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And then there was Julia, who had planned to video chat with Ross the night he was arrested.
She had stripped down to her sexy lingerie and logged on to Skype, hoping to see a handsome Ross
staring back at her through his laptop camera. But he never showed up. She rang and rang, trying to
reach him, but no one answered. She was completely unaware that at that very moment, the man she
hoped to flirt with through a tiny little camera on her computer was sitting in handcuffs in a jail cell,
and that his laptop was being probed in an FBI forensic truck by two federal agents. Eventually she
gave up trying to call him that evening, assuming that Ross had forgotten about their online
assignation, and she went to bed alone.
The next morning a client came into her office, and as they sat going through photos, Julia’s cell
phone rang, interrupting the meeting. It was a friend from Austin who simply uttered the words
“Google Ross Ulbricht.”
“Huh?” Julia queried.
“Just do it,” the friend demanded. “Google Ross Ulbricht’s name.”
Julia turned to her computer, typed in a name she had written ten thousand times before, and
waited for the results to load on her screen. When she saw the news she almost fainted. Shock took
over her body as she fell on the floor and began wailing.
• • •
Two weeks later Ross boarded a flight on Con Air (a nickname given to the prison airline that
transports inmates) to New York City. When he landed, after an arduous zigzag across the country,
picking up and dropping off other prisoners, Ross was placed into the general population in a
Brooklyn jail, where he would live until his trial began.
His devastated parents flew up from Austin to see him, friends made the pilgrimage to show their
support, and Ross met his new lawyer, Joshua Dratel, a stalwart attorney who was known for
defending some of the most notorious criminals on American soil, including two men who were
involved with the U.S. embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania that killed 224 people. Ross had
chosen Dratel because he saw him as a lawyer who subscribed to the philosophy that someone’s
beliefs shouldn’t be a crime and that the system should offer everyone—even alleged terrorists—a
fair trial.
The FBI had tried to find the bodies of the people murdered on the site, the ones DPR had paid to
have killed, but no database matched the crimes. It appeared that either the Hells Angels had disposed
of the bodies perfectly or, more than likely, no one had actually been killed at all. Rather, the Dread
Pirate Roberts had been scammed for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The government offered Ross a plea deal of ten years to life, but he wasn’t willing to take the
chance of a judge handing down the latter of those two sentences. Ross still very much believed that
he could get himself out of this. He declined the offer. In response, and in frustration, the U.S.
Attorney’s Office decided to throw everything it had at Ross and to make an example of him.
What Ross didn’t know at the time was that the laptop the FBI had managed to slip out of his
hands had not been as secure as he hoped. Ross’s booby traps had failed, and his password
(“purpleorangebeach”) had too, as the FBI team managed to find the password hidden in the
computer’s RAM. The forensics team had uncovered a trove of digital evidence, including Ross’s
diary entries, Silk Road financial spreadsheets, and, worst of all for Ross, some documents that Ross