I was, by late 2012, obsessed with the Dread Pirate Roberts. Here was someone making millions of dollars in highly illegal narcotics sales—a study by Carnegie Mellon’s Christin earlier that year had estimated that the Silk Road was moving $15 million in narcotics annually—while evading every global law enforcement agency. All of this after the DEA and Justice Department had been explicitly ordered by two U.S. senators to hunt him down and take his market off-line. The fact that he remained free more than a year after Schumer’s press conference seemed to testify to the very real power and
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