‘Contact with the outside is good for me’: Silk Road founder’s messages to the world

THE founder of the internet’s most notorious drugs marketplace, Silk Road, has been passing messages to the outside world as he stares down a life in prison.

“IT has been a strange journey.”

Those words relayed from a US prison cell and posted on social media may be the most understated description of what has happened to the man known as the internet’s first drug lord.

They purportedly came from Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the Silk Road online marketplace which operated on the dark web and become the most famous trading website for illegal drugs and all things and other illicit products and services.

He spent years on the run living in places like Thailand and Sydney, during which time he was only known to authorities by his screen name of Dread Pirate Roberts. He was raking in millions by taking a tiny fraction of the sales that took place on his website.

But a handful of mistakes brought it all crashing down and after the FBI swooped, he is now fighting two life sentences plus 40 years.

But the high-profile prisoner is finding a voice to the outside world through messages relayed by his family members and closest supporters and posted on Twitter.

“Hi, this is Ross! I’m hoping to find my voice here after all these years of silence. It has been a strange journey, but I’m so grateful for all those who’ve shown love and support and held me up through the hard times,” his first message said.

After less than a week on Twitter, and just a handful of tweets, his profile has attracted 13,000 followers.

Mr Ulbricht’s sentence was considered by many as unduly harsh and the Twitter messages are mostly flooded with supportive replies from wellwishers.

I should be getting printouts of your comments in the mail this week. Looking forward to it. I hear there’s lots of love out there for me 😀

— Ross Ulbricht (@RealRossU) July 23, 2018

Mr Ulbricht was convicted of all seven crimes he was charged with, including narcotics and money laundering conspiracies as well as a “kingpin” charge usually reserved for leaders of drug cartels and mafia bosses.

His mother recently started a petition, addressed to the US president, which ambitiously calls for clemency for her son.

“Ross is condemned to die in prison, not for dealing drugs himself but for a website where others did. This is far harsher than the punishment for many murderers, paedophiles, rapists and other violent people,” the petition reads.

After two weeks, the petition has attracted strong support from those online.

“I got nine pages of comments from the petition in the mail tonight, and I’ve been told about all the retweets and interest in what I’m trying to do here. I am deeply moved by your response and feel the beginning of that connection I was hoping for,” a tweet from the Ross Ulbricht account said this week.

His emergence on social media comes as the US state of Maryland dismissed a 2013 three-count indictment against Mr Ulbricht that included murder-for-hire allegations. The charge stemmed from the fact that he allegedly contracted an undercover FBI agent to kill a rival through his website.

Some legal experts suggested the looming Maryland indictment emboldened US law enforcement in advocating aggressive sentencing in Mr. Ulbricht’s case.

While the dropping of the Maryland indictment was reportedly described by someone from the Maryland US Attorney’s office as a formality due to “district overlap” rather than anything amounting an exoneration, prior to the decision Mr Ulbricht said it would be a “weight off my shoulders”.

Mr Ulbricht’s mother has started a petition for her son’s clemency.

At the time of writing, the petition has received more than 35,000 signatures as Mr Ulbricht’s family tries to galvanise the strong support for him in certain communities.

One of those supporters who believes Ross Ulbricht has been harshly dealt with is Australian author Eileen Ormsby. She was one of the earliest members of the Silk Road website and has written two books about Silk Road and the emergence of the Dark Web. In her eyes, the original idea that underpinned Ulbricht’s creation remains a worthwhile one.

“To me it was a harm minimisation model for drug dealing, that was the most interesting thing for me,” she recently told news.com.au.

“I was very much there from the beginning of Silk Road. I was a part of the community all the way through the growth. It was such a fascinating microcosm of what the world might look like in a post-prohibition era,” she said.

While Mr Ulbricht undeniably turned to some highly nefarious tactics to protect his growing online empire, as the administrator of the website his actual crimes are of a rather unique nature.

“Ross Ulbricht was an idealist. Sure he made millions and millions of dollars but he was an idealist. He had this utopian vision of what a free market could be like,” Ms Ormbsy said.

Author and Vanity Fair writer Nick Bilton has also written a book on the rise and fall of the Silk Road founder and while he has remarked about how quickly Ross seemed to morph into someone capable of serious criminality to protect the website, in an interview with news.com.au last year he recalled how many of those around him described him as a gentle person.

“The more people I spoke to the more I was told time and again that Ross was a very gentle and kind person. That was a through-line from his childhood to the time when he was arrested,” he said.

But despite the best efforts of his family and legal team, Ross Ulbricht will be left to funnel messages to the world via notes bound for Twitter for quite some time.

Got a visit today. It felt so good. Almost forgot I'm locked up. It was hard to go back to the cell, but the contact with the outside is good for me. Keeps me grounded. Sorry for the 98% here who don't get visitors.

— Ross Ulbricht (@RealRossU) July 22, 2018

Originally published as ‘Contact with the outside is good for me’: Silk Road founder’s messages to the world