The Connect- with Johnny Mitchell - The Truth About Ross Ulbricht & The Silk Road: How One Man Became World's BIGGEST Online Drug Dealer

Episode Date: February 5, 2025

Ross Ulbricht, the mastermind behind Silk Road, created one of the most notorious underground marketplaces in internet history. From 2011 to 2013, Silk Road facilitated over $200 million in drug sales using Bitcoin, making Ulbricht a target for the U.S. government. But was he truly the criminal kingpin they made him out to be? In this deep dive, we explore: 🔹 The rise and fall of Silk Road – the "Amazon for drugs" 🔹 Ross Ulbricht’s trial, sentencing, and controversial murder-for-hire allegations 🔹 How the justice system made an example out of him with a life + 40-year sentence 🔹 Libertarian ideals, Bitcoin, and the war on drugs 🔹 Donald Trump’s shocking pardon and its implications Was Ross a visionary, a criminal, or just a pawn in a bigger game? Watch the full video and decide for yourself. Join The Patreon For Bonus Content! https://www.patreon.com/theconnectshow Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Ross Ulbrick is finally free after serving 11 and a half years in prison. He was given a full and unconditional pardon by President Donald Trump a day after he took office last week. This is one of the most followed and controversial criminal cases of the last 15 years. The federal government and the Supreme Court call Ulbrick an unabashed drug kingpin. Libertarians call him a freedom fighter and a martyr, and most people in the middle like me think he was just a kid who got by the system. And apparently Donald Trump did too. In case you haven't heard of Ross Ulbrick, he was one of the alleged founders of the Silk Road underground website that operated online from 2011 to 2013.

According to law enforcement, Silk Road was the most sophisticated and extensive criminal marketplace on the internet, best known for sales of illicit drugs. In just over two years of operation, it's estimated that over $200 million in drug sales were conducted on the website. This thing was like an online open-air drug market. Imagine Skid Row meets Amazon. And one of the biggest controversies surrounding the case were the alleged murder-for-hire plots conducted at the behest of Ulbrick. I remember very clearly when that case was going on, reading the paper and thinking, wow, this white boy is kind of a mad genius and also maybe a psychopath. I was taking the government's word for it like a lot of people did back then.

Ross took his case to trial and was found guilty on seven charges all related to drug trafficking and money laundering, nothing to do with the supposed murder plots. and the judge still sentenced him to life in prison plus 40 years. That's decades more than they gave El Chapo. That's what we in the business call getting hung. They made an example out of that kid. A sentence like that has nothing to do with justice or retribution for victims or their families because there were no victims.

There were no murders in this case. They never even located the supposed targets of these murder-for-hire plots. And in fact, by 2018, those charges had been dropped. But still, they upheld the sentence, and they gave Ross Ulbrick basically everything but the death penalty. Yes, a few people did die from overdoses who bought drugs off of the website, and that's very sad. But does that warrant a life sentence? Donald Trump didn't think so, and had this to say about the U.S. attorney and the judge involved in Ross's case.

He said, quote, The scum that worked to convict him were some of the same lunatics who were involved in the modern-day weaponization of the government against me. And whatever you think about Donald Trump, Scum is the appropriate adjective to ascribe to someone who would hand down a sentence like that in a case where, just like so many in the federal system, it was illegally and unconstitutionally manufactured by the prosecution. Let's dive into who Ross Ulbrick is, the details of the case and of Silk Road, and why it has become a flashpoint for more and more Americans who are decrying the abuse of power

by the criminal justice system. And as always, do us a quick favor. Like the video, leave a comment. and if you haven't already, subscribe to our channel. All right, let's get into it. Ross Ulbric was ahead of his time, like most Brainiacs and good business people are. By all accounts, he was a nice middle-class kid

who grew up in Austin, Texas, got a full academic scholarship, and then achieved a master's degree in engineering. While he was still in college, he became interested in libertarian political philosophy. Now, this is important because it led him to develop Silk Road later on down the line. Libertarians believe in very limited government intervention

and a truly free society and a free economy based off of maximizing individual choice. And one of the major libertarian causes that unites both right and left-wing people is their condemnation of the war on drugs. Nothing is more antithetical to the concepts of freedom from tyranny and individual choice than spending billions of dollars a year to incarcerate people for using and for selling drugs, like what America does. Another big libertarian issue is the U.S. debt and the existence of the Federal Reserve, known as the Fiat Money System, which is the global economic system we live in currently, where a country's central bank, which in our case is the Federal Reserve,

forces their citizens to use one currency that they can print out of thin air, causing this spiral of never-ending inflation wars and a gigantic, unaccountable government. Does any of this looker sound familiar to you? And one of the solutions to this Fiat system is, of course, Bitcoin, because it's decentralized, scarce, and no government or hierarchy can control it. Ross Oldbrick created Silk Road partly as a solution to this system. Silk Road was an e-commerce platform that allowed people to freely buy and sell whatever. And yes, most of it was drugs and much of it was paid for with Bitcoin.

And what's so fascinating to me about Silk Road is that I think it's a look into the future. 50 years from now, 100 years from now, all drugs are going to be legal, even if they're regulated in some fashion. And we'll be able to use a doctor's note to order heroin, cocaine, speed, whatever. and we'll be doing it with coins and blockchain backed and powered by Bitcoin. So Silk Road was almost like this futuristic experiment of what society will probably look like in the near term. But as they say, the first man over the hill gets the arrows. The government hates when you challenge them, especially in the feds. That's the reason they sentence you to triple or quadruple the penalty when you take your case all the way to trial and lose.

How dare you stand up to them, even if it's your constitutional right? That's the implied message. They want you to take a plea and beg for mercy. It's very sinister when you think about it. There's something very evil about a system like that. And of course, they'll tell you the reason they do it is because the criminal justice system is bogged down with cases. And so giving out plea deals in exchange for lighter sentences is a way for the government to save time and money. And of course, bed space inside of the prisons.

Which is true maybe at the state level. But the feds have unlimited money. They literally print it. And their budget just gets bigger every year. year. Ross not only took them to trial, he had the audacity to threaten the whole system. That's what Bitcoin and drugs and a free market do. It threatens centralized authoritarian rule. This is what the United States judge said to Ulbrick at his sentencing. What you did was unprecedented. And in breaking that ground as the first person, you sit here as the defendant having to pay the consequences for that.

Like I said, it is the audacity that these people really hate. I've been in the system. I've been around a ton of lawyers, judges, and prosecutors. And they aren't some necessarily enlightened, brilliant, idealistic people. That's why they work for the government. They are just as petty, ego-driven, and prone to abuses of power as any petty tyrant in any country and from any socioeconomic background. Now, it's hard for people to believe that representatives in the highest law of the land, a federal courtroom, could consciously break their own rules in order to secure a guilty

verdict against a defendant. But the reality is, it happens all the time and it has for years. just ask any poor person, black person, et cetera. But only in more recent times, this corruption has been getting attention because the tyranny has become political. Just listen to what former Illinois governor, Rod Blagojevich, told Tucker Carlson

about the way that his corruption charges were virtually invented by U.S. prosecutors, and a wiretapped conversation that would have exonerated him was deliberately and illegally withheld from the judge and the jury. How do you do a deal like that? I mean, it's got to be legal.

Obviously, I'm on the tape saying that. A couple of years go by, I'm at my second trial because they failed to convict me on their corrupt charges the first trial, and they're going to play that tape against me. And I'd actually charged one of my crimes was that phone call. How do you do a deal like that? I mean, it's got to be legal, obviously. I'm asking, I don't even know if you could do it.

I'm just thinking out loud. And they criminalized it, but surely I'm going to get acquitted on this. But the jury instruction was custom tailored to fit these conversations to tell you. the jury that those things were criminal and they can convict anybody if they do that if they decide for example that this conversation you and i are having and they criminal you know they charge us and then they got to prove it for a jury and they got to judge us when you do anything they want them to do all they got to do is just write up a jury instruction 12 laymen average everyday ordinary people

aren't lawyers aren't in politics just tell them this is against the law and they'll make the right decision they'll convict you of this conversation because they're told by the judge and the prosecutors It's against the law. They could do whatever they want these prosecutors. The judge was their guy. And so they're playing all these tapes out of context. They're not allowing me to play tapes we want to fill up the context. They only play 2% of the tapes.

They denied 98% of them. To this day, those tapes are covered up. But play those tapes. What are you hiding? The side that's hiding is the side that's lying. And they're hiding it to this day. They covered up all those tapes. They wouldn't even let me play them in court in the second trial,

even though they promised that I would. could play them if I testify to the second trial. So I get up there, I testify. Then when it's time to play the tapes, the judge won't allow them. It was a setup. You won't hear a single tape. Even though there were 102 conversations on that subject, they were all covered up and the jury didn't know those tapes existed.

It was a total fucking frame-up. As we're seeing now with New York Mayor Eric Adams, and after witnessing so many of the exaggerated or outright falsified charges leveled against Donald Trump over the last eight years, from the Rushgate hoax to federal criminal charges claiming he overvalued his real estate while trying to secure loans. Who doesn't do that, by the way?

It's becoming clear to most Americans on both sides of the political aisle that the criminal justice system has been co-opted by unaccountable bureaucrats who will coordinate lies to incarcerate their enemies. In the case of Ross Oldbrick, the official narrative was sketchy from the beginning. He was charged with CCE, the Kingpin Act,

meaning they accused him of being the head of an ongoing criminal enterprise. But there's evidence that he wasn't the sole founder of Silk Road and may have even inherited or taken over the site from someone else after it was already in existence. In the course of the public proceedings of the case, evidence mounted that Silk Road's DPR, or Dread Pirate Roberts, as was his online pseudonym, was not solely operated by Ulbrick.

In a conversation with a former friend Richard Bates, who helped Ulbric set up the Silk Road site, Obrick responded with, Glad it's not my problem anymore, when he was made aware of the news coverage concerning the site. Furthermore, during the trial, prosecutors attempted to stop the defense from questioning another law enforcement officer

involved in the case, who believed that the so-called dread pirate Roberts was actually a man named Mark Capellase, who was the former CEO of Mount Gox, which was an early Bitcoin exchange that was hacked and had billions of dollars worth of BTC stolen from it. Mark Capellis was later convicted for falsifying Mount Gawkes records and inflating the exchanges supply by tens of millions. So basically what the feds are doing here is they're taking a non-credible witness, a guy who's clearly a liar and a fraud, and getting them to lie on the stand or they're omitting evidence, just like they did in the case of Rod Blagojevich, that would have either exonerated Ross Oldbrick or showed that he was definitely not the sole kingpin.

and he was not the mastermind behind this gigantic criminal enterprise. And again, he may have not even been the one who invented Silk Road. Yet, he was given the sentence of an iron-fisted mafia boss, or as I said before, Chapo Guzman. The rest of the defendants in the case got what we call skid bids short time, almost all of them under five years. The fact that Ross was given life plus 40 proves that the sentence was punitive, cruel, and unusual, and therefore unconstitutional. And what is so disturbing is that the sentence was given life plus 40, proves that the sentence was punitive, sentence was upheld by every appeals court all the way up to the Supreme Court. It seems like the Constitution means less and less to those who are supposed to uphold it the most. Hopefully the pardon

of Ross Oldbrick shifts the pendulum back in the direction of freedom, limited government, and the rule of law, and the burden of proof being on the state, the feds, whatever. And to be fair, look, Ross was definitely guilty of facilitating drug sales. There's no question about it. I think he would admit to as much, and his letters home from prison show that he was contrite for his crimes. He was a young renegade, much like I was back in my 20s when I was shipping weed all over America and FedEx packages. He and I both deserve to do time, but not life plus 40. And what's so interesting about this pardon is that it contradicts Donald Trump's tough on crime talk and his threats to impose the death penalty on drug dealers. Also, it remains to be seen whether Ross will

get his Bitcoin back, the ones that he earned from Silk Road, now at estimated to be worth billions. One of the last things that the Biden government did before leaving office was to liquidate the billions and seized Bitcoin. So if I were Ross, I wouldn't hold my breath. I'll bet he's just happy to be free. Welcome home, buddy. All right, you guys, that's been today's video.

Thank you so much for tuning in. My name is Johnny Mitchell. You have been watching The Connect. We will see you next week. Take care.