For the past year, the FBI and federal prosecutors have told and retold the story of how Ross Ulbricht created, owned and operated the massive, anonymous online drug empire known as the Silk Road. But as his trial began Tuesday, Ulbricht's defense lawyers for the first time told their own version of that story. And while theirs also begins with Ulbricht creating the Silk Road, it ends with Ulbricht being framed by the "real" operators of the site to whom he'd handed over control.

In his opening statement in a Manhattan courtroom, defense attorney Joshua Dratel began with a surprising admission: that his client Ross Ulbricht was in fact the founder of the Silk Road.

But Dratel went on to explain that the site was meant merely to be a kind of "economic experiment" that Ulbricht only controlled for a brief time. The eventual adoptive owners of the Silk Road, Dratel claimed, would later trick Ulbricht into serving as the "fall guy" when they sensed an impending law enforcement crackdown.

"After a few months, he found it too stressful for him, and he handed it over to others," Dratel told the jury, describing the Silk Road's early days. "At the end, he was lured back by those operators to...take the fall for the people running the website."

"Ross was not a drug dealer," Dratel added. "He was not a kingpin."

Powerful New Evidence Against Ulbricht

That new story, describing Ulbricht as a patsy for the powerful online drug lords who operated the Silk Road at its peak, won't be an easy sell. In its own opening statement, the prosecution described powerful evidence against Ulbricht that includes proof the FBI caught him logged into a Silk Road administrator panel in the San Francisco public library last year and a journal and logbook found on his laptop that detail his activities running the Silk Road.

__Assistant US attorney Timothy Howard also said in his statement that Ulbricht at one point confessed to running the Silk Road to an old college friend. __That purported personal breach of Ulbricht's secrecy represents a damaging new claim from the prosecution, and Howard said that the college friend would be serving as a witness in the trial.

As the alleged administrator of the Silk Road known as the Dread Pirate Roberts, Ulbricht faces charges including narcotics, money laundering and hacking conspiracies. But Tuesday's opening statements show that the trial will center around proving that Ulbricht is in fact the Dread Pirate Roberts. The Silk Road, after all, used the anonymity software Tor and the cryptocurrency bitcoin expressly to hide its users' identities, and the trial could be a case study in how law enforcement cuts through those layers of technological obfuscation—or fails to.

"The Internet is a strange place," Dratel told the jury. "People can create and fabricate profiles for themselves and others."

"The Perfect Fall Guy"

As Dratel told it, Ulbricht had long given up control of the Silk Road by the time he was arrested and charged with running the site last year. But as the site's initial creator, he was the "perfect fall guy," Dratel said. He told the jury that he would present evidence that the "real" Dread Pirate Roberts paid for information about the law enforcement investigation that focused on him, including information that they had possibly learned his real name. "And that name is not Ross Ulbricht," Dratel said.

The new operators of the Silk Road "had been alerted the walls were closing in," Dratel said. "That's what compelled the Dread Pirate Roberts to put his escape plan into action," framing Ulbricht, according to Dratel's telling.

In Dratel's version of events, Ulbricht's store of bitcoins was simply the earnings from his early investments in the cryptocurrency, not the Silk Road profits the prosecutors allege. He points out that the bitcoins seized from Ulbricht are only a "small fraction" of the full $18 million the government has said the Dread Pirate Roberts earned in Silk Road commissions. And he implied that the evidence found on Ulbricht's computer at the time of his arrest was falsified to "leave him holding the bag when the real operators of Silk Road knew their time was up." He didn't elaborate on how evidence could have been planted on Ulbricht's PC.

"[The Dread Pirate Roberts] is someone who studiously avoided revealing his identity to anyone on the site...This same person goes to a public library and uses a public Wifi connection?" Dratel asked the jury. "That Ross is DPR is a contradiction so fundamental that it defies common sense."

Dratel added, "The real DPR is out there."

Kingpin or Patsy

But even if Dratel can cast doubt on evidence like Ulbricht's purported logbook and diary, Dratel's narrative has serious flaws that will no doubt be seized upon by the prosecution. The prosecution's opening statement promised to show evidence that the Silk Road was advertised on drug forums as a way to buy narcotics from its earliest days. Since its initial criminal complaint against Ulbricht, the FBI has claimed it can prove that Ulbricht wrote messages on those forums advertising the Silk Road.

In his own opening statement, prosecutor Timothy Howard stressed that the government will prove that Ulbricht was not only the Silk Road's creator, but the central operator of the site, who exerted sole control over it and its staff of 10. He quoted a message from Dread Pirate Roberts in the early days of the Silk Road forums: "I am Silk Road the market, the person, the enterprise, everything."

Perhaps the most significant new evidence in Howard's statement was his claim that Ulbricht confessed to running the site to an college friend who had helped him with programming. That confession would represent the first claim that Ulbricht confided his Silk Road secret to anyone, and also contradicts Dratel's claim that Ulbricht had cut ties with the site and handed over control to other operators.

According to Howard, Ulbricht called the as-yet unnamed friend for programming advice multiple times in 2010 and 2011. After initially refusing to tell the friend about the nature of the site and describing it as "top secret," Howard says that Ulbricht eventually caved and revealed his ownership of the Silk Road. "He showed him the Silk Road, and he bragged that he was the mastermind behind the entire thing," Howard told the jury.

The debate about whether the Dread Pirate Roberts created the Silk Road or merely inherited it, however, could be reignited by Dratel's argument. When I interviewed the Dread Pirate Roberts in July of 2013, he claimed that he had actually purchased the Silk Road from its creator after helping him to patch a security flaw in the site. "I didn’t start the Silk Road, my predecessor did...I was in his corner from early on and eventually it made sense for me to take the reigns," Roberts told me.

He was well compensated and happy with our arrangement. It was his idea to pass the torch in fact. We met through the site. I had discovered a big vulnerability in the way he had configured the main Bitcoin wallet that was being used to process all of the deposits and withdrawals on the site. At first he ignored me, but I persisted and gained his trust by helping him secure the wallet. From there we became close friends working on Silk Road together.

That claim, of course, couldn't be confirmed at the time. And in a phone interview following Ulbricht's arrest, an FBI staffer who declined to be named said that prosecutors had evidence that Ulbricht, speaking as the Dread Pirate Roberts, had lied to me in that interview.

If that passing of the Silk Road torch—now reiterated by Ulbricht's defense—was a lie, the prosecution will have to prove it. And that will depend on what evidence they can present over the next four to six weeks of trial. "We will pull the curtain back on this dark and secret world," Howard said. "Behind it are Ulbricht and his laptop."