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SALT LAKE CITY – A man from Utah who was once persuaded by federal agents to suffer fake torture – and even his fake death – is finally telling his incredible story.
It is a dramatic film made of how he was entangled with a well-known website called Silk Road, run by a mysterious figure who called himself "Dread Pirate Roberts".
"I feel terrible," said Curtis Green, a resident of Utah County. "There is a terrible sense of guilt, I really would not have gone on the Silk Road".
Once called "the Amazon of illegal drugs", Silk Road was among the first and certainly the best known of the so-called darknet drug-dealing sites. Green's personal involvement led to a series of bizarre and dramatic nightmarish events that he was able to sell his movie rights years ago.
In fact, the Silk Road saga has already been transformed into a screenplay by Coen Brothers.
Green's exclusive film contract silenced him for years, but now he's free to talk about the release of his new book, "Silk Road Takedown". In a blurb on the back cover, the book was published as the story of a "Mormon grandfather", in this case a grandfather who stumbled on an electronic journey into a criminal empire that was almost invisible to most people.
Green is not proud of what happened.
"The embarrassment that I brought to my family," said Green in an interview. "It was a terrible ordeal that I do not wish for anyone."
His involvement began in 2011 as a derivation of his interest in a new digital currency called bitcoin. With a sophisticated computer equipment in his home in Utah County, Green began to generate bitcoins through a process called "bitcoin mining". This eventually led him to Silk Road, a website similar to Amazon.com, except that buyers and sellers could remain anonymous and use seemingly untraceable bitcoins instead of money.
"I did not really know what I was meddling with," Green said recently.
Some items offered for sale on Silk Road were legal, some not. It has become a perfect business address in the so-called darknet for drug dealers.
"The things that were illegal on the site were actually a minority," Green said. But some Silk Road customers were not just buying and selling illegal drugs and weapons, some even offered themselves as "killers" willing to kill for bitcoins.
Green says he innocently started in the Silk Road chat forums, helping with medical and medical issues. Later, because of his computer experience, he was hired as a Silk Road administrator. He managed password accounts for customers, even some who were buying and selling drugs.
"The way I rationalized it was that I was not dealing with this," Green said. "I was not selling or receiving those items."
The anonymous founder of Silk Road – later revealed as the Texas graduate Ross Ulbricht – was called Dread Pirate Roberts or D.P.R. after a character in the film "The Princess Bride". He was pocketing millions of dollars as he portrayed Silk Road as a model of libertarian ideals.
Green knew his boss only by exchanging texts with him on the computer. "The PD who I knew was a benevolent, intelligent, intelligent human being," said Green.
When Silk Road advertising generated heat in Congress, several federal agencies launched investigations, trying to figure out who actually was Dread Pirate Roberts. In January 2013, the inquiry almost literally landed on Green's doorstep.
It happened because Dread Pirate Roberts fell into a trap created by a federal infiltrated agent posing as a drug dealer on Silk Road. After D.P.R. revealed the Green's address in Utah County to the undercover agent, the investigators willing to deliver a pound of cocaine to Green's home. Green says he was not involved in a drug transaction knowingly and never knew that cocaine would come. But he took the parcel in his house.
"Well, when I opened it, it came down," he wiped his face with cocaine, Green said. "And I'm like," Oh my God, what the heck is this? "And literally within three seconds I heard it slam and quantum."
The blow was the SWAT team that broke through the main door. Green was arrested and detained for a short period in Utah County Prison. During the investigation, he said he had told the federal agents everything he knew about Silk Road and gave him all his user names and passwords. A few days later, someone using these passwords connected to Silk Road and stole bitcoins from buyers and sellers.
"About half a million dollars in bitcoins," said Green. "Using my credentials, and so it was, it made it seem physically like I did it."
Dread Pirate Roberts was angry at theft. He sent word to the undercover federal agent who wanted Green to "beat" for stealing. So the federal agents played. At Salt Lake Marriott Downtown in the City Creek hotel, federal agents simulated Green's torture and took pictures for Dread Pirate Roberts.
"They decided to make me a waterboarding, fake waterboarding," recalls Green. "Dunk me in the water and a bit like I was beaten and it was very realistic, it was a little too realistic."
But that was not the end. Dread Pirate Roberts apparently was not satisfied, according to the agents.
"The next day they said," Oh, by the way, the order has changed from "beaten" to "kill". " "
The agents told Green and his wife to fake a picture of death. They did it at home, producing a picture showing a seemingly lifeless Green lying on the floor with what seemed to be puking on his face. Green and his wife simulated the effect by crushing his face with Campbell's soup.
After the agents sent the terrifying photo to Dread Pirate Roberts, they told Green to stay hidden in his home while the investigation continued. He did it for almost a year, he said, "having to crawl on my knees from my bedroom to the kitchen, so no one would see me, I had to be dead".
In the end, the feds tracked down Dread Pirate Roberts – Ross Ulbricht – and spotted him using his laptop in a public library in San Francisco. The situation has led to another film breakthrough.
The agents feared that if Ulbricht had shut down his laptop during the arrest, he would have encrypted all his data forever with non-shatter-proof passwords. So they improvised a new arrest action plan.
Agents infiltrated in the library staged a fight behind Ulbricht's back to distract him. When he looked away from his laptop, another undercover agent ripped him away, with a still open connection to the Silk Road website.
Ulbricht is now serving two life sentences over 40 years.
And in the end the truth came out.
An additional investigation revealed that two federal agents had been corrupted by the attraction of bitcoins. The two agents were the ones who used Green's credentials to tear off Silk Road.
"Two people who are deceptive criminals," said Green, "and here they were part of the government."
Carl Force, an agent for the Federal Drug Enforcement Administration, and Shaun Bridges, of the United States secret service, are serving several years in prison.
Green pleaded guilty to knowingly receiving the cocaine package as part of a drug deal. But he maintains that it was not true and that he really did not know that cocaine would arrive; he said he was guilty just because he wanted to finish his nightmare.
Eventually federal officials acted with ease. Green was allowed to go free without a conviction because he cooperated in the investigation and because he was the victim of two dishonest federal agents who horribly mistreated him.
"The bad agents were my prison card, actually," said Green. "They let me spend a year in value – 'hell' is not even a term suited to what they did."
For Green, his wife and nephew who are growing up, life goes on after an all too close brush with death, in an alley behind the information highway.
"I can not go back and change it," he said. "You know, if I could I would, all I can do is apologize, make sure I do not make the same mistakes twice and move on."
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