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Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff You Should Know, all about the dark web and all of the crazy, crazy drugs and hitmen you can buy on it.
Sorry, I was still doing my vocal warm ups.
I didn't know that that helps.
What does that help?
20 dwarves took turns doing pushups on the lawn.
I'm ready. OK, good.
Well, so welcome to the podcast, everybody.
I figured it should start warming up, you know, 17 years into this.
18? How long? You think so?
Yeah, 16 ish. A little over 16.
Coming up on 17, Chuck.
Just wait till you hear the way my lips move in this episode.
They're so loose. So did you loosen your lips up just specifically because the content of this episode is so thrilling?
Oh, I thought you were going to say something about sinking ships.
No, I didn't. But this is a good one.
This, if everyone heard our episode on the dark web from 2020, some of this will be familiar, but this is just more in depth about the notorious Silk Road itself.
Yeah, for sure. Yeah, and we were talking about Silk Road.
For those of you history buffs, Middle Eastern history buffs who are disappointed, sorry, but you should stick around because this is going to be a pretty interesting episode.
I didn't think about that.
When are they going to talk about cinnamon?
We did a whole episode on cinnamon, so relax there, guy.
So, you know, we're talking about what is widely considered because I think it is the world's first illicit marketplace on the internet that was opened in 2011, shut down in 2013, it had a very, very brief run.
It was like the Beatles of illicit drug trading websites.
And its legend will live on for basically forever because not only was it just the most audacious thing anyone had ever done on the internet as far as anyone knew up to that point, it created a blueprint for a bunch of imitators to come and also just the way everything that law enforcement threw at this case
and the court case as well was just so nuts that it's just a heck of a story.
How about that, Brownie?
That's great. Boy, there were 15 filthy jokes I was going to say when you said the most outrageous thing anyone done on the internet up until that point.
I was like, I had a rolling Terminator like scroll about all the early internet nasty memes that would go around.
You couldn't pick any of them?
No, I just didn't want to say any of them out loud because then kids would look them up.
I gotcha. Yeah, I was wondering, and we probably should have talked about this before we recorded, are we going to like call out any active sites or anything like that?
Nah. OK, because I know some, I looked them up.
Hey, just text us to me, it's fine.
OK, so let's start from the start, right?
We're going to start with a guy named Ross Ulbricht, and the reason we're introducing him early on is because he is the mastermind behind Silk Road.
It was his idea. He built it originally.
He ran the thing by hand, almost single handedly for a very long time.
And you just really can't talk about Silk Road without him because his personality was so wrapped up into the ethos of the site that you can't really extract one from the other.
Despite the fact that while he was sitting in federal court, he really wished that they would extract one from the other.
Yeah, big thanks to Kyle.
First of all, our friend and contributing writer from across the pond for his work on this.
But Kyle was keen to point out just a little bit about the Dark Web.
You know, we have a whole episode from 2020 if you want to go listen to that.
But if you don't know what the dark web is, it's a part of the web where you can go and do things anonymously.
And that's just the simplest way to say it.
It's much more complicated than that, obviously, if we did a whole episode.
But it's where you can go if you don't want to be indexed by Google, if you don't want your traffic monitored and if you want your anonymity insured.
Doesn't necessarily mean you're some awful person doing awful things.
There's a lot of people there that just believe in the freedom and anonymity that you should have on the Internet.
Yeah, also, yes, for sure.
Some people are just like there's no reason for you to be invading my privacy while I'm reading The Guardian or something like that, right?
Yeah, just to sell me stuff.
Exactly. That's part of it for sure, too.
And then also, other people are like they have they might be whistleblowers and they have information that they could very easily get them thrown in prison.
But that's really important to get out to the public.
There's sites like ProPublica and other journalists that have dark web sites to where you can submit information and even ProPublica doesn't know who you are.
And with Silk Road specifically, there were three things that came together that made Silk Road exist.
And without any of them, I don't think it would have ever existed.
One was who I already introduced, Ross Ulbrich.
The second is Tor, the Tor network, which basically when you go onto the dark web using Tor, the first thing it does is route you through three different random servers and each one encrypts your information and gives you a new IP address.
So no one can figure out who you are, including the websites you visit.
And then the third thing is Bitcoin.
There's just no way you could have made transactions on drug deals over the Internet without untraceable currency that doesn't involve like a central bank or some other third party like that.
Yeah, for sure. And, you know, Bitcoin was huge because it was they were good for each other.
Like Ross Ulbrich sort of embraced Bitcoin in a big way, which even though it was on the dark web and even though Silk Road was, you know, as you'll soon learn, dabbling in illegal drug trading, they use Bitcoin exclusively.
So the rise of Bitcoin and the rise of, you know, things on the dark web kind of go hand in hand.
Yes. For sure. And this is also a time where like the early 2010s, this was in like disruptive technology was just coming out left and right from Silicon Valley.
Whereas like, well, say goodbye to newspapers.
Say goodbye to printed books.
Say goodbye to music.
And I mean, it did have disruptive effects.
But as we've seen, it still kind of mellows out.
It's not like the original thing just totally goes away.
But this was that same time.
So a lot of people have likened Ross Ulbrich to basically a darker version, if there is such a thing, of some of those Silicon Valley bros who started up a lot of those disruptive tech companies.
Yeah. And you know what, I think we need to add a force on our Silk Road Mountain Rushmore because we have to mention Adrian Chen, who in 2011, when the Silk Road went live, wrote for Gawker and wrote this big expose on the Silk Road just a few months later, including like how to get there, what you can do
there. And it would have been a thing anyway.
But the fact that it was kind of exploded on Gawker made it bigger quicker than it would have been, I think.
Right. And that also brought it to the attention of the authorities pretty quickly.
Chuck Schumer. Yeah, Chuckie.
He basically came out against it first, I think.
So now the Senate was against it.
He said it was a certifiable one -stop shop for illegal drugs that represents the most brazen attempt to peddle drugs online that we have ever seen.
And they all went, Yeah, exactly.
You nailed it. Yeah.
Right. And so because of that Tor network and because of just the anonymity of Bitcoin and the fact that people were drug dealers and drug users engaging in illicit crime over the Internet, like there was a sense like it doesn't matter.
Like the government can't find any of these people.
If they do, it's just random luck, like say, intercepting a drug shipment in the mail.
But if you're really trying to track somebody down who's a user of Silk Road, you're just not going to be able to do it.
There's just a sense of security and safety that people had when they were using it, including Ross Ulbricht.
Yeah. And they also were pretty smart early on, I guess, Ulbricht was, by making it a familiar online shopping experience.
I mean, I never saw it.
I think I've managed to find some screenshots and stuff.
But it supposedly looked and operated much like any other e -retailer.
You would go on there and you would have your little shopping basket and you would have your items that you could, you know, are all categorized and listed that you could sip through and you could look at customer reviews.
And, you know, I'm sure there were bad deals that went down, but supposedly it was it worked because the people selling the drugs believe that you should really sell the thing that you're trying to sell and you'll stay in business.
Right. Just like if you're a like you have terrible customer service and you're selling like widgets.
Sure. I was thinking like some sort of sewn strawberry potholder or something in the shape of a strawberry so much better than a widget.
But you tell all of your customers who say like it's the stitching is coming loose that they can go to hell and die.
Yeah. You're going to get a bad rating and people are going to stop buying from you, especially if there's other people selling sewn strawberry potholders.
Right. Same thing. If you're selling drugs on Silk Road, there were a ton of people selling pot and acid and ecstasy and heroin and cocaine that like you just didn't have to rely on just one dealer.
So the dealers were competing with one another and to compete, they just tried to keep their user rating up as best as possible.
And that kept them honest.
It's just nuts like this whole thing on on in theory should have collapsed on day one.
It just should never have worked out because it was just based on so many faulty assumptions that just happen to come together and support the site until the feds shut it down.
Yeah. They had a seller's guide where if you're going to sell your drugs, they would say, hey, here's how to do that.
Here's how you can ship drugs through the mail pretty safely.
Vacuum sealing and all kinds of tips and tricks.
And not that many packages supposedly were intercepted, a very small percentage of them.
But you mentioned some of the things in your I thought you were singing that Queens of the Stone Age song there for a second.
Which one? When you heard that one song that was I thought it was not so great.
Cocaine and ecstasy and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And they were just like rattling off drugs or whatever.
That doesn't sound very great.
No, it wasn't one of their best songs.
I was into them for a minute.
I like that one hit song of theirs.
It's really good. No one knows, maybe.
Yes. Yeah. The one that I didn't know.
It's a good song. Yeah.
So you could buy anything you want and it wasn't just like, hey, here's some cocaine.
If you're interested in this upper, it was very, very specific stuff, like a very specific strain of Colombian cocaine or a very specific strain of heroin, tar heroin that you could find.
If you've ever been to a legal cannabis shop in any of the states that allow that here in the U .S., it was sort of like that.
You know, you get very detailed descriptions of stuff.
And you know, you could have a customer service representative help you find what you wanted.
And it was like, if you were into that kind of thing, it was probably pretty great for you and probably much safer than going to some drug dealer's house, maybe?
I don't know. That's a big deal.
So one of the things that was touted by supporters of Ross Ulbricht and Silk Road was that it was a site for harm reduction.
Yeah. That it was so vastly safer than buying drugs on the street, often from some rando you don't even know, or at a club or something like that.
Oh yeah, that's dangerous.
It just, yeah, that it was actually providing a service that actually made the world safer.
It didn't fly very well as we'll see, but that was a big talking point for them.
Yeah. And I don't want anyone to misinterpret that I'm saying that, like, hey, you should just be able to buy drugs in the mail and it's totally safe and you should trust that.
But they seem to be setting up a situation where they were trying to ensure that.
There was a lot of trust between buyers, sellers, everybody.
Like a situation like this doesn't happen if there's not trust between all the participating parties.
Precisely. Yeah, for sure.
Yeah, it's just crazy to me that it ever worked.
Should we take a break?
Yeah, let's take a break and we'll come back and talk about some of the nuts and bolts of the whole thing.
We'll be right back.
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AT &T. So you've mentioned this guy, Ross Ulbrecht, the founder and creator.
We need to talk a little bit about this dude.
He went by the alias Dread Pirate Roberts, even though later in his defense, there would be it would be brought up that there were like many Dread Pirate Roberts over the years and that he he sold it at one point and wasn't even involved anymore.
It's if you follow the court case, it gets really, really in the weeds.
Yeah. His quote in court was, do you not know the Dread Pirate Roberts reference?
Yeah. They were like, why would you name yourself that?
Right. And he said, have you never seen The Princess Bride?
Yes. And for the people who haven't seen The Princess Bride, number one, go see The Princess Bride and number two, Dread Pirate Roberts was the name of a well, a pirate who was essentially like a character that different people over the years and generations inhabited.
So say Dread Pirate Roberts was 200 years old because he was made of successive pirates who wore that mask and used that name.
Yeah, for sure. So Ulbrecht had a very, very smart guy as a very smart guy.
He had a Bachelor of Science and Physics, got his Master's in Material Science and Engineering and was in Austin, Texas in 2009 when he tried a few different initial companies.
Basically, he had a video game company, tried.
He found the most success with a second handbook retailer called Good Wagon Books where he kind of learned how to do web development and inventory management and e -retailing, kind of a starter kit for what he would need to start Silk Road.
But it still wasn't making the kind of dough he wanted to make.
I think they were pulling in maybe low six figures in a year.
Yeah. Yeah. And he had like five employees sorting like 50 ,000 books and they were selling them on Amazon like you do, like you can buy used books on Amazon.
That's just what they did.
But his heart wasn't in it and after the shelves that he had built in this warehouse to hold the books all collapsed, he was like, I'm not going to pick those up.
I'm just going to set this warehouse on fire and walk away.
That's really funny.
That sounds like something I would do.
I would do the same thing.
I wouldn't set it on fire and walk away but I'd just walk away.
So one of the other reasons he was keen to walk away is he'd been already thinking about Silk Road for close to a year by now.
Yeah. And one of the things that really kind of spurred his interest in creating something like an online illicit drug sale website is that he became interested in libertarian theory, specifically libertarian economic theory, which is basically that if you don't have economic freedom in particular,
you're going to be a slave to the grind.
They've got you essentially.
And that you can either get rich and remove yourself from that game or that rat race, or you can try to change the rules of the game and make it much more fair and equitable and get rid of coercion and all that stuff.
And it's all based on the libertarian philosophy of self ownership, which essentially explains itself.
Yeah, he, um, I don't know.
Explain it. Oh, well, you own yourself.
So any kind of laws or prohibitions of anything that say you do to yourself, say taking drugs is just completely outrageous and immoral and is, is illegitimate.
Okay. So, so drug laws specifically are illegitimate and, um, terrible to libertarians because you're taking the drugs for yourself and that's your choice.
Right. It's personal choice.
So that really kind of explains a lot.
Why he was like an illicit drug website.
It was a thumb in the eye to the, to the drug laws that, that he and other libertarians feel were illegitimate.
All right. I'm glad I asked.
Yeah, I'm glad you asked too, because I really wanted to get that off my chest.
So Silkroad grew, uh, he started, it was not just a one person operation.
It was too big for that.
So he needed some employees.
Uh, these people all went by these kind of fun little nicknames, uh, including Variety Jones and, uh, Ennego.
Oh, also from a princess bride.
Didn't notice that.
Uh, Libertas, Smed, uh, and then another one, uh, chronic pain, one word, uh, the first C is capitalized and that person's name was Curtis Green.
And he was the first person that would be arrested, uh, in the Silkroad operation.
And so you'll just sort of put a pin in that guy.
Yeah, for sure. Um, so the, the, he gets the website launched in 2011, around the beginning of 2011 and to get things kicked off, he started growing, um, psilocybin mushrooms so that there was something somebody was selling on Silkroad.
And, um, pretty soon other people were like, wait, this is, you're really doing this like this is for real.
I want it. I want to make money selling drugs online.
And it just kind of took off from there.
Again, without cryptocurrency, there just wouldn't have been a silk road.
And this is actually pointed to by some people as like, um, an early proving ground that showed like, yep, Bitcoin works.
It does exactly what, what it says it can do and it could completely revolutionize global, the global economy.
Um, this was the first chance for it to really kind of show it stuff.
And it really did because it worked.
And one of the other reasons it worked too is because Ross Olbricht was honest, he hand, um, I guess hand transacted every transaction between seller and buyer on the site for a while.
And at that point he would hold the money in escrow and then when the whole thing was, when the deal was done and everybody was satisfied, he would release the money to the, to the seller.
At any point in that string, he could have been like, thanks for the money chumps, thanks for the money chumps, thanks for the money chumps, and just taken off with the Bitcoin.
And he didn't and that the reputation that that helped give that site was another reason it started to grow and flourish.
Yeah, for sure. So as the site is, you know, kind of, uh, going along and it's making all kinds of money and getting more and more popular or as popular as something is on the dark web, uh, he started getting a little more political, um, under his, his moniker, uh, DPR dread pirate Robert started making
these big statements about, uh, just sort of his philosophies about politics.
Uh, he would say things like stop funding, uh, the state with your tax dollars and direct your productive energies into the black market.
Uh, so it started sort of bordering on manifesto kind of stuff.
Uh, I think they would have shut it down anyway, just because they were dealing in illegal drugs.
But the U S government definitely hates it when they don't like the word manifesto.
So I think, I think all this other political stuff definitely drew even more attention and ire maybe than it would have.
Yeah. No, I think so.
Like I said, it was a thumb in the eye and I think it kind of felt like that to the, the government and the powers that be, right?
Yeah. He thought, he kind of thought, and he kind of was leading a revolution in a lot of ways because as we'll see later on, um, a lot of more sites like this were born in its wake.
So, um, it's interesting to see too, uh, the evolution, um, of him going from a libertarian idealist to what the feds eventually described as like the kingpin of a global drug cartel.
Yeah. Really overblown as we'll see.
Um, but in the beginning, he, um, even as a libertarian said, don't, there's limits here, like this is not just a free for all.
You can't have, um, child pornography.
You can't try to sell weapons of mass destruction.
You can't offer hit man services, sell soul stolen credit cards or personal information like you just can't do that.
And if you scam anybody, we're going to boot you off the site and we're going to hunt you down and sick dogs on you or something like that.
He said, basic rules are to treat others as you would wish to be treated and don't do anything to hurt or scam someone else.
So that was like the whole idea.
And then the fact that his, um, moniker was dread pirate Roberts and everybody loves, like there's no one who's seen the princess bride and doesn't love it.
Prove me wrong. I will prove you wrong.
Um, so all of that kind of combined almost a cult of personality grew up around dread pirate Roberts and attracted more and more people to silk road.
And like, I think I get the impression like you were, like you felt cool to be a user of silk road.
Yeah. Uh, like he created a kinder, gentler drug trade in a lot of ways.
Yeah. Um, if you're wondering like, yeah, but this guy could get shut down in a lot of ways that don't have anything to do with the government, uh, like a denial of service attack or something like that.
Uh, supposedly, uh, he was paying a lot of money, um, for protection for this kind of thing, uh, maybe up to $50 ,000 a week, a wire did a really great, and I remember reading this back then.
I didn't go back into it, but, um, a big two part report on this and, uh, they, they had it up to 50 grand per weekend and protection, but considering they ended up making about a billion dollars over what, two years or so, uh, that's, you know, uh, pennies in the fountain.
Yeah, for sure. Um, but protection is in quotes.
Like that was from the very hackers who were like, we're going to shut your site down if you don't get any other protection.
Exactly. We're not going to wreck your store for sure.
Yeah. So yeah, he would get blackmailed all the time.
People were trying to shut down the site.
Like it was a, like criminals were attracted to Silk Road and there's plenty of criminals who, um, they're like speculators.
So blackmailers are, you know, they're not actually doing anything productive.
They're just making money off somebody else's, um, work.
Right. Um, so yeah.
Kind of attracted that stuff.
So in addition to dealing with all of that, he was dealing with customer service.
He was trying to keep the site running something to know about Ross Olberc too, he was a self -taught coder.
So he was teaching himself how to keep this massive website going as he went along and, um, keeping himself totally anonymous to everybody, including all of the people who he worked with who were de facto employees, basically.
So it was a lot of stress after a little while.
And besides the drugs, he also had a team of, uh, crocheters making those strawberry oven mitts.
Lots to keep up with.
For sure. So, um, how did it all go bad?
Um, well, it's because again, the government was very, very keen on getting this thing shut down as fast as they could.
But like you mentioned earlier, the very way this thing was built made it really, really hard, um, almost said impossible, but clearly not, uh, but really, really hard to find out any real information about who these people were, where they were, where those, their computers were.
Um, so the FBI got involved initially in, um, trying to take down, uh, Tor, the, um, the, it was called Operation Onion Peeler and I'm pretty sure we talked about that in the dark web app.
Um, but they, uh, in 2013, there was an agent named Chris Tarbell, uh, that identified, uh, secret server at, uh, a data center, a Tor data center in Iceland.
And this is really what got the ball rolling.
So this is the, um, the official line of the FBI, the way that they finally discovered, um, the actual IP address of Silk Road was that Tarbell was sitting there, um, analyzing the traffic, uh, going to and from the site, um, while he was like sending in bad information at it, like bad passwords and stuff
like that. And then tracking what IP addresses came back and then he copied the IP addresses and he put them into a browser URL and do that over and over again.
And eventually he struck gold and stumbled onto, um, the real IP address of Silk Road, which was then traceable to that server data center in Iceland.
And from there, they then had a copy of the Silk Road website, including all administration access and privileges.
And they started to set up their case from that point on.
That's right. That was the FBI's line.
Uh, if that seems a little hard to believe that they would just sort of get lucky.
You're not the only person who thinks that, uh, none other than, oh, geez, is he Bill and Ted, Bill, Bill Alex winner from Bill & Ted's, uh, excellent adventure and don't forget, he was a, he was a vampire and lost boys too.
Yeah. Good point. Uh, he made a film called deep web that, geez, was that out this year?
I think so. Or last year, very recent.
Yeah. Pretty recent film.
I think 24. Uh, where he, you know, he doesn't, he didn't like create this contention, but he, um, basically brought to light like, Hey, a lot of people say that.
No, no, no, that's not how you found out.
What you did was trampled on old bricks, fourth amendment rights, and that you hacked Silk Road.
Um, you didn't have a warrant to do so.
And you had some sort of, you know, mass scanning, uh, going on on the internet, um, for passwords.
And you lied about all of this.
The, the idea is that the NSA was involved helping in this investigation using their crazy, terrible, um, powers to basically find passwords to that site.
And they used it to hack in and the there, well, you'd be like, okay, whatever they're trying to take on the site.
It's the FBI. Well, the gist of that is, is that they did that first, then got the evidence that they then went and got a search warrant for it, and then everything started to get legitimate from that point on.
So that's the contention about his fourth amendment rights to, um, against search, illegal search and seizure were violated.
And if it's all just sounds like weird and screwy because it's online, it would be no different than if they, uh, like broke into someone's house, took some evidence and then said, now that we have the evidence, we're going to get a search warrant to go illegally back into that house.
Right. Yeah. And, um, you mentioned Tarbell.
He was an FBI agent.
He and the FBI were just one of multiple agencies from Department of Homeland Security to the DEA, to the IRS, all working like each one had a task force trying to take down this website, competing with one another in a lot of cases to take down this website and catch this big fish that Chuck Schumer
didn't like, um, and like finally Tarbell was the one who gets the credit.
Not just for finding the actual IP address and then the server for Silk Road and all of the evidence that that yielded, but he was there on the day and helped orchestrate this guy was a cyber crime FBI agent.
So again, this is the official line and it's very thrilling in the Wired article, uh, how they describe it, but he helped orchestrate or oversaw, um, the actual arrest of Ross Ulbricht, which in and of itself was just fantastically amazing.
For sure. Um, all right.
So the FBI gets that copy of the, the server contents from Iceland.
Uh, they look at all the traffic and they found traffic to the administrators log in and then narrowed that down to the most recent traffic was in San Francisco at a place called cafe Luna on Sacramento street.
Uh, they did some more investigation, uh, through the IRS, uh, chipping in this time, like you said, so many agencies involved and they matched, um, the San Francisco lead.
So they are like, this is all lining up.
You guys, uh, there was an IRS agent named Gary Alford who saw a post, uh, about Silk Road on forms in I think a couple of years, 2011 and 2013 from a username Altoid and the email, uh, in the post history said, Ross Ulbricht at gmail .com.
They found out that he lived near that cafe and all roads, all of a sudden we're pointing to Ross Ulbricht.
And then supposedly one, the really damning piece of evidence was that that user Altoid quickly changed their username to Frosty and Frosty was the, the main user account that ran Silk road.
Yeah. That, that was the name of the main, um, central user account, right?
So like all of these things just falling into place.
It was just almost, almost too good to believe.
And then it went down like a movie.
Uh, and you know what, maybe that's a great time for a little cliffhanger, huh?
All right. We're going to see what movie we're talking about right after this.
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Chuck. I'm going to guess the movie is old yeller.
Is it. Am I right? You nailed it.
Okay. Poor old yeller.
I hate how this goes.
I was going to spoil old yeller, but I decided not to watch it.
That dog may live. You never know.
Good for you for not spoiling a 60 year old film.
Yeah. In a book, I think two, right?
Yes. Uh, although there was a sequel, it wasn't very well received.
Old yeller. Do really.
It turns out the little kid missed the first time he didn't this in the second film.
And now he'll hold you close back for revenge.
Yeah. Uh, write that down.
That's a good one. So, um, okay.
What, what movie are we talking about then?
How about what type of movie are we talking about?
Well, we're talking about a probably some sort of a courtroom thriller, uh, because what happened was they went to a library.
And literally, and this is what the prosecution said, literally caught him with his fingers at the keyboard running silk road.
Um, they were in the library.
They had a, uh, an agent, uh, you know, chatting with him and obviously surreptitiously undercover.
And while this was happening, they drew his attention away by starting a little like a quarrel among some other people, also, you know, FBI actors or whatever.
And there was a woman, another FBI agent sitting across from Ulbricht at the time.
When this happened and Ulbricht turns around, I was like, what's going on over there, she grabs that laptop.
And because he could probably in a, in a single swipe of a keystroke or something, like encrypt everything on his laptop.
If he saw somebody coming at him.
So they, they knew that could happen.
They diverted his attention just long enough for this, uh, agent to grab his computer and that was it.
And boy, oh boy, did they find some just damning evidence.
It turns out Ross Ulbricht kept a diary of his, um, like ideas and, and growth and like, um, administration and all the problems he had to deal with for Silk Road.
Those are found on his, chronic pain really hurt my feelings today.
Uh, those were found on his laptop.
Um, logs of chat logs that he had between him and other administrators about running the site.
Um, the, he was logged in as the main user, Frosty, the person who was actually running the show, uh, when they stole it or grabbed his lapbook, no stole it.
Uh, he had spreadsheets like tracking Silk Road.
I mean, if a prosecutor could be like, I want this, this, this and this for evidence, it couldn't get any better than, than what they found on Ross Ulbricht's laptop.
Yeah. What would you, so they also traced about $80 million in profit to him.
This is a dumb question that I'm just now thinking of, but what did he just take a cut from every transaction?
Was it that simple?
Yes. Okay. That's what I figured.
I just didn't know for sure.
And I think it was a reasonable cut.
Um, I don't think it was some massive take or anything like that.
And he would only, he would just transfer it like once a week.
Uh, like his, his accumulated cuts from that week, he was very honest.
In that sense, so he would get his, his small percentage, uh, a bottle of delotted and a strawberry oven mitt for every transaction, every Saturday night.
So we mentioned earlier that, uh, as part of his defense, they were like, you know what, he may have started silk road, but he sold it and there were many dread pirate Roberts and one of the other ones framed him, uh, all, all of this stuff was just a small part of his defense.
Uh, it was not an easy sell.
Um, it did not work.
He was convicted for creating an operating silk road and got five sentences.
Got a 20 year sentence, uh, a 15 year sentence, a five year sentence, two life sentences with no chance of parole.
And the, uh, the judge said it was your Opus.
You wanted it to be your legacy and it is.
Yeah. The judge mentioned harming the fabric of, it was very destructive to the fabric of society.
And when your judge is pulling out fabric of society in your sentencing, you're in big trouble.
And so he was effectively handed a death sentence.
Like you're, you don't outlive a sentence like that.
Um, and it was just totally out of proportion to the charges he was facing.
Like conspiracy to commit like drug trafficking and fraud and just, I mean, it was some hardcore offenses, but non -violent offenses.
And he was given the kind of sentence that you would give like a multiple killer or a mass killer or something like that.
Right. And the reason why is because he was, there was evidence found of five to six murder for hire schemes that he had ordered or agreed to as dread pirate Roberts to, um, kill like a blackmailer, a witness, some other people.
And even though he was never charged, um, in federal court for this, even though, um, they couldn't prove any of those cases and the, the, um, prosecutors in this case even said to the jury, like, we're not saying like we're, this is not part of his, his, um, his charges.
We're not prosecuting him for that.
But seriously, let me, let me, let us just tell you about that.
And so they're like, they, they, the, he was tainted by the media.
He had a bad reputation from that point on, because that's totally different from setting up a libertarian illicit drug marketplace.
Now you're ordering hits on people to keep your drug enterprise going.
That is a whole different kettle of fish in the public's mind.
Um, so his, his reputation was smeared from the outset.
The jury was tainted with this information and the, the idea, oh, and the judge referenced it in, in, um, explaining why the sentence was so harsh.
And so all of that is generally considered illegal, like in, in illegitimate.
And he tried to appeal all the way to the Supreme Court.
They wouldn't hear it.
And that was that. So his last chance is some president coming along at some point and saying like, you know what, you're not so bad.
Uh, presto chango you're no longer a felon.
He was actually, uh, would, would likely have been indicted for a murder conspiracy in Maryland.
Uh, it was dropped because he w he got convicted, you know, for whatever life and beyond it was dropped because he was, you know, convicted on the other charges for, you know, a gazillion years or whatever, with no chance of parole.
Um, but it was a pretty interesting situation with, uh, what ended up being a, uh, corrupt DEA agent and a secret service agent and a, in a sting operation, basically, right?
Yeah. One of the guys who was really pursuing him from the outset was a guy named Carl Force, a DEA agent and posed.
He posed as a gangster named Knob, who basically became a confidant of Dread Pirate Roberts, and it went so far out of undercover that he became a criminal himself.
He, um, posed as another user to sell, um, tips and stuff about the investigation against Silk Road to Dread Pirate Roberts for like a hundred grand.
He stole 350 grand in Bitcoin, which was one of the reasons why Dread Pirate Roberts ordered a hit on one of the people because he thought that other person had stolen it.
This guy was dirty as the day is long.
And, um, they say in part because a lot of the charges, including that extra murder for hire that was in Maryland was arranged by this crooked DEA agent.
They're like, we're not, we're not even going to try this one.
Yeah, I guess there's no point at that point.
Uh, especially cause it's not like it was carried out if there was like a, you know, if it had been carried out and there was a murder victim or something like that, they probably would have, but, um, yeah, there were never any, just to be clear, you know, no murder for hires ever took place, but it
was just the hint that that was going on really influenced the, the judge and the sentencing and everything.
Um, he was, uh, I believe in Alex Winters documentary, he points out that a lot of the people that were also brought to trial for this, uh, got very, including some of the drug sellers, uh, people that that ran silk road 2 .0 after this.
They got sentences of like six years on average.
And so there's been a lot of calls for clemency that it was, you know, it was too stiff of a sentence.
Yeah. And they were clearly, I think the judge also referenced like this is a huge, like everybody's watching this case.
Everybody's following this, you know?
Um, and I want to send a message to anybody who would follow in your footsteps that we're going to basically give you a death sentence.
If you, if you try it, they just didn't follow through on that, which makes his sentence all the more unfair.
Yeah. Like had they handed down sentences similar to his for people, you know, sets, like setting up illicit drug marketplaces, there's some sort of like legitimacy to it just because of the precedent and then the custom that developed just doing that to one person and then not following up, you, that's
just, that's just wholly unfair.
And again, possibly a violation of a Sixth Amendment rights to a fair trial.
Yeah. I mean, the idea may have been to send a message like, Hey, this will never be tolerated.
Uh, this is the first example of this and we're going to throw, you know, 10 books at them, uh, but it, you know, it didn't stop anything.
Uh, like I just mentioned, there was a silk road 2 .0, um, that was closed in 2014, along with 26 other sites, uh, doing similar things.
So Silk Road definitely opened that whole door and it's, it's, I don't know if they can shut them down as fast as they can be born at this point, probably.
It seems like the kind of thing like, um, mushrooms just cropping up like you pluck one and two more in its place, essentially, like there's just nothing.
I mean, it's not just American kids doing this.
They're like the Russians are like, I'm sure the North Koreans are doing it like everybody's doing it.
Like you just can't, it's impossible to stop now.
So much so that almost makes you wonder if somebody else would have come up with this concept head first, you know?
Yeah, yeah. I'm, I'm sure someone would come along.
Um, there's a free Ross .org website, which his supporters created, uh, that's still around, um, and if you're asking like, well, wait a minute, how can everybody support him if he's ordered like five or six murders for hire, their position is that like, that was the other dread pirate Roberts who set
him up, whoever that was that Ross Ulbrich did not order those hits that he's a good guy, humane guy would never do something like that.
Um, but he's still in prison.
I saw a tweet from him.
I don't remember when, but he was saying, uh, the thing he misses the most is not being able to see the night sky anymore, which is somehow like the saddest thing you could say as a prisoner.
Um, but yeah, there's a lot of people out there who are like, that kid is never getting out.
He just put such a thumb in the eye of the U S government and law enforcement that I don't know, I don't know if he'll ever get clemency.
Yeah. The night sky thing is definitely better than saying Olive Garden.
Get more sympathy. I don't know, man.
Never ending breadsticks.
That's true. I think that, uh, Oh, nevermind.
Okay. Um, let's go get some breadsticks after this.
Okay. Oh, that'd be great.
Oh boy. Remember that time we went to red lobster.
And, uh, and silver spring.
And I had never really eaten there much.
And that was one of your like special things as a kid, right.
Eating those, uh, cheddar biscuits or whatever.
Yeah. Kid and adult.
I love those things.
Yes. I introduce you to him is what you're saying, right?
I think so. I think I may have had one when I was a kid, but we just didn't go out to eat a whole lot and red lobster was like far fancier than we could even afford on special occasions.
So, uh, yeah. You always make me feel so bad about my upbringing, which was not wealthy or well to do in the shape of silver spoons.
Are you kidding me?
That's silver spoons.
Red lobster. Yeah. No, that's fine.
Red lobster was a very, or I imagine is a very doable fancy dinner.
Uh, we just didn't go out to eat much.
Don't feel bad. Yeah.
I think the fancy part also is really largely marketing, Chuck.
I think when you see the actual product in front of you, it's not, not super fancy.
Yeah. Although did you hear, I think they filed bankruptcy because of endless shrimp.
It was a disaster. Can you imagine that's like, that's like an onion headline.
Yeah. I've read quite a bit about that for some reason, because it was just so interesting to me.
And it's sad, you know, it's an American icon.
Yeah. Who knew? Uh, well, since we talked about red lobster, of course, that triggered listener mail, everybody.
Uh, I'm going to call this the stuff you should know bump.
Uh, Hey guys, longtime listener, first time caller, love the show.
Uh, I'm curious if you've ever tracked the stuff you should know bump.
Does it even exist?
I know that every time you mentioned a documentary, uh, with more info or something like that, my wife and I ended up coming through our streaming services to find it and learn more.
Uh, most recently we watched tread after the kill dozer episode.
Now I'm teeing up American anarchist, uh, after swatches.
Uh, he said, oh, wait, I may have mixed that up with the anarchist cookbook episode.
And by the way, everyone, we forgot to mention the swatch guards.
I feel so bad about that.
We heard from a lot of people on that.
Oh, yeah. I forgot all about that.
I totally forgot about swatch cards.
Yeah. Anyway, swatch guards are little rubber things that went over the, the glass, not the bezel, I was wrong about that.
The bezel is the ring that holds the glass.
So, man, I understood it before, but not now.
You know, you look at a watch face and I said, I think I said the glass was a bezel.
I just misspoke. The bezel is the ring that holds that glass in place.
Okay. I think I got it that second time around.
Yeah. Uh, all right.
Back to the email. Anyway, guys, it made me think that other viewers like me, if there were other viewers like me, there could be a noticeable bump in views or listens every time a documentary or song or something gets mentioned, uh, creating your own version of the Colbert bump.
Uh, we need statistics.
We're getting meta and do a SYSK episode about the STSK bump.
I think you just, uh, gooped up on that last part.
That's Andy from Baltimore.
Andy, we don't have data on this, but, uh, we definitely had people.
Send in, I can't remember what song it was that you referenced, but, uh, it ended up like ranking in Spotify or something.
And, and we liked to think that was because of us.
Well, we know it was because remember we conducted an experiment and talked about Barry Manilow, I think even now in Black Sabbath, some more pigs showed up in the top 10 Spotify searches.
That's right. Uh, so Hey, I guess we should plug silver spoons then the Josh Clark life story and we'll see if that gets a bump on wherever that's streaming.
Uh, speaking of bumps and plugs, there is, uh, one other podcast I'd like to, to, uh, plug Chuck, you know, our friend and colleague, Daniel White son from Daniel and Jorge explained the universe podcast.
Oh yeah. So, um, the, their podcast just came to an end, but, uh, ever the productive person, Daniel came up with another one that just launched called Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary universe.
He said new podcasts, same universe.
So if you're into all the stuff that is very interesting, like space and time and aliens and black holes and philosophy, and just the whole coolness of the universe we live in, then go check out Daniel and Kelly's extraordinary universe podcast for recommendation.
It sounds great. Good people.
Well, if you want to be like, who was that?
That sent us the STSK.
Amy from Baltimore.
All right. If you want to be like Andy from Baltimore and get in touch with us, then we would love to hear from you.
You can wrap it up, spank it on the bottom and send it off to stuff podcast at I heart radio .com.
Stuff. You should know is a production of I heart radio for more podcasts.
My heart radio visit the heart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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