6.Closing Argument — Prosecution

MR. TURNER: Thank you, your Honor.

At the beginning of this case we told you that we would prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the defendant Ross Ulbricht was the creator, the owner and the operator of the digital drug-trafficking enterprise that was Silk Road, and that's exactly what we've shown.

The evidence presented by the government comes from multiple independent sources. It's interlocking, it's overwhelming, and to a significant extent, it's undisputed. There is no dispute in this case that the defendant started the Silk Road website. The defense counsel conceded that right off the bat. There's no dispute that it was used to sell drugs from the start. There's no dispute the defendant started it on the Tor network so that the users of the site and the dealers on the site and the site itself would be hidden. And there's no dispute that when the defendant was arrested, he was logged into the Silk Road website as the Dread Pirate Roberts.

The dispute in this case isn't even about whether the defendant operated the Silk Road website. The defense has already granted that he did. It's about when and for how long. I'll explain later under the law it doesn't even really matter --

MR. TURNER: -- but the evidence is clear that he ran it from beginning to end. He started it. It was his baby. And he stayed with it enthusiastically for nearly three years. It was his secret livelihood. It was his passion. He built it he grew it, he operated it from top to bottom until the very end when he was arrested logged into the site as its mastermind.

How do you know that it was Ross Ulbricht the whole time behind his computer? Because of the mountain of evidence you've seen that he ran it the whole time. Let's start with the files on his computer, ladies and gentlemen. His computer is filled with evidence related to Silk Road. There are hundreds of files spread across numerous folders. There's an entire copy of the Silk Road website itself. There's an entire copy of transaction records covering the whole duration of the site.

There are chats with Silk Road employees. There are Silk Road bookkeeping records. There are lists of Silk Road servers, there's Silk Road to-do lists, Silk Road reports, Silk Road maintenance logs and on and on. These files date from 2013 all the way back to 2010 when the defendant was first starting to work on the site. This is not what you'd expect to see if Silk Road had been just some passing fad and passing interest of the defendant that he pursued for a few months back in 2011. It's what you'd expect to see on a person's computer who had been running the site continuously for years, and the details of so many of these files are damning, so let's start with the personal journal that the defendant kept on his laptop.

MR. TURNER: Sure.

These files go from 2010 to 2012. And it's absolutely clear that the defendant wrote these journal entries. They're filled with personal details about the defendant. So in these entries, the defendant talks very explicitly about starting and running and continuing to run Silk Road. The 2010 journal entry begins "I started the year in the middle of my stint with Good Wagon Books." Remember this is something he did before Silk Road. The journal entry goes on and on about Good Wagon Books for a few paragraphs and the defendant's personal life.

And then it says, "While all of this was happening, I began working on a project that had been in my mind for over a year. I was calling it Underground Brokers, but eventually settled on Silk Road. The idea was to create a website where people could buy anything anonymously, with no trail whatsoever that could lead back to them. I had been studying the technology for a while, but needed a business model and strategy. I finally decided that I would produce mushrooms," magic mushrooms, illegal drugs, "so that I could list them on the site for cheap to get people interested. I worked my ass off setting up a lab in a cabin out near Bastrop off the grid. In hindsight, this was a terrible idea and I would never repeat it, but I did it and produced several kilos of high quality shrooms. On the website side, I was struggling to figure out on my own how to set it up."

How do you know that's Ross Ulbricht? Well, for one thing in the defendant's Gmail there's an email around the same time showing that he was looking for a place to rent in Bastrop. There's also a copy of the book on the defendant's computer titled "The Construction and Operation of Clandestine Drug Laboratories." It's filled with instructions on how to set up your own laboratory custom built for drug dealing. So from the very beginning the defendant conceives that Silk Road as a website for drug trafficking and he was setting up to be its very first drug dealer.

In 2010 journal entry ends with an express of high hope for Silk Road in the coming year. "It says" in 2011, "I am creating a year of prosperity and power beyond what I have ever experienced before. Silk Road is going to become a phenomenon and at least one person will tell me about it, unknowing that I was its creator." The same journal entry, the same guy. It's clear from this entry that Silk Road is not some little experiment he's pursuing for a few months. It's an obsession. He wants power. He wants prosperity. He is relishing the thought, the site becoming a phenomenon with him the secret mastermind behind it. Those are long-term ambitions, ladies and gentlemen.

We see these ambitions continue in the journal entries into 2011 and beyond. So the 2011 journal starts out, "Still working on Good Wagon Books and Silk Road at the same time. Programming now. Patchwork PHP MySQL. Don't know how to host my own site. Didn't know how to run bitcoind. Got the basics of my site written. Launched it on freedom hosting. Announced it on the bitcointalk forums. Only a few days after launch, I got my first signups, and then my first message. I was so excited I didn't know what to do with myself. Little by little, people signed up, and vendors signed up, and then it happened. My first order. I'll never forget it. The next couple of months, I sold about ten pounds of shrooms through my site."

How do you know that's Ross Ulbricht? First of all, he says he launched his site on Freedom Hosting and there's an email in his Gmail account where he's contacting somebody about setting up a Tor hidden service. The person recommends Freedom Hosting. Second, the journal entry says he announced the site on the bitcoin talk forums. And you saw evidence recovered from the bitcointalk.org website showing that that was one of the places where Silk Road was first publicized on the Internet. Remember, that's how IRS Agent Gary Alford caught up to the defendant's trail. He found a message on bitcointalk.org that quoted a message by another user named Altoid from January 2011 publicizing Silk Road. Altoid's original message had been deleted from the forum, but the quotation still remained. The defendant didn't realize that. There's a chat on his computer where the defendant is telling a Silk Road employee about how he first publicized the site. He says he made one thread on the forums at bitcointalk.org but it got taken down pretty quickly. The defendant must have thought that once his original Altoid post had been deleted from the site, there was no longer any link between that Altoid username and Silk Road, because months after that Altoid post, he would use the same Altoid username to post a message on bitcointalk, unrelated to Silk Road, where he mentioned his true email address, rossulbricht@gmail.com. That's how Special Agent Alford was able to tie the Altoid username of the defendant, and that's another way that you know that the defendant was the author of that 2011 journal entry where he's talking about announcing the site on the bitcointalk forums.

Now, he also talks about, in that journal entry, the shrooms that he grew. He said those were the first things he sold on Silk Road. And you know that another place the defendant first advertised Silk Road was on a website called the Shroomery and you see that in his Gmail account, too. And you see there was another forum that he advertised on, drugsforum.com where he's actually sort of punished by the forum for spamming. So, these emails show, again, the defendant knew what he was doing. He wasn't starting up some content-neutral economic experiment. He was creating a drug-trafficking website. That's why he's spamming about it in discussion forums relating to illegal drugs.

Going back to that 2011 journal entry, there is nothing in there, nothing to indicate that Ross Ulbricht ever walked away from Silk Road a few months after starting it. To the contrary, the journal entry goes on and on about how the site grew bigger and bigger over the course of 2011. He says "For the first several months, I handled all of the transactions by hand." And he rewrites the site. "Rewriting the site was the most stressful couple of months I've ever experienced." Then he perseveres. "When I finally got the site ready, there were several new features including a tumbler and an automated payment processing."

He keeps going: "Two U.S. Senators came out against the site..they made a big deal out of it and called for a shutdown of the site. I started getting into a bad state of mind. I was mentally taxed." Then he ends with "Eventually we got through it and entered a more calm and harmonious phase." Later: "Some major advances were price pegging, vendor ranking, a more sophisticated feedback system, buyer stats, transaction logging, building up the admin toolset. More importantly, the market began its path to maturity. After making about 100k and up to a good 20- to 25k monthly, I decided it was time to bring in some hired guns to help me take the site to the next level. For the next three months, SYG," one of those hired guns, "had my full attention."

So the journal entry goes through the year. He's continuing to run Silk Road. It's getting big enough to attract the attention of government officials. It doesn't dissuade him. He sticks with it. He grows it bigger. And there's a separate file on the defendant's computer with a journal entry for 2012 which makes it clear again he's still running the site. "Well, I'm choosing to write a journal for 2012," he says. "I imagine that some day I may have a story written about my life, and it would be good to have a detailed account of it."So it's clear at this point the site has only gotten bigger and the defendant's ego has gotten bigger with it.

It goes on to talk about his life in Australia where Ross Ulbricht was living at the time. And he talks about personal things like his friends inviting him to hang out but he can't, he says, he's too busy, it's just too much time away from Silk Road. How else do you know that the defendant didn't just run Silk Road for a few months? Because the evidence from these journal entries dovetails with what you heard from a personal friend of the defendant, Richard Bates. Mr. Bates was only one of two people in real life who he confided his secret to.

You saw Mr. Bates testify on the stand. He was not happy to tell you about that, ladies and gentlemen. He did not want to be here. You could tell it was painful for him to testify about his former friend. But Mr. Bates' testimony makes clear that the defendant talked with him about running Silk Road for many months in 2011 until the defendant moved to Australia and cut his ties to Mr. Bates.

Mr. Bates told you the defendant started acting mysteriously in late 2010 when the defendant kept contacting him with programming questions. He wouldn't say what it was for. Instead the defendant would only say top secret. And again, we saw the journal entries where in 2010 he says "On the website side I was struggling to figure out on my own how to set it up."

Eventually at the end of February 2011, Mr. Bates told the defendant he wasn't going to help him until you tell me what your secret is, right? I'm officially forbidding you from mentioning your secret project to me again unless you're going to reveal it. So the defendant gave it and he let him in on his carefully-guarded secret. The defendant showed Mr. Bates the Silk Road website. He was full of pride about it. And Mr. Bates told you he continued to talk with the defendant about Silk Road regularly in the months that followed.

Mr. Bates told you he remembered conversations where the defendant mentioned he was making commissions from the site. He told you he remembered a conversation where the defendant said the site was getting too big for himself and he needed to hire admins, and he actually asked Mr. Bates if he wanted to be an admin.

All of this lines up with what you saw in the 2011 journal entry. Do you remember how Mr. Bates told you he remembered Senator Chuck Schumer issuing a statement about Silk Road calling it to be shut down by law enforcement. That's also referenced in the 2011 journal entry. And Mr. Bates told you after that happened, he tried to dissuade the defendant from continuing to work on Silk Road, work on something legal, but the defendant didn't drop it; he continued working on Silk Road and talking with Mr. Bates about it.

How do you know he's telling you the truth? Because you see references to Silk Road in the communications between Mr. Bates and the defendant all the way through October 2011. Mr. Bates told you that after the defendant told him about Silk Road whenever they'd mention it in chat, they wouldn't say "Silk Road," they talked about "the site," right.

"My site had a 40-minute spot on a national radio program."

"I might tell people about the site if that's okay." This is from March 2011.

April 2011: "All my friends think your site is really cool."

October 2011: "You don't have a job besides the site right now, do you?"

"Nope."

Now, in November 2011, things changed between the defendant and Mr. Bates. The defendant got nervous about how much Mr. Bates knew. You remember that Mr. Bates testified that he invited the defendant to an 11-11-11 party, November 11th party and the defendant shows up early to talk to Mr. Bates in private. He was panicking. He asked Mr. Bates have you told anybody, have you told anybody about my involvement with Silk Road. Mr. Bates says no. The defendant explained that the only other person who knew his secret, his ex-girlfriend, had told someone else, and that person had posted a message on the defendant's Facebook page saying I'm sure the authorities would love to know about your drug-trafficking site.

The defendant told Mr. Bates he had deleted that message and unfriended the poster. And Mr. Bates warned the defendant, you've got to shut this thing down. And the defendant responds I can't shut it down, I've already sold it. That was a lie. It was a lie that the defendant told so he could cut his ties to Mr. Bates and eliminate him as a potential source of liability. Chats recovered from the defendant's computer make that crystal clear. You remember those chats. They were read into evidence right after Mr. Bates testified. Those charts were with VJ, Variety Jones, who went later by the name Cimon, and you can tell from the chats he's kind of a mentor to the defendant. The defendant talks about him in that 2011 journal entry. He says around the end of 2011 that Variety Jones shows up. This was the biggest and strongest willed character he had met through the site so far. He quickly proved he had value in pointing out a major security hole I was unaware of. And he says he helped me interact with the community about Silk Road, delivering proclamations, handling troublesome characters, running a sale, changing my name. He's been a real mentor.

The idea of "changing my name," changing the defendant's username on Silk Road came from a chat the defendant had with VJ about Bates. It's dated December 9, 2011, about a month after that party where the defendant told Mr. Bates he had sold the site.

And VJ asked the defendant: "IRL," in real life, "is there anyone with a clue at all?"

"myself: Unfortunately, yes. There are two, but they think I sold the site and got out."

"Good for that - when do they think you've sold."

"About a month ago," right when he told that lie to Mr. Bates.

Then about a month later, VJ comes up with the idea of changing the defendant's name on Silk Road to the Dread Pirate Roberts. And as you heard during the trial, Dread Pirate Roberts is a movie character and part of the legend is that there's not just one Dread Pirate Roberts. When one person gets tired of being Dread Pirate Roberts, he hands off the title to someone else to be the successor. So VJ suggests this to the defendant to clear his trail.

"Have you ever seen The Princess Bride? Do you know the history of the Dread Pirate Roberts? You need to change your name from admin to Dread Pirate Roberts, clear your old trail - to be honest, as tight as you play things, you are the weak link from those two previous contacts," those two previous contacts being Mr. Bates and his ex-girlfriend. And that's what happened. So on the site about a month later -- well, about a month later, the defendant changes his name on Silk Road: My new name is Dread Pirate Roberts.

That's whole point of the Dread Pirate Roberts nickname, ladies and gentleman. It's a con. It's a bogus cover story designed to fool people into believing there was some sort of rotating command over the site. The defendant and VJ explicitly talked that way about it in other chats. For example, this one from October 2012: The DPR thing is great, and we need to make at least one publid set of statements that indicates that the old admin is long gone, and dpr is now in charge.

Myself: yea, I was thinking the same thing. Have a back story for him.

Cimon: I suggested DPR when I first realized I could track you. I don't give a shit who you are, and it's to my and everyone's advantage no one else can. DPR by it's very nature indicates a rotating command. We'll play that."

Which brings us to the TorChat logs on the defendant's computer, the chat logs you saw so many of between DPR and the Silk Road employees and advisors like VJ. And like the journal entries, they are incredibly damning. There are reams of them. Some of these chat logs are hundreds of pages long. The one with VJ is over 1,000 pages long. And there is no real dispute that the person reflected as "myself" in those chats is DPR, the operator of the Silk Road website.

Here is an example. This one is with Squid Shepard, who was a member of the Silk Road support staff labeled here as sSh, and he starts the chat by confirming that he's talking to DPR.

"May I ask to whom I'm speaking?"

"Myself: DPR, and you are?"

And that's consistent with all of the other chat logs you've seen. In each one "myself" is either specifically referred to as DPR or Dread Pirate Roberts or Silk Road admin or the context otherwise makes clear that "myself" is the operator of the Silk Road website.

How do you know that the user reflected as "myself" a/k/a DPR is the defendant, Ross Ulbricht? Well, first of all, Mr. Bates communicated with the defendant through TorChat later in 2011. And he told you he recognized who was who. "r," Richard, Richard Bates; "myself" was the defendant. This is the same TorChat program that generated all the other TorChats you see on the computer. So it's true for all the other chats that involve Silk Road employees and coconspirators. The user "myself" is the defendant. But of course, you don't have to rely on Mr. Bates' testimony to infer that because repeatedly and these chats "myself" reveals little details about what's going on in his life that match up perfectly with the details of Ulbricht's life. The details don't pop up regularly, but when they do, it's often a perfect match between what they talked about in the chat and what we see in the email account or Facebook account or other evidence of what's going on in the defendant's life.

For example, whenever "myself" talks about traveling or being away in his chats, it matches up with the defendant's travel plans. An example is this chat with h7, who was one of the programmers who worked for Silk Road, and in these chats, "myself" is clearly the boss and h7 -- he gives programming assignments to h7. He tells h7 when he's going to be paid. In other words "myself" is DPR.

Now, at one point in these chats between "myself" and h7, "myself" tells him I'm going to be unavailable from 4:00 a.m. UTC Friday to 4:00 a.m. UTC Sunday. At that point, the defendant is living in Australia, which is 12 hours ahead, so that makes him unavailable from Friday to Sunday afternoon, and that's what you see in the defendant's email account. He's going house-boating starting Friday 7:00 p.m. staying two nights. So it's the defendant who is speaking as "myself" in a chat with h7. He is the boss of h7.

Here is another example, a chat with VJ, January 26, 2012. He tells VJ he's in a relaxing environment, friendly folks everywhere. VJ says "Sounds very Thai."

DPR says "Haha, I didn't expect you to start guessing."

Well, where is the defendant at that time? His Facebook account shows that he is in Thailand. A few days later there's more chats with VJ where "myself" says "Took the day off. Ran around beaches and jungles with some girls, very little on my mind."

"VJ: Girls and jungles, life don't get any better for 'ol Dread Pirate Roberts."

Where is the defendant that day? Beaches and jungles, ladies and gentlemen. This is his Facebook album "Thailand, February 2012." There are many more examples like this.

The chat with VJ -- now he's using the name Cimon -- "myself" says "I changed timezones today." There's an itinerary in his Gmail account where he's flying from San Francisco to Austin.

November 2012, DPR says "I'm done traveling, at least for a while anyway." What does the defendant's email account show? He was traveling to Dominica that day. He just got done with three flights.

February 2013, DPR tells Cimon he's going to be away over the weekend. What does the defendant's Facebook account show? He went camping that weekend.

And it's not just travel. It gets a lot more specific than that. Another example relates to a series of chats that DPR has with VJ from March to May 2012 where DPR is talking about how he is applying for foreign citizenship so he can eventually renounce his U.S. citizenship. And they specifically talk about what it takes to buy citizenship in foreign countries, and DPR mentions he is specifically looking at applying for citizenship in the Caribbean island of Dominica.

Elsewhere on the defendant's computer there's a brochure about Dominica's Economic Citizenship Program where you can buy citizenship with a cash investment in the form of a donation to the government, to the Dominican government. And there's a filled-out application form signed by -- or with the name "Ross Ulbricht," and the metadata is May 2012. How do you know that it's the defendant who is talking with VJ about these things? Well, in the defendant's Gmail account there are several emails to friends where he says May 1, 2012, lines up with the chat, "I'm applying for a second citizenship to an island in the Caribbean called Dominica." And then he says in the second paragraph, "You may wonder why I'm doing this crazy thing. There are opportunities available, tax opportunities." And he says at the end "It's a bit of a political hedge if things ever get dicey here in the U.S." What does that mean, ladies and gentlemen? Why would things ever get dicey for the defendant here in the U.S.? Because he was still running Silk Road at the time, and that's why he's talking with VJ about getting non-U.S. citizenship. This isn't the only time you see the defendant thinking about things getting dicey for him. You saw on July 2013, he orders nine fake IDs from Silk Road, nine fake IDs with different guises from different states, from different countries. Is this normal, ladies and gentlemen? You saw the messages on the Silk Road where those IDs were ordered. He doesn't use his own DPR account to write those messages because you have to give an address for the order. He uses a sham buyer account, shefoundme account, Government Exhibit 935.

And what does he ask the vendor of those IDs in placing the order? He says things like will these IDs get me through airport security; will these IDs work if I get pulled over by a cop? He's not going bar-hopping with these IDs, ladies and gentlemen. He's worried about the possibility of a life on the lam.

So back to the Tor chats: There's another chat on the defendant's computer with, again, VJ. And you can see in this chat the defendant actually crosses over chatting with VJ to his Gmail account and then back to the chat with VJ. Here they're talking about improving the bitcoin tumbler on Silk Road, part of the bitcoin payment system. And VJ suggests find me some statistician they can consult somehow about the math involved. And DPR says he knows a statistician, he knows her and her husband well. And VJ tells DPR to ask her who are the top five statisticians in the world.

Five days later, we see the defendant emailing someone, apparently the husband, with this very question. "Who are the top five statisticians in the world besides Heather?" An exchange of emails ensues. "Wow. Good question. In terms of lifetime achievement or current hotness?"

And then we see after that DPR passes the exact same email exchange to VJ. It says "Here is my convo with my stats friend. Who are the top five statisticians in the world? Wow. Good question."

So it's undeniable that these chat logs from the defendant's computer, hundreds of pages of chats, in which DPR is assigning tasks to people, consulting about matters with VJ/Cimon, the person behind those chats reflected as "myself" is the defendant, Ross Ulbricht.

The evidence on the laptop does not stop by any means with the journal entries in the chat logs. There's still more. There's a file labeled "sr accounting," Silk Road accounting. It's a bookkeeping record of Silk Road. How do you know that it was created by the defendant? Well, for one thing, it starts all the way back in July 2010, July 17, 2010 start.

What sort of expenses does it list to start off? This is the same time when, according to the defendant's journal, he's renting a cabin in Bastrop to grow magic mushrooms, and that's what you see here: Lab clothes, petri dishes, HEPA filter. And in the defendant's Gmail account, you find matching receipts for the same items: HEPA filter, carryover from 2009. 2009, 88.94. $89. The same thing later: Humidifier, August 15, 2010, $33. There's an August 16 receipt from Amazon, $33.

And the SR accounting document keeps going for months. It doesn't stop after a few months. It keeps going all the way through July 2013 like the journal entries keep going well after the site is launched.

And notably, it contains a number of entries for commissions and that matches up with data found in the Silk Road server. The commissions start on the spreadsheet in May of 2011. As Brian shaw testified, the transaction data from the server starts up in May 2011. And this also matches up with the 2011 journal entry in the defendant's computer. He says there after making about 100k and up to a good 25k monthly, I decided it was time to bring in some hired guns and that's what you see. He starts making 25k or so monthly. There's no break in the document or an indication that someone different starts to maintain it. In fact, there's an entry in that sr accounting spreadsheet for the defendant's laptop, Okay. This is, like, a year later, April 28, 2012, $1,150 for a laptop. What do you see in the defendant's Gmail account? A matching receipt, April 27, 2012, just a day apart, $1,149.99, one cent off, and it's a Samsung silver laptop, Model 700Z, the same laptop that was seized from the defendant at the time of his arrest. He considered it a Silk Road business expense at the time, and it's clear why: Because he planned to use it to run Silk Road, just as he was caught doing on the day he was arrested. There's another spreadsheet on the defendant's computer. This one is labeled "networth calculator," and the entries on it go all the way from August 6 through June 2012 and it lists a bunch of different assets, including one that is astronomically bigger than the rest labeled "SR Inc., $104 million." Now, how do you know it's the defendant who gave SR Inc. that valuation? Look at the other items in the spreadsheet. There's the Samsung 700Z, there's the laptop. There's also entry for USAA and PayPal accounts. And if you look at the USAA records for June 2012 where the last entry was made in the spreadsheet, you see matching balances: 1347 in the USAA account, $1,400; 46.89 in the PayPal account, $50. So, this shows you in June 2012, the defendant counts SR Inc. among his assets. Why? Because he is, of course, still running it.

Another document in the defendant's computer worth noticing, it's labeled log.txt, and on its face, it's clearly a log of actions taken in connection with operating Silk Road. So there are entries in there like tried moving forum to multi.onion config, finished rewriting Silk Road.PHP controller, rewrote orders page, paid attacker -- it was a hacker -- 50,000 weekly ransom. And these entries go from March 20, 2013, all the way through September 30, 2013, the day before the defendant's arrest.

How do you know that the defendant was the person who maintained this log? Because, again, every now and then there are references to personal details that match up with information known about the defendant. So there's an entry for May 3, 2013, "I'm sick." What do you see in the defendant's Gmail account? Same date, "How are you feeling today?"

"A lot better. I took NyQuil last night. Got a good night's sleep."

September 11, four months later to 18th says he got covered in poison oak. What does the defendant's email account show? "I have poison oak from head to toe."

It also says went on a first date with Amelia from OKC. What do you see in the Gmail account: Okaycupid messages dating services, involving Amalia, "Be there in a few. Nice meeting you."

But perhaps the most revealing of the defendant's emails is a May 2, 2013 email. If you look at the log file around this time, you'll see a number of entries relating to smed, smedley, one of the programmers that worked for Silk Road. And these log entries reflect that who ever is keeping the log, DPR, was working closely with smed in early May to deal with attacks on Silk Road: Helping smed to fight off attacker, working with smed to put up more defenses.

Well, smed shows up in the defendant's Gmail account at this time. And what appears to be a keyboard accident, this email is sent to -- this is May 2, 2013 -- sent to somebody named Curtis and has a screenshot attachment, no body in the message, just a screenshot. And the screenshot appears to have been taken just a minute earlier before the email was sent if you adjust for Pacific timezones. And there is the photo that was attached, the screenshot.

Now, presumably what the defendant was trying to do was just send a screenshot of his desktop with this bizarre-looking lizard on it. But he probably didn't realize that what happened was he had two monitors open and when he hit "print screen," both screens are included in the screenshot because on the other screen at the time was a chat with smed, "smed: Morning, hey, good morning," the same programmer that according to the log DPR was busy working with at the time. And if you look even further at the chat window, you'll see there's another tab indicating the defendant had a chat going with the username MG. MG is also mentioned in the log file, that Pidgin chat working with inigo working with MG. And what's more is that both MG and smed show up on the defendant's computer the day of the arrest on his chat buddy list along with cirrus, libertas and all the other Silk Road employees, and the part of the defendant's chat buddy list where his own username was listed as dread.

So in short, there is overwhelming evidence that all of the files on the defendant's computer relating to Silk Road -- the journal entries, spreadsheets, TorChats, the log -- all of them were authored and created by the defendant in the course of operating Silk Road. But there is even more, there's even more on the computer that links the defendant to Silk Road. There's evidence that links him directly to the Silk Road server, the server that hosted the website. Remember that the name of the defendant's computer, the name of his user account on that computer was frosty. And we see from his Gmail account that this is a nickname of the defendant's. The email is referring to him as Rossty Frosty. And you remember that when the defendant was arrested, frosty was the name of his user account on his computer.

And you're familiar with this: When you have a computer at home, you log in, you can set up an account where you can name it anything you want. And the name of the defendant's computer itself was frosty. So you know, you have a Windows computer. It might be called "My Computer," but you can rename it anything you want. The defendant's user account was frosty. His computer name is frosty. And Special Agent Chris Beeson told you that's how that's reflected in sort of the computer terminal on the defendant's screen, frosty@frosty.

Well, then, let's look at the Silk Road server at the authorized keys file that you heard about. As Mr. Shaw explained, this authorized keys folder defines the computer users -- the computers that can log into the Silk Road server automatically without having to enter a password. So it's a way for a website administrator to log on quickly. The server just recognizes the person's computer so he can automatically log in. And you can see from the top entry in the file that one of the computers that had the special permission was frosty@frosty, the defendant's computer.

How long had the defendant's computer had this access to Silk Road, the Silk Road Marketplace server? Since the very time the server had been set up. The last modified date of this file is March 26, 2013. That's the last time it would have been changed. And if you look back at the log file on the defendant's computer, you see that that's exactly when this server was being set up by the defendant. On 3/27, there's an entry, "set up servers." So we have the Silk Road server was set up right around this time, including the authorized keys folder, and from the very beginning, the defendant's computer had automatic access to it.

There's another revealing connection, though, between the defendant's computer and the servers used to run Silk Road, and that's the bitcoin wallet on the defendant's laptop. The defendant had simply an enormous trove of bitcoins on his laptop, 144,000 at the time he was arrested, worth $18 million at the time. Those were Silk Road bitcoins.

How do you know that? Besides the obvious, besides the obvious fact that no one is going to store $18 million worth of bitcoins on their laptop as opposed to, you know, a bank if you're dealing with proceeds from legitimate activity but you know these are Silk Road bitcoins from the mastermind page for one thing that was on the defendant's laptop at the time he was arrested.

There's an entry there for cold BTC, 144,000 bitcoins, the same amount of bitcoins found on the defendant's laptop wallet. Remember Agent Yum explained that cold storage refers to a bitcoin wallet that's offline, not constantly being accessed on the Internet. There are wallets on the Silk Road servers that had a lot smaller amounts of bitcoins on it, and they're used to process the payments on a daily basis. But if the site gets hacked, those bitcoins are vulnerable. So as a result, you want to keep the excess funds offline.

Just think of it like a business owner, okay? You have a cash register at a store and you have a safe at home. You don't want to keep too much cash in the store because if it gets robbed, you're going to lose it. So you take your excess cash and you keep it in a safe at home protected. You can always move it back if you need it, but if you have access, you're going to keep it at home, and that's exactly what the defendant did.

Mr. Yum, former Special Agent Ilhwan Yum, showed you how there was a long history of bitcoin transfers from the wallets on the Silk Road server to the wallet found on the defendant's laptop from September 2012 to August 2013 totaling over 13 million based on the transfers -- the value of the transfers at the time they were made, and that's because the laptop was being used for cold storage. It's the defendant taking money out of the register for the night and putting it in a safe at home. And the evidence is also clear that the wallet on the defendant's laptop had been on the laptop for months. It didn't suddenly appear on the day of his arrest. Look at the metadata for the wallet file. Date created: 4/7/2013. Computer scientist Tom Kiernan told you the "date created" date means that's the date the file initially hits the computer, either it's created on that computer at that point or it's transferred in from somewhere else. That April 7 date matches up exactly again with an entry on the log file on the defendant's laptop: 4/7/2013, moved storage wallet to local machine. In other words, the defendant must have kept the storage wallet elsewhere before on a server he controlled. On April 7, he decides to move it to his local machine, his laptop, which is exactly where it was found on the date of his arrest. Again, this is just more evidence that the defendant controlled the Silk Road website, including the massive proceeds from the website.

There's one more truly damning connection between the defendant's laptop and the Silk Road server, and that's the connection with the murder-for-hire messages found in the Dread Pirate Roberts' account on the Silk Road server. You remember what those messages were about. A Silk Road vendor, FriendlyChemist, was trying to blackmail the defendant threatening to leak the names of thousands of Silk Road customers, as well as a handful of vendors. So Dread Pirate Roberts tries to identify this person. He's told his name is Blake Krokoff and then he gets in touch with the username redandwhite who he is told is involved with Hell's Angels.

And Dread Pirate Roberts tells redandwhite FriendlyChemist is causing me problems, that he wants to put a bounty on his head. And he elaborates: "He's threatening to expose the identities of thousands of my clients. This kind of behavior is unforgivable to me. Especially here on Silk Road, anonymity is sacrosanct."

And Dread Pirate Roberts contracts with redandwhite to put a hit out on FriendlyChemist for the price of $150,000 for 1,670 bitcoins. Redandwhite answers back a day later, "Your problem has been taken care of." Dread Pirate Roberts says "Excellent work. Send me a picture," which redandwhite apparently does.

Well, you see that the log file on the defendant's computer contains entries matching up with the private messages that are recovered from the Silk Road server. So the private messages with redandwhite, they're from the Silk Road server. Here you have the log entries that match up with that precisely:

3/28/2013: "Being blackmailed with user info. Talking with large distributor (Hell's Angels.)"

3/29/2013: "Commissioned hit on blackmailer with angels."

4/01/13: "Got word that blackmailer was excuted. Created file upload script. Started to fix problem with bond refunds over 3 months old." He is doing this as he's fixing server bugs, ladies and gentlemen.

Then you saw that the messages between Dread Pirate Roberts and redandwhite didn't stop there. Redandwhite tells DPR that before FriendlyChemist was killed, the hitmen extracted information from him that he was working with another person, Andrew Lawsry. And Dread Pirate Roberts says "I would like to go after Andrew, too." Redandwhite says, "Well, he's living with three other people. You can put a hit out on just Andrew. But redandwhite says "I prefer to do all four because it would be better than having to get Andrew somewhere else and having no chance of recovering any potential product/money he may have." And astoundingly Dread Pirate Roberts says "Hmm, okay, I'll defer to your better judgment and hope we can recover some assets from you." And he agrees to pay redandwhite $500,000 this time for four more murders-for-hire, 3,000 bitcoin. And a week later redandwhite reports back "The problem was dealt with." So again, you see that in the log file, 4/6/2013: "Gave angels go ahead to find tony76."

4/8/2013: "Sent payment to angels for hit on tony76 and his three associates."

Again, how do you know that the Dread Pirate Roberts behind these chilling chats was Ross Ulbricht? Because it's the same log file that has the entry "I'm sick" in May. It matches up with the defendant's emails that has the poison oak, the date with Amalia. It's the same person. And there's also a separate file in the defendant's computer labeled ops.txt like black ops, operations, and the file contains information that appears verbatim in the Dread Pirate Roberts messages about the murders-for-hire. Blake Krokoff lives in an apartment near White Rock Beach, tony76, Andrew Lawsry. This is the same information that's discussed in the communications between redandwhite and DPR.

And there's a chat with Cimon where "myself" talks about it, again, the same "myself" that we've already matched up with DPR in numerous ways. The same date range, April 3, 2013:

"Myself: I get blackmailed by a guy saying he's in deep shit with hell's angels. He says he was fronted $700k in LSD from them. I said, have the hells angels contact me so i can work something out.

Cimon: ha!

Myself: very foolishly he did. They said they caught up with lucy, got the product back and killed him.

Cimon: Well, I bet ya he won't use the HA," the Hell's Angels, "as a reference again any time soon."

But beyond that, the most devastating link between the defendant and DPR's murder-for-hire message is the payment trail. The payment trail shows that March 31, 2013 redandwhite is talking with FriendlyChemist about sealing the deal and he's given a bitcoin address to send the money to redandwhite. So he tells redandwhite I paid you, here is the transaction info for 1,670 btc, the bitcoin address that redandwhite gives him, and he even gives him the transaction number so you can look it up on the block chain and make sure the payment is done. And if you look it up on the block chain, as there was testimony, those payments were made. Same thing for the April payment of $500,000 in bitcoins.

Here is the text where he says after redandwhite said I prefer to kill all four, DPR: Hmm, okay, I'll defer to your better judgment. 500,000 has been sent to bitcoin address, transaction number. You look it up on the block chain. There is the payment. The payment was made. How do we know that the payments were made by the defendant? Because they were sent directly from the defendant's bitcoin wallet. That's what Special Agent Yum testified to. Those payments came from addresses that were found on the defendant's laptop, the same wallet we were just discussing earlier, the wallet that was moved to the defendant's local machine right around the same time; in fact, it was moved to the defendant's laptop on April 7 and then on April 8th, he's making the payments. So it was the defendant who made these payments. It was the defendant who was trying to murder five people.

Now, to be clear, the defendant has not been charged for these attempted murders here. You're not required to make any findings about them. And the government does not contend that those murders actually occurred. The defendant may have fallen for a big con job, which would only go to show that the Dread Pirate Roberts is not a criminal super-genius that the defendant wants to make him out to be, but what the murder-for-hire exchanges do show is how far the defendant was willing to go to protect his criminal enterprise if users got the idea that their anonymity wasn't safe on Silk Road, that their identities could be leaked en masse, they weren't going to use the site, and the defendant was going to lose business, and he was willing to use violence to stop that from happening.

For him, it was trivial. The click of a mouse, send $500,000, half a million dollars' worth of bitcoins, wait for the picture of a dead body. Thank goodness it does not look like any murders occurred. Thank goodness that this man's power trip was stopped before he managed to connect with a true hitman through his criminal website.

Let's talk about how he was finally stopped. Let's talk about his arrest, which gives you even more evidence, perhaps the clearest evidence of all that Ross Ulbricht and Dread Pirate Roberts were one in the same because he was caught red-handed, okay.

You heard from Agent Der-Yeghiayan, the first witness that took the stand and the second witness, computer scientist Tom Kiernan about how the arrest unfolded. The afternoon began with the defendant at home. He was under surveillance by FBI agents. Meanwhile, Agent Der-Yeghiayan was sitting on a bench elsewhere in the neighborhood with Mr. Kiernan keeping DPR under surveillance online by monitoring him on the Silk Road staff chat. And while Mr. Ulbricht was at home, DPR was online and at 2:47 p.m., DPR goes offline. And a few minutes later, the defendant is seen leaving his home heading towards the area where Agent Der-Yeghiayan and Mr. Kiernan are stationed. Just to be clear, you remember it says 9:47 here but Agent Der-Yeghiayan testified it was UTC. It was seven hours ahead of the local time.

So what happens? Well, about 15 minutes later, Agent Der-Yeghiayan and Mr. Kiernan see the defendant approach. He crosses the street, pops his head into an Internet cafe, sees it's crowded and then he heads next door to the public library. Mr. Kiernan follows him inside with a number of other FBI agents. And they assemble at the top landing of the stairwell waiting to get a signal for the arrest.

Meanwhile, Agent Der-Yeghiayan remains outside waiting for DPR to pop up online, and that's what happens. A few minutes later, after the defendant enters the library at 3:08 p.m. DPR shows up on staff chat. At this point, the defendant's had enough time to open his computer in the library and log on. And Agent Der-Yeghiayan starts chatting with him at that point using his undercover account as a Silk Road staff member, cirrus. He says hi. And DPR responds, and he knows who cirrus is. He's been chatting with him for months. And that's why when Agent Der-Yeghiayan tells DPR "Can you check out one of the flagged messages for me," DPR knows exactly what he's talking about. DPR had trained cirrus, had trained Agent Der-Yeghiayan, on the use of that flagged messages screen a month and-a-half earlier in August, we went over that during Agent Der-Yeghiayan's testimony. DPR doesn't say hmm, you'll have to remind me what the flagged message screen is all about cirrus, I don't remember that. No. He says sure, let me log in. In fact, a couple lines later, DPR says you did bitcoin exchange before you started working for me, right? Agent Der-Yeghiayan told you that was not something he had told DPR before; the person he took over the cirrus account from back in July had operated a bitcoin exchange. She had told DPR that months before the arrest, and the defendant remembered that because he was DPR back then, just as he was on the day of his arrest.

A minute later into the chat, when it's clear DPR had logged in where he says "okay, I'm here, which post," Agent Der-Yeghiayan gives the signal to arrest. It's approximately 3:14 p.m. Remember, it's seven hours ahead. So agents quickly move in for the arrest. The defendant is behind his laptop. Two agents distract him by faking a domestic dispute. The defendant turns his head, they grab him, they pull away the laptop and handed it to Tom Kiernan.

And Mr. Kiernan immediately starts keeping the computer alive and taking pictures on the screen. This is just a minute or so after Agent Der-Yeghiayan had given the signal to arrest. Remember, Mr. Kiernan had a Blackberry set to Eastern Time because he's from the New York field office. It was from 3:15. And there's the chat right there on the screen where the discussion had left off.

Not only that, but they go back in the web browser. They see the defendant had logged in as Dread Pirate Roberts and gone to the Silk Road mastermind page, which Agent Der-Yeghiayan had never seen before. Not only that, but agents follow up by searching the defendant's residence, and what do they find there? They find a couple of crumpled notes in the trash. And what are those notes about? They're about a revamp of the Silk Road buyer rating system -- seller rating system, excuse me, that Dread Pirate Roberts had been posting about on the Silk Road forums since way back in August, August 11. And there's a match of specific terms: Solid, would recommend. It matches a post from September 12 where he's talking about the changes he's thinking about making to the rating system. And agents also find a couple of thumb drives on the defendant's night stand, one of which contains a backup of many of the same Silk Road-related files that were found in his laptop. So the evidence is overwhelming, ladies and gentlemen, that this man Ross Ulbricht is the same person who started Silk Road and kept it running up until the very end, up until the moment he was arrested logged into the Silk Road server as the mastermind of the site under the Dread Pirate username chatting with someone he believed was a Silk Road employee. There is no way he can credibly explain away this evidence, and the defense's attempts to do so throughout this case have been absurd.

At the beginning of this case, Mr. Dratel admitted, he had to, admitted that the defendant started Silk Road, but he said the evidence would show that operating the site became too stressful to him, so he handed it off to other people. There's been no evidence to show that. It's just the same bogus cover story that he told to Richard Bates to throw him off his trail.

The defendant is trying to dust off the old Dread Pirate Roberts play and try it out one last time on you, ladies and gentlemen. It's not surprising the defendant is used to living a lie at this point.

Remember, this chat, he was talking with inigo, one of his customer support representatives. Inigo asks: "If you don't mind me asking, what do you tell your family that you do?"

"I live a modest life still. Security requires it. So I have my little alibi. I'm clever, so I can bs when I need to but I hate having to lie to people. And friends will tell me shit like why don't you do this or that, like I have all this free time. I just want to scream at them 'because I'm running a goddam multi-million dollar criminal enterprise!!!!"

MR. TURNER: It's a Stephen Colbert show he was watching or downloading into his computer. It's ludicrous. There were no little elves that put all of that evidence on the defendant's computer. It was the defendant who put all that evidence on the defendant's computer and in his trashcan, in his nightstand, in the Silk Road server, his Gmail account and his Facebook account, from the bitcoin talk forum and the shroomery, everywhere else you have seen the digital fingerprints. Use your common sense, ladies and gentlemen.

But even if there were any reason to believe the defendant's story, which there is not, it wouldn't even make a difference under the law. The government doesn't have to prove that the defendant's criminal activity continued from start to finish, from the beginning of Silk Road to the end. As I expect the Judge will instruct you, it doesn't matter when a person becomes part of a criminal conspiracy, even if it's just at the beginning or just at the end, he is liable for everything that happens as part of the conspiracy as long as it is foreseeable to him, before or after he joins. You don't need to go there because the evidence is absolutely clear. This man ran the site from start to finish.

So let me now talk with you about what the defendant is charged with, what he's liable for as a result of masterminding Silk Road. The defendant is charged with seven offenses. The first four relate to drug trafficking. The fifth relates to the computer hacking tools and services sold on the site. The sixth, to the fake passports and IDs that were sold on the site, and the seventh relates to money laundering, the laundering of the proceeds from all the illegal sales conducted on the site.

Let's take the drug charges first. Count One charges the defendant with distributing illegal drugs or helping others to do so. Count Two charges the defendant with much the same thing, distributing drugs but over the Internet specifically, or helping others do so.

MR. TURNER: And Count Three charges the defendant with conspiring to distribute drugs, which just means agreeing with others to distribute drugs.

To be clear, the Judge will instruct you after the addresses about what the law is and her instructions control, but this is what I expect her to instruct you.

Now, these charges -- these first three charges, they are not complicated. The basic question is were drugs distributed through Silk Road and did the defendant help distribute them, or agree with others to do so. Now, if you don't believe that drugs were distributed through Silk Road, then you must have been watching the wrong trial because that is what the site was all about. There were thousands of listings on Silk Road every day for drugs -- heroin, cocaine, LSD, methamphetamine, ecstasy, speed, steroids, prescription pain killers, pretty much every possible controlled substance you can imagine; even cyanide the defendant was willing to sell on the site.

You heard Agent Der-Yeghiayan explain how Silk Road first came to his attention. Right? Ecstasy and other drugs started showing up in the international mail in O'Hare in ways that had never been seen before. The packaging was stealthy and professional. There was a business model behind it. And those packages started as a trickle and eventually turned into a flood. And he told you how he was able to tie many of those packages back to drug dealers operating on Silk Road.

He also told you about the undercover buys he himself did on Silk Road, over 50 of them, from dealers in more than ten different countries, and all of those purchases, except one, tested positive for illegal drugs.

You also heard a stipulation that the DEA New York Field Office here, in the Southern District of New York, did undercover buys from Silk Road as well, more than a dozen of them from September 2011 to May 2013 -- heroin, cocaine, oxycodone, and all of them positively tested for drugs.

You also heard from Brian Shaw, who told you about the staggering sales figures in the transaction database on the Silk Road server. The silk Road server showed that the site executed over one-and-a-half million transactions during its lifetime, involving over 100,000 unique buyer accounts. Nearly 3700 unique seller accounts. And it took in over $213 million in revenue. Some of those sales were done before Silk Road kept track of the categories being sold. But of the 190 million reflected in the database of categorized sales, sales that had a category of goods associated with them, 96 percent, $182 million of them were for illegal drugs. So there is no doubt that drugs were sold through Silk Road in massive quantities.

You also heard from Michael Duch, who once ran his IT business, his own IT business, but started dealing drugs on Silk Road as a way of supporting his own heroin addiction, and he told you how easy it was to become a Silk Road drug dealer. All he had to do was buy heroin off the street in the same New York City area where he bought it, and he was able to sell it at 100 percent markup on Silk Road because the customers he was selling to were located all over the country, where heroin is a lot more scarce. Within six weeks, he told you, he was shipping out around 500 glassine bags of heroin a day, making 60 to $70,000 in revenue per month.

So did the defendant help distribute these drugs? Of course he did. The defendant was the one who made this entire enterprise possible. He custom built Silk Road to be an online storefront for drug dealing. He attracted customers by making it easy for them to buy drugs on the site anonymously. He attracted suppliers by making it easy for them to deal drugs on the site. And he manned the cash register to make sure that he got his cut from every sale because it was his store. The site's customers were his customers. The sales from the purchases were his sales, just as much as they were customers and sales of the individual drug dealers on the site.

The defendant made no bones about that. Here is a post of his, January 10, 2012, in which he responds to a series of complaints he was getting at the time from drug dealers on the site about the commission rates he was charging. He says: "Whether you like it or not, I am the captain of this ship. You are here voluntarily, and if you don't like the rules of the game, or you don't trust your captain, you can get off the boat." Here is another post, where he's responding to a user who is complaining about getting taxed by the site. The defendant responds: "What you are referring to is more appropriately called a commission or broker's fee. It would be a tax if I tried to take money from you based on a transaction I wasn't involved in. You are free to sell whatever you want to whomever without my interference, but if you are going to use" Silk Road, "the Silk Road platform to meet your customers and advertise your wares, you will need to pay a commission."

The defendant was involved in every single sale on Silk Road, and that's why it was so important to him to enforce the rule the site had against vendors selling outside of escrow, or OOE. Right? You heard about this. Collecting payment outside of Silk Road to avoid paying commissions, doing side deals.

That rule was prominently posted in the seller's guide. Right? "Do not create listings that instruct customers to pay outside of escrow. If you do your privileges will be revoked." There are chats with VJ where he talks about enforcing the rule by searching through vendors' listings and users' private messages to check to make sure that they are not doing side deals outside of Silk Road's payment system.

Here is a private message the defendant sent to one Silk Road seller telling him why he had lost his privileges. The defendant explains, "You do not have a right to the business I generate for you through Silk Road. Your status as a vendor here is a privilege that is contingent on you following the rules."

The defendant knew his site was critical to generating business for the drug dealers operating on it.

Think back to what Michael Duch told you. Michael Duch had never dealt drugs in his life. He was an IT guy. He had never considered dealing drugs on the street. But with Silk Road, what had once been unthinkable for him became a no-brainer of a business decision. Silk Road supplied everything he needed to become an online drug dealer overnight -- a fully anonymous online sales portal, a huge preexisting customer base, instructions on how to package drugs to evade detection, an escrow system and a support staff to make sure that he would get paid by his customers if he shipped out the drugs as ordered.

And as you saw, Duch was able to reach customers all over the country through Silk Road. He would never have been able to do that on his own. That's the legacy of Silk Road. It lowered the barriers to drug dealing by enabling drug dealers to reach customers online they could have never met on the street.

That was how the defendant facilitated drug dealing through Silk Road. And because he knew the value of his services, he knew how prized his drug dealing territory was. He required drug dealers to agree to his terms of service. You remember this, the Seller Agreement that you had to click on in order to create a vendor account on the site. Every time a new dealer clicked on that agreement, they were agreeing with the defendant to deal drugs together. The agreement was you get to use my site; I get a piece of your deals. It is a criminal business partnership.

Again, that's the defendant's own words. Here is one private message where he tells a user: "Silk Road isn't some bureaucracy. I consider us business partners."

So the defendant helped others deal drugs on the site. He distributed drugs. He agreed with others to distribute drugs. And that covers Counts One through Three of the Indictment.

And, you know, he himself acknowledges this. Who knew that a softie could lead an international narcotics organization? Thank you for being here. Thank you for being my comrades."

MR. TURNER: Before I go into Count Four, let me touch briefly on drug quantities. Assuming you find the defendant guilty on Count One, Two or Three, you will be asked to make a further finding, whether certain quantities of drugs were involved in the offenses, how much of these substances did the defendant help others distribute, or agree with others to distribute. More than a kilogram of heroin. More than five kilograms of cocaine. At least ten grams of LSD, or at least 500 grams of methamphetamine.

So for heroin it's easy. Michael Duch told you he alone distributed over three kilograms of heroin as a dealer on the site, which by itself puts the amount over the threshold and that's just one vendor. So you know the total amount of heroin the defendant helped others distribute or agreed with others to distribute through Silk Road is well beyond that.

For other substances, take a look at Government Exhibit 940E. This is data from the Silk Road transaction database. For cocaine, for example, there were 82,582 orders of cocaine on the site. Even if each of those orders was only a tenth of a gram of cocaine, there would still have been 8 kilograms of cocaine distributed through the site to be above the 5-kilogram threshold.

If you look at Government Exhibit 911A, pictured under here, all the cocaine -- 1 gram, 3.5 grams, 7 grams, 5 grams -- they are all well above -- well above .1 grams. And you can go through the same sort of calculation for the other drug quantities. The quantities of drugs distributed through Silk Road were massive.

So let's go on to Count Four.

Count Four charges the defendant with operating a continuing criminal enterprise. Basically what this means, as the Judge, I expect, will instruct you is that the defendant engaged in drug trafficking on a continuing serious basis, and that he oversaw others and made substantial profits in doing so.

So to find the defendant guilty on this charge, you have to find that the defendant committed a series of three or more drug crimes, oversaw five or more persons in the process, and received substantial profits from his crime.

Now, here the defendant clearly committed a series of three or more drug crimes. He was facilitating drug deals every day. You only have to agree on three such crimes. Just pick a few. Pick three of the thousands of drug sales that Michael Duch did himself over the site, or pick three of the undercover purchases of drugs done by Agent Der-Yeghiayan or DEA New York. All of those were drug deals the defendant was involved in as a middleman.

Did the defendant oversee five or more persons as part of his operation? Of course he did. First, he had employees. If you look back -- this is an exhibit with his to-do list. He has employees -- a list of employees that he pays every week. There are chats with the employees on the computer. There are other references to the employees.

Look at the government exhibit numbered here, if you want to go back and take a look and see what those individuals did as part of the operation. Basically some were the support staff, the customer support, who would basically make sure everything ran smoothly on the site. If there were disputes between buyers and dealers, they would resolve those disputes. That was partly what Agent Der-Yeghiayan, in operating his undercover account, was involved in, as support staff.

Then you have the back-end people, the computer programmers, Smedly, Syg, H7. In one of the chats with H7 they talk about having a team of programmers. So he has people working under him, working for him. He is a boss of the enterprise.

Not only that, you don't even have to limit yourself to the employees that the defendant supervised. He was the leader of the whole site. He organized the hundreds of vendors of drug dealers that sold drugs on this site. He harmonized their operations into one essentially orderly business enterprise. And that is acting as an organizer. And that, too, is a basis for finding that he oversaw five or more people as part of his operation.

Finally, did he make substantial profit from his enterprise? Of course he did. He earned millions of dollars in commissions. So far at least, he earned the millions of dollars that were recovered from his laptop in bitcoins. Next there is Count Five, conspiring to commit or aid and abet computer hacking. Now, computer hacking tools and services were offered on Silk Road. Agent Der-Yeghiayan told you that he would see those listings in the digital goods section, in the computer equipment sections of the website. And although we didn't look at them in detail during the testimony of Brian Shaw, the government introduced a sampling of the computer hacking listings found on the Silk Road website when the FBI seized it. There were keyloggers. There were email account crackers. There were password stealers. There were DDos services for knocking websites offline. You heard from Agent Alford about how he made an undercover purchase of some of this hacking software and it worked as advertised.

And you have seen evidence that the defendant controlled what was sold on the site. Customer support chats about cyanide, for example. The customer support staff part of the role is looking for stuff that is not supposed to be sold on the site. Computer hacking was a feature on the site throughout. So this was something that the defendant allowed to be sold on the site. And then vendors were only allowed to sell on Silk Road at the pleasure of the defendant. He let them sell on the site; they agreed to give him a cut of the proceeds, he's conspiring with them as well.

It is the same thing with the trafficking or aiding and abetting trafficking of fraudulent identity documents. You've seen the fake IDs and passports regularly offered on Silk Road. You even saw forum posts where the defendant announced the creation of the forgery section on the site where fake IDs and passports were specifically supposed to be listed. And you saw that the site did over a million dollars in sales in fake IDs and passports, including the ones the defendant bought. Just like the drug dealers on the site, the sellers of these fake IDs and passports all had to enter into an agreement with the defendant to sell their wares on the site. He conspired with them, too.

Finally, Count Seven charges the defendant with conspiring to commit money laundering. Now, the Judge will instruct you on the elements of money laundering in more detail. But basically money laundering is taking proceeds of certain crimes, like drug trafficking, and moving the money from one account to another, for example, or exchanging it from one form to another, with the purpose of either promoting illegal activity, where the illegal activity came from, or concealing the money from law enforcement. Through his operation on Silk Road, the defendant agreed to do that for the sellers on the site in basically two ways.

First, in operating the Silk Road payment system, he was agreeing to help drug dealers on the site get the funds from their illegal sales and move them off the site anonymously. That was why he chose bitcoins as the coin of Silk Road because it is an anonymous currency. And not only that but Silk Road's payment system included a tumbler built into it. What this means is money didn't go straight from a buyer's bitcoin address to a seller's bitcoin address when a payment was made. Money would be tumbled through a bunch of dummy bitcoin addresses before it hit the seller's account in order to make the payments harder to trace on the block chain. You read about this on the buyer's guide. "Just when you thought Silk Road couldn't be more secure, we went one step further. The tumbler sends all payments through a complex semi-random series of dummy transactions, each one with a new, one-use receiving address making it nearly impossible to link your payment with any coins leaving the site."

That feature, all those features of the payment system, were designed to help drug dealers move their dirty money through the site without being tracked. That's money laundering.

How else did the defendant agree with others to launder their money? Well, we already had a whole section on the site of money laundering services. That was what the money section of the site was about. And that section allowed drug dealers on the site to take their bitcoins and exchange them for cash or anonymous credit cards or other forms of money that couldn't be traced back to them. Here you have -- you can trade your bitcoins in for $10,000 in cash delivered to your door. This vendor advertises you will be mailed genuine U.S. currency that has not been altered or linked to criminal activity. Here is one for anonymous credit cards and debit cards. It's a normal debit card but hasn't got your personal information. It's totally anonymous.

So the defendant agreed with these money laundering service providers to allow them to operate on the site so that they could help the drug dealers on the site anonymously cash out their illegal proceeds. That's another way he conspired, agreed with others to commit money laundering.

Let me talk about one more legal requirement and that's venue. You have to find that the defendant, or people he aided or abetted or conspired with, caused something to happen here in the Southern District of New York in furtherance of his crime. For the drug crimes in the case, you can find venue multiple ways. You know, for example, that Michael Duch based his heroin dealing operation here, in Orange County, in the Southern District of New York, where he lived. And as a Silk Road vendor he is a co-conspirator of the defendant. He is someone who is aided and abetted by the defendant, and he performed his drug dealing operation out of this district.

You've also got undercover drug buys by DEA New York in which the drugs were ordered from here and delivered here. Again, the drug dealers who were to ship those orders were co-conspirators of the defendant, aided and abetted by him. The defendant is involved in each of those deals as a middleman.

But there's also another basis for venue that actually provides venue for all the counts in the Indictment and that's the Silk Road website itself. The Silk Road website was projected across the Web, accessed throughout the world, including here in the Southern District of New York. And as I expect Judge Forrest to instruct you, venue could be based on the transmission of a website into the Southern District of New York where the operation of the website is in furtherance of the criminal activity at issue and where it's reasonably foreseeable to the defendant that the website could be accessed by someone here.

Here, the operation of the website was critical for the offense, and it was obviously reasonably foreseeable that people in New York, in this district, could access it. In fact, you know it was accessed here because, for example, it was accessed by DEA New York in conducting their undercover buys. It was accessed by Mr. Duch every time he had to log onto the site in order to do his business.

So, for example, for the fake ID charge, it's enough for venue that the defendant ran a website with offerings for fake IDs and broadcast those offerings through the Web into this district. It is as if he put a billboard up here in this district in furtherance of the effect. The same thing with the computer hacking and money laundering charges and the drug charges.

And that's where the action was in this case, ladies and gentlemen. The hundreds of thousands of drug deals and other illegal transactions that occurred on Silk Road didn't take place on some street corner; they took place in a dark corner of the Internet. That was the defendant's criminal turf.

But just because he operated in cyberspace doesn't make his crimes any less real. Those were real drugs he was selling through his site, just as dangerous and addictive as drugs sold on the street. Think of Michael Duch. All he was doing -- all he was doing was taking drugs off the street and using the defendant's site to redistribute them across the country. Think of the messages he got from his customers that you saw. On a daily basis, anxiously waiting for their shipment to arrive before debilitating withdrawal symptoms set in. I am extremely dope sick and need something by tomorrow. Those are real people, real families, with real addictions. And it was the defendant's website that made it easier than ever before to feed those addictions, for people to get hooked in the first place, and it was the defendant's website that made it easier for drug dealers to get users hooked, users from all over the world. Based on his operation of the website, which the government has proven beyond a reasonable doubt, the defendant is liable for all the crimes charged in the Indictment. His conduct was brazenly illegal. He knew perfectly well what he was doing the whole time, and you should find him guilty on all counts.

Thank you.