‘american Kingpin,’ By Nick Bilton

Narratives and counter-narratives abound in “American Kingpin,” Nick Bilton’s account of the Icarus-like arc of Ross Ulbricht and the Silk Road, the $1.2 billion online drug emporium he patched together from the digital equivalent of chewing gum and string; he then ruled it with an iron rod over suitably encrypted instant messages, before an alphabet soup of federal agencies caught up with him and his silver Samsung 700Z laptop among the stacks of Glen Park Public Library in October 2013. In one version, “American Kingpin” is the familiar story of an enigmatic Ayn Rand-fixated, Internet unicorn CEO, the subject of media fascination, disrupting an age-old industry, committed to building his legacy. In another, it’s about a fugitive fronting a monumental criminal enterprise, on the run from a frantic manhunt, furtively bumming Wi-Fi from coffee shops and sleeping in a succession of dreary lodgings. In yet another telling, it’s the fable of an idealistic, ideological warrior upending the War on Drugs, freeing the people from state tyranny to pursue their own hedonic thrill. [...] again, maybe it’s nothing more elevated than a cautionary tale of an opportunist trafficking in misery and addiction, enabling minors to score powerful narcotics like the potent, synthetic hallucinogen procured by an adolescent in Australia and handed to a classmate who went berserk, launching himself from the second story of the hotel at which they were celebrating the end of the school year. By turns wholesome and courtly, he is a renunciate clad in 5-year-old jeans despite a fortune in bitcoin and a goody two-shoes who, irked at trash lodged in the boughs of a tree, clambers up to retrieve it, yet also as “Dread Pirate Roberts” (DPR), his handle on the Silk Road, an amoral monster who draws the line at nothing — guns, body parts, hard drugs, even murder — the biggest, baddest libertarian of them all, pushing that creed’s animating idea of personal freedom to its logical conclusion. A vile and putrid prison system kept those people locked away; lives destroyed because the government wanted to tell people what they could and could not do with their own bodies. The purported assassins simply furnished DPR with supposed photographic evidence of the deed and collected the bounty. Among them was rogue undercover DEA agent Carl Force, who also relieved DPR of loot, spilling details on the government’s probe into him. [...] the FBI, IRS, DHS and sundry other agencies eventually team up to pull off the thread-the-needle feat of apprehending Ulbricht in the incriminating manner needed to make charges stick — hands on keyboard, browser open to the Silk Road — before he can hit any “kill switch” he might have installed to lock the hard drive. No drug dealer from the Bronx selling meth or heroin or crack has ever made these kinds of arguments to the Court.