8.Rebuttal Closing Argument — Prosecution

MR. HOWARD: Thank you, your Honor.

So I get it. The defense theory appears to be that he was the victim of a complicated conspiracy, a huge setup with many, many layers. He admitted that he started the site, but then he quickly left and was set up at the very end. He was the fall guy. He was just in the wrong place at the wrong time.

The defendant's story is absolutely ridiculous and defies all common sense. This is a desperate attempt to create a smokescreen, a distraction from the mountain of evidence that shows that that man created and ran Silk Road.

Ladies and gentlemen, his digital fingerprints are on everything, which shows that he ran Silk Road from beginning to end. All the files on his laptop computer, the thumb drive found on his bedside table, the $18 million worth of bitcoins that were found on his laptop computer, his personal email, Facebook account and bank records, the posts on the various Internet forums that he made advertising the site, and on top of all of that evidence, the defendant simply cannot escape the fact that he was caught with his fingers on the keyboard. He was caught redhanded in the middle of a conversation as the Dread Pirate Roberts with an undercover agent who he thought at the time was posing as a member of his support staff.

He was right there, logged into Silk Road as the Dread Pirate Roberts. But he claims that he had no control over what he was doing. He was not running Silk Road at the time. He had absolutely nothing to do with the thousands of pages of chat logs on his computer, journal entries, expense reports, all regarding the operation of Silk Road. Those aren't his, even though they were mixed with very intimate personal details about his life, details that match precisely in dates and content with his personal email account, on his Facebook account, and his bank accounts. These documents cover years and years. In the face of actual evidence, his story is absolutely ridiculous.

This case is about -- this is about the evidence in this case. It's about the conduct of the defendant in this case. It's what each of the witnesses told you about the evidence against the defendant in this trial. It's about all the evidence that shows through and through that that man was the digital kingpin of the Silk Road underground criminal empire.

The defense theory is a complete distraction that is not supported by any actual evidence. He tries to create boogie men and talk about hypothetical computer vulnerabilities. He comes up with an incredible fantasy, that he set up, that all the evidence was planted, all of the evidence was fabricated.

He was caught redhanded, with a computer full of incriminating evidence. So what does he do? He pedals the same Dread Pirate Roberts story that he invented after he realized a mistake by telling too many people that were close to him about his secret. The one that came up with VJ -- the one that VJ and him came up with together after he had told VJ that he had told a couple of people in real life and told them that he had sold the site. And VJ said, you remember that chat. VJ said, you know what, you should come up with a new identity on the site. Remember the Princess Bride? You should become the Dread Pirate Roberts. That's exactly what he did in real life, and that's exactly the story he's trying to sell to you now, that he sold the site and someone else was the one running in.

He knows he has to carefully craft the defense story right now because there are some things he simply cannot deny. He simply cannot deny that he started the site; the evidence is way too powerful on that point. And he can't deny that he was caught redhanded at the end. So he tells us now that he started and created Silk Road. He may have gotten too stressful, left quickly, and then was set up at the end by some mysterious hacker or little elves that put all of these files on his computer. This story does not add up. It defies all common sense. The defendant is the Dread Pirate Roberts and ran the Silk Road empire the entire time. Now, let's just start with something simple, the money, something that he does get. During opening arguments he didn't claim it was planted on his laptop, the 144,000 in bitcoins, almost worth $18 million at that time. And during open arguments this was legitimate investment income, or something about bitcoin mining. He admitted that they were his back then. But that's not true. You heard the testimony of former Special Agent Ilhwan Yum, which is absolutely devastating to that story that that was investment income.

He showed you that he analyzed the bitcoin addresses that were recovered from the servers that were running Silk Road, and he analyzed the bitcoin addresses that were found on the defendant's laptop, the personal laptop that had 144,000 bitcoins, almost $18 million at the time of his arrest. Mr. Yum's analysis was clean and simple. It looked at direct transfers from Silk Road to the defendant, to the defendant's computer.

The defendant is trying to cause confusion by trying to make bitcoins sound more complicated than they are. But don't be distracted. As Mr. Yum explained, it's much like bank accounts. You had one set of bank accounts here from Silk Road and another set that was associated with the defendant's laptop. And he found over 700,000 bitcoins and over 4,000 transactions in a year's period that flowed directly from Silk Road to the defendant's computer. He did that by looking at public records, the block chain. This was not legitimate investment income. This was Silk Road money.

But now, after hearing Mr. Yum's testimony, there is a suggestion that that was planted, too. Just like the chat logs and the journal entries and the expense report, like all of those things, that was planted, too.

But this is just the beginning. Let me just talk about a few of the things the defense also told you that defies common sense, the smokescreens that are designed to take your focus off the actual evidence in this case.

Mr. Dratel talked a lot about this theme that the Internet is not what it seems. Multiple people company use different accounts. It thrives under deception and misdirection. Yet, the only deception and misdirection is the story they're trying to push right now. This is not that complicated.

Imagine a bank robber in a case where the bank robber is robbed just as he's leaving the bank, holding the bag of cash, the bag with the gun, the getaway plan, and the cell phone with text messages going back for months where he's planning every single detail of the robbery. This is no different just because it happened on the Internet. He was caught red-handed with his hands at the keyboard. Computer crimes can be solved just like any other crime. The investigation showed that that man was the man behind the keyboard, the Dread Pirate Roberts.

Now, the defendant makes a whole series of arguments that there's no way that he could have been the Dread Pirate Roberts because there is no way that the Dread Pirate Roberts could have been that sloppy. DPR was so careful and security conscious that he could not be the defendant. He would never have stored his encryption keys in a folder labeled "Keys" or accessed Silk Road from a library. He would have never kept a journal detailing all of the stuff that he did on Silk Road. The defense wants to paint the Dread Pirate Roberts as a perfect cybercriminal.

Ladies and gentlemen, criminals make mistakes all the time. That's how they get caught. No one is perfect. And there are plenty of opportunities to make mistakes when you're running a massive online criminal enterprise for a period of years, which is processing hundreds of millions of dollars in illegal transactions. But the fact is he thought he was completely protected. He thought he was completely safe for two reasons. First, he thought he was safe because of the protections that he got from the Tor network. Second, he thought he was safe because he had a fully-encrypted computer. That was what he relied on to preserve his anonymity and protect himself from law enforcement. This was not the first time he had used someone else's wireless connection to access Silk Road. You may remember the testimony of Richard Bates, how when the defendant went over to Bates' house to show him Silk Road after he was forced to do so otherwise he wouldn't get any more help from Mr. Bates. He used the neighbor's Wi-Fi just to be sure in case -- in case he was wrong and something would get traced back to him. That's why he didn't use his house, ladies and gentlemen. That's why he went to a library. In case there was a mistake, it could have been any of the patrons in the library. It wouldn't be traced back to the defendant's home. He did that for his own protection.

Tor was his shield. Sure, he told Special Agent Critten, after Critten tried to deliver the nine counterfeit driver's licenses to him, that hypothetically someone could buy these kind of things or drugs from Silk Road. He thought he had no chance of being caught. He thought he was smarter than everyone else. It's his ego, ladies and gentlemen. You see it in the journal entries. He thought he was safe because of Tor. He thought he was completely anonymous. And it didn't matter what Special Agent Critten might have learned about Silk Road based on his statements.

He thought he was completely safe from law enforcement because his computer was encrypted. The defense showed you Government Exhibit 225B, the chat with Scout talking about where the Dread Pirate Roberts tells Scout put yourself in the defendant's -- the shoes of a prosecutor. They'd have to get right behind you and see you logon. Ladies and gentlemen, that's exactly what we did here. The FBI did exactly that. They were able to get behind him and catch him redhanded, logged on to the site, before he had a chance to close his computer and protect all the files that were in there through encryption.

It doesn't matter what the names of the files were or the folders on the computer, whether the keys were stored in a folder named "Keys" or the aliases that he used, like Richard Page, you might remember, were stored in a folder named -- it didn't matter because no one would get anything so long as the encryption worked. But the FBI made sure that they got the computer before he could engage the encryption.

If he had closed the laptop, it would have been, as Mr. Kiernan told you, a brick. He thought he was safe. He thought Tor and the encryption was going to save him. He thought we would never be able to show you all the documents we've shown you in court over the past few weeks.

The defendant talks about Mark Karpeles. I am not going to talk about him very long. There is really no real evidence to support that. It is an utter distraction and a red herring. Remember what we learned about the ask any connection, any real connection that Mark Karpeles had to Silk Road. The Silk Road market.org website, not the Silk Road market on Tor but a simple website that was used to advertise the Silk Road, tell people how to get there. But it's even -- Mark Karpeles is even farther away than that. He owned a -- he ran a company that hosted hundreds and hundreds of websites, or servers where people could host their websites, and someone registered -- someone else registered the Silk Road market.org Web page, Web server at his company. And who was that? That was Richard Page. We showed you the registration information. That was Richard Page. There was a phone number. There was an address. And where do we find all of the same information about Richard Page? On the defendant's computer, in the folder labeled "Aliases."

Silkroadmarket.org was not -- was tied to the defendant, not Mark Karpeles. Without -- and that's all you have. It's completely, completely smoke.

Let's talk a little bit about Mr. Bates, Richard Bates. Mr. Turner told you you could tell he wasn't happy to be here to talk about his friend. They want to use his testimony and he did. He got up there and told you that on November 11, 2011, he had a party, the 11/11/11 party. They were excited that the days were all the same. And at that party the defendant got there early, had a private conversation with Mr. Bates, because he was worried. Mr. Bates told you that he saw that the defendant was nervous. Who else have you told? Who else have you told my secret to? Because he was having a crisis. He was having a crisis because he had also told his girlfriend, who was sloppy with the secret, and someone else posted on his Facebook. He was freaking out.

That's not a man who had sold the site six months ago. That's a man who was connected to the site.

So Bates got up there and told all of you that he believed the defendant when he told him he sold the site. The defense makes a big deal about Government Exhibit 1004, our exhibit which we showed, the 2013 conversation. Do you remember that conversation where Mr. Bates tells the defendant do you see the article on I think it was slashed out -- some article he was referencing on the Internet. And the defense says, Sheesh, I'm glad that that is not my problem anymore.

Those are lies. Those are lies that are part of the story that he invented back then, that he had sold the site. You saw that almost exactly one month later, on December 9, 2011, he talked to VJ. VJ asked him whether he had told anyone else in real life. He told him he had told two people. He claimed that he had sold this story on them. He spun the story on them that he had sold the site and they believed him. Mr. Bates believed the defendant, that's true. But there you have it, a chat log on his computer where he admits that that's a lie. And then one month after that, that's when VJ comes up with the bright idea, let's deal with those loose ends, those people that you shared your secret with. Let's invent this new identity on the site, the Dread Pirate Roberts, as part of this whole scheme from the very beginning to claim that it's someone else.

It's the same story from the very beginning. And he's trying to pull it over on you right now.

None of this really matters. As Mr. Turner told you, he admitted to starting the site. He was logged in at the end. He had to have known the Dread Pirate Roberts' password. He was running Silk Road. Listen to the Judge's instructions, ladies and gentlemen. Just listen to the instructions.

Once you put all the distractions off to the side, there is overwhelming evidence the defendant is guilty -- the laptop and everything on it. The defendant wants you to believe that it was all planted there at the last second, through BitTorrent or something, but this is ridiculous. He wants you to believe that all of those writings weren't his. Those weren't his words. But they absolutely were. He wants you to believe that literally thousands of pages of highly incriminating chats were invented from thin air and planted. That's not all. During the hundreds of files on that computer, all of those files were neatly organized by some boogie man who downloaded them to his personal computer at the last minute -- the Silk Road keys, the list of servers, the Silk Road accounting spreadsheet, the copy of the Silk Road website and the transaction database that was on his computer, the computer filled with documents, and the same documents talk about Silk Road and also talk about his personal life. Remember the spreadsheet in which he listed all of his assets, which had showed that he thought that Silk Road was worth $104 million to him, but then also had references to his job at Good Wagon Books and entries to the exact amount of money that he had in his USAA account and his PayPal account the last time that spreadsheet was updated. It is the same thing with the chats.

Those chats, as I've mentioned, and as Mr. Turner mentioned, include details about his personal life that match up exactly with things you saw from his Facebook account and his email account. The trip to Thailand, his travel and his weekend getaways, the poison oak incident, getting sick. Remember the email in 2012 to his friend about statistics? The same email that was found copied almost exactly into the chat that was talking about Silk Road?

He wants you to -- he's claiming that the part about his personal life are real but everything else is fabricated and planted. You have got to be kidding me. And how about the evidence seized from his residence? I just want to hold up. This is Government Exhibit 502A. These are the thumb drivers. They are very small, but one of these is very, very important; it is a powerful piece of evidence. It was a thumb drive that the FBI found on that man's bedside table.

Now, Mr. Kiernan talked to you about this thumb drive. It contained backup copies of the Silk Road website, the same copies of files that were also found on the computer. It contained backup copies of other files from his computer, many of the incriminating documents you've seen during this trial. And Mr. Kiernan showed you the date that backup was made, September 23, 2013, weeks before he was arrested.

So these files were planted on both the laptop and the thumb drive weeks apart? The same mysterious hacker or Mark Karpeles, or whoever you want it to be, broke into his house and planted that thumb drive on his bedside table?

This shows that he was running the Silk Road website, ladies and gentlemen. He backed up his files to a thumb drive and he had left it on his table. It was encrypted. But Mr. Kiernan was able to figure out the encryption, and the evidence is very powerful.

Mr. Kiernan showed you one of the files, the log file, the one that also contains the references to the murders for hire, when he talks about, you know, getting confirmation that the blackmailer was executed, the same file that had details about his personal life, about getting sick, that's corroborated by his Gmail account about the poison oak, about the date with Amelia. There were two different copies. There was a copy on the thumb drive that was up to date as of the date that the backup was made, September 23rd, and he had a copy on the laptop which had a more recent update about what he had done on Silk Road since the backup was made. It's devastating evidence, ladies and gentlemen. It's devastating. The story does not make sense, his story that has no actual evidence to support it.

How about the piece of trash? Was that planted, too? The piece of paper with details about the vending system formula that was on the Silk Road website for weeks. Someone placed a telephone call and he blindly listened and wrote it down on a piece of paper, the exact same formulas that the Dread Pirate Roberts was talking about on Silk Road for changing the vending system? It doesn't make sense. This simply cannot be explained away.

And, third, the money trail. The absolutely devastating evidence the bitcoins on his laptop were from Silk Road and not from legitimate investing as, you know, they wanted you to believe in opening statement. That money trail also shows you that he made two payments of hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars for those murders for hire.

Again, we don't think -- there is no evidence those occurred, and hopefully they did not. But he felt threatened and he made those payments to arrange for a hitman to take out five different people. Thank God that didn't work out. As Mr. Turner explained, it showed he was willing to stop at nothing to protect his illegal empire, his multimillion-dollar empire.

Ladies and gentlemen, the evidence is overwhelming that that man, Ross Ulbricht, built and operated Silk Road.

At the end of the day, Judge Forrest will tell you that what I say is not evidence, what Mr. Dratel says is not evidence. Reasonable doubt is not about flights of fancy, ridiculous stories of conspiracy theories that do not match up with the actual evidence. It's your job to apply the evidence that you've heard, the actual evidence, to the law as the Judge will instruct you. Use your common sense and don't let the defendant insult your intelligence.

You, the jury, are entrusted with finding the facts. Look past all of these distractions and look at the actual evidence. Listen to the Judge's instructions. Use your common sense. If you do these things, I expect that you will see the defendant's wild conspiracy theories do not hold water. There is only one real conspiracy here. That's the conspiracy that was created and run by that man -- to create Silk Road, to control every single aspect of that illegal empire, and for that he took his cut, his piece, of all the drugs and illegal goods that were sold on the site.