Alleged online drug kingpin arrested at SF library S.F. man arrested at library accused as the mastermind 
 
 
 
 
 
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 Photo: Kurt Rogers Image 1 of / 3 Caption Close Image 1 of 3 The entrance to the Glen Park Branch Library in San Francisco. Ross Ulbricht, previously known by the pseudonym "Dread Pirate Roberts, was arrested at the library on Tuesday. Ulbricht was the alleged mastermind behind the online drug marketplace known as Silk Road. less The entrance to the Glen Park Branch Library in San Francisco. Ross Ulbricht, previously known by the pseudonym "Dread Pirate Roberts, was arrested at the library on Tuesday. Ulbricht was the alleged ... more Photo: Kurt Rogers Image 2 of 3 The F.B.I. siezed the Silk Road website. The F.B.I. siezed the Silk Road website. Photo: FBI Image 3 of 3 Alleged online drug kingpin arrested at SF library 1 / 3 Back to Gallery 
 
 After spending months trying to infiltrate an underground website that made buying and selling drugs as easy as shopping online for a book or TV, half a dozen FBI agents shuffled into the science fiction section of a San Francisco library and grabbed a young man working on a laptop. 
 
 Authorities said Wednesday the man was Ross William Ulbricht, and they accused him of being "Dread Pirate Roberts," the once-anonymous mastermind behind the online drug marketplace known as Silk Road. Ulbricht, 29, collected tens of millions of dollars in commissions, investigators said, and twice ordered people killed in a bid to protect his empire. 
 
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 The Texas native and San Francisco transplant didn't resist as he was taken into custody Tuesday at the Glen Park library branch, officials said. 
 
 In a complaint filed in New York and a parallel grand jury indictment handed down in Maryland, federal prosecutors accused him of charges including narcotics trafficking, money laundering and attempting to murder a witness. 
 
 They said his business, while operating in a dark corner of the Internet, was penetrated by undercover agents. 
 
 The FBI said Ulbricht ran Silk Road from San Francisco, where he had been living for the past year, including at a cafe not far from his former Hayes Valley home. Since at least 2011, authorities said, he had facilitated the sale of heroin, cocaine and other drugs as "Dread Pirate Roberts" - a reference to a character in the film "The Princess Bride" who turns out to be not one man but rather a series of men passing down the title. 
 
 Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who in 2011 asked federal agents to take down the site after it began to get media attention, applauded the arrest. 
 
 "Sayonara to Silk Road," Schumer said. "The country is safer now that this open market for lawbreaking has been shuttered." 
 
 Change in goals 
 
 Ulbricht has in the past railed against government control. After studying solar cells as a graduate student in Pennsylvania, he wrote on his LinkedIn profile that his goals had changed. 
 
 "The most widespread and systemic use of force is amongst institutions and governments, so this is my current point of effort," he said. "I am creating an economic simulation to give people a first-hand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force." 
 
 That simulation, the government alleged, is Silk Road. 
 
 Federal authorities had seized the website by the time Ulbricht appeared Wednesday in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, where he was remanded into custody pending a hearing Friday. His attorney declined to comment. 
 
 Undercover buys 
 
 The charges were the result of an investigation during which law-enforcement officials made more than 100 undercover purchases of drugs from Silk Road vendors from 10 countries, authorities said. The site itself didn't sell drugs, but connected sellers with buyers, who would generally ship items through the mail. 
 
 FBI Special Agent Christopher Tarbell described the website in an affidavit as a "sprawling black-market bazaar." Users could only access Silk Road using the Tor network - technology that was first developed by the U.S. Navy and conceals communications. Tor browser software can be downloaded for free on the Internet. 
 
 To pay for items, buyers used Bitcoins, an anonymous digital currency with no central bank or authority. Bitcoins - whose value plunged after news spread of Ulbricht's arrest - aren't illegal and are used in many legitimate ways, but the FBI noted that they've been used by "cyber-criminals for money-laundering purposes." 
 
 The Silk Road site had many of the trappings of popular online retail sites, like user comments, which sought to ward off shady dealers and undercover cops. It featured wares like "amphetamine paste" and "high quality #4 heroin." One commenter wrote after making a purchase that he "had to snort almost triple the amount of this new stuff to get where I was with the old." 
 
 $1.2 billion in sales 
 
 Over the past two years, Silk Road had been used by "several thousand drug dealers and other unlawful vendors" to sell "hundreds of kilograms" of illegal drugs, generating the Bitcoin equivalent of $1.2 billion in sales and $80 million in commissions, Tarbell wrote. At one point, Ulbricht hid behind the username "altoid" to marvel about Silk Road, describing it as an "anonymous Amazon.com," investigators said. 
 
 Authorities also alleged that Ulbricht sought to use violence to protect his domain. 
 
 The Maryland grand jury indictment said a federal agent began communicating with Ulbricht in April 2012 while posing as a drug smuggler. Then in January, prosecutors said, Ulbricht paid the agent $80,000 to torture and kill a Silk Road employee who had stolen Bitcoins and had been arrested, prompting fears he would become a government witness. 
 
 Ulbricht allegedly wrote to the agent that he had "never killed a man or had one killed before, but it is the right move in this case." 
 
 In February, the agent sent staged photographs of the employee being tortured and a picture of the purported dead body, prosecutors said. 
 
 Another try 
 
 They said they found out later that Ulbricht soon sought to kill again. In March, Tarbell wrote, Ulbricht offered $150,000 to a Silk Road user "to execute a murder-for-hire of another Silk Road user, who was threatening to release the identities of thousands of users of the site" unless he was given $500,000. 
 
 "I wouldn't mind if he was executed," Ulbricht allegedly wrote. 
 
 Ulbricht was again given a picture of the purportedly dead victim, a resident of British Columbia, but there were no reports of anyone having been killed there, the FBI said. 
 
 "Your problem has been taken care of," the reported hit man wrote in a message to Ulbricht, authorities said. "Rest easy though, because he won't be blackmailing anyone again. Ever." 
 
 Ulbricht "has acted as a law unto himself in deciding how to deal with problems affecting Silk Road, and that he has been willing to pursue violent means when he deems that the problem calls for it," Tarbell wrote. 
 
 San Francisco operation 
 
 Authorities said they identified Ulbricht by tracing his online activity. They said that in June he was living with a friend on Hickory Street in San Francisco's Hayes Valley, just 500 feet from an Internet cafe on Laguna Street "from which someone logged into a server used to administer the Silk Road website." 
 
 By July, he had moved to 15th Street in San Francisco, where U.S. Department of Homeland Security agents visited him to see why a package for him that they had intercepted contained nine fake identification documents, all with his picture on it, authorities said. 
 
 Ulbricht refused to discuss the counterfeit papers, the affidavit said, but "volunteered that 'hypothetically' anyone could go onto a website named 'Silk Road' on 'Tor' and purchase any drugs or fake identity documents the person wanted." ||||| The owner of the underground drug market Silk Road was a 29-year-old Libertarian engineer living in San Francisco raking in over $80 million in 2 years, according to the indictment revealed today. Who is the man behind the biggest underground drug market, and how did he get caught? The indictment lays out a detailed account of how Silk Road grew and how FBI agent Christopher Tarbell took it down. 
 
 According to the indictment, Silk Road was bigger than anyone had suspected: It boasted over $1.6 billion in sales from 2011-2013, which resulted in $80 million in commissions. (Researchers had previously estimated that Silk Road was doing about $22 million in total sales per year.) According to the indictment, which claims that FBI agents obtained a mirror of the server that housed Silk Road's business from law enforcement in an unidentified foreign country, Ulbricht "alone has controlled the massive profits generated from the operation of the business." He used some of the profits to pay a team of administrators as much as $2,000 a week each. And yet, he only paid $1,000 a month in rent for his San Francisco apartment, according to the indictment. 
 
 The most bizarre and spectacular allegation in the indictment is that Ulbricht solicited a murder-for-hire against a Silk Road user who was attempting to blackmail him. The user, FriendlyChemist, told Ulbricht—whose alleged online persona was "Dread Pirate Roberts," or DPR, a reference to the film The Princess Bride—that he had obtained a list of thousands of Silk Road users and was going to release them unless DPR paid off his $500,000 debt to another user, RedandWhite. Instead of paying the debt, DPR contacted RedAndWhite and paid him $150,000 in Bitcoins to off Friendly Chemist. 
 
 "In my eyes, FriendlyChemist is a liability and I wouldn't mind if he was executed," DPR wrote. DPR even tried to bargain down FriendlyChemist, messaging: "Don't want to be a pain here, but the price seems high. Not long ago, I had a clean hit done for $80K." DPR gave redandwhite the address of FriendlyChemist in British Columbia, and the indictment reports that redandwhite sent back photo evidence of the deed. But according to the indictment there is no indication the hit actually happened—"Although I believe the foregoing exchange demonstrates DPR's intention to solicit a murder-for-hire," Tarbell wrote, "I have spoken with Canadian law enforcement authorities, who have no record of there being any Canadian resident with the name DPR passed to redandwhite as the target of the solicited murder-for-hire. Nor do they have any record of a homicide occurring in White Rock, British Columbia on or about March 31, 2013." 
 
 Currently the most-discussed aspect of the case on the Darknet is speculation on how Ulbricht got caught. Silk Road was hosted using the privacy-protecting Tor Network, and its brazen customers believed their digital tracks were hidden. But it appears that Ulbricht was tripped up by some security mistakes while promoting Silk Road in the early days. Tarbell found that the two earliest mentions of Silk Road were forum posts by a user called Altoid on the drug forum Shroomery.org and the semi-official Bitcoin Forum. Both were obvious astroturfing efforts to promote the Silk Road: 
 
 "Has anyone seen Silk Road yet?" goes one. "It's kind of like an anonymous Amazon.com. I don't think they have heroin on there, but they are selling other stuff. Let me know what you guys think." Altoid was easily connected to Ulbricht by a post on the Bitcoin forum in which Altoid solicits programming help for a "venture backed bit coin startup" using the email address: Rossulbricht@gmail.com. From there, agents surveilled Ulbricht in real life and were able to match up his locations to locations used to log into the DPR account. They noticed that both Ulbricht and DPR were fans of the Libertarian Ludwig Von Mises Institute. And a key used to log into Silk Road's administrator account was linked to another email address Ulbricht had used. 
 
 The feds also managed to gain access to servers belonging to Silk Road. They spied on the traffic in real time, determining that from Feb 2011 to July 2013 there were 2013 1,229,465 transactions on the site, and 957,079 total registered users. This raises the question of exactly how much information they have on Silk Road's users, and whether more busts are to come. (Agents made over 100 undercover transactions throughout the investigation, according to the indictment.) 
 
 Browsing Ulbricht's social media accounts show a pretty normal, nerdy guy. Ulbricht graduated from the University of Texas in 2006 with a degree in Physics and went to the University of Pennsylvania Pennsylvania State University for grad school, where he studied engineering and wrote a master's thesis on "Growth of EuO Thin Films by Molecular Beam Epitaxy." According to property records, he owned a home in State College, PA, which he sold in 2010 for $187,0000. Curiously, the indictment misidentifies his grad school as the University of Pennsylvania. 
 
 He's got a Facebook page full of beer pong pics and, of course, was a vocal supporter of Ron Paul, donating $200 to his campaign in 2007. "He doesn't compromise his integrity as a politician and he fights quite diligently to restore the principles that our country was founded on," Ulbricht told the Penn State student newspaper in 2008. 
 
 Last year in a YouTube video for the storytelling project StoryCorps with his friend Rene Pinnell. Pinnell, speaking to the Verge, was adamant about his friend's innocence: "I don't know how they messed it up and I don't know how they got Ross wrapped into this, but I'm sure it's not him," he said.
– Alleged Silk Road mastermind Ross Ulbricht was no ordinary drug boss—he paid $1,000 a month for a San Francisco apartment he shared with two roommates, used an alias from the Princess Bride, and was arrested in the sci-fi section of his public library. But the FBI says the 29-year-old not only raked in around $80 million from his online drug marketplace's $1.6 billion turnover over two years, he ordered at least two killings to protect his operation, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. The FBI says Ulbricht, aka "Dread Pirate Roberts," was provided with a photo of the supposed victim in one killing he ordered but there's no indication the killing actually took place. The other hit man he tried to hire was an undercover agent. Ulbricht, a Texas native, appears to be a "normal, nerdy guy" in his social media postings, Gawker finds. He went to grad school at Pennsylvania State University, where he studied solar cells. On his LinkedIn profile, he complained about government control and said his goals had changed after graduation. "The most widespread and systemic use of force is amongst institutions and governments, so this is my current point of effort," he wrote. "I am creating an economic simulation to give people a first-hand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force."