Jury hears clashing claims on accused Silk Road boss
NEW YORK – Closing arguments in the trial of alleged Silk Road mastermind Ross Ulbricht alternately portrayed him as a crime boss who founded and ran the darknet drug-trafficking site or a novice who was framed to take the fall for others.
The clashing legal claims cleared the way for a Manhattan federal court jury of six women and six men to begin deliberations as soon as Wednesday on evidence from the more than three-week trial.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Serrin Turner said reams of evidence recovered from the site and matched with material from the defendant's laptop proved that Ulbricht, 30, was Dread Pirate Roberts, the computer alias of the person who allegedly presided over more than $182 million in Silk Road drug transactions from 2011 to 2013.
"The evidence is overwhelming that the defendant, Ross Ulbricht, is the same man who started Silk Road and kept it running until the very end," Turner told jurors. "There were no little elves that put all that evidence on the defendant's computer."
Standing at a podium inches from jurors, Turner recapped evidence government evidence that showed Ulbricht built Silk Road into an underworld drug bazaar that "lowered the barriers" to organized drug-selling by bringing together buyers and sellers from around the world.
The site required payment for all transactions in bitcoins, an anonymous electronic currency that promised secrecy to participants. Silk Road commissions charged on each deal helped make Ulbricht a virtual fortune of roughly $18 million in bitcoins found on his laptop when investigators arrested him inside a San Francisco library in Oct. 2013, said Turner.
Ridiculing defense arguments that Ulbricht launched Silk Road in 2011 but soon turned the site over to others, Turner told jurors "he ran the cash register to make sure he got a cut from every sale."
"There is no evidence that Ross Ulbricht ever walked away from it. Nothing," added Turner.
He argued that prosecution evidence proved that Ulbricht launched Silk Road by growing and selling hallucinogenic mushrooms, and quickly expanded the site to sell everything from heroin, cocaine and LSD to phony drivers licenses and passports and even computer hacking programs.
When blackmailers threatened to expose the operation unless they were paid off, Turner argued that Ulbricht moved to protect his valuable crime operation by paying $650,000 in bitcoins to commission a murder-for-hire plot with what he believed was a Hells Angels motorcycle club representative.
"The payment was made. How do we know it was from the defendant? Because the payment came from the (bitcoin) wallet on the defendant's machine," Turner told jurors.
Ulbricht, who did not testify in the case, could face life in prison if convicted of drug conspiracy and other charges in a seven-count indictment. Wearing a grey sweater, white shirt and tie, he smiled and chatted with relatives and friends before and after the closing arguments.
He listened intently, and appeared to wipe his eyes briefly as defense lawyer Joshua Dratel told jurors the alleged mastermind had been set up by the real operators of Silk Road.
"The Internet is not what it seems," said Dratel, who noted that an undercover federal investigator who testified for the prosecution evaded detection even while aiding Dread Pirate Roberts as a Silk Road administrator.
"You never know who precisely is on the other side of that computer screen," said Dratel, who added that the Internet allows and to some extent thrives on "deception and misdirection."
Dratel asked jurors to focus on evidence that showed Ulbricht told a college friend to whom he had confided his Silk Road secret that he ultimately sold the site to others. The defense lawyer also argued that much of the prosecution case rested on computer evidence that could easily have been edited and manipulated to implicate Ulbricht.
"You can create an entire fiction, an entire fictional episode on the Internet, and not know here right now whether it was real or not," said Dratel.