Technology
American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road
2017·329 pages
True story of the libertarian programmer who built a dark-web drug empire and the federal manhunt to stop him.
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Owned
True story of the libertarian programmer who built a dark-web drug empire and the federal manhunt to stop him.
About
Details
In 2011, a twenty-six-year-old libertarian programmer named Ross Ulbricht launched the ultimate free market: the Silk Road, a clandestine Web site 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 Web site where anyone—not just teenagers and weed dealers but terrorists and black hat hackers—could buy and sell contraband detection-f...
What Readers Think
What's Inside
will contain mild spoilers
Sexual content
AI
No evidence found in available sources
Violence & gore
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Murder-for-hire plots ordered; criminal threats and underworld violence central
Profanity
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Occasional strong language in crime and law-enforcement contexts
Substance use
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Dark-web drug empire selling heroin and narcotics; addiction themes throughout
LGBTQ+ Rep.
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No evidence found in available sources
Religious content
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No evidence found in available sources
Magic & witchcraft
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No fantasy magic present
Occult / demonology
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No occult or demonic content present
Political content
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Libertarian free-market ideology versus government control is central
Self-harm / suicide
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No evidence found in available sources
Abuse & suffering
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Murder-for-hire schemes; harm and exploitation within the drug trade
Other
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No information found