July 27, 2026 • 58 mins
Is Bitcoin dangerous to America? In the third and final installment of Crypto, we follow the hunt for Silk Road’s captain Dread Pirate Roberts and dig deep into the murder-for-hire accusations against him.
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Speaker 1 (00:03):
This is Red Pilled America.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
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(00:32):
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Speaker 3 (00:50):
The first time I ever heard the word bitcoin was
back in twenty twelve when I was a federal prosecutor
at the US Department of Justice, previously on Red Pilled America,
and I heard the word bitcoin because I was asked
to prepare an investigation in a case against it and
to help shut it down.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
The product that would eventually make Silk Road and national
headline were the drugs.
Speaker 4 (01:14):
It's a certifiable one stop shop for illegal drugs that
represents the most brazen attempt the pedal drugs online that
we have ever seen.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Two separate federal task forces were formed to find the
mastermind behind silk Road.
Speaker 4 (01:28):
At the beginning of bigot mitcoin was totally an automates
and that here the government.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
The blockchain is basically one big banking statement for all
bitcoin transactions, and that history can be tracked and never
be changed. It's permanent. The silk Road administrator announced his
new name as dread Pirate.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
Roberts, and just like that, DPR ordered and paid for
the assassination of a total of six people that were
threatening his Silk Road empire. One of the primary reasons
people think bitcoin is dangerous to America is because our
leaders claim it's nothing but a tool for criminals.
Speaker 5 (02:06):
Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin have been exploited to support billions
of dollars of illicit activity like cybercrime, tax evasion, extortion, ransomware,
illicit drugs, human trafficking. Many players have attempted to use
(02:26):
cryptocurrencies to fund their malign behavior.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
But that doesn't tell the whole truth. And we know
this because it's the technology behind bitcoin that's helped catch criminals.
I'm Patrick Corelchi and this is Red Pilled America. It's
our third and final episode looking into the cryptocurrency Bitcoin.
This is a complicated series, so if you missed the
earlier episodes, you may want to start from the beginning.
(02:56):
In part one, we explained how we've been hearing a
lot of concern about the new Internet cash called Bitcoin,
so we wanted to find out it was really dangerous
to America. We learned that the idea of digital cash
began forming in the early nineteen eighties for people that
wanted to bypass the watchful eye of the government. This
(03:16):
concept percolated until the onset of the two thousand and
eight financial crisis, when a mysterious figure named Satoshi Nakamoto
released his digital currency system to the public. He called
it Bitcoin. This new internet cash replaced the function of
(03:40):
a trusted third party like a bank or a credit
card company with an automated system of computers. Bitcoin needed
a large scale test case to prove its utility, and
that came with the launch of silk Road, an anonymous
online marketplace on the dark web, a site that became
the eBay of illegal drugs with bitcoin as its currency.
(04:03):
We heard from Curtis Green, an early bitcoin enthusiast who
was drawn to silk Road's message boards because it was
a hot spot for people interested in cryptocurrency. Curtis eventually
became a paid employee of the site, a move that
would quickly put his life in grave danger. In Part two,
we watched as Chuck Schumer discovered silk Road and brought
national attention not only to the illegal marketplace, but to
(04:27):
the new digital cash Bitcoin as well. We also learned
about the technology driving Bitcoin, called the blockchain, and how
it allows bitcoins to be transferred from one person to another.
The blockchain is a complete history of all transactions ever
made with bitcoin, and this history is permanent and can
never be altered. Then we watched as silk Road transformed
(04:49):
from a self described libertarian marketplace to what appeared to
be a ruthless digital drug cartel. As the captain of
silk Road, someone that went by the name of dread
Pirate Roberts or DPR, ordered the assassination of six people
that threatened his enterprise. But just as DPR thought he'd
tied up all his loose ends, a federal task force
(05:09):
was closing in on a suspect by the name of
Ross Ulbricht. So how did law enforcement find dread Pirate Roberts,
or DPR, as he's called, the mastermind behind the Silk
Road marketplace. As most of these things go, it was
(05:32):
a team effort, but there's usually one key individual that
makes a difference, and in this case, that person was
a young IRS agent named Gary Alford. Gary was tasked
with trying to trace the money going through Silk Road.
Growing up in the Brooklyn Projects, he had firsthand knowledge
(05:52):
of the negative impact of drugs, so the hunt for
DPR became personal to Gary, so much so that over
his weekends in June twenty thirteen, Gary found himself searching
for the captain of Silk Road. Not through some secret
back channel only accessible to government agents. No, he used
a tool available to everyone. He used Google. Like any
(06:18):
good researcher would do, Gary wanted to get as close
as possible to the origin of the site, so he
began looking for the first mention of Silk Road on
the Internet. A few things were widely known about this
dark web marketplace. One, it was only accessible by the
tor browser. Two, Silk Road used bitcoin as its currency,
and three it was thought to have launched around early
(06:40):
February twenty eleven, so Gary used scant bits of info
like these to search for the first time. Silk Road
emerged online. As any seasoned web researcher knows, Google has
tools to focus its search results. One of those tools
is an option to target a search within a specific
date range. So, for example, if you know the approximate
(07:02):
date of a site line launched, you can use unique
search terms associated with that website and constrain Google to
scour web pages that were posted before the launch date.
That way, if you're lucky, you may find someone talking
about the site before anyone else knows about it. Whoever
that person is would be a great starting point to
find the mastermind of the site. With the widely believed
(07:25):
launch date of silk Road being February twenty eleven, Gary
began using search terms associated with silk Road, but constrain
Google to only return web pages published prior to its launch.
You can try this at home. Enter the four words
silk Road, Bitcoin Tour into Google Press Center, and once
the results come back, click the tools button in the menu.
(07:47):
From there, you can constrain Google to search web pages
that were published on or before January thirty first, two
thy eleven. If you do this, what you'll likely find
is that on the first page of Google results, or
perhaps even in the very first spot, there's a posting
entitled a Heroin store on a website called bitcoin talk
dot org. This is the page that Gary Alford says
(08:10):
he found. Forums like bitcoin talk dot org are places
where someone posts topics related to bitcoin for people to discuss.
This particular topic started when a user posted a thought
experiment about how a drug dealer would set up a
(08:32):
website that accepts bitcoins for Heroin. The person who posted
the topic asked users to try to find ways that
someone could attack the store to take it down. The
topic was first published on June ninth, twenty ten, and
many users responded to it, but the particular page that
Gary found was a response posted months later on January
(08:53):
twenty ninth, twenty eleven, and the response mentioned silk Road. Apparently,
a user by the name of Altoid posted his response
to the topic, but at some point deleted it. However,
unfortunately for Altoid, deleting his response did not erase posts
by other commenters that had already quoted him, and what
(09:13):
Altoyd said in his original post was very interesting. What
he said was quote, what an awesome thread. You guys
have a ton of great ideas. Has anyone seen silk
Road yet? It's kind of like an anonymous Amazon dot com.
I don't think they have Heroin on there, but they
are selling other stuff. They basically used Bitcoin and tour
to broker anonymous transactions. Altoid then posted a link to
(09:38):
a word press website that gave instructions on how to
connect a silk Road using the Tor browser. Altoyd was
promoting silk Road on a bitcoin forum before anyone really
knew about the site. The post gave a plethora of
new paths to explore, so Gary didn't stop there. He
searched Google using the word Press site mentioned in the
(09:59):
post and found a similar listing promoting silk Road on
a site called schrumery dot com, a website that helps
spread information about magic mushrooms, a psychedelic drug. The post
was published two days earlier and listed the same WordPress
site that taught people how to use Tor to connect
to silk Road and the username that published the post.
(10:21):
He also went by the name of Altoid. Gary decided
to go back to bitcoin talk dot org and see
if Altoyd made any additional post to that site, and
what he found ended up being an enormous break in
the hunt for dread pirate Roberts. Altoid's last entry on
bitcoin talk dot org was on October eleventh, twenty eleven.
(10:42):
The entry was a listing for a website development job
and included an email to contact and the email adjuress
ross Ulbricht at gmail dot com altoid. The user that
apparently first promoted silk Road online was someone named ross Olbricht.
(11:05):
Gary was of course elated, and he went back to
work that Monday to share his find with his coworkers,
but when he said he found the potential mastermind of
silk Road through a simple Google search, they brushed him off.
People have a hard time believing how much you can
find by methodically searching the public web. A few years ago,
(11:27):
everyone was trying to find a person who stole an
anti Trump protest flag that was being live streamed from
an unknown property occupied by actor Shi La Beau. We
did a simple Google search and found an online police
scanner that included a recording of someone being questioned near
the property the day before the flag was stolen. The
officer read the license plate of the driver to dispatch.
(11:50):
We connected that license plate to a person involved in
the flag heist, and woila case solved, all through a
simple Google search. Difficult things can be found if you
take the time to hunt. Gary was deterred by the
disinterest of his colleagues. He returned home and began searching
for all public data on Ross Olbricht. He found a
(12:18):
listing on another forum with a post that connected Ross
Olbrick to another web alias Frosty. Ross Olbrich was using
two online avatars, Altoyd and Frosty. Gary pulled information from
Google and learned that the last time Ross logged in
with his Google account was in the San Francisco area.
He even found a thirty five minute video of Ross
(12:40):
talking with a friend.
Speaker 6 (12:41):
I'm twenty eight years old. Today is November sixth December.
That was December sixth, twenty twelve, here in San Francisco.
Speaker 1 (12:53):
So Ross, how did you come to live in San Francisco?
Speaker 6 (12:55):
You twisted my arm until I said, ah, fine, I'll come.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
While Gary was busy building a profile of Ross Albricht.
An FBI task force was also on the hunt for
dread Pirate Roberts. They didn't have a primary suspect yet,
but they'd found the servers hosting silk Road. One was
in Philadelphia, another the servers storing silk Roads bitcoins, was
in Iceland. They were also able to trace the IP
(13:22):
address of one of the site's administrators to San Francisco.
The federal task force was getting closer just as dread
Pirate Roberts became bolder. In mid August twenty thirteen, DPR
granted an interview with Forbes magazine, claiming he wasn't the
original dread Pirate Roberts, but that he'd inherited the site
from its creator, and DPR was rather cocky in the interview,
(13:45):
boasting quote, we've won the state's war on drugs because
of bitcoin end quote. The article must have ruffled some feathers,
because just a few weeks later, the New York Task
Force decided to convene everyone involved in the hunt to
one location to share information. IRS agent Gary Alford attended.
(14:06):
While at the meeting, he heard someone mention San Francisco
and chimed in that he'd had a suspect in San
Francisco as well, but the team was dismissive, so the
tenacious agent jumped on the phone with the prosecutor and
shared the San Francisco IP address of his suspect, Ross Olbricht.
After searching their database, the prosecutor called for an immediate
meeting with Gary, Homeland Security and the FBI because Gary's
(14:30):
IP location was just around the block from another location
where DPR was known to have logged in. During the meeting,
Gary mentioned he found another avatar associated with his suspect,
Ross Olbricht, used the name Frosty. That's when the FBI
perked up. Because Frosty was the username of the person
(14:53):
running Silk Road Servers. They thought they had their man.
Ross Olbricht was likely dread pirate Roberts. The FBI issued
a warrant for his but the team didn't want to
just arrest Ross. They wanted to catch him in the
act of being DPR on Silk Road so that he
couldn't just claim he was framed. To do this, the
(15:14):
task force needed to grab his computer before he had
a chance to shut it down and enact its encryption,
forever locking them out of the computer. And all of
the evidence that it may contain. Fortunately, by this time,
a Homeland Security special agent, Jared dr Yagen, had infiltrated
DPR's inner circle. Apparently, law enforcement had caught one of
(15:35):
DPR's high level staff members with the user named Cyrus,
and Dr Yegen took over his Silk Road account as Cyrus.
Dr Yaegen frequently communicated with dread Pirate Roberts on a
dark web service called staff Chat. DPR went by Dread
on that service, so, with Ross Oulbert as their primary suspect,
(15:57):
Dr Yegen and other members of the New York Task
Force traveled to San Francisco to methodically map out his arrest,
and the plan had to be executed flawlessly because one
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(16:22):
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Speaker 2 (17:34):
Welcome back. I'm Adrianna Cortez So with Ross Albert as
the primary suspect for Dread Pirate Roberts, Special Agent Dir
Yagen and other members of the New York Task Force
travel to San Francisco to methodically map out his arrest.
The plan was to get Ross Albert into a public area,
then Special Agent Dir Yagan would initiate a chat with
(17:55):
DPR on staff Chat and coax him into logging into
Silk Road. If Ross was in fact Dreadpirate Roberts, they
could get his computer in an open, unencrypted state while
he was connected to Silk Road as DPR, catching him
red handed running the drug enterprise. On October one, twenty thirteen,
(18:19):
Dr Yaegen connected with FBI agents who'd been monitoring Ross
Albrick the day before as he worked at a coffee
shop near his apartment. Dur Yegen set up near the
cafe with his laptop and monitored the user name Dread
as he was logged into staff Chat. When Dread logged off,
(18:40):
dur Yegen concluded that Ross Albrick was leaving his apartment
and heading for a place with a public Wi Fi,
so the special agent notified the Task Force that Ross
was on the move, then quickly moved to a bench
near Ross Albrick's home to trail him. As dur Yagen watched,
Ross walked by, carrying his laptop in a shoulder bag,
waited at the intersection for a green light, then crossed
(19:03):
the street and walked into Bellow Coffee, the cafe he
was in the day before. But the shop must have
been too packed, because half a minute later he exited
and walked down the street towards the Glen Park Public Library,
just a street away. The team's arrest plan was quickly changing.
(19:27):
As Ros sat up in the library, Dr Yagen found
a spot in the stairwell and monitored staff chat for
Dred to come back online. When Dred resurfaced on staff chat,
der Yagen sent him a message as cyrus, Hey, can
you check out one of the flagged messages for me?
Dur Yegan asked Dred, referring to messages on Silk Road.
Dred responded, you did bitcoin exchange before you worked for me, right, yes?
(19:52):
Dr Yagan responded, but just for a little bit, not
anymore then, No, I stopped because of reporting requirements damn regulators, EH,
responded Dred. He continued, which post with DPR now logged
into both staff chat and Silk Road der Yagan gave
the signal to arrest Ross Albricht. As Ross sat with
(20:13):
his laptop at a library table, two federal agents acted
out a lover's quarrel to distract Ross, and when he
turned to watch the commotion, an agent swiftly grabbed Ross's computer,
making sure to keep it open as a swarm of
agents came from all angles of the library to finally
arrest the man they thought was dread Pirate Roberts. The
(20:34):
arrest was orchestrated perfectly. The team was able to take
possession of Ross's laptop before he was able to enact
any encryption, and by looking at the laptop, it appeared
they hooked the mother load. Ross's computer was logged into
the silk Road mastermind page as dread Pirate Roberts. News
(20:56):
of the arrest quickly hit the media.
Speaker 7 (20:58):
Now it was a giant black market in illegal drugs
where buyers and sellers believed they could beyond the law.
Last week, Channel four News showed just how easy it
was to buy Class A drugs through Silk Road, a
so called dark website well hidden behind special software. It
was easy, but it seems that the site's boasts about
being impenetrable to police were wrong. It's now been taken
(21:22):
offline and it's alleged owner arrested by the FBI.
Speaker 8 (21:25):
Ross All Bricks has certainly made an impact on the FBI.
They arrested the twenty nine year old in San Francisco
and charged him with narcotics trafficking, money laundering, computer hacking,
and soliciting murder. They believe he has dread Pirate Roberts,
the master of this black market Silk Road and eBay
(21:48):
for drugs and other illegal goods.
Speaker 9 (21:50):
But they needed a scapegoat, and Ross's their scapegoat. That's
my opinion, and I think I personally think it was
because of the bitcoin.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
That's Lynn Albritt Ross's mom. She's been a vocal supporter
of her sentence his rest and remembers that day, well, yeah.
Speaker 9 (22:05):
I was just home about to go out to do
errands and I went into my husband's home office and
he was sitting with his head in his hands. I'm like,
what happened?
Speaker 4 (22:11):
Where are you?
Speaker 10 (22:12):
Okay?
Speaker 9 (22:13):
And he goes, Ross has been arrested, and I'm like,
what arrested? I mean, because like I said, Ross had
never been you know, and I could tell it was
serious because he had his head in his hands, and
he hand me the phone. It was a Reuters reporter
and she filled me in and this whole thing, and
I was like, this is unbelievable. I mean, this is crazy.
And Ross is such a stellar person. There's no way
he'd hurt someone, and blah blah, blah blah. And then
(22:34):
I turn on the TV and there's George Stephanopolis.
Speaker 5 (22:36):
That's stunning arrest of the drug kingpin who goes by
the name dread Pirate Roberts Pierce've cornered the internet drug market.
Speaker 7 (22:42):
His real name is ross Albrick, and.
Speaker 11 (22:44):
His website, Silk Road, is packed with products like cocaine
and heroin.
Speaker 9 (22:48):
George Stefanopolis going, oh, they found the guy. I'm like,
wait a minute, George, don't are we supposed to have
innocent to a proven guilty in a trial and stuff
like that, you know, I mean, just typical media crap.
And then suddenly there's the phone's ringing off the hook,
and the emails are pouring in, and media's driving by,
upsetting our neighbors, taking photos of everything and knocking on
(23:08):
our door. And I'm like it was like it was
so weird. It was just this siege and honestly that
my life has not been the same since that day.
That was just everything changed because I knew I had
to try to save him.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
Many that knew Ross found it unbelievable that he was
the mastermind of a massive online drug enterprise. At the
time of his arrest, the twenty nine year old, six
foot two, good looking white dude was known by his
friends and family as an easygoing, brilliant young man. He
grew up in Austin, Texas, the son of Lynn and
his father Kirk. He has an older sister and by
(23:45):
all accounts, Ross had a pretty regular family.
Speaker 9 (23:48):
Yeah, and he was always very exceptionally easy going and
he still is easy going. Actually, he's got his personality
just really a joyed raise wasn't a problem at all,
and just a very pleasant person. I was able to
take him around everywhere because he was so easy to do,
you know, to take places.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
Roscott good grades in high school and when he graduated,
he went to the University of Texas in Dallas.
Speaker 9 (24:14):
He majored in physics and worked in a solar lab
where they developed solar cells for research for solar energy
and published several academic papers there and then went on
to get a master's at Penn State in material science
and engineering, and then had actually was on his way
(24:37):
to Cornell for his PhD and got passionate about well
the wrong He got involved with the Ron Paul campaign.
He got passionate about Austrian economics and all of the
writings of those people, and decided that telling him, I'm like, no,
don't tell me, you're not going to do this as
(24:59):
his mother, but he said, I just don't have the
passion for it. This is what I want to really
get it to his free markets and the whole freedom movement,
and so that's what he did.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
Ross decided to explore the free markets by taking the
entrepreneurial route.
Speaker 9 (25:12):
He opened a business. It was a book business, online
book business, kind of like a tiny Amazon really, but
with used books, and he was doing pretty well. He
came up with a system that made it really efficient
and he basically how it worked was that he'd go
around collecting people who donate books and then they would
sell them and donate a portion of that to various
(25:34):
charities in Austin, including a prison literacy program.
Speaker 2 (25:38):
But as he developed this book site, he got interested
in bitcoin and decided to marry it with Tor to
launch silk Road.
Speaker 9 (25:45):
Yeah, it was to provide a truly free market that
offered privacy to users and the used bitcoin as the
means of exchange. It was actually because he saw the
potential for monetary freedom with bitcoin and was very excited
about it. Talked to me about it. I even said
(26:07):
should I get some? And he goes, no, it's too volatile.
Don't do that.
Speaker 2 (26:10):
To get silk Road started, Ross actually grew magic mushrooms
and sold them on the site. In other words, silk
Road was going to be a drug marketplace from the
get go. As we've seen, Ross launched silk Road in
early twenty eleven. And it's about here where the government
and Ross's stories diverge. His lawyer and mother contend that
(26:31):
Ross left silk Road shortly after it launched because the
enterprise was too stressful.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
Ross when did he? Was he involved with it throughout
or did he ever step away from it? The silk
Road I'm talking about.
Speaker 9 (26:47):
Yeah, and this goes into a lot and something that
we put together called Railroaded. The targeting and caging of
Ross Olbricht all based on the public record. It's heavily footnoted,
it's on our website, and there's also an audio component
that No, he stepped away and because it got to
be too much. He's not a computer programmer.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
In January twenty fifteen, Ross Albrick's trial began in a
New York City courtroom. During the trial, Ross's lawyer suggested
he sold the business in mid twenty eleven to an
unspecified third party, but showed no clear evidence of that sale.
His lawyer also suggested that around the time of his arrest,
Ross was lured back to working on Silk Road and
(27:30):
was either framed by the actual dread pirate Roberts, or
perhaps he was framed by some other unknown person that
hacked Ross's computer. Who did this framing is unclear, but
Ross was framed, argued his supporters, even after watching a
nearly three hour documentary entitled Railroaded The Targeting and Caging
(27:50):
of Ross albrit The documentary had no real hard evidence
proving Ross was framed. Instead, it weaves a complicated story
suggesting a long list of potential culprits and how Ross
was wronged. Throughout the judas process. Ross's mother, Lynn follows
this same line of argument.
Speaker 9 (28:09):
The defense was not permitted to pursue the alternate perpetrator,
was not permitted to cross examine about certain things, was
not allowed to bring witnesses, for instance, a tech witness
who would have talked about how you cannot determine who
was on the other side of an anonymous chat. The
(28:29):
time stamps were questionable, and the evidence there was you know,
as I said, Ross was on an open source network
at the library. How easily infiltrated that is, things can
be tampered with things. You know, they had his laptop
for three hours unsupervised, just one guy. That's totally against protocol.
I have no idea what that guy did with his
laptop at all.
Speaker 12 (28:51):
There was an.
Speaker 9 (28:51):
Alternate perpetrator brought up a trial that the judge would
not permit being pursued. There were two corrupt agents who
had free reign of sight, who could change anything, including
the in the jury was seeing there now in prison.
So the trial was very fast because a lot of
the defense was not permitted to be heard. They wouldn't
(29:11):
even let Ross turn around when we'd come into the
room and smile at us, because they didn't want the
jury to think he had a supportive family.
Speaker 12 (29:19):
They weren't.
Speaker 9 (29:20):
His libertarian views were not allowed to be known. A
good number of them also worked for the government, which
I think is a bit of a conflict of interest
because here's the government saying this, and they work for
the government, and I think there's a certain, you know
assumption that well, if the government saying it and a
prosecutor saying it, must be true. None of the legal
things or anything like that that was sold on the
(29:40):
site because it was like an eBay, were allowed to
be known. Even marijuana, of all things, which you know
obviously is a drug, but that was not allowed to
be known, even though was the main drug that was sold.
Speaker 12 (29:53):
I think it was.
Speaker 9 (29:54):
Ten out of twelve were over forty, and I don't
really think they many of them understood at all the
technical aspects, the bitcoin aspects. The bitcoin witnesses that the
defense wanted to call were not permitted to testify. It
kind of goes on and on at all the complication.
It's a very complicated case.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
So the prosecution, on the other hand, had a very clear,
cohesive and simple narrative, and that is that Ross created
Silk Road and ran the site from the beginning to
the end, and only came up with the dread Pirate
(30:33):
Roberts persona to muddy the waters in the event that
law enforcement closed in on him. The prosecution's case against
Ross was absolutely overwhelming. First and foremost, he was caught
red handed, logged in as dread Pirate Roberts. The silk
(30:54):
Road servers automatically recognized his laptop at login. Ross's laptop
was named Frosty, the same name the silk Road servers recognized.
There was a detailed electronic journal on his laptop, and
many of the significant events and dates in the journal
aligned with things that dread Pirate Roberts said in silk
Road chat logs and forums. His Gmail account included confirmation
(31:17):
emails addressed to Altoid, the same avatar used to promote
silk Road before anyone really knew about the site. Specific
events and vacations Ross posted on social media aligned both
in timing and content with things DPR said. An entire
backup of the silk Road server was found in Ross's possession.
His close friend even testified that he helped Ross write
(31:41):
the code for the site and also to authenticate his messages.
DPR used was called a private PGP key as a signature.
That private key was found on Ross's computer and the
key never changed throughout the entire time dread Pirate Roberts existed.
But perhaps the biggest indication that Ross Allbridge was in
(32:03):
fact the head of the Silk Road site was something
else that was found on his laptop, something that would
be used to suggest Ross Albrick was a ruthless drug kingpin.
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(32:45):
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Speaker 1 (32:49):
Welcome back. The evidence showing Ross Olbrich was Dreadpirate Roberts
was overwhelming, but perhaps the biggest indication that Ross Olbrich
was in fact the head of Silk Road was something
else that was found on his laptop, something that be
used to suggest that Ross was a ruthless drug kingpin.
When the Federal Task Force confiscated Ross Olbrik's computer, they
(33:12):
found a bitcoin wallet on his hard drive. A witness
for the prosecution, former FBI agent Ilwan Yum, led an
analysis of this bitcoin wallet. You may recall from part
two of this series that the blockchain is the technology
driving bitcoin and that it stores every Bitcoin transaction that
has ever occurred onto an immutable, permanent public ledger called
(33:35):
the blockchain. For each transaction, it doesn't store anyone's name,
but instead it stores the bitcoin address of the sender,
the Bitcoin address of the receiver, the amount of bitcoin sent,
and the date it was sent. Since the FBI had
both the server that hosted silk roads bitcoin wallet and
Ross Olbrich's computer that it housed a bitcoin wallet, former
(33:55):
FBI agent Yum was able to use the blockchain to
trace more than thirteen million dollars in direct transaction from
Silk Road's Bitcoin address to the bitcoin address on Ross
Olbrich's laptop. It was undeniable. Ross Olbrichs's computer contained massive
amounts of money from a criminal drug enterprise. The only
(34:16):
response to this damning evidence has been that the Bitcoin
wallet was planted on Ross's computer by someone else, which
we'll get to in a bit. But first, and undoubtedly
the biggest controversy associated with the Silk Road case was
the alleged murder for Higher Plots. You may recall from
Part two, the DPR ordered and paid for the assassination
(34:37):
of six people that threatened his Silk Road enterprise. That
information was gathered during the federal investigation, found in chat
logs on the Silk Road server and in the journal
found on Ross Olbrich's computer, But to date, the government
was never able to prove that any of these murders
ever actually occurred. Ross was never charged or convicted of
a murder for Higher Plot. The prosecution did contend, however,
(35:00):
that DPR did in fact order and pay for assassinations
and believe they happened at the time, and the prosecution
brought this up in trial. I asked Lynn Ulbrick about
the murder for Higher accusations against Ross.
Speaker 9 (35:13):
So, for example, with Ross's case, the first we hear
about this is at the bail hearing. Totally ambushed by
this at the bail hearing, trying to get bail, and
so they use that to deprive them of bail. The
defense didn't even know about it. Then they were they
were permitted, the prosecution was permitted to talk about it
(35:33):
a trial, even though they said, we're not charging him
with this, there's no murders, but believe us, just trust
us he did this. Now that's not how it's supposed
to work. You're supposed to have proof and all of that.
Now they got they were permitted to prejudice the jury
with that. Then the judge she uh used.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
It so and they they basically what they claimed was
is that he was involved in some kind of a
plot to you to take out people that were investigating
him or what was this?
Speaker 9 (36:08):
No, it was he was accused and it's all based
on again anonymous digital evidence, no witnesses, nothing. He was
accused of by you know, paying hitmen. Now mind you,
there were no hit men allowed on Silk Road. But anyway,
paying hitman to kill one was somebody blackmailing, supposedly blackmailing
(36:30):
him and or set threatening to give names of people
on Silk Road. There was a couple of different instances.
One was Curtis Green, who supposed they faked his death
and showed pictures. He's the guy who says he doesn't
think it was Ross.
Speaker 1 (36:46):
I actually talked to Curtis Green about this and his
take was a little different than Lin's. And do you
think that Ross was involved with the murder for hire?
Speaker 13 (36:59):
You know that I don't know. My view has changed
on that multiple times, and so I'm not you.
Speaker 4 (37:09):
Know, I lot mentally because I was told so many
different story so I don't know what to believe.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
Well, Bitcoin helps shed some light on this issue. You
may recall from part two that dread Pirate Roberts was
in communication with a supposed Hell's angel called Red and
White and asked him to assassinate a guy named Friendly Chemist.
The Department of Justice says these communications were found on
silk Roads market server and user forum. Red and White
said he would charge somewhere between one hundred and fifty
(37:40):
thousand and three hundred thousand dollars to kill Friendly Chemist,
but dpr boked, stating, quote, don't want to be a
pain here, but the price seems high. Not long ago,
I had a clean hit done for eighty thousand dollars
are the prices you quoted? The best you can do?
End quote. Eighty thousand dollars is the same amount of
money that the DOJ says DPR anonymously wired to an
(38:02):
undercover agent for the fake assassination of Curtis Green. Red
White responded to DPR holding firm on the hundred fifty
thousand dollars price tag and told DPR, quote, if you
want it done by Monday, that only leaves today. It's
Sunday morning.
Speaker 4 (38:16):
Here.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
We always seem to miss each other online, so I
will leave a bitcoin address in case you want to
pay that way. Red and White continued, quote, I will
check the computer in about ten hours, and if I
see that you do want to go ahead with this
and a payment has been sent, we'll do it to
day end quote. Red and White sent his bitcoin address
along with this message to DPR. Dread pirate Roberts responded
(38:38):
a few hours later and said, thank you, Red and White.
I've only ever commissioned the one other hit, so I'm
still learning this market. I have no problem putting my
faith in you, and I'm sure you will do a
good job. The exchange rate is about ninety right now,
so at ninety dollars per bitcoin, a hundred and fifty
thousand dollars is about one thousand, six hundred and seventy
(38:59):
bitcoins end quote. DPR then paid Red and White the
one thousand, six hundred and seventy bitcoins, and to prove it,
he sent Red and White the bitcoin transaction number, which
is like a confirmation number for a credit card payment.
And sure enough, the transaction is immortalized on the blockchain.
Anyone can go there now and see it. But DPR's
(39:20):
interaction with Red and White didn't end there. He also
called for the hit of four more people and negotiated
with Red and White the price of five hundred thousand
dollars for the job. At the time, five hundred thousand
dollars was roughly three thousand bitcoins, so DPR sent three
thousand bitcoins to Red and White's bitcoin address and again
sent the blockchain transaction number to confirm the payment went through.
(39:43):
And if you go to the blockchain right now, the
transaction is once again forever immortalized. However, the blockchain does
not record the names of the sender and receiver. So
how do we know ross olbrichs sent these payments. Well,
the bitcoin addresses that sent the alleged hitman the money
were found on ross olbricht laptop. Even Ross's lawyer had
(40:05):
to admit to that fact to an appeals judge.
Speaker 14 (40:08):
Was there not evidence that he paid six hundred and
fifty thousand dollars worth of bitcoin to someone who had
represented that he killed people at the orders of dread pirate?
Roberts that again that we can't elevate.
Speaker 10 (40:25):
Yes, yes, yes, yes, but but you can't but only
in the sense of what's on an internet chat room.
Speaker 14 (40:31):
We can't wait. Why I don't understand this.
Speaker 15 (40:33):
It's one thing to say, wouldn't you know in a
fantasy chat you know, I'd like to kill everybody that
I don't like. It's a different thing to actually pay
money to someone.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
Ross Olbrich was never charged with or found guilty of
a murder for higher plot, that's for sure. But a
bitcoin wallet that was on his laptop sent money to
a man claiming to have successfully killed five people. Make
of that what you may. Many still argue that the
incriminating evidence found on ross Olbrich's laptop was all planted.
That argument reminds me of another story.
Speaker 11 (41:09):
A woman who was caught with meth in a Regina
claims to police that it was not hers.
Speaker 1 (41:15):
You see, in order to believe that the government planted
all of this incriminating evidence on Ross's computer, you also
have to believe that they planted evidence that incriminated one
of their own federal agents. Remember in part two, when
DPR was constantly getting approached by Silk Road users attempting
to extract money from him. One was Death from Above,
(41:36):
who claimed to know DPR's identity and was going to
release it to the public. Then another user, french Maid,
claimed to have inside information on the federal investigation into
Silk Road. DPR paid french Maid for that info. After
Ross was arrested, they found a folder on his computer
that stored the information that french Maid provided. There were
(41:57):
also journal entries on Ross's laptop documenting communications with french
Maid that all also matched up with chat logs between
DPR and french Maid on the Silk Road server. And
who was french Maid and Death from Above? Well, it
turns out that both were none other than a DEA
agent named Carl Force. And we know this because of
(42:18):
the blockchain. Carl Force was the DEA agent that went
undercover into Silk Road as a mafia connected drug dealer
called Knob, the same Knob that sent Curtis Green cocaine,
the same knob that DPR hired to kill Curtis Green,
and the same knob that staged Curtis Green's murder. A
few months after ross Ulbrich was arrested, a Department of
(42:39):
Justice prosecutor named Katie Han got a tip.
Speaker 3 (42:42):
The essence of the tip was Knobs moving around a
lot of bitcoin. Now, remember I was in San Francisco
at the time, used to kind of crazies calling me
up telling me about the government conspiracies that were going on.
So I took this with a grain of salt. But
the tipster was pretty insistent, and I looked into it
(43:02):
a little further and found that Knob was liquidating hundreds
of thousands of dollars of bitcoin every month. I thought
it was probably a poorly backstopped undercover operation, but I
looked into it a little further and I found that
Knob was liquidating this to his own personal accounts. And
when I subpoened some of those entities, what I found
(43:24):
was that Knob, with his badge, was telling them to
delete all of the transaction history. So now I was
getting suspicious too.
Speaker 1 (43:32):
So Katie Hahn went to the blockchain to follow the
history of Knob or Carl Force's bitcoin transactions.
Speaker 3 (43:38):
So using the blockchain working backwards, we went to Knob's
accounts and we traced those bitcoin payments. You can see
it up on your screen here. And what's interesting is
where we trace those payments too, right back to the
Silk Road. It turns out that those payments, and we
(43:58):
compared them and the timing to Ross Silbrook's journals of
when he had French Maid. Turns out that Knob was
French Maid. He'd been selling Ross Olbrucht's DPR information into
the government's investigation the whole time.
Speaker 1 (44:16):
But that's not all.
Speaker 3 (44:17):
He'd also been extorting Olbricht as death from above, threatening
to reveal his identity to law enforcement. In short, Knob
was a double agent. He'd gone rogue, and he was
playing both sides the entire time.
Speaker 1 (44:31):
Carl Force was arrested and is serving a six and
a half year sentence in federal prison. Federal law enforcement
didn't even know about Carl Force's corruption until months after
Ross Olbrich's arrest. So to believe that the government planted
Ross Olbrich's computer with all of this damning evidence, you
also have to believe that they planted evidence against one
of their own. And here's the kicker. They had to
(44:52):
have planted it before they even knew Carl Force was corrupt.
The technology behind bitcoin brought down the mastermind of Silk
Road and a federal agent, but the blockchain also held
to prove another man's innocence. Do you remember the missing
twenty thousand bitcoins that the government thought Curtis greenstole. The
(45:15):
blockchain helped find that money as well.
Speaker 3 (45:18):
Going back to the blockchain and looking at the stolen
twenty one thousand bitcoin the one hundred and fifty million dollars,
we saw that the patterns of the theft were very
different from French maize and death from aboves. Instead of
going through a series of convoluted hops, the stolen funds
from the Silk Road accounts went straight to one place,
(45:40):
to Mount Gox. Mount Gox was a cryptocurrency exchange based
in Japan, but it too had suffered a series of
hacks to the tune of five hundred million dollars. And
what this meant was that by the time we trace
this to Japan into mount Gox, there were no records
(46:00):
available for us to go look at But remember what
I told you about the blockchain, that it's immutable and
it's permanent. So we were able to trace the flow
of funds through the blockchain from Mountcox to a US
financial institution. And where that led was also a surprise
(46:21):
right back to the Silk Rowe task Force, but not
to knob to a secret service agent on that same
task force, a secret service agent by the name of
Shan Bridges. Shawn Bridges had also been at that proffer
session where Curtis had turned over his password and computer
and credentials, and that night Shawn Bridges went home using
(46:44):
Curtis Green's computer user named credentials and password and drained
Silk Road accounts of twenty one thousand bitcoin, and he
framed it. He framed Curtis Green, and then he stood
by the next day while his fellow agents on the
task force confronted Green and told told Green to come clean.
And he also stood by knowing that Russlbrit had put
(47:06):
a hit out on Curtis Green. In fact, Sean Bridges
helped stage those proof of death photos and helped stage
the torture and murder of Curtis Green. So later that
year we brought charges against both of these agents for embezzlement, extortion,
international money laundering, and obstruction of justice. Things really out
(47:27):
of a movie, and in fact, if you can believe it,
some of the guys in this story had movie deals.
But they won't be appearing in the movie because they're
now sitting in federal prison. But they almost weren't. Why.
These guys were the perfect criminals. With thirty years of
law enforcement investigative experience behind them, they knew exactly how
(47:50):
to cover their tracks. They were also able to get
unwitting participants like banks, cryptocurrency exchanges, and other entities to
destroy evidence. These guys had justice departments of poenis, they
forged court orders, seizear warrants, they even destroyed evidence in
burn bags. But the one thing they couldn't escape was
(48:11):
the immutable, transparent blockchain. And I'm here to tell you
that without it, we never would have caught these guys.
In fact, without the blockchain, they would have still been
sitting in the federal government today instead of in the
federal penitentiary.
Speaker 1 (48:27):
The technology behind bitcoin proved that it can be used
to trace criminal behavior. Ross Albert ultimately lost his trial
and was found guilty on all counts. He was sentenced
by the judge to do two life sentences plus forty
years without the possibility of parole. He also lost his
appeal and the Supreme Court refused to hear his case.
(48:48):
He now has only two options again, Lynn Olbricht.
Speaker 9 (48:52):
So now there's a habeas petition that's been filed, which
is basically for various arguments Ross should have a new trial.
It's asking for a new trial in the District Court
in New York. And then the other thing is clemency.
Speaker 1 (49:06):
Jakie nil Chapel Guzman, the notorious drug kingpin that was
the head of the ruthless Sinaloa cartel for roughly three decades,
was found guilty of massive drug trafficking, money laundering, conspiracy
to murder, and was directed to hand over fourteen billion
dollars in drug money. Comparatively speaking, silk Road was a
minuscule operation, yet l Chapo got a lighter sentence than
(49:29):
Ross Olbricht. Some think that the harsh sentence was handed
down to stop Bitcoin in its tracks, to taint the
cryptocurrency as a tool for criminals.
Speaker 10 (49:38):
Think silk Road was a marginal company.
Speaker 1 (49:40):
That's Mike Cernovich, filmmaker, journalist, author, and an early proponent
of cryptocurrency.
Speaker 10 (49:46):
Why did they target it? Because Wall Street wanted to
shoy Bitcoin before it could get big enough to compete
for them. Because a lot of people don't want to
have to deal with central bankers.
Speaker 1 (49:55):
The Trump administration has tried to paint bitcoin and other
cryptocurrencies as dangerous.
Speaker 16 (50:00):
A crypto is being talked about. The President actually in
and tweeted about cryptocurrencies last night. He wrote in part this,
I'm not a fan of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, which
are not money and whose value is highly volatile based
on thin air. He writes, unregulated crypto assets can facilitate
unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity rights
(50:20):
the present.
Speaker 1 (50:21):
But the Federal Reserve prints the US dollar out of
thin air, and there's nothing more that facilitates unlawful behavior
than paper money. As we've shown, cryptocurrency actually helps law
enforcement catch criminals. Cryptocurrencies also have another benefit in these
politically volatile times, Activists within financial institutions have worked to
(50:42):
unbank their adversaries.
Speaker 10 (50:44):
Again, Mike Cernovich, So now, of course we're saying that
banks Bank of America won't do business with gun owners.
What happens when every big bank won't even do business
with people exercising their constitutional rights. There are people being
banned for free speech, and that's why Trump is losing
the plot when he wants to go after bitcoin.
Speaker 1 (51:03):
Many big tech companies like Patreon and PayPal have also
blocked people from using their services. Bitcoin has helped solve
that troubling phenomenon.
Speaker 17 (51:12):
But as it currently stands, it is a very viable
alternative to people who are no longer welcome within perhaps
some traditional financial institutions, so that does give them another option.
Speaker 1 (51:25):
As Billy Bambra, a freelance journalist that's been covering cryptocurrencies
since twenty twelve.
Speaker 17 (51:30):
So, we're already seeing the issue of deplatforming come up
amongst some groups where companies don't want to work with them. PayPal,
for example, Patreon have said that they're going to consider
or in some case already have done, barring people from
their platforms. As digital money becomes much more important than
physical money, this is going to be a bigger issue
(51:53):
in the future because really we're letting private companies decide
who has access to money. Bitcoin is away and other
cryptocurrencies are a way of stopping big companies being involved
in that decision.
Speaker 1 (52:05):
The future of cryptocurrency looks so promising that Facebook is
trying to get in on the action.
Speaker 11 (52:10):
Facebook announcing a new digital currency called Libra, and Facebook
says this digital currency aims to make it as easy
to send money around the world as it is to
send a photo now. The currency is set to launch
in the first half of next year, and it will
be run not by Facebook but by a nonprofit in Switzerland.
And unlike Bitcoin, Libra, this digital currency will be backed
(52:32):
by real money, so if you put in a dollar
or some other currency into Libra, you'll get a dollar
or the equivalent out.
Speaker 17 (52:39):
Now.
Speaker 11 (52:39):
The goal is for that reserve of real money to
make the whole currency more stable, unlike Bitcoin, which is
obviously very volatile.
Speaker 1 (52:48):
There the social media behemoth is trying to squeeze into
the currency game, and many believe it has an even
larger potential to become a global currency.
Speaker 12 (52:57):
It would have enormous attraction to people involved with China.
Speaker 1 (53:01):
That's economist Peter Marisi, Professor emeritus at the University of
Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business.
Speaker 12 (53:07):
Because the Chinese government being so authoritarian and so capable
of just taking away anything your own anytime it wants to,
including your life beyond. Is not a good candidate to
be a reserve currency, and this could provide a convenient alternative.
The Chinese now use bitcoin to get money in an
out of the country, so they can't otherwise get in
(53:28):
and out, the same thing with the Koreans. This would
be a much more attractible alternative to bitcoin because it
would have a much more stable value. So you know,
governments are worried.
Speaker 4 (53:38):
However, I don't know that anybody can prevent it.
Speaker 1 (53:41):
With Facebook now wanting in the government may try to
stop the growth of cryptocurrency in other ways. Again Peter Maurici,
and the real question becomes is this like armies.
Speaker 12 (53:52):
You know it's illegal to have a private army in
the United States, should it be illegal to have private money?
You can make it illegal in the United States, But
who's to prevent someone from establishing money out of Switzerland?
Speaker 1 (54:07):
Which brings us back to the question is bitcoin dangerous
to America?
Speaker 10 (54:11):
What would happen? For example, if Gulf nations, rather than
trading oil and dollars, moved to bitcoin, that would I
think destroy America as a global empire that said, I
don't think that they're going to do that because bitcoin
has way too much volatility.
Speaker 4 (54:27):
It's revolutionary and it's going to change the way we
do think. That's what I put blocking technology up there
to the invention of the cell phone to the invention
of a computer. That's what it's going to do to
liberate and liberate it and help us with our daily
lives in the future.
Speaker 17 (54:45):
And personally, I do see as a revolutionary technology that
is going to be like, I don't even know how,
but I'm convinced that it is going to change the
world's significantly.
Speaker 1 (54:55):
Bitcoin is not necessarily dangerous to Americans. We can use
it to protect us from the poor policies of the
Federal Reserve. It can be a life vote when the
banks and big tech companies deplatform us for our political views.
And the technology behind bitcoin, the blockchain has so many
positive uses that we don't even see them yet. For example,
imagine an election system built on the blockchain technology that
(55:19):
drives bitcoin. It could drastically eliminate voter fraud because every
vote could be stored on the blockchain ledger, just like
every bitcoin transaction. And if there's any claim of voter fraud.
The entire vote for that election is there on the
blockchain for all to see an audit, and it could
never be changed because it's immutable. That's the possibility of
the technology underpinning bitcoin. Bitcoin is also not dangerous in
(55:43):
the way our leaders are telling us. The US dollar
is made out of thin air, and nothing facilitates illegal
behavior more than paper money. Bitcoin, by contrast, has helped
put criminals behind bars.
Speaker 3 (55:55):
Now you might be thinking that cryptocurrency really is just
used by criminals, but nothing could be further from the truth.
In fact, it's not surprising that in those early days
criminals we're using cryptocurrencies. After all, criminals are great beta
testers of any new technology. Think about in the early
days of the Internet, although we now i'll use it,
(56:17):
some of its earliest adopters were fraudsters, and the same
as true of cryptocurrency. In twenty twelve, thirty percent of
bitcoin transaction value was associated with darknet markets like alphabet
or silk rowed, but by twenty eighteen that number is
down to less than one percent. The fact of the
(56:38):
matter is that plenty of ordinary people all over the
world now are using cryptocurrency.
Speaker 1 (56:44):
Bitcoin may have had a dark web start, but it's
now entered the mainstream. And some may not like to
hear this, but Ross Albert helped prove that bitcoin can
be used at scale as Internet cash. It's too early
to say how bitcoin, blockchain, or other cryptocurrencies will be
used in America. Could have predicted Fortnite or Snapchat in
(57:05):
the early days of the dial up Internet, but I
think it's safe to say that crypto is here to stay.
And then it appears that some of our leaders in Washington,
d C. Like House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, are beginning
to get on board the crypto train.
Speaker 6 (57:20):
But I'm just surprised that a Republican city, and you know,
on a in a powerful position, is making the case
for Really, I think you're making the case for blockchain
and bitcoin.
Speaker 2 (57:29):
Leader, Well, look, I like bitcoin.
Speaker 1 (57:33):
Be sure to catch our new series entitled Crypto Revisited,
where we do another deep dive into cryptocurrency. Roughly three
and a half years after airing this series, we answer
the question where is cryptocurrency going? The industry is no
longer in its infancy, and our Crypto Revisited conclusion will
no doubt shock you.
Speaker 2 (57:53):
Red Pilled America is an iHeartRadio original podcast. It's owned
and produced by Patrick Carrelci and me Adrianna Cortez of
Informed Ventures. Now you can get ad free acts to
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To subscribe, visit Redpilled America dot com and click join
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(58:14):
click join in the top menu. Thanks for listening.
This is Red Pilled America.
Speaker 2 (00:08):
Before we start the show, just a reminder to share, like,
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(00:32):
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Help us save America, one story at a time.
Speaker 3 (00:50):
The first time I ever heard the word bitcoin was
back in twenty twelve when I was a federal prosecutor
at the US Department of Justice, previously on Red Pilled America,
and I heard the word bitcoin because I was asked
to prepare an investigation in a case against it and
to help shut it down.
Speaker 1 (01:10):
The product that would eventually make Silk Road and national
headline were the drugs.
Speaker 4 (01:14):
It's a certifiable one stop shop for illegal drugs that
represents the most brazen attempt the pedal drugs online that
we have ever seen.
Speaker 2 (01:24):
Two separate federal task forces were formed to find the
mastermind behind silk Road.
Speaker 4 (01:28):
At the beginning of bigot mitcoin was totally an automates
and that here the government.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
The blockchain is basically one big banking statement for all
bitcoin transactions, and that history can be tracked and never
be changed. It's permanent. The silk Road administrator announced his
new name as dread Pirate.
Speaker 1 (01:47):
Roberts, and just like that, DPR ordered and paid for
the assassination of a total of six people that were
threatening his Silk Road empire. One of the primary reasons
people think bitcoin is dangerous to America is because our
leaders claim it's nothing but a tool for criminals.
Speaker 5 (02:06):
Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin have been exploited to support billions
of dollars of illicit activity like cybercrime, tax evasion, extortion, ransomware,
illicit drugs, human trafficking. Many players have attempted to use
(02:26):
cryptocurrencies to fund their malign behavior.
Speaker 1 (02:33):
But that doesn't tell the whole truth. And we know
this because it's the technology behind bitcoin that's helped catch criminals.
I'm Patrick Corelchi and this is Red Pilled America. It's
our third and final episode looking into the cryptocurrency Bitcoin.
This is a complicated series, so if you missed the
earlier episodes, you may want to start from the beginning.
(02:56):
In part one, we explained how we've been hearing a
lot of concern about the new Internet cash called Bitcoin,
so we wanted to find out it was really dangerous
to America. We learned that the idea of digital cash
began forming in the early nineteen eighties for people that
wanted to bypass the watchful eye of the government. This
(03:16):
concept percolated until the onset of the two thousand and
eight financial crisis, when a mysterious figure named Satoshi Nakamoto
released his digital currency system to the public. He called
it Bitcoin. This new internet cash replaced the function of
(03:40):
a trusted third party like a bank or a credit
card company with an automated system of computers. Bitcoin needed
a large scale test case to prove its utility, and
that came with the launch of silk Road, an anonymous
online marketplace on the dark web, a site that became
the eBay of illegal drugs with bitcoin as its currency.
(04:03):
We heard from Curtis Green, an early bitcoin enthusiast who
was drawn to silk Road's message boards because it was
a hot spot for people interested in cryptocurrency. Curtis eventually
became a paid employee of the site, a move that
would quickly put his life in grave danger. In Part two,
we watched as Chuck Schumer discovered silk Road and brought
national attention not only to the illegal marketplace, but to
(04:27):
the new digital cash Bitcoin as well. We also learned
about the technology driving Bitcoin, called the blockchain, and how
it allows bitcoins to be transferred from one person to another.
The blockchain is a complete history of all transactions ever
made with bitcoin, and this history is permanent and can
never be altered. Then we watched as silk Road transformed
(04:49):
from a self described libertarian marketplace to what appeared to
be a ruthless digital drug cartel. As the captain of
silk Road, someone that went by the name of dread
Pirate Roberts or DPR, ordered the assassination of six people
that threatened his enterprise. But just as DPR thought he'd
tied up all his loose ends, a federal task force
(05:09):
was closing in on a suspect by the name of
Ross Ulbricht. So how did law enforcement find dread Pirate Roberts,
or DPR, as he's called, the mastermind behind the Silk
Road marketplace. As most of these things go, it was
(05:32):
a team effort, but there's usually one key individual that
makes a difference, and in this case, that person was
a young IRS agent named Gary Alford. Gary was tasked
with trying to trace the money going through Silk Road.
Growing up in the Brooklyn Projects, he had firsthand knowledge
(05:52):
of the negative impact of drugs, so the hunt for
DPR became personal to Gary, so much so that over
his weekends in June twenty thirteen, Gary found himself searching
for the captain of Silk Road. Not through some secret
back channel only accessible to government agents. No, he used
a tool available to everyone. He used Google. Like any
(06:18):
good researcher would do, Gary wanted to get as close
as possible to the origin of the site, so he
began looking for the first mention of Silk Road on
the Internet. A few things were widely known about this
dark web marketplace. One, it was only accessible by the
tor browser. Two, Silk Road used bitcoin as its currency,
and three it was thought to have launched around early
(06:40):
February twenty eleven, so Gary used scant bits of info
like these to search for the first time. Silk Road
emerged online. As any seasoned web researcher knows, Google has
tools to focus its search results. One of those tools
is an option to target a search within a specific
date range. So, for example, if you know the approximate
(07:02):
date of a site line launched, you can use unique
search terms associated with that website and constrain Google to
scour web pages that were posted before the launch date.
That way, if you're lucky, you may find someone talking
about the site before anyone else knows about it. Whoever
that person is would be a great starting point to
find the mastermind of the site. With the widely believed
(07:25):
launch date of silk Road being February twenty eleven, Gary
began using search terms associated with silk Road, but constrain
Google to only return web pages published prior to its launch.
You can try this at home. Enter the four words
silk Road, Bitcoin Tour into Google Press Center, and once
the results come back, click the tools button in the menu.
(07:47):
From there, you can constrain Google to search web pages
that were published on or before January thirty first, two
thy eleven. If you do this, what you'll likely find
is that on the first page of Google results, or
perhaps even in the very first spot, there's a posting
entitled a Heroin store on a website called bitcoin talk
dot org. This is the page that Gary Alford says
(08:10):
he found. Forums like bitcoin talk dot org are places
where someone posts topics related to bitcoin for people to discuss.
This particular topic started when a user posted a thought
experiment about how a drug dealer would set up a
(08:32):
website that accepts bitcoins for Heroin. The person who posted
the topic asked users to try to find ways that
someone could attack the store to take it down. The
topic was first published on June ninth, twenty ten, and
many users responded to it, but the particular page that
Gary found was a response posted months later on January
(08:53):
twenty ninth, twenty eleven, and the response mentioned silk Road. Apparently,
a user by the name of Altoid posted his response
to the topic, but at some point deleted it. However,
unfortunately for Altoid, deleting his response did not erase posts
by other commenters that had already quoted him, and what
(09:13):
Altoyd said in his original post was very interesting. What
he said was quote, what an awesome thread. You guys
have a ton of great ideas. Has anyone seen silk
Road yet? It's kind of like an anonymous Amazon dot com.
I don't think they have Heroin on there, but they
are selling other stuff. They basically used Bitcoin and tour
to broker anonymous transactions. Altoid then posted a link to
(09:38):
a word press website that gave instructions on how to
connect a silk Road using the Tor browser. Altoyd was
promoting silk Road on a bitcoin forum before anyone really
knew about the site. The post gave a plethora of
new paths to explore, so Gary didn't stop there. He
searched Google using the word Press site mentioned in the
(09:59):
post and found a similar listing promoting silk Road on
a site called schrumery dot com, a website that helps
spread information about magic mushrooms, a psychedelic drug. The post
was published two days earlier and listed the same WordPress
site that taught people how to use Tor to connect
to silk Road and the username that published the post.
(10:21):
He also went by the name of Altoid. Gary decided
to go back to bitcoin talk dot org and see
if Altoyd made any additional post to that site, and
what he found ended up being an enormous break in
the hunt for dread pirate Roberts. Altoid's last entry on
bitcoin talk dot org was on October eleventh, twenty eleven.
(10:42):
The entry was a listing for a website development job
and included an email to contact and the email adjuress
ross Ulbricht at gmail dot com altoid. The user that
apparently first promoted silk Road online was someone named ross Olbricht.
(11:05):
Gary was of course elated, and he went back to
work that Monday to share his find with his coworkers,
but when he said he found the potential mastermind of
silk Road through a simple Google search, they brushed him off.
People have a hard time believing how much you can
find by methodically searching the public web. A few years ago,
(11:27):
everyone was trying to find a person who stole an
anti Trump protest flag that was being live streamed from
an unknown property occupied by actor Shi La Beau. We
did a simple Google search and found an online police
scanner that included a recording of someone being questioned near
the property the day before the flag was stolen. The
officer read the license plate of the driver to dispatch.
(11:50):
We connected that license plate to a person involved in
the flag heist, and woila case solved, all through a
simple Google search. Difficult things can be found if you
take the time to hunt. Gary was deterred by the
disinterest of his colleagues. He returned home and began searching
for all public data on Ross Olbricht. He found a
(12:18):
listing on another forum with a post that connected Ross
Olbrick to another web alias Frosty. Ross Olbrich was using
two online avatars, Altoyd and Frosty. Gary pulled information from
Google and learned that the last time Ross logged in
with his Google account was in the San Francisco area.
He even found a thirty five minute video of Ross
(12:40):
talking with a friend.
Speaker 6 (12:41):
I'm twenty eight years old. Today is November sixth December.
That was December sixth, twenty twelve, here in San Francisco.
Speaker 1 (12:53):
So Ross, how did you come to live in San Francisco?
Speaker 6 (12:55):
You twisted my arm until I said, ah, fine, I'll come.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
While Gary was busy building a profile of Ross Albricht.
An FBI task force was also on the hunt for
dread Pirate Roberts. They didn't have a primary suspect yet,
but they'd found the servers hosting silk Road. One was
in Philadelphia, another the servers storing silk Roads bitcoins, was
in Iceland. They were also able to trace the IP
(13:22):
address of one of the site's administrators to San Francisco.
The federal task force was getting closer just as dread
Pirate Roberts became bolder. In mid August twenty thirteen, DPR
granted an interview with Forbes magazine, claiming he wasn't the
original dread Pirate Roberts, but that he'd inherited the site
from its creator, and DPR was rather cocky in the interview,
(13:45):
boasting quote, we've won the state's war on drugs because
of bitcoin end quote. The article must have ruffled some feathers,
because just a few weeks later, the New York Task
Force decided to convene everyone involved in the hunt to
one location to share information. IRS agent Gary Alford attended.
(14:06):
While at the meeting, he heard someone mention San Francisco
and chimed in that he'd had a suspect in San
Francisco as well, but the team was dismissive, so the
tenacious agent jumped on the phone with the prosecutor and
shared the San Francisco IP address of his suspect, Ross Olbricht.
After searching their database, the prosecutor called for an immediate
meeting with Gary, Homeland Security and the FBI because Gary's
(14:30):
IP location was just around the block from another location
where DPR was known to have logged in. During the meeting,
Gary mentioned he found another avatar associated with his suspect,
Ross Olbricht, used the name Frosty. That's when the FBI
perked up. Because Frosty was the username of the person
(14:53):
running Silk Road Servers. They thought they had their man.
Ross Olbricht was likely dread pirate Roberts. The FBI issued
a warrant for his but the team didn't want to
just arrest Ross. They wanted to catch him in the
act of being DPR on Silk Road so that he
couldn't just claim he was framed. To do this, the
(15:14):
task force needed to grab his computer before he had
a chance to shut it down and enact its encryption,
forever locking them out of the computer. And all of
the evidence that it may contain. Fortunately, by this time,
a Homeland Security special agent, Jared dr Yagen, had infiltrated
DPR's inner circle. Apparently, law enforcement had caught one of
(15:35):
DPR's high level staff members with the user named Cyrus,
and Dr Yegen took over his Silk Road account as Cyrus.
Dr Yaegen frequently communicated with dread Pirate Roberts on a
dark web service called staff Chat. DPR went by Dread
on that service, so, with Ross Oulbert as their primary suspect,
(15:57):
Dr Yegen and other members of the New York Task
Force traveled to San Francisco to methodically map out his arrest,
and the plan had to be executed flawlessly because one
false move could mean that dread Pirate Roberts could slip
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(16:22):
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Speaker 2 (17:34):
Welcome back. I'm Adrianna Cortez So with Ross Albert as
the primary suspect for Dread Pirate Roberts, Special Agent Dir
Yagen and other members of the New York Task Force
travel to San Francisco to methodically map out his arrest.
The plan was to get Ross Albert into a public area,
then Special Agent Dir Yagan would initiate a chat with
(17:55):
DPR on staff Chat and coax him into logging into
Silk Road. If Ross was in fact Dreadpirate Roberts, they
could get his computer in an open, unencrypted state while
he was connected to Silk Road as DPR, catching him
red handed running the drug enterprise. On October one, twenty thirteen,
(18:19):
Dr Yaegen connected with FBI agents who'd been monitoring Ross
Albrick the day before as he worked at a coffee
shop near his apartment. Dur Yegen set up near the
cafe with his laptop and monitored the user name Dread
as he was logged into staff Chat. When Dread logged off,
(18:40):
dur Yegen concluded that Ross Albrick was leaving his apartment
and heading for a place with a public Wi Fi,
so the special agent notified the Task Force that Ross
was on the move, then quickly moved to a bench
near Ross Albrick's home to trail him. As dur Yagen watched,
Ross walked by, carrying his laptop in a shoulder bag,
waited at the intersection for a green light, then crossed
(19:03):
the street and walked into Bellow Coffee, the cafe he
was in the day before. But the shop must have
been too packed, because half a minute later he exited
and walked down the street towards the Glen Park Public Library,
just a street away. The team's arrest plan was quickly changing.
(19:27):
As Ros sat up in the library, Dr Yagen found
a spot in the stairwell and monitored staff chat for
Dred to come back online. When Dred resurfaced on staff chat,
der Yagen sent him a message as cyrus, Hey, can
you check out one of the flagged messages for me?
Dur Yegan asked Dred, referring to messages on Silk Road.
Dred responded, you did bitcoin exchange before you worked for me, right, yes?
(19:52):
Dr Yagan responded, but just for a little bit, not
anymore then, No, I stopped because of reporting requirements damn regulators, EH,
responded Dred. He continued, which post with DPR now logged
into both staff chat and Silk Road der Yagan gave
the signal to arrest Ross Albricht. As Ross sat with
(20:13):
his laptop at a library table, two federal agents acted
out a lover's quarrel to distract Ross, and when he
turned to watch the commotion, an agent swiftly grabbed Ross's computer,
making sure to keep it open as a swarm of
agents came from all angles of the library to finally
arrest the man they thought was dread Pirate Roberts. The
(20:34):
arrest was orchestrated perfectly. The team was able to take
possession of Ross's laptop before he was able to enact
any encryption, and by looking at the laptop, it appeared
they hooked the mother load. Ross's computer was logged into
the silk Road mastermind page as dread Pirate Roberts. News
(20:56):
of the arrest quickly hit the media.
Speaker 7 (20:58):
Now it was a giant black market in illegal drugs
where buyers and sellers believed they could beyond the law.
Last week, Channel four News showed just how easy it
was to buy Class A drugs through Silk Road, a
so called dark website well hidden behind special software. It
was easy, but it seems that the site's boasts about
being impenetrable to police were wrong. It's now been taken
(21:22):
offline and it's alleged owner arrested by the FBI.
Speaker 8 (21:25):
Ross All Bricks has certainly made an impact on the FBI.
They arrested the twenty nine year old in San Francisco
and charged him with narcotics trafficking, money laundering, computer hacking,
and soliciting murder. They believe he has dread Pirate Roberts,
the master of this black market Silk Road and eBay
(21:48):
for drugs and other illegal goods.
Speaker 9 (21:50):
But they needed a scapegoat, and Ross's their scapegoat. That's
my opinion, and I think I personally think it was
because of the bitcoin.
Speaker 2 (21:58):
That's Lynn Albritt Ross's mom. She's been a vocal supporter
of her sentence his rest and remembers that day, well, yeah.
Speaker 9 (22:05):
I was just home about to go out to do
errands and I went into my husband's home office and
he was sitting with his head in his hands. I'm like,
what happened?
Speaker 4 (22:11):
Where are you?
Speaker 10 (22:12):
Okay?
Speaker 9 (22:13):
And he goes, Ross has been arrested, and I'm like,
what arrested? I mean, because like I said, Ross had
never been you know, and I could tell it was
serious because he had his head in his hands, and
he hand me the phone. It was a Reuters reporter
and she filled me in and this whole thing, and
I was like, this is unbelievable. I mean, this is crazy.
And Ross is such a stellar person. There's no way
he'd hurt someone, and blah blah, blah blah. And then
(22:34):
I turn on the TV and there's George Stephanopolis.
Speaker 5 (22:36):
That's stunning arrest of the drug kingpin who goes by
the name dread Pirate Roberts Pierce've cornered the internet drug market.
Speaker 7 (22:42):
His real name is ross Albrick, and.
Speaker 11 (22:44):
His website, Silk Road, is packed with products like cocaine
and heroin.
Speaker 9 (22:48):
George Stefanopolis going, oh, they found the guy. I'm like,
wait a minute, George, don't are we supposed to have
innocent to a proven guilty in a trial and stuff
like that, you know, I mean, just typical media crap.
And then suddenly there's the phone's ringing off the hook,
and the emails are pouring in, and media's driving by,
upsetting our neighbors, taking photos of everything and knocking on
(23:08):
our door. And I'm like it was like it was
so weird. It was just this siege and honestly that
my life has not been the same since that day.
That was just everything changed because I knew I had
to try to save him.
Speaker 2 (23:22):
Many that knew Ross found it unbelievable that he was
the mastermind of a massive online drug enterprise. At the
time of his arrest, the twenty nine year old, six
foot two, good looking white dude was known by his
friends and family as an easygoing, brilliant young man. He
grew up in Austin, Texas, the son of Lynn and
his father Kirk. He has an older sister and by
(23:45):
all accounts, Ross had a pretty regular family.
Speaker 9 (23:48):
Yeah, and he was always very exceptionally easy going and
he still is easy going. Actually, he's got his personality
just really a joyed raise wasn't a problem at all,
and just a very pleasant person. I was able to
take him around everywhere because he was so easy to do,
you know, to take places.
Speaker 2 (24:08):
Roscott good grades in high school and when he graduated,
he went to the University of Texas in Dallas.
Speaker 9 (24:14):
He majored in physics and worked in a solar lab
where they developed solar cells for research for solar energy
and published several academic papers there and then went on
to get a master's at Penn State in material science
and engineering, and then had actually was on his way
(24:37):
to Cornell for his PhD and got passionate about well
the wrong He got involved with the Ron Paul campaign.
He got passionate about Austrian economics and all of the
writings of those people, and decided that telling him, I'm like, no,
don't tell me, you're not going to do this as
(24:59):
his mother, but he said, I just don't have the
passion for it. This is what I want to really
get it to his free markets and the whole freedom movement,
and so that's what he did.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
Ross decided to explore the free markets by taking the
entrepreneurial route.
Speaker 9 (25:12):
He opened a business. It was a book business, online
book business, kind of like a tiny Amazon really, but
with used books, and he was doing pretty well. He
came up with a system that made it really efficient
and he basically how it worked was that he'd go
around collecting people who donate books and then they would
sell them and donate a portion of that to various
(25:34):
charities in Austin, including a prison literacy program.
Speaker 2 (25:38):
But as he developed this book site, he got interested
in bitcoin and decided to marry it with Tor to
launch silk Road.
Speaker 9 (25:45):
Yeah, it was to provide a truly free market that
offered privacy to users and the used bitcoin as the
means of exchange. It was actually because he saw the
potential for monetary freedom with bitcoin and was very excited
about it. Talked to me about it. I even said
(26:07):
should I get some? And he goes, no, it's too volatile.
Don't do that.
Speaker 2 (26:10):
To get silk Road started, Ross actually grew magic mushrooms
and sold them on the site. In other words, silk
Road was going to be a drug marketplace from the
get go. As we've seen, Ross launched silk Road in
early twenty eleven. And it's about here where the government
and Ross's stories diverge. His lawyer and mother contend that
(26:31):
Ross left silk Road shortly after it launched because the
enterprise was too stressful.
Speaker 1 (26:38):
Ross when did he? Was he involved with it throughout
or did he ever step away from it? The silk
Road I'm talking about.
Speaker 9 (26:47):
Yeah, and this goes into a lot and something that
we put together called Railroaded. The targeting and caging of
Ross Olbricht all based on the public record. It's heavily footnoted,
it's on our website, and there's also an audio component
that No, he stepped away and because it got to
be too much. He's not a computer programmer.
Speaker 2 (27:08):
In January twenty fifteen, Ross Albrick's trial began in a
New York City courtroom. During the trial, Ross's lawyer suggested
he sold the business in mid twenty eleven to an
unspecified third party, but showed no clear evidence of that sale.
His lawyer also suggested that around the time of his arrest,
Ross was lured back to working on Silk Road and
(27:30):
was either framed by the actual dread pirate Roberts, or
perhaps he was framed by some other unknown person that
hacked Ross's computer. Who did this framing is unclear, but
Ross was framed, argued his supporters, even after watching a
nearly three hour documentary entitled Railroaded The Targeting and Caging
(27:50):
of Ross albrit The documentary had no real hard evidence
proving Ross was framed. Instead, it weaves a complicated story
suggesting a long list of potential culprits and how Ross
was wronged. Throughout the judas process. Ross's mother, Lynn follows
this same line of argument.
Speaker 9 (28:09):
The defense was not permitted to pursue the alternate perpetrator,
was not permitted to cross examine about certain things, was
not allowed to bring witnesses, for instance, a tech witness
who would have talked about how you cannot determine who
was on the other side of an anonymous chat. The
(28:29):
time stamps were questionable, and the evidence there was you know,
as I said, Ross was on an open source network
at the library. How easily infiltrated that is, things can
be tampered with things. You know, they had his laptop
for three hours unsupervised, just one guy. That's totally against protocol.
I have no idea what that guy did with his
laptop at all.
Speaker 12 (28:51):
There was an.
Speaker 9 (28:51):
Alternate perpetrator brought up a trial that the judge would
not permit being pursued. There were two corrupt agents who
had free reign of sight, who could change anything, including
the in the jury was seeing there now in prison.
So the trial was very fast because a lot of
the defense was not permitted to be heard. They wouldn't
(29:11):
even let Ross turn around when we'd come into the
room and smile at us, because they didn't want the
jury to think he had a supportive family.
Speaker 12 (29:19):
They weren't.
Speaker 9 (29:20):
His libertarian views were not allowed to be known. A
good number of them also worked for the government, which
I think is a bit of a conflict of interest
because here's the government saying this, and they work for
the government, and I think there's a certain, you know
assumption that well, if the government saying it and a
prosecutor saying it, must be true. None of the legal
things or anything like that that was sold on the
(29:40):
site because it was like an eBay, were allowed to
be known. Even marijuana, of all things, which you know
obviously is a drug, but that was not allowed to
be known, even though was the main drug that was sold.
Speaker 12 (29:53):
I think it was.
Speaker 9 (29:54):
Ten out of twelve were over forty, and I don't
really think they many of them understood at all the
technical aspects, the bitcoin aspects. The bitcoin witnesses that the
defense wanted to call were not permitted to testify. It
kind of goes on and on at all the complication.
It's a very complicated case.
Speaker 2 (30:12):
So the prosecution, on the other hand, had a very clear,
cohesive and simple narrative, and that is that Ross created
Silk Road and ran the site from the beginning to
the end, and only came up with the dread Pirate
(30:33):
Roberts persona to muddy the waters in the event that
law enforcement closed in on him. The prosecution's case against
Ross was absolutely overwhelming. First and foremost, he was caught
red handed, logged in as dread Pirate Roberts. The silk
(30:54):
Road servers automatically recognized his laptop at login. Ross's laptop
was named Frosty, the same name the silk Road servers recognized.
There was a detailed electronic journal on his laptop, and
many of the significant events and dates in the journal
aligned with things that dread Pirate Roberts said in silk
Road chat logs and forums. His Gmail account included confirmation
(31:17):
emails addressed to Altoid, the same avatar used to promote
silk Road before anyone really knew about the site. Specific
events and vacations Ross posted on social media aligned both
in timing and content with things DPR said. An entire
backup of the silk Road server was found in Ross's possession.
His close friend even testified that he helped Ross write
(31:41):
the code for the site and also to authenticate his messages.
DPR used was called a private PGP key as a signature.
That private key was found on Ross's computer and the
key never changed throughout the entire time dread Pirate Roberts existed.
But perhaps the biggest indication that Ross Allbridge was in
(32:03):
fact the head of the Silk Road site was something
else that was found on his laptop, something that would
be used to suggest Ross Albrick was a ruthless drug kingpin.
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(32:45):
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Speaker 1 (32:49):
Welcome back. The evidence showing Ross Olbrich was Dreadpirate Roberts
was overwhelming, but perhaps the biggest indication that Ross Olbrich
was in fact the head of Silk Road was something
else that was found on his laptop, something that be
used to suggest that Ross was a ruthless drug kingpin.
When the Federal Task Force confiscated Ross Olbrik's computer, they
(33:12):
found a bitcoin wallet on his hard drive. A witness
for the prosecution, former FBI agent Ilwan Yum, led an
analysis of this bitcoin wallet. You may recall from part
two of this series that the blockchain is the technology
driving bitcoin and that it stores every Bitcoin transaction that
has ever occurred onto an immutable, permanent public ledger called
(33:35):
the blockchain. For each transaction, it doesn't store anyone's name,
but instead it stores the bitcoin address of the sender,
the Bitcoin address of the receiver, the amount of bitcoin sent,
and the date it was sent. Since the FBI had
both the server that hosted silk roads bitcoin wallet and
Ross Olbrich's computer that it housed a bitcoin wallet, former
(33:55):
FBI agent Yum was able to use the blockchain to
trace more than thirteen million dollars in direct transaction from
Silk Road's Bitcoin address to the bitcoin address on Ross
Olbrich's laptop. It was undeniable. Ross Olbrichs's computer contained massive
amounts of money from a criminal drug enterprise. The only
(34:16):
response to this damning evidence has been that the Bitcoin
wallet was planted on Ross's computer by someone else, which
we'll get to in a bit. But first, and undoubtedly
the biggest controversy associated with the Silk Road case was
the alleged murder for Higher Plots. You may recall from
Part two, the DPR ordered and paid for the assassination
(34:37):
of six people that threatened his Silk Road enterprise. That
information was gathered during the federal investigation, found in chat
logs on the Silk Road server and in the journal
found on Ross Olbrich's computer, But to date, the government
was never able to prove that any of these murders
ever actually occurred. Ross was never charged or convicted of
a murder for Higher Plot. The prosecution did contend, however,
(35:00):
that DPR did in fact order and pay for assassinations
and believe they happened at the time, and the prosecution
brought this up in trial. I asked Lynn Ulbrick about
the murder for Higher accusations against Ross.
Speaker 9 (35:13):
So, for example, with Ross's case, the first we hear
about this is at the bail hearing. Totally ambushed by
this at the bail hearing, trying to get bail, and
so they use that to deprive them of bail. The
defense didn't even know about it. Then they were they
were permitted, the prosecution was permitted to talk about it
(35:33):
a trial, even though they said, we're not charging him
with this, there's no murders, but believe us, just trust
us he did this. Now that's not how it's supposed
to work. You're supposed to have proof and all of that.
Now they got they were permitted to prejudice the jury
with that. Then the judge she uh used.
Speaker 1 (35:53):
It so and they they basically what they claimed was
is that he was involved in some kind of a
plot to you to take out people that were investigating
him or what was this?
Speaker 9 (36:08):
No, it was he was accused and it's all based
on again anonymous digital evidence, no witnesses, nothing. He was
accused of by you know, paying hitmen. Now mind you,
there were no hit men allowed on Silk Road. But anyway,
paying hitman to kill one was somebody blackmailing, supposedly blackmailing
(36:30):
him and or set threatening to give names of people
on Silk Road. There was a couple of different instances.
One was Curtis Green, who supposed they faked his death
and showed pictures. He's the guy who says he doesn't
think it was Ross.
Speaker 1 (36:46):
I actually talked to Curtis Green about this and his
take was a little different than Lin's. And do you
think that Ross was involved with the murder for hire?
Speaker 13 (36:59):
You know that I don't know. My view has changed
on that multiple times, and so I'm not you.
Speaker 4 (37:09):
Know, I lot mentally because I was told so many
different story so I don't know what to believe.
Speaker 1 (37:17):
Well, Bitcoin helps shed some light on this issue. You
may recall from part two that dread Pirate Roberts was
in communication with a supposed Hell's angel called Red and
White and asked him to assassinate a guy named Friendly Chemist.
The Department of Justice says these communications were found on
silk Roads market server and user forum. Red and White
said he would charge somewhere between one hundred and fifty
(37:40):
thousand and three hundred thousand dollars to kill Friendly Chemist,
but dpr boked, stating, quote, don't want to be a
pain here, but the price seems high. Not long ago,
I had a clean hit done for eighty thousand dollars
are the prices you quoted? The best you can do?
End quote. Eighty thousand dollars is the same amount of
money that the DOJ says DPR anonymously wired to an
(38:02):
undercover agent for the fake assassination of Curtis Green. Red
White responded to DPR holding firm on the hundred fifty
thousand dollars price tag and told DPR, quote, if you
want it done by Monday, that only leaves today. It's
Sunday morning.
Speaker 4 (38:16):
Here.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
We always seem to miss each other online, so I
will leave a bitcoin address in case you want to
pay that way. Red and White continued, quote, I will
check the computer in about ten hours, and if I
see that you do want to go ahead with this
and a payment has been sent, we'll do it to
day end quote. Red and White sent his bitcoin address
along with this message to DPR. Dread pirate Roberts responded
(38:38):
a few hours later and said, thank you, Red and White.
I've only ever commissioned the one other hit, so I'm
still learning this market. I have no problem putting my
faith in you, and I'm sure you will do a
good job. The exchange rate is about ninety right now,
so at ninety dollars per bitcoin, a hundred and fifty
thousand dollars is about one thousand, six hundred and seventy
(38:59):
bitcoins end quote. DPR then paid Red and White the
one thousand, six hundred and seventy bitcoins, and to prove it,
he sent Red and White the bitcoin transaction number, which
is like a confirmation number for a credit card payment.
And sure enough, the transaction is immortalized on the blockchain.
Anyone can go there now and see it. But DPR's
(39:20):
interaction with Red and White didn't end there. He also
called for the hit of four more people and negotiated
with Red and White the price of five hundred thousand
dollars for the job. At the time, five hundred thousand
dollars was roughly three thousand bitcoins, so DPR sent three
thousand bitcoins to Red and White's bitcoin address and again
sent the blockchain transaction number to confirm the payment went through.
(39:43):
And if you go to the blockchain right now, the
transaction is once again forever immortalized. However, the blockchain does
not record the names of the sender and receiver. So
how do we know ross olbrichs sent these payments. Well,
the bitcoin addresses that sent the alleged hitman the money
were found on ross olbricht laptop. Even Ross's lawyer had
(40:05):
to admit to that fact to an appeals judge.
Speaker 14 (40:08):
Was there not evidence that he paid six hundred and
fifty thousand dollars worth of bitcoin to someone who had
represented that he killed people at the orders of dread pirate?
Roberts that again that we can't elevate.
Speaker 10 (40:25):
Yes, yes, yes, yes, but but you can't but only
in the sense of what's on an internet chat room.
Speaker 14 (40:31):
We can't wait. Why I don't understand this.
Speaker 15 (40:33):
It's one thing to say, wouldn't you know in a
fantasy chat you know, I'd like to kill everybody that
I don't like. It's a different thing to actually pay
money to someone.
Speaker 1 (40:47):
Ross Olbrich was never charged with or found guilty of
a murder for higher plot, that's for sure. But a
bitcoin wallet that was on his laptop sent money to
a man claiming to have successfully killed five people. Make
of that what you may. Many still argue that the
incriminating evidence found on ross Olbrich's laptop was all planted.
That argument reminds me of another story.
Speaker 11 (41:09):
A woman who was caught with meth in a Regina
claims to police that it was not hers.
Speaker 1 (41:15):
You see, in order to believe that the government planted
all of this incriminating evidence on Ross's computer, you also
have to believe that they planted evidence that incriminated one
of their own federal agents. Remember in part two, when
DPR was constantly getting approached by Silk Road users attempting
to extract money from him. One was Death from Above,
(41:36):
who claimed to know DPR's identity and was going to
release it to the public. Then another user, french Maid,
claimed to have inside information on the federal investigation into
Silk Road. DPR paid french Maid for that info. After
Ross was arrested, they found a folder on his computer
that stored the information that french Maid provided. There were
(41:57):
also journal entries on Ross's laptop documenting communications with french
Maid that all also matched up with chat logs between
DPR and french Maid on the Silk Road server. And
who was french Maid and Death from Above? Well, it
turns out that both were none other than a DEA
agent named Carl Force. And we know this because of
(42:18):
the blockchain. Carl Force was the DEA agent that went
undercover into Silk Road as a mafia connected drug dealer
called Knob, the same Knob that sent Curtis Green cocaine,
the same knob that DPR hired to kill Curtis Green,
and the same knob that staged Curtis Green's murder. A
few months after ross Ulbrich was arrested, a Department of
(42:39):
Justice prosecutor named Katie Han got a tip.
Speaker 3 (42:42):
The essence of the tip was Knobs moving around a
lot of bitcoin. Now, remember I was in San Francisco
at the time, used to kind of crazies calling me
up telling me about the government conspiracies that were going on.
So I took this with a grain of salt. But
the tipster was pretty insistent, and I looked into it
(43:02):
a little further and found that Knob was liquidating hundreds
of thousands of dollars of bitcoin every month. I thought
it was probably a poorly backstopped undercover operation, but I
looked into it a little further and I found that
Knob was liquidating this to his own personal accounts. And
when I subpoened some of those entities, what I found
(43:24):
was that Knob, with his badge, was telling them to
delete all of the transaction history. So now I was
getting suspicious too.
Speaker 1 (43:32):
So Katie Hahn went to the blockchain to follow the
history of Knob or Carl Force's bitcoin transactions.
Speaker 3 (43:38):
So using the blockchain working backwards, we went to Knob's
accounts and we traced those bitcoin payments. You can see
it up on your screen here. And what's interesting is
where we trace those payments too, right back to the
Silk Road. It turns out that those payments, and we
(43:58):
compared them and the timing to Ross Silbrook's journals of
when he had French Maid. Turns out that Knob was
French Maid. He'd been selling Ross Olbrucht's DPR information into
the government's investigation the whole time.
Speaker 1 (44:16):
But that's not all.
Speaker 3 (44:17):
He'd also been extorting Olbricht as death from above, threatening
to reveal his identity to law enforcement. In short, Knob
was a double agent. He'd gone rogue, and he was
playing both sides the entire time.
Speaker 1 (44:31):
Carl Force was arrested and is serving a six and
a half year sentence in federal prison. Federal law enforcement
didn't even know about Carl Force's corruption until months after
Ross Olbrich's arrest. So to believe that the government planted
Ross Olbrich's computer with all of this damning evidence, you
also have to believe that they planted evidence against one
of their own. And here's the kicker. They had to
(44:52):
have planted it before they even knew Carl Force was corrupt.
The technology behind bitcoin brought down the mastermind of Silk
Road and a federal agent, but the blockchain also held
to prove another man's innocence. Do you remember the missing
twenty thousand bitcoins that the government thought Curtis greenstole. The
(45:15):
blockchain helped find that money as well.
Speaker 3 (45:18):
Going back to the blockchain and looking at the stolen
twenty one thousand bitcoin the one hundred and fifty million dollars,
we saw that the patterns of the theft were very
different from French maize and death from aboves. Instead of
going through a series of convoluted hops, the stolen funds
from the Silk Road accounts went straight to one place,
(45:40):
to Mount Gox. Mount Gox was a cryptocurrency exchange based
in Japan, but it too had suffered a series of
hacks to the tune of five hundred million dollars. And
what this meant was that by the time we trace
this to Japan into mount Gox, there were no records
(46:00):
available for us to go look at But remember what
I told you about the blockchain, that it's immutable and
it's permanent. So we were able to trace the flow
of funds through the blockchain from Mountcox to a US
financial institution. And where that led was also a surprise
(46:21):
right back to the Silk Rowe task Force, but not
to knob to a secret service agent on that same
task force, a secret service agent by the name of
Shan Bridges. Shawn Bridges had also been at that proffer
session where Curtis had turned over his password and computer
and credentials, and that night Shawn Bridges went home using
(46:44):
Curtis Green's computer user named credentials and password and drained
Silk Road accounts of twenty one thousand bitcoin, and he
framed it. He framed Curtis Green, and then he stood
by the next day while his fellow agents on the
task force confronted Green and told told Green to come clean.
And he also stood by knowing that Russlbrit had put
(47:06):
a hit out on Curtis Green. In fact, Sean Bridges
helped stage those proof of death photos and helped stage
the torture and murder of Curtis Green. So later that
year we brought charges against both of these agents for embezzlement, extortion,
international money laundering, and obstruction of justice. Things really out
(47:27):
of a movie, and in fact, if you can believe it,
some of the guys in this story had movie deals.
But they won't be appearing in the movie because they're
now sitting in federal prison. But they almost weren't. Why.
These guys were the perfect criminals. With thirty years of
law enforcement investigative experience behind them, they knew exactly how
(47:50):
to cover their tracks. They were also able to get
unwitting participants like banks, cryptocurrency exchanges, and other entities to
destroy evidence. These guys had justice departments of poenis, they
forged court orders, seizear warrants, they even destroyed evidence in
burn bags. But the one thing they couldn't escape was
(48:11):
the immutable, transparent blockchain. And I'm here to tell you
that without it, we never would have caught these guys.
In fact, without the blockchain, they would have still been
sitting in the federal government today instead of in the
federal penitentiary.
Speaker 1 (48:27):
The technology behind bitcoin proved that it can be used
to trace criminal behavior. Ross Albert ultimately lost his trial
and was found guilty on all counts. He was sentenced
by the judge to do two life sentences plus forty
years without the possibility of parole. He also lost his
appeal and the Supreme Court refused to hear his case.
(48:48):
He now has only two options again, Lynn Olbricht.
Speaker 9 (48:52):
So now there's a habeas petition that's been filed, which
is basically for various arguments Ross should have a new trial.
It's asking for a new trial in the District Court
in New York. And then the other thing is clemency.
Speaker 1 (49:06):
Jakie nil Chapel Guzman, the notorious drug kingpin that was
the head of the ruthless Sinaloa cartel for roughly three decades,
was found guilty of massive drug trafficking, money laundering, conspiracy
to murder, and was directed to hand over fourteen billion
dollars in drug money. Comparatively speaking, silk Road was a
minuscule operation, yet l Chapo got a lighter sentence than
(49:29):
Ross Olbricht. Some think that the harsh sentence was handed
down to stop Bitcoin in its tracks, to taint the
cryptocurrency as a tool for criminals.
Speaker 10 (49:38):
Think silk Road was a marginal company.
Speaker 1 (49:40):
That's Mike Cernovich, filmmaker, journalist, author, and an early proponent
of cryptocurrency.
Speaker 10 (49:46):
Why did they target it? Because Wall Street wanted to
shoy Bitcoin before it could get big enough to compete
for them. Because a lot of people don't want to
have to deal with central bankers.
Speaker 1 (49:55):
The Trump administration has tried to paint bitcoin and other
cryptocurrencies as dangerous.
Speaker 16 (50:00):
A crypto is being talked about. The President actually in
and tweeted about cryptocurrencies last night. He wrote in part this,
I'm not a fan of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies, which
are not money and whose value is highly volatile based
on thin air. He writes, unregulated crypto assets can facilitate
unlawful behavior, including drug trade and other illegal activity rights
(50:20):
the present.
Speaker 1 (50:21):
But the Federal Reserve prints the US dollar out of
thin air, and there's nothing more that facilitates unlawful behavior
than paper money. As we've shown, cryptocurrency actually helps law
enforcement catch criminals. Cryptocurrencies also have another benefit in these
politically volatile times, Activists within financial institutions have worked to
(50:42):
unbank their adversaries.
Speaker 10 (50:44):
Again, Mike Cernovich, So now, of course we're saying that
banks Bank of America won't do business with gun owners.
What happens when every big bank won't even do business
with people exercising their constitutional rights. There are people being
banned for free speech, and that's why Trump is losing
the plot when he wants to go after bitcoin.
Speaker 1 (51:03):
Many big tech companies like Patreon and PayPal have also
blocked people from using their services. Bitcoin has helped solve
that troubling phenomenon.
Speaker 17 (51:12):
But as it currently stands, it is a very viable
alternative to people who are no longer welcome within perhaps
some traditional financial institutions, so that does give them another option.
Speaker 1 (51:25):
As Billy Bambra, a freelance journalist that's been covering cryptocurrencies
since twenty twelve.
Speaker 17 (51:30):
So, we're already seeing the issue of deplatforming come up
amongst some groups where companies don't want to work with them. PayPal,
for example, Patreon have said that they're going to consider
or in some case already have done, barring people from
their platforms. As digital money becomes much more important than
physical money, this is going to be a bigger issue
(51:53):
in the future because really we're letting private companies decide
who has access to money. Bitcoin is away and other
cryptocurrencies are a way of stopping big companies being involved
in that decision.
Speaker 1 (52:05):
The future of cryptocurrency looks so promising that Facebook is
trying to get in on the action.
Speaker 11 (52:10):
Facebook announcing a new digital currency called Libra, and Facebook
says this digital currency aims to make it as easy
to send money around the world as it is to
send a photo now. The currency is set to launch
in the first half of next year, and it will
be run not by Facebook but by a nonprofit in Switzerland.
And unlike Bitcoin, Libra, this digital currency will be backed
(52:32):
by real money, so if you put in a dollar
or some other currency into Libra, you'll get a dollar
or the equivalent out.
Speaker 17 (52:39):
Now.
Speaker 11 (52:39):
The goal is for that reserve of real money to
make the whole currency more stable, unlike Bitcoin, which is
obviously very volatile.
Speaker 1 (52:48):
There the social media behemoth is trying to squeeze into
the currency game, and many believe it has an even
larger potential to become a global currency.
Speaker 12 (52:57):
It would have enormous attraction to people involved with China.
Speaker 1 (53:01):
That's economist Peter Marisi, Professor emeritus at the University of
Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business.
Speaker 12 (53:07):
Because the Chinese government being so authoritarian and so capable
of just taking away anything your own anytime it wants to,
including your life beyond. Is not a good candidate to
be a reserve currency, and this could provide a convenient alternative.
The Chinese now use bitcoin to get money in an
out of the country, so they can't otherwise get in
(53:28):
and out, the same thing with the Koreans. This would
be a much more attractible alternative to bitcoin because it
would have a much more stable value. So you know,
governments are worried.
Speaker 4 (53:38):
However, I don't know that anybody can prevent it.
Speaker 1 (53:41):
With Facebook now wanting in the government may try to
stop the growth of cryptocurrency in other ways. Again Peter Maurici,
and the real question becomes is this like armies.
Speaker 12 (53:52):
You know it's illegal to have a private army in
the United States, should it be illegal to have private money?
You can make it illegal in the United States, But
who's to prevent someone from establishing money out of Switzerland?
Speaker 1 (54:07):
Which brings us back to the question is bitcoin dangerous
to America?
Speaker 10 (54:11):
What would happen? For example, if Gulf nations, rather than
trading oil and dollars, moved to bitcoin, that would I
think destroy America as a global empire that said, I
don't think that they're going to do that because bitcoin
has way too much volatility.
Speaker 4 (54:27):
It's revolutionary and it's going to change the way we
do think. That's what I put blocking technology up there
to the invention of the cell phone to the invention
of a computer. That's what it's going to do to
liberate and liberate it and help us with our daily
lives in the future.
Speaker 17 (54:45):
And personally, I do see as a revolutionary technology that
is going to be like, I don't even know how,
but I'm convinced that it is going to change the
world's significantly.
Speaker 1 (54:55):
Bitcoin is not necessarily dangerous to Americans. We can use
it to protect us from the poor policies of the
Federal Reserve. It can be a life vote when the
banks and big tech companies deplatform us for our political views.
And the technology behind bitcoin, the blockchain has so many
positive uses that we don't even see them yet. For example,
imagine an election system built on the blockchain technology that
(55:19):
drives bitcoin. It could drastically eliminate voter fraud because every
vote could be stored on the blockchain ledger, just like
every bitcoin transaction. And if there's any claim of voter fraud.
The entire vote for that election is there on the
blockchain for all to see an audit, and it could
never be changed because it's immutable. That's the possibility of
the technology underpinning bitcoin. Bitcoin is also not dangerous in
(55:43):
the way our leaders are telling us. The US dollar
is made out of thin air, and nothing facilitates illegal
behavior more than paper money. Bitcoin, by contrast, has helped
put criminals behind bars.
Speaker 3 (55:55):
Now you might be thinking that cryptocurrency really is just
used by criminals, but nothing could be further from the truth.
In fact, it's not surprising that in those early days
criminals we're using cryptocurrencies. After all, criminals are great beta
testers of any new technology. Think about in the early
days of the Internet, although we now i'll use it,
(56:17):
some of its earliest adopters were fraudsters, and the same
as true of cryptocurrency. In twenty twelve, thirty percent of
bitcoin transaction value was associated with darknet markets like alphabet
or silk rowed, but by twenty eighteen that number is
down to less than one percent. The fact of the
(56:38):
matter is that plenty of ordinary people all over the
world now are using cryptocurrency.
Speaker 1 (56:44):
Bitcoin may have had a dark web start, but it's
now entered the mainstream. And some may not like to
hear this, but Ross Albert helped prove that bitcoin can
be used at scale as Internet cash. It's too early
to say how bitcoin, blockchain, or other cryptocurrencies will be
used in America. Could have predicted Fortnite or Snapchat in
(57:05):
the early days of the dial up Internet, but I
think it's safe to say that crypto is here to stay.
And then it appears that some of our leaders in Washington,
d C. Like House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy, are beginning
to get on board the crypto train.
Speaker 6 (57:20):
But I'm just surprised that a Republican city, and you know,
on a in a powerful position, is making the case
for Really, I think you're making the case for blockchain
and bitcoin.
Speaker 2 (57:29):
Leader, Well, look, I like bitcoin.
Speaker 1 (57:33):
Be sure to catch our new series entitled Crypto Revisited,
where we do another deep dive into cryptocurrency. Roughly three
and a half years after airing this series, we answer
the question where is cryptocurrency going? The industry is no
longer in its infancy, and our Crypto Revisited conclusion will
no doubt shock you.
Speaker 2 (57:53):
Red Pilled America is an iHeartRadio original podcast. It's owned
and produced by Patrick Carrelci and me Adrianna Cortez of
Informed Ventures. Now you can get ad free acts to
our entire archive of episodes by becoming a backstage subscriber.
To subscribe, visit Redpilled America dot com and click join
in the topmenu. That's red Pilled America dot com and
(58:14):
click join in the top menu. Thanks for listening.
Hosts And Creators
Adryana Cortez
Patrick Courrielche
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