American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal MasterMind Behind the Silk Road

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I would have liked more on the trial as the author only give's it about twenty or so pages but that aside i can't fault it. This power game can be played well or poorly, and in these 48 laws culled from the history and wisdom of the world’s greatest power players are the rules that must be followed to win.

We have more than 25 books on the initial candidate list, but we are soliciting help from the cybersecurity community to increase the number to be much more than that.Each law, however, gets its own chapter: “Conceal Your Intentions,” “Always Say Less Than Necessary,” “Pose as a Friend, Work as a Spy,” and so on. It has every element of a good narrative, while being able to google all the characters and timelines = story happiness! The unbelievable true story of the man who built a billion-dollar online drug empire from his bedroom – and almost got away with it.

Instead, American Kingpin is the fascinating story of the Silk Road, a clandestine online drug bazaar hidden on the dark web, and its creator, Ross Ulbricht.American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road doesn’t qualify as a “must read” for all cybersecurity professionals, but it is a very interesting and entertaining book. My only knock on American Kingpin is that there is simply too much inner monologue from DPR, who refused to be interviewed, to truly believe that all of the conversations were factual and not somewhat fictionalized for dramatic purposes. A real-life political thriller about an American financier in the Wild East of Russia, the murder of his principled young tax attorney, and his dangerous mission to expose the Kremlin's corruption. It wasn’t easy, and there were a lot of jurisdictional squabbles as different agencies grabbed pieces of the evidence that would eventually bring down Ross Ulbricht (aka, Dread Pirate Roberts).

He has written three books, including The New York Times bestseller, “Hatching Twitter,” which chronicled the turmoil and chaos inside Twitter as it grew from a fledgling startup to a multi-billion dollar company. It's like the mythical monster Hydra 'cut off one head, two more shall grow back' (yes, i stole this from Captain America!Behind his libertarian bluster and wiseguy threats, he could sound a lot like any other startup founder: simultaneously cocky and desperate. My only concern with American Kingpin was if the author would be biased toward the American Authorities, making them out to be superheroes but this wasn't the case. I'm one of those people who will happily read about the seedy, dark, grim, dirty, tainted underworld side of the internet but would never take that step into downloading software like Tor. I enjoyed the story of Ross: how he developed this idea and, using admirable entrepreneurial drive, built a massive money spinning business.

Seemingly another bright, restless millennial, Ulbricht enacted his libertarian beliefs by founding a drug marketplace intended to make purchasing safer and undermine the drug war. Mix in agents from the DEA, FBI, Homeland Security and even the IRS (remember that’s how Al Capone was eventually brought down) and you have all of the elements for a riveting read. Far from the well-organized endgame, in this case, the investigations began when various law enforcement officers in the DEA, DHS, FBI, and IRS learned about the Silk Road and pursued their own separate investigations. I guess the most important part of me reading this book is that even though the entire thing was a giant neon flashing sign of Ross's guilt - with his association to the sales of drugs, guns and anything else illegal that the Silk Road wanted to dabble in. You also get to see how law enforcement departments both help and hinder each other as well as how easy it is to blur the line between what is legal or not.To the FBI, he was the Dread Pirate Roberts — the man responsible for building an anonymous marketplace for selling drugs and firearms that was processing millions of dollars in sales each month. In this film, many different people assume the identity of DPR, adding to the intrigue and power of the character.