Ex-counsellor and drugs moderator awaits sentence
Peter Nash lived a double life, working as a trusted counsellor with mentally ill prisoners in Queensland during the day and at night moderating chat forums on the Silk Road bazaar website where hundreds of kilograms of heroin, cocaine and other drugs were sold.
The 42-yearold did so while satisfying his own addiction to cocaine and ecstasy.
Nash was so good at his job as a counsellor that he was commended by the Queensland government.
Next week Nash will be escorted by United States marshals into a Manhattan courtroom where Judge Thomas Griesa could sentence him to life in jail.
Nash’s lawyers, Andrew Frisch and Jeremy Sporn, have asked the judge to set the ‘‘award-winning counsellor’’ free on a time-served sentence.
‘‘Mr Nash is hardly the sort of predatory large-scale drug trafficker that policymakers had in mind when formulating the severe penalties in whose cross-hairs he now finds himself,’’ the lawyers wrote in a 32-page sentencing memorandum.
It was accompanied with another 39 pages of heartfelt testimonials from friends, his elderly mother in England and mental health professionals he worked with in Australia and Britain.
Nash has been in jail since the FBI and Australian authorities arrested him in Queensland in December, 2013.
He was working as a senior manager of the Forensic Disability Service in Wacol, Brisbane, where he helped intellectually disabled adults in or facing jail.
Prosecutors allege Nash was one of the key players in Silk Road, a hidden, encrypted website where users could buy and sell heroin, cocaine, ecstasy and other drugs and illicit goods.
In its 2.5 years of operation before US authorities shut it down and arrested Nash, the US mastermind Ross Ulbrecht and others, Silk Road ‘‘was used by several thousand drug dealers and other unlawful vendors to distribute hundreds of kilograms of illegal drugs and other illicit goods and services to well over 100,000 buyers and to launder hundreds of millions of dollars’’, according to the indict- ment.
Prosecutors allege Nash, known by the names Batman73, Samesame butdifferent and Anonymous asshit, worked from Brisbane as the primary moderator on the site’s discussion forums.
He was paid US$1000 (NZ$1350) a week in digital currency bitcoins.
In March Nash entered guilty pleas to one count of narcotics conspiracy, which carries a maximum sentence of life in prison, and one count of money laundering conspiracy, with a maximum 20 years.
Nash denies he was a primary moderatorand has asked the judge to note that during the sentencing.
He told the judge he gave up cocaine when he moved to Australia and became a citizen in 2007, began using occasionally again in 2011 and due to high job stress the drug use increased and was ‘‘most severe’’ in 2013.