Online drug lord pleads guilty
The world’s most prolific online drug dealer pleaded guilty in a Chicago courtroom Thursday under a deal that could see him locked up for 15 years.
The world’s most prolific online drug dealer pleaded guilty in a Chicago courtroom Thursday under a deal that could see him locked up for 15 years.
Cornelis Jan “SuperTrips” Slomp — a 23-year-old Dutchman, who was arrested in Miami last August — admitted he sold more illegal drugs on the now-shuttered underground website “Silk Road” than anyone else.
Despite his youth, Slomp quickly amassed more than $3 million in bitcoins selling MDMA, ecstasy, cocaine, LSD and other drugs.
Wearing the traditional orange of his countrymen in court Wednesday, he spoke in excellent English, with his head bowed, as he entered a guilty plea and agreed to cooperate with authorities.
A college graduate and former software engineer, the tattooed Slomp had rented a Lamborghini and was ready to make a splash on South Beach’s party scene when he was arrested by the feds at Miami International Airport last year.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Andrew S. Boutros on Thurs- day called Slomp’s conviction the largest yet in the authorities battle against Silk Road traders.
“Mr. Slomp was the world’s largest drug dealer on Silk Road,” he told U.S. District Judge Matthew Kennelly.
Equipped with only a laptop, an iPhone and a backpack, Slomp shipped 104 kilos of MDMA, 566,000 ecstasy pills and four kilos of cocaine and other drugs through the mail, using the online moniker “SuperTrips.”
Some drugs ended up in Chicago, but Slomp shipped to almost every continent, boasting he had “big stockpiles of product, you literally cannot empty me out.”
On Silk Road, where anonymous traders sold illegal drugs and other illicit products, he developed a reputation for ecstasy pills marked with his logo, a green question mark. He was planning to hand off his U.S. business to an unnamed associate who went by the nickname “Underground syndicate” when he was arrested.
Though he could be sentenced to up to 40 years behind bars, prosecutors have agreed to ask for a sentence of 15 years in return for Slomp’s cooperation.
Slomp could even serve some of his sentence in a Dutch prison, if his cooperation lives up to its billing.
He has forfeited about $3,030,000 in drug proceeds, which the government converted from bitcoins, a digital currency, into cash.
Silk Road’s collapse in October 2013 followed the arrest in San Francisco of its alleged founder Ross William Ulbricht — who allegedly went by “Dread Pirate Roberts” — and is accused in a New York federal court case of drug trafficking, soliciting murder, facilitating computer hacking and money laundering.
Slomp could testify against Ulbricht and “Underground syndicate,” his attorney Paul Petruzzi said.
The feds say that during an 18-month undercover investigation of Slomp, they seized more than 100 packages he sent, including a large shipment of ecstasy seized at O’Hare Airport in April 2012.