On January 26, 2013, Dread Pirate Roberts received a series of urgent messages from one of his top lieutenants, Inigo. His online drug marketplace, Silk Road, was being robbed blind.

"I hope you get online soon," Inigo wrote. "We are under attack over 100k stolen, shits hitting the fan you need to pull the plug on withdrawals."

But there was no "kill switch" for withdrawals, and Inigo couldn't stop the bleeding. He and DPR would later lament lacking this critical security feature. One by one, the drug dealers who relied on Silk Road to make money were having their accounts broken into, their passwords changed, and their bitcoins looted.

"Over 300k stolen," Inigo wrote later. He was up late, frantic, trying to contain the theft. He kept sending messages to DPR, but the boss wasn't online.

Eventually he did stop it, after about 20,000 bitcoins had been stolen, or around $350,000 at the time. The thefts had been via the account of "Flush," another Silk Road admin—either he'd gone rogue, or someone had broken into his account. "My hunch is that it was him," said Inigo. "Looks like he took 900 bitcoins from the petty cash fund and the rest by changing vendor passwords and resetting their pins, and then logging into their accounts to wipe out their balances."

DPR was online about an hour later. "This makes me sick to my stomache [sic]," he wrote. DPR knew Flush was really Curtis Green, a 47-year-old Utah man. "I did some digging. He was arrested for cocaine possession last week. This will be the first time I have had to call on my muscle. Fucking sucks."

New revelations

The charging of two federal agents on Monday has led to a heap of documents from the Silk Road drug trafficking case being unsealed, including the above chats about the massive January theft—an attack that was actually perpetrated by a Secret Service agent, Shaun Bridges. The 121-page document stash (PDF), unsealed yesterday, provides new insight into the details of how Bridges and DEA agent Carl Force ripped off the website.

The documents also reveal how the conflict played out between government prosecutors and defense lawyers for 31-year-old Ross Ulbricht, whom the government fingered as being Dread Pirate Roberts and arrested in October 2013. Ulbricht was tried and convicted on charges of drug trafficking and money laundering. He will be sentenced next month.

Ulbricht's lawyer Joshua Dratel argued that the facts of the investigation should have been made public before Ulbricht's trial and that by preventing him from talking about the corrupt agents, Ulbricht didn't get a fair trial. The government ultimately prevailed on that point, arguing to US District Judge Katherine Forrest that the corrupted Baltimore investigation was kept wholly separate from the New York-based investigation that actually went to trial.

The unsealed documents include an array of online chats between Dread Pirate Roberts and his top staffers, including Inigo, his mentor Cimon (also called Variety Jones), and Nob, an undercover account that was being operated by Carl Force, the former DEA agent.

The documents, court filings from November and December, only refer to Force, who was apparently the sole suspect at that time. It wasn't until later that government investigators realized that both Force and Bridges, who worked together in the Baltimore investigation, had both independently ripped off Silk Road.

According to the government, it was Bridges who was responsible for the January theft, which he perpetrated by taking over Curtis Green's "Flush" account. It was that theft that first caused Ulbricht to turn to violence to defend his empire. And when he needed to hire a "hitman," another corrupt cop—Force—made himself available to do the deed.

Arrest and theft

Curtis Green was a Silk Road admin who says he became active in the Silk Road forums because he "had an interest in harm reduction related to drug use." He was hired by Dread Pirate Roberts as a "customer service rep," helping people use the site. In statements made after his arrest, he said he never used drugs and never intended to become involved in drug deals.

Green ultimately did become involved, though, agreeing to take receipt of a kilogram of cocaine. It was a DEA sting, and Green was arrested on January 17, 2013.

He immediately agreed to cooperate with federal agents, giving them access to his accounts and showing them how to use them. Soon after he did so, Bridges skipped out on a meeting and used Green's credentials to start looting the website.

That enraged Dread Pirate Roberts, who got in touch with "Nob," an account he believed was controlled by a major drug dealer, but was in fact run by Force.

"Do you want him beat up. shot, just paid a visit?" Nob asked DPR.

"I'd like him beat up, then forced to send the bitcoins he stole back," DPR answered. "Like sit him down at his computer and make him do it."

The next day, DPR's most trusted staffer, "Cimon," who also went by Variety Jones, chatted with him about the theft.

"As a side note, at what point in time do we decide we've had enough of someones shit, and terminate them?" asked Cimon. "Like, does impersonating a vendor to rip off a mid-level drug lord, using our rep and system; follows up by stealing from our vendors and clients and breeding fear and mis-trust, does that come close in yer opinion?"

"Terminate?" wrote DPR. "Execute?"

"Yeah, pretty much," said Cimon. "At what point in time is that the response. We're playing with big money with serious people, and that's the world they live in."

That apparently convinced him. Later that day, DPR told Nob to "change the order to execute rather than torture."

"Yes, is that what you want?" Nob asked.

"It is, after I had a chance to think on it," DPR answered.

Force and his colleagues set up a fake hit, and they staged Green's death in order to send DPR a photo.

"You would have surprised me if you had balked at taking the step, of bluntly, killing Curtis for fucking up just a wee bit too badly," Cimon said later. He continued:

Also, if you had balked, I would have seriously re-considered our relationship. We're playing for keeps, this just drives it home. I'm perfectly comfortable with the decision, and I'll sleep like a lamb tonight, and every night hereafter. Let's just try and not make a habit of this, mkay.

"Well put," said DPR.

Corrupt cops, clean trial?

The unsealed documents show that Ulbricht's lawyer argued in December that the revelations about corrupt agents within the government's investigation should be brought up at trial. This week, Dratel added that his inability to bring up the heretofore secret investigation had destroyed his client's rights to due process and a fair trial.

"The government's considerable efforts at keeping this monumental scandal from being aired at Ross Ulbricht's trial is itself scandalous," Dratel said in an e-mailed statement.

Force and those he worked with "obtained access to the administrative platforms of the Silk Road site, where they were able to commandeer accounts and had the capacity to change PIN numbers and other aspects of the site—all without the government's knowledge of what precisely they did with that access," said Dratel.

Those issues were raised before trial, and the New York-based prosecutors responded that not only had Force played no role in their investigation, but that they wouldn't be using any evidence at all from the Baltimore office.

"Even if [Special Agent] Force is found to have stolen the Bitcoins, he at most caused a situation to which the defendant chose to respond to with violence, which is wholly insufficient to prove an entrapment defense," wrote prosecutor Serrin Turner.

US District Judge Katherine Forrest sided with the prosecution.

"Defendant has not made a showing that either the fact of the Force Investigation or the information learned during that investigation is 'needed to avoid a possible injustice,'" Forrest wrote. She continued:

Contrary to defense's arguments, the statements in the November 21, 2014 Letter are not exculpatory... The Government alleges that Ulbricht solicited Green's murder-for-hire in part because he believed that Green had stolen the $350,000 in bitcoins. The fact that SA Force may have been responsible for the theft is irrelevant unless defendant knew about it, and there is no evidence that he did.

Ultimately, the information about DPR's first alleged "hit" wasn't included in the trial. However, messages showing the five other people he tried to have killed were admitted to trial. No murders actually took place, and the last five "hits" appear to be the work of an extremely successful scam artist.