Who is Ross Ulbricht, founder of drug marketplace Silk Road, now pardoned by Trump?
The creator of a dark web market that sold illegal drugs, stolen passports and hacking equipment using Bitcoin has been pardoned by President Donald Trump.
Ross Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison, without the possibility of parole, in 2015 in connection with his ownership and operation of the hidden website. The then-26-year-old was also ordered to forfeit $183.9m (£120.2m).
“Make no mistake: Ulbricht was a drug dealer and criminal profiteer who exploited people’s addictions and contributed to the deaths of at least six young people,” said Preet Bharara, US Attorney for the Southern District of New York said at the time of his incarceration.
What was Silk Road?
According to documents presented at his trial, Ulbricht created Silk Road in January 2011 and owned and operated the underground website until it was shut down by the police in October 2013.
Silk Road took its name from a network of historic trading routes that were active in the second century.
It emerged as the most sophisticated and extensive criminal marketplace on the internet, where a variety of illegal drugs were bought and sold.
Silk Road was used by thousands of drug dealers, distributing hundreds of kilograms of illegal drugs to more than 100,000 buyers, totaling more than $200m (£131m). Ulbricht was accused of making more than $13m (£10.53m) in commission.
Ulbricht was accused of using a Bitcoin-based payment system to facilitate illegal activity on the site, and he used a special network to conceal the identities and locations of its users.
Read more: How users accessed Silk Road
The FBI said the site had just under a million registered users, but it’s not clear how many of those were active, or which country they were in.
Silk Road
Murder for hire and six deaths
Prosecutors also claimed Ulbricht was willing to use violence to protect his criminal enterprise.
They said he solicited six murders-for-hire – including one against a former employee – although there was no evidence any of these actually took place and Ulbricht was never tried for them.
The former employee has also voiced support for the campaign to free Ulbricht, and said he did not believe he was dangerous.
Six deaths were connected to drugs sold on the site. Among them, was a 27-year-old Microsoft employee who was found unresponsive in front of his computer, which was logged into Silk Road. He had died of a heroin and prescription drug overdose.
Two sixteen-year-old boys, one from Australia and one from California, both died from taking 25i-NBOMe, a powerful synthetic drug designed to mimic LSD (and commonly referred to as “N-Bomb”) that they had bought on the site.
Read more: Seized Silk Road Bitcoins auctioned by US
Ulbricht during his trial. Pic: AP
Caught by a Gmail account
It was a painstaking process to identify the man behind Silk Road, known online as Dread Pirate Roberts (DPR), a reference to a character in the 1987 film The Princess Bride.
It began with a post made on a web forum where users discussed magic mushrooms. A user nicknamed Altoid started publicising the site, linking off to its dark web location.
Altoid then appeared on another site, discussing virtual currency. In a post asking for an IT expert with a knowledge of Bitcoin, he asked people to contact him via rossulbricht@gmail.com.
This email address was the breakthrough that ultimately linked Ulbricht to Silk Road.
An undercover agent linked this address to a series of social networks, including a YouTube account, which had favourited several clips from the Ludwig von Mises Institute, an Austrian school of economics. DPR would later make several references to the institute on Silk Road discussion forums.
A further lead came in the form of a routine border check of a package from Canada that contained several forged documents, all with Ulbricht’s photo, being delivered to his flat share in San Francisco.
Another slip-up came when Ulbright posted on a question-and-answer site for programmers, asking questions about an intricate code that later become part of the source code for Silk Road. He accidentally identified himself as Ross Ulbricht, before quickly correcting it.
Ross Ulbricht taken from his Google + page
Life in prison
Ulbricht spoke after sentencing expressing remorse for what he had done.
“I’ve essentially ruined my life and broken the hearts of every member of my family and my closest friends,” he said. He walked out of the courtroom carrying with him photographs of those who died as a result of drugs purchased on his website.
Now aged 39, he most recently wrote to President Joe Biden in October 2022, pleading for release.
“Over countless hours, I have searched my soul and examined the misguided decisions I made when I was younger,” he wrote.
“I have dug deep and made a sincere effort to not just change what I do, but who I am. I am no longer the type of man who could break the law and let down so many.”
He said he had worked with prisoners to overcome addictions and come to understand “the damage I caused by helping promote drugs”.
He said he longed to have a future once more and hoped to start a family with his fiance, who “stood by me for all these years”.
A group of supporters had been campaigning for his release. Pic: AP
Freedom
On the second day of his presidency, Mr Trump said he had called Ulbricht’s mother to let her know “it was my pleasure to have just signed a full and unconditional pardon of her son”.
He called those who had convicted Ulbricht “scum”, citing his own convictions: “[They] were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of government against me.”
Pic: Truth Social
The ‘Free Ross’ X account posted an image of Ulbricht leaving prison a short while later.
A Mexican navy ship has hit the Brooklyn Bridge during a promotional tour in New York City.
The New York Fire Department said authorities were responding to injuries but had no details about how many people might have been hurt or whether they were on the vessel or on the bridge.
Sky’s US partner network NBC News reports that at least three people were seriously injured in the incident.
The Mexican navy said in a post on X that the Cuauhtemoc, an academy training vessel, was damaged in the accident, which has prevented it from continuing its voyage.
Eyewitness video of the collision posted online showed the mast of the ship, which was flying a large Mexican flag, scraping the underneath of the bridge.
Pic: AP
The vessel then drifted toward the edge of the river as onlookers scrambled away from shore.
The Mexican navy said the status of personnel and material was under review by naval and local authorities, which were providing assistance.
The Cuauhtemoc is about 297ft long and 40ft wide, according to the Mexican navy. It sailed for the first time in 1982.
Pic: AP
Each year, it sets out at the end of classes at the naval military school to finish cadets’ training.
It left the Mexican port of Acapulco, on the Pacific coast, on 6 April with 277 people onboard, the navy said at the time.
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One person has died in a bomb explosion near a reproductive health clinic in California, authorities have said.
The incident took place in Palm Springs, a city two hours east of Los Angeles, and is being investigated as a possible car explosion.
The city’s mayor Ron DeHarte said one person died in the blast, adding that the bomb was “either in or near” a vehicle. The deceased’s identity is not known, Palm Springs police said.
Dr Maher Abdallah, who runs the American Reproductive Centers clinic, told the Associated Press his facility was damaged but all staff were safe and accounted for.
The explosion damaged the office space where the practice conducts patient consultations, but the IVF lab and stored embryos were unharmed, he added.
“I really have no clue what happened,” he said. “Thank God today happened to be a day that we have no patients.”
Debris covers the ground after the explosion. Pic: ABC7 Los Angeles/AP
In a statement posted on Facebook the clinic said it was “heartbroken” to learn someone died in the explosion and added: “Our deepest condolences go out to the individuals and families affected.”
It continued: “Our mission has always been to help build families, and in times like these, we are reminded of just how fragile and precious life is.
“In the face of this tragedy, we remain committed to creating hope – because we believe that healing begins with community, compassion, and care.
The clinic will be fully operational on Monday, it added.
“This moment has shaken us – but it has not stopped us. We will continue to serve with strength, love, and the hope that brings new life into the world,” the statement concluded.
Pic: ABC7 Los Angeles/AP
The Palm Springs city government said in a post on Facebook that the explosion happened on North Indian Canyon Drive, near East Tachevah Drive, before 11am local time (6pm GMT).
A burned-out car can be seen in a parking lot behind the building in aerial footage.
The blast caved in the clinic’s roof and blew debris across four lanes of the road.
Another person said he was inside a cannabis dispensary nearby when he felt a massive explosion.
Nima Tabrizi said: “The building just shook, and we go outside and there’s massive cloud smoke.”
Investigators from the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives are travelling to the scene to help assess what happened.
California governor Gavin Newsom has been briefed on the explosion, his press office said.
A former FBI director has been interviewed by the US Secret Service over a social media post that Republicans say was a call for violence against President Donald Trump.
James Comey, who led the FBI from 2013 until he was fired in 2017 by Mr Trump during his first term in office, shared a photo of seashells appearing to form the numbers “86 47”.
James Comey later removed the Instagram post. File pic: AP
He captioned the Instagram post: “Cool shell formation on my beach walk.”
Some have interpreted the post as a threat, alleging that 86 47 means to violently remove Mr Trump from office, including by assassination.
Mr Comey later removed the post, saying he thought the numbers “were a political message” and that he was not aware that the numeric arrangement could be associated with violence.
“I didn’t realise some folks associate those numbers with violence. It never occurred to me, but I oppose violence of any kind, so I took the post down,” Mr Comey said.
Mr Trump rejected the former FBI director’s explanation, telling Fox News: “He knew exactly what that meant. A child knows what that meant… that meant assassination.”
Donald Trump Jr accused Mr Comey of “casually calling for my dad to be murdered”.
US Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem confirmed in a post on X that Mr Comey had been interviewed as part of “an ongoing investigation” but gave no indication of whether he might face further action.
The Secret Service is part of the Department of Homeland Security.
White House deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich said Mr Comey had put out “what can clearly be interpreted as a hit on the sitting president of the United States”.
“This is deeply concerning to all of us and is being taken seriously,” Mr Budowich wrote on X.
Another White House official James Blair said the post was a “Clarion Call (…) to terrorists & hostile regimes to kill the President of the United States as he travels in the Middle East”.
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Mr Trump fired Mr Comey in May 2017 for botching an investigation into 2016 democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, the White House said at the time.
While Mr Comey was the director of the FBI, the agency opened an investigation into possible collusion between the Trump 2016 presidential campaign and Russia to help get Mr Trump elected.
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