The man who advised the mastermind responsible for the sprawling dark-web drug marketplace The Silk Road has been jailed for 20 years – after being arrested in Thailand in 2015.
Roger Thomas Clark, 62, known online as ‘Variety Jones’, was sentenced in a Manhattan court on Monday after he was extradited to the United States in 2018.
Federal charges filed against the elderly Canadian citizen include conspiracy to distribute a large quantity of drugs — for which he pleaded guilty in 2020.
Prosecutors said the crimes stemmed from his role as a top adviser to Ross Ulbricht, owner and operator of the ‘Silk Road’ online illegal black market.
At its height — and before Ulbricht’s arrest in 2013 — the darknet market website made millions of illegal transactions, including more than $183 million in drug sales.
The man who advised Ross Ulbricht (pictured) the mastermind responsible for the sprawling dark-web drug marketplace The Silk Road has been jailed for 20 years – after being arrested in Thailand in 2015
Roger Thomas Clark, 62, known online as ‘Variety Jones’, was sentenced Monday in the Daniel Patrick Moynihan US District Court for the Southern District of New York courthouse.
Now 39, Ulbricht, nicknamed ‘Dread Pirate Roberts’ on the now-defunct forum, is already serving a life sentence for his part in the illegal market.
Before the arrest – conducted by undercover FBI agents at a web cafe in San Francisco – Ulbricht described Clarke as a ‘real mentor’.
During the trial, prosecutors claimed that he advised Ulbricht on a range of issues related to his digital empire — such as security vulnerabilities at Silk Road sites, technical infrastructure, and rules that govern users and sellers.
Before fleeing abroad after his guardian was discovered, he helped Ulbricht – a college-educated Texan from a wealthy family – engage in clandestine promotion of nefarious sites, including drug sales.
The drugs sold on Silk Road included at least 82 kilograms of cocaine and 26 kilograms of heroin, according to the feds, and Clark faced the maximum sentence under his plea agreement.
For his role as Ulbricht’s ‘right-hand man’, he would likely spend most of the rest of his life in prison – once fleeing abroad after his guardian’s capture.
Daniel Patrick Moynihan for the Southern District of New York courthouse rebuked Judge Sidney Stein Clark, a self-confessed libertarian, during his sentencing remarks Monday in the U.S. District Court.
‘[Clark] Erroneously turned his belief that drugs should be legalized into material support for a criminal enterprise’, the lawyer wrote, Clark was ‘clear-sighted and deliberate’ during his exploits with Ulbricht.
‘These beliefs clearly crossed over into illegal behaviour.’
The online black market was shut down in October 2013, when authorities seized the website and arrested Ulbricht at a San Francisco website after months of surveillance.
Trial: This courtroom sketch shows Ulbricht, far right, at his own sentencing hearing in 2015. For his role as Ulbricht’s ‘right-hand man’, Clark will likely spend most of his life in prison – after fleeing overseas when the FBI found his guardian.
Clark, as prosecutors noted in their memo arguing for a two-decade sentence, served as more than Ulbricht’s right-hand man on the Silk Road and even played a role in the failed assassination plot that nearly landed him.
In addition to being Ulbricht’s lieutenant, he served as the site’s de facto security consultant, PR adviser and bodyguard, prosecutors said.
For example, when a Silk Road staff member was suspected of stealing nearly $350,000 in bitcoins from the site, Clark suggested to Ulbricht that Ulbricht commission a hit to take care of the alleged dissident.
Ulbricht took the suggestion and tried to hire a triggerman online to do the job – but failed to realize that the bitcoins had been stolen by a rogue Secret Service agent.
Although the target was not harmed as a result of the attempted murder-for-hire, Ulbricht paid the alleged hitman $80,000 for the job.
Long believed to be a plot by the FBI, Monday’s proceedings revealed Clark as the real culprit behind the authorized hit — which was monitored but not presented as evidence before Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. He was not charged with murder.
After encountering Clark as a marijuana seed dealer at the market, Ulbricht marveled at how the older man was ‘the biggest and strongest-willed character I’ve ever seen through the site’, according to Ulbricht’s journal.
‘He advised me on many technical aspects of what we were doing, helped me speed up the site and squeeze more from my current servers,’ wrote Ulbricht.
He helped me better communicate with the community around Silk Road, make announcements, handle problematic characters, run a sale, change my name, make rules and go.
‘He helped me get my head around legal protections, cover stories, making wills, finding heirs, etc. He is a true mentor.’
For more than a year, the dynamic continued, with the pair combining their skills to allow users to buy drugs and other illegal products anonymously, and in the process making more than $214 million in sales, prosecutors said.
Now 39, Ulbricht, nicknamed ‘Dread Pirate Roberts’ on the now-defunct forum, is already serving a life sentence for his part in the illegal market.
The online black market was shut down in October 2013, when authorities seized the website and arrested Ulbricht at a San Francisco website after months of surveillance.
Ulbricht ran the website under the name Dread Pirate Roberts, a reference to a character from the 1987 film The Princess Bride.
The website relies on the Tor network, which allows users to communicate anonymously, and accepts bitcoin as payment, which prosecutors said allows users to hide their identities and locations.
Prosecutors said Ulbricht, who grew up in Austin, Texas, took extreme measures to protect the Silk Road, requesting the killing of several who posed a threat. There is no evidence of murder.
During the trial, his lawyer Joshua Dratel said that Ulbricht had in fact created what he intended to be a ‘freewheeling, free market site’ where all but a few harmful items could be sold.
Dratel said Ulbricht handed the website over to others when it became too stressful and eventually returned to it to be the ‘fall guy’ for its real operators.
Before handing down his sentence, Ulbricht asked for a sentence that would leave ‘a small light at the end of the tunnel’.
He was sentenced to life imprisonment.
In the case of Clark’s 20-year sentence handed down on Monday, Stein said: ‘The sentence must reflect the massive criminal enterprise of which he was the leader.’