Federal prosecutors in New York dropped a bombshell in their response to a bail request from alleged Silk Road owner Ross Ulbricht.

In a filing to the court (.pdf) today in New York, they say that Ulbricht, as the Dread Pirate Roberts, negotiated for six murders-for-hire, none of which were ever carried out. This is four more murders-for-hire than have previously been known.

The documents also reveal a wealth of new information about evidence investigators collected that they say prove that Ulbricht was Dread Pirate Roberts, the owner and operator of Silk Road, including a journal that Ulbricht kept on his computer describing his development and operation of the site. In one entry summarizing the major events of his life during 2010, Ulbricht allegedly explained his initial efforts to start the business:

I began working on a project that had been in my mind for over a year. I was calling it Underground Brokers, but eventually settled on Silk Road. The idea was to create a website where people could buy anything anonymously, with no trail whatsoever that could lead back to them.

Ulbricht was denied bail today by U.S. District Judge Kevin N. Fox in the Southern District of New York and ordered to be detained until his trial.

Until now, there have only been allegations that Ulbricht negotiated two murders-for-hire.

Charging documents in New York previously indicated that Dread Pirate Roberts had negotiated the murder of someone in Canada, but U.S. officials had never been able to confirm that the murder occurred and believed that DPR had been duped into paying some unknown person for the "killing." Ulbricht has not been charged with murder in that case or conspiracy to commit murder.

But a second case brought against him in Maryland last month includes charges for a murder-for-hire that Ulbricht, or DPR, allegedly negotiated with an undercover federal agent, who was paid $80,000 to torture and kill a former administrator of the Silk Road drug emporium. In that case, federal agents staged the torture and killing of Curtis Clark Green, a former administrator of Silk Road who lives in Utah. Green has acknowledged that federal agents took photos of the mock torture and murder. Federal officials told WIRED that half a dozen images, including ones showing mock waterboarding and a "corpse," were sent to DPR to prove that his former administrator had been killed

In the new documents out of New York, prosecutors say that in total, Ulbricht, as DPR, arranged six murders in the span of four months in 2013, noting that Ulbricht demonstrated a "sinister disregard for the lives of others in operating his online cartel."

Although it appears that none of the murders was actually carried out, prosecutors write, "Ulbricht clearly intended them to happen, and the details of the attempted murders demonstrate that Ulbricht will not hesitate to use violence in order to silence witnesses, safeguard his criminal proceeds, or otherwise protect his self-interest."

Ulbricht has denied through his attorney that he's Dread Pirate Roberts. But prosecutors say that evidence recovered from the laptop he was using at the time of his arrest at a San Francisco public library "conclusively confirms that Ulbricht was in fact the individual who created and controlled the Silk Road website.

They say that Ulbricht was logged into the computer as DPR when federal agents seized him at the library.

"The webpage open on his Tor-enabled Internet browser was part of the administrative infrastructure of Silk Road, consisting of a customer-support interface listing messages from Silk Road users that had been flagged for administrative attention," prosecutors write. "The previous two pages he had viewed in the browser were similarly part of the Silk Road administrative interface: one page contained a customer-support control panel from which various administrative actions could be taken (e.g. deleting listings, demoting sellers); the other page, titled 'mastermind,' provided an overview of the transactions and money moving through the site."

They also say that Ulbricht had a Tor-enabled chat program open at the time of his arrest, in which Ulbricht was logged in under the username “dread” that used the same avatar that matched the avatar that “DPR” on Silk Road used. The name Ulbricht had given his computer was “frosty," a name that Ulbricht had used public forums in the past and that was also part of a login authentication key that investigators recovered from the Silk Road web server.

In the journal that investigators say they found on Ulbricht's machine, he allegedly described how he set up “a lab in a cabin . . . off the grid” where he “produced several kilos of high quality shrooms,” so that he would have a product to sell on Silk Road when it launched. Ulbricht allegedly wrote that he “struggl[ed] to figure out . . . how to set it up,” and that, by the end of the year, he “still didn’t have a site up, let alone a server.”

He predicted, however, that 2011, he would be “a year of prosperity and power beyond what I have ever experienced before,” adding that “Silk Road is going to become a phenomenon and at least one person will tell me about it, unknowing that I was its creator.”

A journal entry from June 2, 2013, references a joint venture with another Silk Road user, in which Ulbricht allegedly writes about “loaning $500k” to the user to “start vending on SR.”

A spreadsheet found on the computer titled “sr_accounting” listed hundreds of expenditures relating to Silk Road, prosecutors say, including expenditures titled “server rent” and “pay off hacker.” A second spreadsheet titled “NetWorthCalculator" listed all of Ulbricht's assets and liabilities, including an entry for “sr inc” that he indicated had a worth of $104 million.

Prosecutors say that investigators also found a Bitcoin wallet on the computer containing about 144,000 Bitcoins, equivalent to over $20 million based on the exchange rate at the time of Ulbricht’s arrest.

As for the murder allegations, prosecutors write that the murder that supposedly occurred in Canada, in which DPR was duped into believing that it occurred, was arranged with a Silk Road member named "redandwhite" who was supposedly a member of the Hells' Angels biker gang. Investigators say they found a log file on Ulbricht's computer where he kept notes about the incident, describing the victim as someone who was trying to blackmail him. Other records indicate they negotiated price for the murder was $150,000.

After the murder was supposedly done, redandwhite told DPR that before he died, the victim had spilled the beans on at least three others in Canada who were involved in the blackmail scheme against DPR and asked if he should kill them as well. Prosecutors say DPR agreed and sent a message to redandwhite indicating that he had sent $500k in Bitcoins to an address that redandwhite had indicated, as payment for the kills. U.S. investigators checked with authorities in Canada and could find no evidence that the murders had ever occurred.