When Silk Road went under more than a month ago, one if the biggest stories that came out was that the site's operator, Ross Ulbricht—aka Dread Pirate Roberts—had hired a hitman to kill one of the site's users. Turns out that person was actually an admin for the site, and the Feds faked his death to trick Ulbricht.
The admin in question, Curtis Clark Green, had been recruited by Ulbricht to help find a buyer who would buy a large sum of drugs from another Silk Road seller. Green, who is a 47-year-old grandfather who says he worked at a learning center for children with disabilities, had been operating under the aliases "flush" and "chronicpain" and says he joined Silk Road because he had an "interest in harm reduction related to drug use." He was hired as an admin in November 2012, and in the following month Ulbricht asked him to search for the potential buyer. Green agreed, and when he finally found a buyer, he didn't know that the seller that Ulbricht had found was actually an undercover Fed agent slowly planning to take down the site. The buyer and the undercover agent negotiated for 2.2 lbs. of cocaine, but Green had set himself up as a middleman for the buyer and was going to act as a delivery point for the drugs—and he didn't tell Ulbricht, or the seller, about this. When agents stormed into Green's home in Utah, they found 1,092 grams of cocaine, and according to Green, the agents then told him that Ulbricht had hired a hitman (who was an undercover agent) to kill him, and they immediately started taking photos of him as they faked his death.
Then, in dramatic fashion, the site was taken down last month. Ulbricht is set to soon stand trial, and Green's testimony will likely play a big part. No word if the Feds are currently in the process of taking down Silk Road 2.0.
[via Epic Magazine]
