American Kingpin

The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road

By: Nick Bilton

Narrated by: Will Damron

Length: 12 hrs and 14 mins

Publisher's summary

The unbelievable true story of the man who built a billion-dollar online drug empire from his bedroom - and almost got away with it

In 2011, a 26-year-old libertarian programmer named Ross Ulbricht launched the ultimate free market: the Silk Road, a clandestine website hosted on the Dark Web where anyone could trade anything - drugs, hacking software, forged passports, counterfeit cash, poisons - free of the government's watchful eye.

It wasn't long before the media got wind of the new website where anyone - not just teenagers and weed dealers but terrorists and black hat hackers - could buy and sell contraband detection-free. Spurred by a public outcry, the federal government launched an epic two-year manhunt for the site's elusive proprietor, with no leads, no witnesses, and no clear jurisdiction. All the investigators knew was that whoever was running the site called himself the Dread Pirate Roberts.

The Silk Road quickly ballooned into a $1.2 billion enterprise, and Ross embraced his new role as kingpin. He enlisted a loyal crew of allies in high and low places, all as addicted to the danger and thrill of running an illegal marketplace as their customers were to the heroin they sold. Through his network he got wind of the target on his back and took drastic steps to protect himself - including ordering a hit on a former employee. As Ross made plans to disappear forever, the feds raced against the clock to catch a man they weren't sure even existed, searching for a needle in the haystack of the global Internet.

Drawing on exclusive access to key players and two billion digital words and images Ross left behind, Vanity Fair correspondent and New York Times best-selling author Nick Bilton offers a tale filled with twists and turns, lucky breaks, and unbelievable close calls. It's a story of the boy next door's ambition gone criminal, spurred on by the clash between the new world of libertarian-leaning, anonymous, decentralized web advocates and the old world of government control, order, and the rule of law. Filled with unforgettable characters and capped by an astonishing climax, American Kingpin might be dismissed as too outrageous for fiction. But it's all too real.

©2017 Nick Bilton (P)2017 Penguin Audio

Critic reviews

“An astonishingly well-researched narrative.... Bilton's storytelling bears not so much as a trace of fat; the book he's conjured is so sharp and bright that it can be whipped through in the airport lounge before the flight takes off." (The Globe and Mail)

"Unbelievably riveting." (Casey Neistat)

“I dare you not to read this book in one sitting. Masterfully reported and written, Bilton’s book drops you hard into the dark heart of the most famous Internet crime to date. A first-rate thrill.” (Joshua Cooper Ramo, author of The Seventh Sense)

A great narrative look into a fascinating story.

The narration was great and the author turned what could have been boring and tedious geek speak, into something that really draws you in.

Couldn’t stop listening!

This book is such a page-turner and the narrator is terrific! When I wasn’t listening to “American Kingpin” I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Nick Bilton is a fantastic reporter and an even better writer; the “characters” really come alive thanks to his attention to detail. One of the best books I’ve read in the last year!

Great story, but not flawless

The story told here is fascinating and the detail given is amazing. There are moments of poor writing, with sections becoming repetitive. The narrator is mediocre, ending up with a mostly flat delivery, though he has his moments.

This is a good one because I've actually finished it.

I have a severe attention deficit when it comes to reading and even listening to audio books, so if I don't keep falling asleep, its pretty interesting. This was the case with american kingpin, although there were times when I wondered if it was targeted to a slightly younger audience.

Quite a thrill ride, especially for a true story!

This was a fascinating story. The amount of detective work that goes into taking down one of these illegal sites is staggering. I hope it gets made into a movie!

amazing

hard to believe such a mind exust that can reason right into such blatant wrong

Mindboggling, Entertaining Cautionary True Story

Nick Bilton's exciting and wry nonfiction story of the rise and fall of the dark web's Silk Road and its founder is destined to become a classic. Bilton's research and writing deliver an electric portrait of a technical whiz/political idealist brought down by hubris and his infatuation with his own creation.Along the way, Bilton delivers lively portraits of the men who worked with patient passion to unravel the trail to the nefarious operation and bring justice. Will Damron's narration is perfect in pace, a real plus because aspects of this story are hard to follow for those (like me) who, going in, might know practically nothing about IT, encryption, and communication technology. I was up all night listening to this terrific stranger than fiction story.

A 'boys' great adventure' to the dark (web) side

I kept thinking of the "Sorcerer's Apprentice" story, and all the stories into ancient times of creativity gone awry. A project-oriented guy (most of these ancient characters were guys, like Icarus, but then again, there was Pandora) burrows into something, staving off the regular world, reveling in it, and then exploring further reaches of it that start to come back with an ever-more-vicious bite. Mean reversion, I guess. In the Sorcerer's Apprentice story, the apprentice set something in motion that turned out to be a runaway process, but got remorseful, panicked even, and tried to undo it. In this book, the young sorcerer, Ross, just kept going deeper into new variants of crime until something outside his realm stopped him. All the while he meticulously maintained, even sprouted more, fake identities, toward the world and toward those closest to him. Ross refused interviews with this author, so his alleged thoughts, plugged in here without bashfulness, apparently are the author's own reconstructions. The author it seems, did do a ridiculous level of homework, going places, reading masses of communications important and incidental. It is amazing that this secretive Ross yet left data fingerprints everywhere that made it possible, once he was keyed in on, to reconstruct countless days literally minute-by-minute, location-by-location, over years. This authoring work, like the story, like the policing, is tech and modern.
The writing (alongside the narration, a good fit), is very listenable. Tech concepts are explained simply. I wonder whether this has been optioned as a movie, because the imagery is very cinematic. Indeed, it is so pre-digested in that sort of direction, one could hire a lazy fool to convert this into a screenplay, or direct it as a Hollywood film, right down to the tear-jerking moments of sentimentality. It's very well crafted, but the clean story flows like paint-by-numbers for a movie adaptation. This is all seemingly very consciously done: it seems written from the ground up as a "hit." That's not necessarily a cutting remark: it was easy to listen right through this. It manages to be informative and gripping and very skillfully paced. There's something for everybody, down to the agent explaining what he's doing to his 3-year-old son, to Gary, the African-American hero IRS agent who made some critical links in the evidence, meanwhile feeling shut out in a visit with the FBI and Homeland Security guys. Moments are not only tear-jerkers, but STRUCTURED to be. It is not quite "the Horst Wessel song," but not completely alien from that. That's the only aspect that made me squirm even a little: sometimes the flag-waving gets a little bit too redundantly heavy-handed. Basically I agree with the sort of patriotism and teamwork on display here, and I agree with the national and community and family ethics this is a primer on. Many of these agents deserve the title "the finest," and these are likeable and respectable people, in every sense. Some are young techie nerdy guys who happen to work for government agencies. No problemo there. We need them.
As for Ross, fascinating as his doings might be, his expression, and I hope I get this right, "I think every man is his own god," shows he is on the opposite side of a divide from me that will never be crossed. My entire ethos is based on that statement being the wrongest one of all. As, I believe, our entire system, in its best ideas, is based. I feel sorry for the fanboys who follow Ross's views, except I feel plenty of anger toward the ones who did a data dump on an FBI agent and his wife and kids, urging others to hurt or kill them, and made similar threats toward the judge. There is nothing faintly cute or funny about that.
I used the phrase "boys' adventure" also because the story is largely about the doings of men, in effect playing cops and robbers. The only woman who is three-dimensional is the hopeful girlfriend (who got the longest treatment). And she is quite outside the stratospheric techie dynamics of the top good and bad guys that drive the story. I hope she realizes Ross for all his appealing attributes (and if accurately shown here) was a user who would never really let her in, the way she earnestly sought. The rest are some version of cardboard cutout, quickly dropping off to the cameos of the concerned wives, the Asian FBI agent (20 seconds screen time), and the federal judge who is a woman (but whose very eloquent statement is quoted near the book's end, and whose decision I utterly agreed with). Any other women are even more ciphers, wraiths flitting around the edges of the screen. But these doings are centered in what is still largely a boys' side of the world.
I feel much better informed about everything the Silk Road touched on: my highest sort of compliment.

fantastic performance and thrilling story!

Definitely one of the best audio books I've heard so far, if not he best!

Fascinating

And unbelievable-in some ways it was amazing that he did what he did - but equally amazing that the Feds tracked him down so fast