High on his own supply
Narratives and counternarratives abound in “American Kingpin,” Nick Bilton’s account of the Icarus-like arc of Ross Ulbricht and the Silk Road, the $1.2 billion online drug emporium he patched together from the digital equivalent of chewing gum and string; he then ruled it with an iron rod over suitably encrypted instant messages, before an alphabet soup of federal agencies caught up with him and his silver Samsung 700Z laptop among the stacks of Glen Park Public Library in October 2013.
In one version, “American Kingpin” is the familiar story of an enigmatic Ayn Rand-fixated, Internet unicorn CEO, the subject of media fascination, disrupting an age-old industry, committed to building his legacy. In another, it’s about a fugitive fronting a monumental criminal enterprise, on the run from a frantic manhunt, furtively bumming Wi-Fi from coffee shops and sleeping in a succession of dreary lodgings. In yet another telling, it’s the fable of an idealistic, ideological warrior upending the War on Drugs, freeing the people from state tyranny to pursue their own hedonic thrill. Then again, maybe it’s nothing more elevated than a cautionary tale of an opportunist trafficking in misery and addiction, enabling minors to score powerful narcotics like the potent, synthetic hallucinogen procured by an adolescent in Australia and handed to a classmate who went berserk, launching himself from the second story of the hotel at which they were celebrating the end of the school year.
No less contradictory is its central character. By turns wholesome and courtly, he is a renunciate clad in 5-year-old jeans despite a fortune in bitcoin and a goody two-shoes who, irked at trash lodged in the boughs of a tree, clambers up to retrieve it, yet also as “Dread Pirate Roberts” (DPR), his handle on the Silk Road, an amoral monster who draws the line at nothing — guns, body parts, hard drugs, even murder — the biggest, baddest libertarian of them all, pushing that creed’s animating idea of personal freedom to its logical conclusion.
Eventually, Ulbricht is betrayed by his own addiction — decent Wi-Fi. Flushed out of his Glen Park lair by a quest for a signal strong enough to download a Web interview with the writer of “Breaking Bad,” he’s nabbed in that outpost of the nanny state, the local library.
So was he Walter White or Walter Mitty? All of the above, really.
“American Kingpin” is about the grip of an idea on a young man with a point to prove. Ulbricht’s infatuation with libertarianism tanks his graduate studies in materials science and engineering at Penn State. With the Silk Road, he set out to “make money,” Bilton writes. “But he wanted to free people, too. There were millions of souls crammed into jails across the country because of drugs, mostly inconsequential drugs like weed and magic mushrooms. A vile and putrid prison system kept those people locked away; lives destroyed because the government wanted to tell people what they could and could not do with their own bodies.” For the edification of the Silk Road customers, he runs a libertarian-themed book club and movie nights.
It’s also about the odd, frictionless nature of a virtual world in which no one’s who they say they are and the normal rules of feedback don’t apply. It’s hard to escape the conclusion that, in part, Ulbricht was a glorified roleplayer in an elaborate fantasy game. As DPR, he meted out summary justice, commissioning “hits” on those who crossed him — to do otherwise would invite mutiny, his acolytes advised. Hardly the most salubrious online precinct, the Silk Road had no shortage of bad actors willing to do his bidding. But there’s no evidence anyone died. The purported assassins simply furnished DPR with supposed photographic evidence of the deed and collected the bounty. Among them was rogue undercover DEA agent Carl Force, who also relieved DPR of loot, spilling details on the government’s probe into him.
The feds’ dysfunctional investigation into the Silk Road is perhaps the best argument in the entire story for smaller government. Force and a similarly crooked Secret Service agent were later jailed. But the FBI, IRS, DHS and sundry other agencies eventually team up to pull off the thread-the-needle feat of apprehending Ulbricht in the incriminating manner needed to make charges stick — hands on keyboard, browser open to the Silk Road — before he can hit any “kill switch” he might have installed to lock the hard drive.
Bilton, formerly of the New York Times and now at Vanity Fair, opens “American Kingpin” collecting string, introducing the characters. This doesn’t come without some slack while the reader waits for the action to spool up, and Bilton serves up the occasional clunker: “After the bubble had popped a few years earlier, companies that had been built on a wing and a prayer had siphoned people’s retirements into thin air and collapsed, leaving San Francisco a metaphorical no-fly zone.” But halfway through, with everyone in place and the tick-tock under way toward its denouement, the narrative, retailed in brisk Vonnegut-length chapters, becomes tight and riveting.
At Ulbricht’s New York trial, those competing narratives resurface. Did it “matter” no lives appeared to have been lost from the hits he ordered? Judge Katherine Forrest had this to say, writes Bilton, “Did you commission a murder? Five? Yes ... Did you pay for it? Yes. Did you get photographs relating to what you thought was the result of that murder? Yes.’ ”
And, sentencing Ulbricht to life in prison, she doesn’t buy the defense’s “moral” case for more drugs, that this improves quality and safety. Bilton recounts:
“No drug dealer from the Bronx selling meth or heroin or crack has ever made these kinds of arguments to the Court.”