceedings. Metal detectors had been placed outside for added security after an online vigilante had published the judge’s personal information online, including her home address, together with a note that read: “Fuck this stupid bitch and I hope some drug cartel that lost a lot of money with the seizure of silk road will murder this lady and her entire family.”
The prosecution presented its argument for a sentence longer than twenty years. They had flown out the parents of some of the young teens and adults who had overdosed and died from drugs they had purchased on the Silk Road, including the mother of Preston Bridges, who wept as she told the story of the last time she ever saw her son, the night he went off to his Year 12 Ball in Perth, Australia.
The defense rebutted with “character witnesses” who had known Ross since he was a child, people who told stories of his altruism and his kindness. And then Ross stood up and spoke himself. “One of the things I have realized about the law is that the laws of nature are much like the laws of man. Gravity doesn’t care if you agree with it—if you jump off a cliff you are still going to get hurt.” He ended with a heartfelt apology.
“Thank you, Mr. Ulbricht,” the judge said as Ross returned to his seat. Judge Forrest then told the court that they would take a fifteen-minute break.
? ? ?
At first, as Judge Forrest started the delivery of Ross’s sentence, she was calm yet resolute. She explained that she wanted to walk Ross, and the rest of the courtroom, through the exhaustive thinking she had gone through to arrive at this sentence.
She began explaining that the site was clearly Ross’s creation and that it was not just an experiment, not a lightbulb moment, but something that had been planned for well over a year before it opened for business, that it was meant as an attack on the democracy of the country she had been appointed to protect. “You were captain of the ship, as the Dread Pirate Roberts, and you made your own laws and you enforced those laws in the manner that you saw fit,” she said to Ross as she glared at him. “It was, in fact, a carefully planned life’s work. It was your opus. You wanted it to be your legacy—and it is.”
The judge noted that the defense had presented research papers that argued that increased drug distribution could be morally better for society by reducing violence and encouraging the sale of better-quality and therefore safer drugs. By this Judge Forrest seemed incensed. It was as if Ross had been arguing that just because he had sold drugs from behind a computer, he was different.
“No drug dealer from the Bronx selling meth or heroin or crack has ever made these kinds of arguments to the Court,” Judge Forrest said. “It is a privileged argument. You are no better a person than any other drug dealer, and your education does not give you a special place of privilege in our criminal justice system.”
She talked about the collateral damage of drugs. Ross had argued that drug use takes place in a cocoon and doesn’t harm anyone but the person who takes the drugs. But in her eyes that was not the case. There are often ancillary people who are hurt as the result of dangerous substances that had been sold on the Silk Road, she said. People die. Junkies are created. There are social costs, and in many instances drug addicts lose their ability to care for their children and a generation can grow up neglected.
She addressed the murders, noting that, sure, no bodies had been found, but that in her mind that did not matter. “Did you commission a murder? Five? Yes,” she scolded. “Did you pay for it? Yes. Did you get photographs relating to what you thought was the result of that murder? Yes.”
As she came to a close, she looked at Ross and said, “What is clear is that people are very, very complex and you are one of them. There is good in you, Mr. Ulbricht, I have no doubt, but there is also bad, and what you did in connection with Silk Road was terribly destructive to our social fabric.”
The courtroom fell silent as Judge Forrest asked Ross to rise.
Thirty-year-old Ross stood and arched his neck upward as he looked at the judge, contemplating what she was about to say. His mother and father sat in the back of the courtroom watching Ross and the judge as she began to speak.
“Mr. Ulbricht, it is my judgment delivered here, now, on behalf of our country, that on counts two and four you are sentenced to a period of life imprisonment,” the judge declared. She then added another forty years to his sentence for the other counts. Ross stood there, unmoved by the words he was hearing. Behind him, in the benches of the courtroom, all that could be heard was the uninterrupted sound of cries. “In the federal system,” the judge continued, “there is no parole and you shall serve your life in prison.”
Chapter 71
THE PLURAL OF MONGOOSE
It was more than a year after the trial until the last employee was arrested for working on the Silk Road. And yet he was, without question, the site’s most influential. One of the highest-ranking advisers and one of the most prolific dealers, he went by the curious moniker “Variety Jones.”
For a while it seemed that Jones would actually get away. He had been holed up for more than two years in a small beach town in Thailand. He paid off some local cops, and whenever anyone started to come close, Jones was able to evade the authorities.
Jones had been sitting in a hotel room in Asia, watching the news, when he discovered that his friend and boss, the Dread Pirate Roberts, had been arrested. Well, you could knock me over with a feather! Jones thought at the time, seeing a picture of Ross Ulbricht on his television.
Like everyone associated with the site, VJ followed Ross’s trial religiously, getting to know more about the former Boy Scout and physicist he had advised and helped mold into the Dread Pirate Roberts. But unlike others, VJ got to see just how influential he had been to the site’s leader, as the diaries from Ross’s computer were presented as evidence in court. “This was the biggest and strongest willed character I had met through the site thus far,” Ross had written about his friend and consigliere, Variety Jones. “He has helped me better interact with the community around Silk Road, delivering proclamations, handling troublesome characters, running a sale, changing my name, devising rules, and on and on. . . . He’s been a real mentor.”
There was also another piece of evidence that was talked about in the trial: The Feds had found the folder on Ross’s laptop with the IDs of all of his employees, including a picture of a passport that belonged to a fifty-four-year-old Canadian man whose real name was Roger Thomas Clark. A man whom authorities soon discovered was hiding out in Asia.