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Silk Road murder-for-hire target is writing a memoir

Dread Pirate Roberts found out about Green's involvement with police and allegedly paid $80,000 to have him killed.

 

Patrick Howell O'Neill

Tech

Posted on Jun 21, 2016   Updated on May 26, 2021, 2:01 pm CDT

The Silk Road employee that Dread Pirate Roberts allegedly tried to have murdered is writing a memoir.

Curtis Green was an administrator named “chronicpain” at the dark net black market Silk Road, the first modern dark net market. In two years, it grew into a billion dollar business selling mostly drugs.

Green was caught with $27,000 and soon flipped to cooperate with police. Dread Pirate Roberts, the founder and leader of Silk Road, found out about Green’s involvement with police and allegedly paid $80,000 to have him killed.

Ross Ulbricht was convicted of founding Silk Road, which launched in 2011. He was arrested in 2013 and convicted on multiple charges in 2015 including drug trafficking, money laundering, computer hacking, and identity fraud. 

Even though Ulbricht was never tried or convicted for any murder charges, the accusations played heavily into the trial against him. His legal team is currently fighting for an appeal.

Dread Pirate Roberts believed Green had stolen money from Silk Road. Green worked closely with Carl Mark Force, a Drug Enforcement Administration agent, who masqueraded as a hitman. He pretended to murder Green and event sent Roberts staged photos of the hit.

Federal law enforcement and prosecutors argue that Ulbricht was the one who ordered the hit. Ulbricht’s defense team claimed during his first trial and the fight for appeal that he was not involved or in control of Silk Road during these events, meaning someone else was allegedly operating under the Dread Pirate Roberts name at the time.

Despite Roberts’ suspicions, it was Agent Force himself who was stealing money from Silk Road as one of at least two corrupt cops on the Silk Road case. Green is the one who taught the pair of dirty police officers how to use bitcoins, the only currency accepted on Silk Road, and later said the cops “set me up to take the fall.”

Force and Secret Service agent Shaun Bridges were both convicted on theft and blackmail charges last year.

Suffice it to say, Green has a hell of a lot of material for a book here.

Green is currently looking at different possible cover art for his memoir, tentatively titled Silk Road Memoir. He did not return a request for comment.

Green’s book joins a wide range of media already published or in the works about Silk Road, including a documentary called Deep Web, Eileen Ormsby’s book Silk Road, a Vice documentary, a 20th Century Fox feature-length film, and more.

Green’s plea deal and cooperation with police meant he served no prison time on felony drug charges. But the cops aren’t the only group Green cooperated with. The former Silk Road staffer is said to have worked closely with journalists and writers at Wired and 20th Century Fox starting last year during Ulbricht’s criminal trial.

Now we can wait for a comic book version of this saga.

Editor’s note: We have updated the article to clarify Green’s history with drug use.

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*First Published: Jun 21, 2016, 9:53 am CDT