Ross Ulbricht, the convicted founder of Silk Road, has been
sentenced to life in prison for running the underground online drug
bazaar, signaling the government's seriousness in combating
Internet crime.
The punishment is a heavy price to pay for the 31-year-old, who
had pleaded with the judge to spare him his old age and "leave a
small light at the end of the tunnel."
Mr. Ulbricht faced a mandatory minimum of 20 years in prison,
but federal prosecutors asked the judge to give him "substantially"
more than that, arguing that a harsh sentence is necessary to deter
others from following in Mr. Ulbricht's footsteps.
After a three-week trial in Manhattan, Mr. Ulbricht was found
guilty of seven criminal charges in February, including
conspiracies to sell drugs, launder money and hack computers. At
trial, Mr. Ulbricht admitted to creating Silk Road but said he left
the site after a few months and didn't engage in any
wrongdoing.
Prosecutors have described Silk Road as a criminal marketplace
of unprecedented scope and sophistication. The site, which operated
for two years, facilitated millions of dollars in transactions
between buyers and sellers, who hawked illegal goods ranging from
cocaine to fake driver's licenses. At the heart of the criminal
conspiracy, prosecutors say, was Mr. Ulbricht, who allegedly ran
the site using the pseudonym Dread Pirate Roberts.
In many ways, the Silk Road case was the first of its kind. The
site operated on a hidden part of the Internet called the Tor
network, and its only accepted form of payment was bitcoin, a
digital currency whose movements are difficult to trace. The
anonymity of the site's transactions posed new challenges for law
enforcement and forced them to depart from investigative techniques
that would have been used in a traditional street drug case.
Mr. Ulbricht is also not the typical drug kingpin. He was an
Eagle Scout and grew up with a close-knit family in Austin, Texas,
according to his lawyer. Mr. Ulbricht studied physics at the
University of Texas in Dallas on a full scholarship and completed a
master's degree in material sciences at Pennsylvania State
University.
While he's been in custody, he started a yoga group in prison
and has been tutoring fellow inmates in math and physics, according
to letters submitted by his family.
Write to Nicole Hong at nicole.hong@wsj.com
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