The accused mastermind behind the
Silk Road underground website was
sentenced on Friday to life in prison for orchestrating a scheme that
enabled more than $200 million of anonymous online drug sales using the
digital currency
Bitcoin.
Ross Ulbricht, 31, was sentenced by U.S.
District Judge Katherine Forrest in Manhattan after a federal jury in
February found him guilty of charges including distributing drugs
through the Internet and conspiring to commit computer hacking and money
laundering.
"What you did was unprecedented," Forrest said. "And
in breaking that ground as the first person, you sit here as the
defendant having to pay the consequences for that."
Ulbricht stood silently as Forrest announced the sentence, which also included an order to forfeit $183.9 million.
Outside of court, Joshua Dratel, his lawyer, promised an appeal, calling the sentence "unreasonable, unjust and unfair."
A
sniffling Ulbricht, who had admitted to creating Silk Road but denied
wrongdoing at trial, told the judge before being sentenced that,
contrary to what the prosecutors argued, he did not build Silk Road out
of greed.
"I wanted to empower people to make choices in their lives and have privacy and anonymity," he said.
Serrin
Turner, a prosecutor, said Ulbricht was like any drug other kingpin,
having fantasized about becoming a billionaire through his criminal
enterprise and taking extreme steps, including soliciting murders, to
protect it.
"This was not some disinterested do-gooder," he added.
Silk
Road operated for more than two years, allowing users to anonymously
buy drugs and other illicit goods and generating over $214 million in
sales in the process, prosecutors said.
They said Ulbricht ran
Silk Road under the alias Dread Pirate Roberts, a reference to a
character in the 1987 movie "The Princess Bride."
The website
relied on the Tor network, which lets users communicate anonymously, and
accepted Bitcoin as payment, which prosecutors said allowed users to
conceal their identities and locations.
Prosecutors said Ulbricht,
who grew up in Austin, Texas, took extreme steps to protect Silk Road,
soliciting the murders of several people who posed a threat. No evidence
exists the murders were carried out.
The online black market was shutdown in October 2013, when authorities seized the website and
arrested Ulbricht at a San Francisco library.
Prosecutors say Silk
Road became a blueprint for other so-called "dark market" websites that
allow illegal drug sales, a phenomenon law enforcement agencies
continue to battle.
"Ulbricht went from hiding his cybercrime
identity to becoming the face of cybercrime and as today's sentence
proves, no one is above the law," Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara
said in a statement.
At trial, Dratel said his client had indeed
created what he intended to be a "freewheeling, free market site" where
all but a few harmful items could be sold.
Dratel said Ulbricht
handed off the website to others after it became too stressful, and was
lured back toward its end to become the "fall guy" for its true
operators.
Ahead of sentencing, prosecutors urged Forrest to take
into account how at least six people died from overdoses on drugs linked
to Silk Road. The parents of two of them spoke at the hearing.
One
was a man who identified himself only as Richard, whose son, named
Bryan B. in court papers, overdosed in Boston in 2013 using heroin
authorities said was bought on Silk Road.
"He did not consider the impact on society of the expansion of the market for deadly drugs," the father told Forrest.
Ulbricht,
who appeared in court in blue jail clothing, apologised to the
families, saying he never wanted to harm anyone. He said he had ruined
his life.
"I wish I could go back to convince myself to take a different path," he said. "But I can't do that."
The case is U.S. v. Ulbricht, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 13-06919.
© Thomson Reuters 2015
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