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." ||||| It appears the Federal Bureau of Investigation has finally cracked down on Silk Road, the underground marketplace where users could buy cocaine, heroin, meth, and more using the virtual currency Bitcoin. The Verge has obtained a copy of the criminal complaint, civil forfeiture complaint, and protective order filed in the Southern District of New York against Ross Ulbricht, who is alleged to be the mastermind behind the site and the handle Dread Pirate Roberts. 
 
 Ulbricht is being charged with narcotics trafficking conspiracy, computer hacking conspiracy, and money laundering conspiracy. The site, which is only accessible through the anonymizing Tor network, has been pulled and replaced with an FBI notice. The Silk Road forums are still operating, suggesting they were hosted on a different server. 
 
 
 
 
 
 The complaint is based on statements made by Christopher Tarbell, an FBI agent who has been tracking Silk Road out of the cybercrime division in New York. Tarbell acknowledges "undercover activity" by himself and other law enforcement agents, something users have suspected for a long time. 
 
 Law enforcement officers have made more than 100 purchases on the site 
 
 Law enforcement officers have made more than 100 purchases on the site since November of 2011, according to the complaint, and had the drugs shipped to New York for analysis. "Samples of these purchases have been laboratory-tested, and have typically shown high purity levels of the drug the item was advertised to be on Silk Road," Tarbell says. 
 
 Silk Road did $1.2 billion worth of business between February of 2011 and July of 2013, the FBI says, earning Dread Pirate Roberts $79.8 million in commissions using current Bitcoin rates. That number is difficult to pin down, however, because Bitcoin's price has fluctuated so much during that time. Silk Road had 957,079 registered users who did 1.2 million transactions between February of 2011 and July of 2013, the FBI says. 
 
 Dread Pirate Roberts once ordered a murder of a user who was attempting to blackmail him 
 
 The FBI reportedly located the server in "a certain foreign country" on which the Silk Road website was hosted, but does not specify where. It appears from the complaint that the FBI was monitoring Dread Pirate Roberts' private messages through the site. 
 
 Dread Pirate Roberts once ordered a murder of a user who was attempting to blackmail him, the complaint alleges. A user named FriendlyChemist wanted $500,000 from Dread Pirate Roberts, or else thousands of Silk Road identities would be published. Dread Pirate Roberts solicited a hitman through Silk Road to "put a bounty on [FriendlyChemist's] head." 
 
 When quoted a price of $150,000 to $300,000, Dread Pirate Roberts called the price high, saying he had a hit done "not long ago" for $80,000. The parties agreed on a price of $150,000, or 1,670 bitcoins, and the hitman reported the job was done. However, the FBI could not find any evidence of a related homicide and Ulbricht was not charged with murder. 
 
 
 
 
 
 Ross Ulbricht, who is accused of running Silk Road. 
 
 According to the complaint, Dread Pirate Roberts was actually Ross Ulbricht, a 29-year-old living in San Francisco. "I studied physics in college and worked as a research scientist for five years," Ulbricht says on his LinkedIn profile. "Now, my goals have shifted. I want to use economic theory as a means to abolish the use of coercion and agression amongst mankind ... 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." 
 
 Astonishingly, the complaint says that Ulbricht was confronted by Department of Homeland Security officials back in July after seizing a shipment of fake IDs that used Ulbricht's photo. Agents visited him at his San Francisco apartment, where Ulbricht declined to answer questions but told them that "hypothetically," anyone could order such documents on a website called Silk Road. 
 
 Ulbricht has an active social media presence, including a Facebook page, Google+ account, Stack Overflow account, defunct Twitter account, and YouTube channel, which seems surprising considering the cautiousness Dread Pirate Roberts supposedly used in covering his and Silk Road users' tracks. Ulbricht used an email address that contained his name to contact developers to work on a Bitcoin startup, and one of his public YouTube videos appears to include his phone number. The FBI quotes from some of these social media postings in its complaint. 
 
 Ulbricht and his best friend and former roommate, René Pinnell, talking about when Ulbricht first moved to San Francisco. 
 
 Ulbricht was confronted by Homeland Security in July 
 
 The FBI used information from Comcast in the investigation and collaborated with US Customs and Border Patrol and the Department of Homeland Security. The site had more than 13,000 listings in the "drugs" category at the time it was shut down. 
 
 René Pinnell, Ulbricht's friend since age 10, says Ulbricht was trading Bitcoin and other currency to make a living. The two were living together until about five months ago, when Pinnell moved in with his fiance. "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," Pinnell told The Verge.
– 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."