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 Ross Ulbricht, 31, was sentenced by U.S. District Judge Katherine
Forrest in Manhattan after a federal jury in February found him
guilty of charges including distributing drugs through the Internet
and conspiring to commit computer hacking and money laundering.
"What you did was unprecedented," Forrest said. "And in breaking
that ground as the first person, you sit here as the defendant
having to pay the consequences for that."
Ulbricht stood silently as Forrest announced the sentence, which
also included an order to forfeit $183.9 million.
Outside of court, Joshua Dratel, his lawyer, promised an appeal,
calling the sentence "unreasonable, unjust and unfair."
A sniffling Ulbricht, who had admitted to creating Silk Road but
denied wrongdoing at trial, told the judge before being sentenced
that, contrary to what the prosecutors argued, he did not build Silk
Road out of greed.
"I wanted to empower people to make choices in their lives and have
privacy and anonymity," he said.
Serrin Turner, a prosecutor, said Ulbricht was like any drug other
kingpin, having fantasized about becoming a billionaire through his
criminal enterprise and taking extreme steps, including soliciting
murders, to protect it.
"This was not some disinterested do-gooder," he added.
Silk Road operated for more than two years, allowing users to
anonymously buy drugs and other illicit goods and generating over
$214 million in sales in the process, prosecutors said.
They said Ulbricht ran Silk Road under the alias Dread Pirate
Roberts, a reference to a character in the 1987 movie "The Princess
Bride."
The website relied on the Tor network, which lets users communicate
anonymously, and accepted bitcoin as payment, which prosecutors said
allowed users to conceal their identities and locations.
Prosecutors said Ulbricht, who grew up in Austin, Texas, took
extreme steps to protect Silk Road, soliciting the murders of
several people who posed a threat. No evidence exists the murders
were carried out.
The online black market was shutdown in October 2013, when
authorities seized the website and arrested Ulbricht at a San
Francisco library.
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Prosecutors say Silk Road became a blueprint for other so-called
"dark market" websites that allow illegal drug sales, a phenomenon
law enforcement agencies continue to battle.
"Ulbricht went from hiding his cybercrime identity to becoming the
face of cybercrime and as today’s sentence proves, no one is above
the law," Manhattan U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said in a statement.
At trial, Dratel said his client had indeed created what he intended
to be a "freewheeling, free market site" where all but a few harmful
items could be sold.
Dratel said Ulbricht handed off the website to others after it
became too stressful, and was lured back toward its end to become
the "fall guy" for its true operators.
Ahead of sentencing, prosecutors urged Forrest to take into account
how at least six people died from overdoses on drugs linked to Silk
Road. The parents of two of them spoke at the hearing.
One was a man who identified himself only as Richard, whose son,
named Bryan B. in court papers, overdosed in Boston in 2013 using
heroin authorities said was bought on Silk Road.
"He did not consider the impact on society of the expansion of the
market for deadly drugs," the father told Forrest.
Ulbricht, who appeared in court in blue jail clothing, apologized to
the families, saying he never wanted to harm anyone. He said he had
ruined his life.
"I wish I could go back to convince myself to take a different
path," he said. "But I can't do that."
The case is U.S. v. Ulbricht, U.S. District Court, Southern District
of New York, No. 13-06919.
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