The Silk Road saga had a stunning coda in April, when two of the federal agents who investigated the site were charged with stealing from it as well.
One of those two agents has now reached a plea deal with prosecutors. Shaun Bridges, a computer expert for the US Secret Service, is accused of stealing $820,000 in bitcoins from various drug dealers on the site.
Australian Peter Nash, 42, pled guilty in a US District Court last week to charges of conspiracy to commit narcotics trafficking and money laundering. Both charges come from Nash's one-time role within the Silk Road online drug marketplace.
The most disturbing part of the Dread Pirate Roberts (DPR) story is also the strangest: how the boss of the Silk Road drugs marketplace attempted to arrange not one but six murders-for-hire.
As the the trial of alleged Silk Road mastermind Ross Ulbricht unfolds, its transcript has read like a manual of things not to do when running a secret, billion-dollar online drug conspiracy. But on Thursday, the jury heard about the most human of all the human errors Ulbricht may have made: confessing his creation to an in-real-life friend.
More people were using the mail to get high, and Jared Der-Yeghiayan knew it.
"We hadn't seen ecstasy being seized in letter-class like that in a long time," said the Homeland Security special agent. "Since I'd been at O'Hare."
Once they got the chance, it took prosecutors less than a minute to point the finger—literally—at Ross Ulbricht.
The jury of six men and six women were assembled in Manhattan's federal courthouse to hear a story about a "dark and secret part of the Internet," government lawyer Timothy Howard explained. The story was about "a website called Silk Road, where anybody, anywhere could buy and sell dangerous drugs with the click of a mouse."
In a development that those involved in the project clearly should have seen coming, the FBI today shut down Silk Road 2.0, the revival of the deep web black market site that the FBI took down in September 2013, and arrested its suspected operator exactly one year after it went live.
Ross Ulbricht, alleged creator of the online black market Silk Road, was indicted in New York Tuesday on narcotics, money laundering and so-called "kingpin" charges, and faces up to life in prison.
Authorities say Ulbricht created in 2011 the Silk Road, a site that was used to sell drugs including heroin and ecstasy, as well as hacking tools and other goods. He was arrested in October when federal agents picked him up in a San Francisco public library. Prosecutors say his pseudonyms included "Dread Pirate Roberts" and "DPR."
The United States police investigation into the Silk Road marketplace has seen a Brisbane man arrested by Australian Federal Police on allegations of violating American narcotics laws.
In the indictment filed at the New York southern district court, US authorities allege that 40-year-old Peter Philip Nash was the primary moderator on Silk Road discussion forums.
