NEW YORK—A federal jury saw a final clash between prosecutors and lawyers for Ross Ulbricht on Tuesday as the Silk Road drug-trafficking trial sped to a close.

The case will be with the jury shortly, after a stunningly short defense case. Ulbricht's lawyers put on three brief character witnesses yesterday. Today, they brought a private investigator who offered just a few minutes of testimony and a former roommate of Ulbricht's in San Francisco who only knew him for a few months.

Before long, the packed courtroom was hearing closing arguments. Defense lawyer Joshua Dratel suggested again that Ulbricht left the site behind but came back—or at least, the government hadn't offered proof beyond a reasonable doubt to show otherwise. He made cryptic suggestions that the online personalities they'd seen and the data on his client's computer might have been created by unknown others. "The Internet is not what it seems," he said today, repeating his theme about the uncertainty of digital evidence.

The defense had no case because Ulbricht didn't have one to make, suggested prosecutor Tim Howard in rebuttal. "He thought he had no chance of being caught," Howard said. "He thought he was smarter than everyone else."

Not an experiment, an obsession

Closings began about an hour before the lunch break, with prosecutor Serrin Turner turning the podium to face the jury. The evidence against Ross Ulbricht is "interlocking, it's overwhelming, and to a significant extent, it's undisputed," he began.

Ulbricht's own lawyer admitted during opening statements that his client created the site. "There's no dispute it was used to sell drugs," said Turner. "There's no dispute when the defendant was arrested, he was logged in as Dread Pirate Roberts."

He blasted Dratel's "left and came back" theory. Even if it was true, it wouldn't get Ulbricht out of a conspiracy charge, said Turner—but that didn't matter. Ulbricht was the man, start to finish. "He started the site," said Turner. "It was his baby. He worked on it, enthusiastically, for over three years. He ran it from top to bottom."

To see that conviction was the right answer, jurors just had to look at the "mountain of evidence" they'd seen from his computer, Turner said. Consider the bookkeeping spreadsheets. The to-do lists. The weekly reports. The maintenance logs. The chats—more than 1,000 pages of chats with Variety Jones, his hacker-mentor.

And of course, there were Ulbricht's journals. "He wants 'power,' he wants 'prosperity,'" Turner said, quoting one of Ulbricht's journal entries. "It's not an experiment. It's an obsession! He relishes being the 'unknown mastermind.'"

In the last journal entry, Ulbricht suggested someone may want to write his life story one day.

"It's clear the site is growing, and his ego is too," Turner said.

Turner reminded jurors about the testimony of Richard Bates, Ulbricht's once-close friend. "You could tell it was painful for him to be here," Turner told the jury. Ulbricht began preparing to embrace the identity of "Dread Pirate Roberts," a pop-culture legend that signified shifting identities. In late 2011, he told Bates he had sold the site.

"That was a lie," Turner said. "It was a lie the defendant told so he could cut ties with Mr. Bates."

The content of the thousands of pages of chats makes clear that "myself" on TorChat is Ulbricht, for the entire life of the site, said Turner, and the defense's suggestion to the contrary was ridiculous.

"Myself" keeps revealing little personal details from Ulbricht's life, Turner told the jury. "Myself" talks about his travel plans with Silk Road staff, on exactly the dates that Ulbricht's e-mail and Facebook data show he was traveling.

The chats and the Silk Road log file (PDF) are inextricably mixed with Ulbricht's life. When DPR wrote in the log that he was sick, Ulbricht emailed his parents about being sick; when DPR got hit with poison oak, Ulbricht emailed his ex-girlfriend telling her about the same condition; when Ulbricht had an OKCupid date, it was right there in the Silk Road log as well.

"He kept it running up until the very end," said Turner. Agents did something DPR practically joked about in chats—they snuck up behind him while he was working. They cuffed him and took his open computer.

Turner ran through the seven counts against Ulbricht, which include three drug trafficking charges, as well as running a "continuing criminal enterprise," which involves overseeing at least five people involved in illegal transactions. He's also charged with conspiracy to sell fake IDs (Silk Road sold more than $1 million worth of them), conspiracy to sell hacking tools, and money laundering.

"There's no way to explain this away, and the defendant's attempts to do so have been absurd," said Turner. "He's trying to do the old Dread Pirate Roberts play, one more time—on you, ladies and gentlemen. He thinks he can pull one over on you."

"Objection," said Dratel. It was sustained.

"He still thinks he's clever," said Turner. "It's a hacker! It's a virus! It's ludicrous."

DPR “Doesn’t fit”

“The Internet permits—and thrives, to a certain extent—on deception and misdirection,” Dratel said at the beginning of his closing statement.

The HSI agent who infiltrated the Silk Road staff had more than a dozen accounts, and there were other law enforcement agents online too. “They were never detected,” Dratel said.

All of the online personalities the jury had seen could be the same person—or many. “They could all be agent [Jared] Der-Yeghiayan!" said Dratel. "Where is the proof? They don’t know.”

“Reasonable doubt is what protects us all,” he continued. If any jurors have such a doubt, it is their duty to acquit, he said.

Dread Pirate Roberts and Ulbricht can’t be the same person, in part because Ulbricht just didn’t have the sophistication and cunning that DPR exhibited, said Dratel.

An entire copy of the Silk Road site was found, encrypted, on a thumb drive on Ulbricht’s bedside table. “Would Dread Pirate Roberts do that?” he asked.

Would DPR have saved his chats? Even Ulbricht’s position in the library, with his back to the door, was a move Dread Pirate Roberts wouldn’t have made, said Dratel.

“Keeping a journal like that?” he asked. “Does that sound like DPR? It’s a little too convenient. It’s like a virtuoso piano player who can’t play Happy Birthday. It doesn’t fit.”

The only trustworthy chats, Dratel said, were the ones verified by Richard Bates, Ulbricht’s former friend, who had shown up in court to verify them.

“A person!” said Dratel. “Not a document created on the Internet, on a computer, that anyone can change, at any time.”

In one of those chats, Ulbricht had told Bates he sold the site by November 2011. In April 2013 Bates pointed out a news article about Silk Road, and Ulbricht told him he was “glad that’s not my problem anymore :)”.

“I submit to you it was sold before November, that’s just when he told him about it,” Dratel said. “No one knows anything about the beginning of the site. There are no documents, no transactions or anything.”

By late 2011, the URL had changed, and the silkroadmarket.org advertising site wasn’t renewed. The site went down in June 2011, then back up again. “Sounds like a transition,” Dratel posited.

As for the other chats, Dratel painted them in a questionable light. Those chats are “edited, sprinkled with facts about Mr. Ulbricht’s life,” said Dratel. Some of those facts are public, others are available to “anyone with access to his files, his accounts.”

As for the murder-for-hire chats, Dratel was dismissive. “Can they explain what those chats mean, since those people never existed? Money was paid? We don’t know where the money went. It could have been a way for DPR to get money out of Silk Road.”

It wasn’t just the chats—practically any digital data can be changed, said Dratel. He continued:

The prosecution said there was no break in [to Ulbricht’s computer]. How would you know? Sophisticated people know how to manipulate metadata. It was easy to reconstruct Mr. Ulbricht’s activities from Facebook, from his email account. It’s a bit disturbing for all of us. Think if someone was trying to frame you…. As for the bitcoins that the government traced from addresses on Ulbricht’s computer—well, bitcoin addresses can be moved around too.

Dratel again pointed to the owner of the Mt. Gox bitcoin exchange, without drawing any solid connections. “Mark Karpeles, he was under investigation," said Dratel. "He had computer expertise, he had resources. He had the primary Bitcoin exchange in the world.”

The government got the Silk Road server copied in July 2013, and after that the pressure to make an arrest pushed them quickly to Ulbricht, Dratel said. But they had the wrong guy. “Mr. Ulbricht was never a conspirator,” Dratel said.

Ulbricht’s computer may have been infiltrated—perhaps via the BitTorrent client that was downloading the previous day’s Colbert Report when he was arrested.

“Nine people connected to an open port on his computer,” Dratel said. “There’s something that was uploaded into the computer, received by Mr. Ulbricht.”

“Where was anyone who said Ross Ulbricht conspired on that laptop?” asked Dratel. “Where was anyone who said metadata was manipulated? It’s as easy as a keystroke. Ross Ulbricht is not guilty on all counts.”

“Thank God it did not work out”

“I get it,” said prosecutor Tim Howard, speaking sarcastically as he took the podium to offer a rebuttal. “It’s a huge conspiracy, with many layers. He had absolutely nothing to do with the thousands of pages of chats on his computer.”

“The defendant’s story is absolutely ridiculous. It’s a distraction from the mountain of evidence that that man”—he pointed at Ulbricht, just a few feet away—“ran Silk Road.”

The defense would have the jury dismiss everything, said Howard—the files on his laptop, the thumb drive on the bedside table, the chat logs, Ulbricht’s Gmail, his Facebook account. And of course, they’d have to overlook the circumstances of the arrest: he was logged in as Dread Pirate Roberts, the Silk Road “mastermind” page up on the screen.

“He was caught with his fingers on the keyboard," Howard said. Now he was just trying to “peddle the same DPR story that he invented."

During opening argument, defense lawyers suggested the money was from trading bitcoins. But the FBI’s analysis showing the bitcoin trail from Silk Road to Ulbricht was “absolutely devastating to that story,” so they dodged it, Howard said.

As for Dratel’s suggestion that the real DPR was too careful to be Ulbricht? "Criminals make mistakes all the time,” said Howard. “That’s how they get caught.”

Ulbricht had lots of opportunities to make mistakes, because Silk Road had grown so large, making more than 1.5 million transactions. He thought he’d be protected by a combination of Tor and his own personal encryption, said Howard. To anyone without his password, the laptop would be a brick—unless it was open.

“So all the files were invented by some bogeyman, who downloaded them to his computer at the last minute,” said Howard, playing out his version of the defense theory. “So the parts about his personal life are real, and everything else is made up? You have got to be kidding me. They want it to be some mysterious hacker, or Mark Karpeles, or whoever you want it to be. The story does not make sense.”

The murders-for-hire for which DPR paid $650,000 to "redandwhite" looked like a big con job, and that was something to be thankful for, said Howard. “We don’t think those murders took place,” he said. “Thank God it did not work out.”

“Reasonable doubt is not about flights of fancy. Don’t let the defendant insult your intelligence. He took his cut of every drug sale on the site. The defendant is guilty as charged.”

The jury will begin deliberations tomorrow.

This post covered the 11th day of the Silk Road drug-trafficking trial. For all posts, see our series page.