Things aren’t looking so good for Ross Ulbricht, the alleged Silk Road mastermind. Federal prosecutors in New York just filed paperwork accusing the 29-year-old of ordering six murders for the lofty price of $US730,000. Ulbricht’s friends swear he wouldn’t hurt a honeybee.
It’ll be up to a jury to decide what Ulbricht did or didn’t do, but for now, a judge will decide whether or not to deny him bail. Prosecutors say that evidence of the hits ordered shows that Ulbricht is “a danger to the community” who’s prepared to “resort to violence in order to protect himself, whether through intimidating witnesses, recovering proceeds of his criminal activity, or otherwise.” While two of the hits were detailed in the charges against Ulbricht, the other four come from the police investigation into Ulbricht’s alleged role in Silk Road. There’s no evidence that any of the killings were actually carried out.
The judge obviously denied Ulbricht bail.
Ulbricht’s friends and family, meanwhile, were prepared to do anything to keep young Ross out of prison. His parents even offered up the value of their house in a $US1 million defence fund. However, the evidence against Ulbricht is really stacking up. It was also recently revealed that when police came to arrest him Ulbricht was logged on to Silk Road as Dread Pirate Roberts, the pseudonym of the site’s administrator. Feds now say Ulbricht was stockpiling fake identity documents (see above) and exploring how to become a citizen of a Caribbean country at the time. There’s even a journal, apparently Ulbricht’s detailing all of the bad behaviour.
That’s not really something innocent people do. [Baltimore Sun]