It's been nearly five years since the FBI surrounded Ross Ulbricht in the science fiction section of a San Francisco library, arrested him, and grabbed the laptop from which he had run the dark web drug bazaar known as the Silk Road. Ulbricht went on trial in a New York courtroom, and is currently serving a life sentence without parole. But even now, the Silk Road saga still hasn't ended: Half a decade after Ulbricht's arrest, his alleged advisor, mentor and right-hand man Roger Clark will finally face a US court, too.

On Friday, the FBI, IRS, DHS, and prosecutors in the Southern District of New York announced the extradition of 56-year-old Canadian man Roger Clark from a Thai jail cell to New York to face newly unsealed charges for his role in Silk Road's operation. The indictment accuses Clark, who allegedly went by the pseudonyms Variety Jones, Cimon, and Plural of Mongoose in his role as Silk Road's consigliere, of crimes ranging from narcotics trafficking to money laundering. But even those charges don't capture the outsize role Clark is believed to have played in building and managing the Silk Road, from security audits to marketing, and even reportedly encouraging Ulbricht to use violence to maintain his empire.

"As Ulbricht’s right-hand man, Roger Clark allegedly advised him of methods to thwart law enforcement during the operation of this illegal ploy, pocketing hundreds of thousands of dollars in the process," writes FBI assistant director William Sweeney in a press statement. "Today’s extradition of Roger Clark shows that despite alleged attempts to operate under the radar, he was never out of our reach.”

'As Ulbricht’s right-hand man, Roger Clark allegedly advised him of methods to thwart law enforcement during the operation of this illegal ploy.' William Sweeney, FBI

Clark was arrested more than two and a half years ago by Thai police, and since been held in a Bangkok prison. When a reporter for Ars Technica interviewed him there in 2016, he claimed that police had found only his encrypted laptops—unlike Ulbricht, whose PC was seized before he could close the lid and enable its encryption—and that as a result, law enforcement had no evidence against him of any crimes. "They don’t have shit on me," Clark said at the time. "I’m not going [to the US]. It’s an impossible circumstance.”

But if authorities can prove that Clark is the same person as his alleged pseudonyms Variety Jones and Cimon, feds would already have a mountain of evidence against him from their investigation into Ross Ulbricht, including Ulbricht's journal and vast logs of communications between Ulbricht and his top advisor.

In fact, that advisor stood out as a dramatic character throughout Ulbricht's trial in early 2015. In one 2011 entry of Ulbricht's journal, he described Variety Jones as nothing less than a "mentor" and the "the biggest and strongest willed character I had met through the site thus far."