NEW YORK, May 29 (UPI) — Ross Ulbricht, the founder of the online drug website Silk Road, was sentenced to life in prison Friday for drug trafficking and money laundering, among other crimes.
The 31-year-old was found guilty of all seven counts against him in February.
Prior to his sentencing, Ulbricht asked U.S. District Judge Katherine Forrest to go easy on him and “leave a small light at the end of the tunnel” in his old age.
“What you did with Silk Road was terribly destructive to our social fabric,” Forrest said, adding that she spent more than 100 hours considering Ulbricht’s sentence.
Silk Road brought together buyers and sellers of drugs, with anonymous transactions paid in bitcoin, prosecutors said. Ulbricht, they said, began planning for the site in 2009, launched it in 2011 and ran it under the name Dread Pirate Roberts until it was shut down on Oct. 1, 2013. It had 12 employees, all of them anonymous.
During his trial, prosecutors showed jurors how Silk Road operated and how it was taken down. Investigators, starting with clues provided by a Google search, eventually linked Ulbricht’s personal email with Dread Pirate Roberts.
Ulbricht was arrested in a public library in San Francisco where he was working on a laptop. He was engaged, as Dread Pirate, in an online chat with an employee he did not realize was a government agent.