In Silk Road Trial, Defense Claims Ulbricht Was The 'Fall Guy' For the 'Real' Dread Pirate Roberts

By Andy Greenberg
WIRED
Jan. 13, 2015

For the past year, the FBI and federal prosecutors have told and retold the story of how Ross Ulbricht created, owned and operated the massive, anonymous online drug empire known as the Silk Road. But as his trial began Tuesday, Ulbricht’s defense lawyers for the first time told their own version of that story. And while their’s also begins with Ulbricht creating the Silk Road, it ends with Ulbricht being framed by the “real” operators of the site to whom he’d handed over control.

In his opening statement in a Manhattan courtroom, defense attorney Joshua Dratel began with a surprising admission: that his client Ross Ulbricht was in fact the founder of the Silk Road.

But Dratel went on to explain that the site was meant merely to be a kind of “economic experiment” that Ulbricht only controlled for a brief time. The eventual adoptive owners of the Silk Road, Dratel claimed, would later trick Ulbricht into serving as the “fall guy” when they sensed an impending law enforcement crackdown.

After a few months, he found it too stressful for him, and he handed it over to others,” Dratel told the jury, describing the Silk Road’s early days. “At the end, he was lured back by those operators to…take the fall for the people running the website.”

“Ross was not a drug dealer,” Dratel added. “He was not a kingpin.”

That new story, describing Ulbricht as a patsy for the powerful online drug lords whooperated the Silk Road at its peak, won’t be an easy sell. In its own opening statement, the prosecution outlined powerful evidence against Ulbricht that includes proof the FBI caught him logged into a Silk Road administrator panel in the San Francisco public library last year and a journal and logbook found on his laptop that detail his activities running the Silk Road.

Assistant US attorney Timothy Howard also said in his statement that Ulbricht at one point confessed creating the Silk Road to an old college friend. That purported personal breach of Ulbricht’s secrecy represents a damaging new claim from the prosecution, and Howard said that the college friend would be serving as a witness in the trial.

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