The criminal case against Ross W. Ulbricht, the man who federal prosecutors contend is the mastermind behind the notorious Silk Road online marketplace for illegal drugs and hacked credit card numbers, began quietly with an indictment filed in a Maryland courthouse against an unidentified individual five months before the authorities made an arrest.
Last May, federal prosecutors in Maryland indicted a man known only at the time by his Silk Road pseudonym, Dread Pirate Roberts, in a suspected murder-for-hire plot. Prosecutors charged that the Silk Road owner hired an undercover federal agent posing as a seller of drugs on the website to kill an employee.
The “John Doe†indictment was sealed by a United States magistrate judge because prosecutors were worried that the operator of the Silk Road website would destroy evidence or flee if he became aware of the pending criminal charges against him. Prosecutors asked the judge to keep the indictment secret until the man known as Dread Pirate Roberts was arrested and no longer at large.
That original three-count indictment was unsealed recently by the United States attorney for Maryland, Rod Rosenstein, whose office filed a superseding indictment against Mr. Ulbricht that identified him by name on Oct. 1, the day the F.B.I. arrested him at a library in San Francisco. The court filing fills in some of the gaps in the timeline of the federal government’s undercover investigation, which lasted more than a year. F.B.I. agents tracked the computer servers that ran Silk Road’s website to locations in Iceland and a small town in eastern Pennsylvania.
The unsealed indictment reveals that while federal prosecutors did not know Mr. Ulbricht’s identity, they did know the name of the Silk Road employee they say he wanted dead â€" Curtis Clark Green, who reached a plea bargain with Maryland prosecutors in September and is cooperating with the investigation. In the court filing, Mr. Curtis, who apparently did not know the identity of his boss, was identified by his initials “CCG†and described as a resident of Spanish Fork, Utah.
The unsuccessful murder-for-hire plot is one of the half-dozen criminal charges against Mr. Ulbricht, 29, whom prosecutors in New York have also indicted on charges of money laundering and narcotics trafficking. Mr. Ulbricht, who has pleaded not guilty and is scheduled to go on trial in November in New York, is being held in custody without bail.
Mr. Ulbricht’s case has garnered more attention than the average drug-trafficking case, not only because of the sensational nature of the murder-for-hire plot but also because Silk Road accepted only Bitcoin as payment and operated in the hidden corners of the Internet accessible only through a special software system. Mr. Ulbricht’s lawyer, Joshua Dratel, has insisted his client is not Dread Pirate Roberts.
Some Bitcoin proponents are following Mr. Ulbricht’s case closely out of fear that it will taint the digital currency as primarily a vehicle for criminals to engage in illegal activity on the Internet with a high degree of anonymity.
Five months after Mr. Ulbricht’s arrest, it remains a mystery just how the F.B.I. and other law enforcement officials working on the investigation were able to unmask him as Dread Pirate Roberts, a name taken from “The Princess Bride,†a novel a later a movie.
What is known is that in May, a few days after Maryland prosecutors indicted Dread Pirate Roberts, agents with the F.B.l. reached out to law enforcement officials in Iceland to try to track down one of Silk Road’s servers. Gunnar Runar Sveinbjornsson, an official with the police department in Reykjavik, said in an emailed statement that “the Icelandic police started assisting the F.B.I. with this matter during middle of May last year.†The federal authorities, in court filings, have not identified the country where the server was found but said the country’s authorities gave the F.B.I. an image of its contents in July.
Also in July, agents with the Department of Homeland Security visited Mr. Ulbricht at the San Francisco apartment he was in living in at the time after the government intercepted a package addressed to him that contained several fake ID documents that were purchased on Silk Road. The agents questioned him about the items, but he was not arrested.
The information on the server in Iceland, meanwhile, would lead authorities to seize information contained on a backup server operated by a company called JTAN.com, which is owned by a staff member in the electrical engineering department at Lafayette College in Easton, Pa. In September, a few weeks before Mr. Ulbricht’s arrest, federal authorities served a search warrant on JTAN, seeking access to all of Silk Road’s records.
The federal authorities said the servers provided a wealth of information about Mr. Ulbricht and the customers of Silk Road, which generated about $1.2 billion in sales during its two-year run and about $80 million in commissions for its owner and his team.
Still, the unsealed indictment does not disclose how the F.B.I. managed to find the first server in Iceland used by Silk Road, which employed an encrypted Internet network called Tor to remain hidden from general viewing. Perhaps that part of the story will come out in the next few weeks as prosecutors turn over to Mr. Dratel and Mr. Ulbricht the information they retrieved during the investigation.
