With the Silk Road, he set out to “make money,” Bilton writes. Ulbricht’s infatuation with libertarianism tanks his graduate studies in materials science and engineering at Penn State. “American Kingpin” is about the grip of an idea on a young man with a point to prove. So was he Walter White or Walter Mitty? All of the above, really. Flushed out of his Glen Park lair by a quest for a signal strong enough to download a Web interview with the writer of “Breaking Bad,” he’s nabbed in that outpost of the nanny state, the local library. By turns wholesome and courtly, he is a renunciate clad in 5-year-old jeans despite a fortune in bitcoin and a goody two-shoes who, irked at trash lodged in the boughs of a tree, clambers up to retrieve it, yet also as “Dread Pirate Roberts” (DPR), his handle on the Silk Road, an amoral monster who draws the line at nothing - guns, body parts, hard drugs, even murder - the biggest, baddest libertarian of them all, pushing that creed’s animating idea of personal freedom to its logical conclusion.Įventually, Ulbricht is betrayed by his own addiction - decent Wi-Fi. No less contradictory is its central character. Then again, maybe it’s nothing more elevated than a cautionary tale of an opportunist trafficking in misery and addiction, enabling minors to score powerful narcotics like the potent, synthetic hallucinogen procured by an adolescent in Australia and handed to a classmate who went berserk, launching himself from the second story of the hotel at which they were celebrating the end of the school year. In yet another telling, it’s the fable of an idealistic, ideological warrior upending the War on Drugs, freeing the people from state tyranny to pursue their own hedonic thrill. In another, it’s about a fugitive fronting a monumental criminal enterprise, on the run from a frantic manhunt, furtively bumming Wi-Fi from coffee shops and sleeping in a succession of dreary lodgings. In one version, “American Kingpin” is the familiar story of an enigmatic Ayn Rand-fixated, Internet unicorn CEO, the subject of media fascination, disrupting an age-old industry, committed to building his legacy. Narratives and counter-narratives abound in “American Kingpin,” Nick Bilton’s account of the Icarus-like arc of Ross Ulbricht and the Silk Road, the $1.2 billion online drug emporium he patched together from the digital equivalent of chewing gum and string he then ruled it with an iron rod over suitably encrypted instant messages, before an alphabet soup of federal agencies caught up with him and his silver Samsung 700Z laptop among the stacks of Glen Park Public Library in October 2013.
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