The Dread Pirate is dreaded no more. 

On October 2nd at 3:15pm PT, Ross William Ulbricht, believed to be the Internet’s most infamous drug lord “Dread Pirate Roberts” was arrested in a San Francisco public library. Ulbricht’s notorious website “Silk Road” also met its demise.

“Silk Road”, the Internet’s black market for anonymously purchasing drugs, weapons, contract killings, (and just about any other illegal substance or service you can think of) has probably been the worst kept secret on the internet since Adrian Chen first wrote about it on Kotaku.  

Which makes you wonder why, two and a half years later, after over 1.2 billion dollars in transactions, the FBI finally got around to shutting the site down.

“Silk Road” was run off of a server system operated by “Roberts” running a variation of the Tor obfuscation programs popular on the Deepnet that are designed to mask a users identity. Not quite sure it did the job though.

Forbes magazine has been following “Silk Road” and “Dread Pirate Roberts” for quite some time, and didn’t quite make a clean getaway either when they experimented to see how anonymous the “Silk Road”  system really was by buying a gram of marijuana with Bitcoin.  

Check out the  Forbes interview with “Dread Pirate Roberts” here.