Silk Road founder gets life for creating online drug market

NEW YORK—A San Francisco man who created the underground drug-selling website Silk Road was sentenced Friday to life in prison by a judge who cited six deaths from drugs bought on his site and five people he tried to have killed.

U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest told 31-year-old Ross Ulbricht he was a criminal even though he doesn’t fit the typical profile—he has two collegiate degrees—and she brushed aside his efforts to characterize the business as merely a big mistake.

“It was a carefully planned life’s work. It was your opus,” she said. “You are no better a person than any other drug dealer.”

Ulbricht’s 2013 arrest shut down what prosecutors described as an unprecedented one-stop online shopping mall where the supply of drugs was virtually limitless, enabling nearly 4,000 drug dealers to expand their markets from the sidewalk to cyberspace, selling drugs on a never-before-seen scale to more than 100,000 buyers in markets from Argentina to Australia, from the U.S. to Ukraine.

The government said in court papers that Ulbricht left a blueprint that others have followed by establishing new “dark markets” in sophisticated spaces of the Internet that are hard to trace, where an even broader range of illicit goods are sold than were available on Silk Road.

Forrest said the sentence could show copycats there are “very serious consequences.” She also ordered $183 million forfeiture. Prosecutors had not asked for a life sentence, saying only they wanted substantially more than the 20-year mandatory minimum.

Ulbricht was convicted in February of operating the site for nearly three years from 2011 until 2013.

Prosecutors say he collected $18 million in bitcoins through commissions on a website containing thousands of listings under categories like “Cannabis,” ‘’Psychedelics” and “Stimulants.” They said he brokered more than 1 million drug deals worth over $183 million while he operated on the site under the alias Dread Pirate Roberts—a reference to the swashbuckling character in “The Princess Bride.”