American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. The unbelievable true story of the man who built a billion-dollar online drug empire from his bedroom—and almost got away with it
In 2011, a twenty-six-year-old libertarian programmer named Ross Ulbricht launched the ultimate free market: the Silk Road, a clandestine Web site hosted on the Dark Web where anyone could trade anything—drugs, hacking software, forged passports, counterfeit cash, poisons—free of the government’s watchful eye.
It wasn’t long before the media got wind of the new Web site where anyone—not just teenagers and weed dealers but terrorists and black hat hackers—could buy and sell contraband detection-free. Spurred by a public outcry, the federal government launched an epic two-year manhunt for the site’s elusive proprietor, with no leads, no witnesses, and no clear jurisdiction. All the investigators knew was that whoever was running the site called himself the Dread Pirate Roberts.
The Silk Road quickly ballooned into $1.2 billion enterprise, and Ross embraced his new role as kingpin. He enlisted a loyal crew of allies in high and low places, all as addicted to the danger and thrill of running an illegal marketplace as their customers were to the heroin they sold. Through his network he got wind of the target on his back and took drastic steps to protect himself—including ordering a hit on a former employee. As Ross made plans to disappear forever, the Feds raced against the clock to catch a man they weren’t sure even existed, searching for a needle in the haystack of the global Internet.
Drawing on exclusive access to key players and two billion digital words and images Ross left behind, Vanity Fair correspondent and New York Times bestselling author Nick Bilton offers a tale filled with twists and turns, lucky breaks and unbelievable close calls. It’s a story of the boy next door’s ambition gone criminal, spurred on by the clash between the new world of libertarian-leaning, anonymous, decentralized Web advocates and the old world of government control, order, and the rule of law. Filled with unforgettable characters and capped by an astonishing climax, American Kingpin might be dismissed as too outrageous for fiction. But it’s all too real.
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Community Reviews
A book behind the guy who created the internet site Silk Road used to buy illegal drugs, weapons, fake documents, pirated software poison and anything else you can't buy legally. Users would use nearly untraceable Bitcoin and buy drugs from sellers with good ratings hoping it wouldn't kill them. Poison was sold as something that could have other uses, but the main use was clear.
The creator is a stringent libertarian. Claiming the state should not be able to control any goods. He started the whole thing by growing his own mushrooms. He puts together a site that sorta works and markets it online on Google using profiles he registered with his personal email. Which is why it was easy to catch him. The site grows huge and years profits will be $100m, then even more. Weapons are hard to send in packages but drugs are just tiny packages in normal letters impossible to spot. It creates such a huge profit he even creates spin off sites.
The book mainly focuses on this business, his personal life, and characters around him like agents searching for him or taking his money. He moves regularly to not be discovered. And the book focuses on his girlfriend, his philosophy, and his friends. The girlfriend just wants a normal family life and hates the site. She tells about the site to her friend who then posts about it online. Soon he understands that telling people about the site is a bad idea. And he feels like he can become a billionaire in a few years, keep the site running forever without ever being found out, and change the world into a world where the government can't control you. He is extremely arrogant and this arrogance makes him blind to extremely obvious errors. He for example is tricked to hiring a fake hitman. The hitman tells him he killed the guy but told 5 of his friends about it so now he needs money to kill those 5 people too. It's basically a giant new company with a narcissistic leader who demands full control and loves bossing people around. Often paying very little except to a few people. He makes a friend he pays extremely well but the friend soon asks for 50% of the site.
Of course he leaves clues everywhere as he just assumes he is a genius without doing the needed groundwork to keep his identity hidden. Agents in FBI and other places soon look into it. The site only ran for 2 years.
The book is quite great. It's a to the point story about how they found him. Yet I would have liked it to be 30% shorter. A ton of it is his personal life and his girlfriend takes up most of the space where the author even describes what days they had sex on and what lead up to it that day. This is not interesting or relevant. Once you tell us the girlfriend is very attractive and that they are having sex we don't really need more stories about some specific day where they had sex as we just assume it happens. I'm not sure this ruins the book as such. It's just totally pointless and some readers will find it infuriating as clearly it's there to fill out the page count.
The audiobook is clear and great. I do recommend it. But because we hear so much about the sex and dates the main stories are typically hidden away. Like the DEA agent who set up a fake hit to extort money from the Silk Road founder. That's interesting but we hear just a bit about it every 30 pages and I forgot how it started. So I don't even think I can retell this story.
I'm sure there will be a few good TV shows made about it. I promise it will happen. And then once he gets out of prison he will do interviews proclaiming himself innocent. Quite likely he'll tell us he knew the murders he paid for were fake and he just did it for fun. Or something that silly as there is really no excuse for it. It will be curious to see what president will pardon him. But it's coming.
The creator is a stringent libertarian. Claiming the state should not be able to control any goods. He started the whole thing by growing his own mushrooms. He puts together a site that sorta works and markets it online on Google using profiles he registered with his personal email. Which is why it was easy to catch him. The site grows huge and years profits will be $100m, then even more. Weapons are hard to send in packages but drugs are just tiny packages in normal letters impossible to spot. It creates such a huge profit he even creates spin off sites.
The book mainly focuses on this business, his personal life, and characters around him like agents searching for him or taking his money. He moves regularly to not be discovered. And the book focuses on his girlfriend, his philosophy, and his friends. The girlfriend just wants a normal family life and hates the site. She tells about the site to her friend who then posts about it online. Soon he understands that telling people about the site is a bad idea. And he feels like he can become a billionaire in a few years, keep the site running forever without ever being found out, and change the world into a world where the government can't control you. He is extremely arrogant and this arrogance makes him blind to extremely obvious errors. He for example is tricked to hiring a fake hitman. The hitman tells him he killed the guy but told 5 of his friends about it so now he needs money to kill those 5 people too. It's basically a giant new company with a narcissistic leader who demands full control and loves bossing people around. Often paying very little except to a few people. He makes a friend he pays extremely well but the friend soon asks for 50% of the site.
Of course he leaves clues everywhere as he just assumes he is a genius without doing the needed groundwork to keep his identity hidden. Agents in FBI and other places soon look into it. The site only ran for 2 years.
The book is quite great. It's a to the point story about how they found him. Yet I would have liked it to be 30% shorter. A ton of it is his personal life and his girlfriend takes up most of the space where the author even describes what days they had sex on and what lead up to it that day. This is not interesting or relevant. Once you tell us the girlfriend is very attractive and that they are having sex we don't really need more stories about some specific day where they had sex as we just assume it happens. I'm not sure this ruins the book as such. It's just totally pointless and some readers will find it infuriating as clearly it's there to fill out the page count.
The audiobook is clear and great. I do recommend it. But because we hear so much about the sex and dates the main stories are typically hidden away. Like the DEA agent who set up a fake hit to extort money from the Silk Road founder. That's interesting but we hear just a bit about it every 30 pages and I forgot how it started. So I don't even think I can retell this story.
I'm sure there will be a few good TV shows made about it. I promise it will happen. And then once he gets out of prison he will do interviews proclaiming himself innocent. Quite likely he'll tell us he knew the murders he paid for were fake and he just did it for fun. Or something that silly as there is really no excuse for it. It will be curious to see what president will pardon him. But it's coming.
