Review of AMERICAN KINGPIN
Building a drug empire on the dark web
Tl;dr – A fantastic true crime read of a modern day internet kingpin who built the Amazon for drugs on the dark web. Recommended for those into true crime, drugs, or just want a fun and easy read.
The dark web is the wild west of the modern world. A parallel internet that uses special servers to evade the law and allow nearly any kind of activity to flourish. Well, that’s what the visible web says it is. I don’t know. I don’t use it.
But many do. And what many people do on the dark web is buy drugs. The illegal drug trade has been fundamentally changed by the dark internet. And there is one man to thank for that in particular: Ross Ulbricht. American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road, by Nick Bilton, details how Ulbricht built and ran his online drug empire – and how it all came crashing down.
Ulbricht’s Silk Road – the name of his ‘Amazon for drugs’ website – was borne from his libertarian beliefs that people have the right to put whatever they want in their body, including drugs which he thinks should be fully legal. To realize his dream, he built a billion-dollar drug empire on the dark web, with thousands of drug dealers and hundreds of thousands of buyers.
Over the course of his reign, Ulbricht morphed from a quixotic libertarian to the biggest drug kingpin in the world. Eventually his site hosted more than drugs to also include weapons and even human organs. His team grew to more than a dozen. And eventually, he even ordered the murder of those who wronged him.
[SPOILERS] American Kingpin takes you on a detailed journey through the building of the site, Ross’ personal life, and the investigation that ultimately led to his quiet arrest in a public library. But how did a mastermind who built a drug empire get caught? Basically, from sloppy code and an old internet chat profile. At one point, Ulbricht updated some code that inadvertently put his server code up on the internet for about an hour. It was eventually found, the servers decrypted, and the entire empire opened up to the FBI. Additionally, his identity was surfaced when an IRS agent of all people tracked down links in news stories and found an original website comment Ulbricht posted online years prior to get the word out about his new site. The profile was connected to his Gmail that included his full name.
Bilton writes a fantastic book that is engrossing as a reader. Short chapters that detail individual scenes keeps you wanting to read ‘just one more’ before putting the book down. I knew you could buy drugs on the dark web, and pretty much anything else, but I had never actually heard of the Silk Road in particular. Somehow I missed that news story in the 2010s (along with the Elizabeth Holmes saga – where was I?!?). I’m glad I picked this book up for a hell of a good read.
Published: 2017
Publisher: Portfolio
Format: Hardcover (gifted)
If you think this sounds interesting, bookmark these other great reads:
Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup (2018) by John Carreyrou | Read my review
Drug Use for Grown-Ups: Chasing Liberty in the Land of Fear (2021) by Carl Hart
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I knew the broad contours of this story before I read it, and even then, I absolutely loved this book. The sub-plot with the crooked FBI agents was insane. Agreed that Bad Blood is a good one for folks who like this one — as would be Michael Lewis's profile of Sam Bankman-Fried from last year, Going Infinite.