Wednesday, October 16, 2013

The First Jailhouse Interview With Alleged Silk Road Operator Ross Ulbricht

By Lauren Smiley

Past the metal detector, the buzz-in security door, and the inmates chatting with Sunday visitors at an Alameda County jail, the man accused of being the Dread Pirate Roberts, the alleged mastermind of the world’s biggest online drug bazaar known as Silk Road, stands behind a plexiglas window in a claustrophobic booth.

Inmate ULW981—real name Ross William Ulbricht—is 29 years old, 6-foot-2, 145 pounds, and ready to grant his first jail interview after being arrested on federal drug trafficking, computer hacking, and money laundering charges. Freshly shaven, Ulbricht wears a red Alameda County Jail XL jumpsuit, his wrists shackled to his waist. His auburn brown hair is combed into a wave above his elfin features, his gaze intense, his skin looking in need of some sun. He sits his beanpole frame on the other side of the window, hands on his hips, bony elbows nearly touching the two beige walls.

He says that I am the first reporter he’s spoken to. He’s been advised by his government-provided attorney not to talk with the press. But he can’t help himself; he wanted “to see what it would be like” to be interrogated by a member of the media. He’s also, apparently, lonely. Though he was just visited by his self-identified best friend RenĂ© Pinnell, he’s still in the mood for more company—any company. I suggest that talking to me must be better than staring at a prison cell wall. He wryly agrees. 

He playfully raises a foot up over the table—no shoe, just a sock and a flip flop—to show me that he is free of the ankle shackles he’d worn in federal court in San Francisco last Wednesday. Shuffling into the courtroom that morning, Ulbricht, through his attorney, had denied that he was the Dread Pirate Roberts, and agreed to be extradited to New York City to face charges.

Before his arrest two weeks ago, Ulbricht tells me that he led “a pretty private life” in San Francisco, where he moved to last fall. There were few people in the city who really knew him, he says. Even fewer who might have guessed at the double life he was allegedly leading. Before FBI agents descended on a community library in the sleepy Glen Park neighborhood to arrest Ulbricht two weeks ago, he had kept a decidedly low profile. Even his friend Pinnell told the press that the Feds must have gotten the wrong guy. Ulbricht’s former roomates on 15th Avenue told a Forbes reporter they only knew him as Joshua Terrey, a reclusive freelance currency trader who was always on his computer.

But underneath that quiet exterior, federal prosecuters claim, was a combustible cocktail of hubris, cyber savvy, and a fierce desire to protect his fortune. The feds accuse Ulbricht of facilitating $1.2 billion in drug deals over Silk Road’s two and a half year existence—all transacted in the online currency of Bitcoin. (The FBI has been unable to decrypt Ulbricht’s personal Bitcoin cache—another $80 million, an FBI spokesperson told Forbes—because they can’t get the passsword from Ulbricht.). Ulbricht was also indicted in Maryland federal court this month just days after the Silk Road charges came down: He’s been accused of ordering a $80,000 murder-for-hire hit on a former Silk Road employee who Ulbricht allegedly believed had been stealing users’ money.

The Ulbricht I meet is every bit the same calm, circumspect, and intensely introverted man who appears in a YouTube video taped last December in San Francisco for StoryCorps StoryBooth, an oral history project that airs on NPR and local radio stations. (On the video, Pinnell identifies Ulbricht as a “currency trader” and Ulbricht quietly waxes, in his laconic Texas drawl, about his early sexual and drug experiences and states, without irony, that, in 20 years, he wants to have had a “substantial positive impact on the future of humanity.”)

Now, Ulbricht awaits extradition from the Glenn Dyer Jail in downtown Oakland. “I think they want me,” he says, meaning that he expects the transfer to New York to come soon, though he doesn’t know the date. Though I’m carrying no pen, paper, or recording device—the jail won’t allow them—Ulbricht is extremely cautious with his answers.

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