The alleged murder target of a secretive online drug kingpin was a 47-year-old semi-pro poker player and self-proclaimed former heroin addict who was caught with $27,000 worth of cocaine.
On Thursday, court documents filed in a Maryland district court revealed that Curtis Clark Green confessed to being an administrator of the Silk Road, an anonymous online drug marketplace. Known online as “chronicpain,” Green was a vocal member of the drug community who worked closely with site leader, the Dread Pirate Roberts, and frequently shared personal anecdotes and detailed advice on using and dealing illegal substances.
Early last month, federal authorities detained the man they believed to be the Dread Pirate Roberts, arresting 29-year-old Ross Ulbricht in San Francisco and accusing him of narcotics trafficking, money laundering and hiring hitmen for the murder of two people. One of those targets was Green, a grandfather and former paramedic who also sold oxycodone and other painkillers on Silk Road.
In a plea agreement signed Thursday, Green admitted to possessing, with the intent to distribute, more than a kilogram of cocaine, which he had accepted from an undercover United States postal inspector in January. An earlier criminal complaint from October against Ulbricht presented the same storyline surrounding an individual identified only as “the Employee.” That complaint alleged that Ulbricht had become aware of a Silk Road employee’s contact with federal agents and had attempted to pay a total of $80,000 to have that individual killed because of that interaction. Green’s real and online identities were not revealed in the original complaint.
By pleading guilty, Green acknowledged that he not only handled drugs but also worked as an administrator on Silk Road where he went by the handles ”Flush” and “chronicpain”. While he never knew his alleged boss by his real name, Green’s admissions will serve as another piece of the puzzle in authorities’ growing case against Ulbricht, who they say ran a $1.2 billion (sales) online drug operation and would do anything–even commit murder–to keep it running.
“[I] never killed a man or had one killed before,” Ulbricht allegedly said online as he was looking to find a hitman to take care of the employee. “But it is the right move in this case.”
Ulbricht is currently being held at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, awaiting a bail hearing in a Manhattan district court that is scheduled for later this month.
Two Separate Lives
Green, on the other hand, is not in custody and was released on conditions, according to Marcia Murphy, a spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the District of Maryland.
A resident of Spanish Fork, Utah, Green led two very contrasting lives, but disclosed many of his own personal details online. To the public he was Curtis Clark Green, a formerly unemployed 47-year-old who, because of an accident, never finished nursing school and lived with his wife Tonya in a quiet town 50 miles south of Salt Lake City. An entrepreneur, his most recent venture was as an officer at Bitcoin, LLC, which was incorporated in Utah in Sept. 2012.
But to the hundreds of thousands of anonymous names that populated the Silk Road, he was a pseudonymous administrator who fielded complaints from the site’s buyers and sellers, ran its user-written information page and peddled narcotics. Green first posted to the Silk Road user forums as chronicpain in June of 2011, and announced that he would be selling drugs like oxymorphone, oxycodone and “maybe” methadone and adderall.
“I’m new to the site but I’m not new to the game,” he noted, adding later that he had been selling drugs in the mail “for years” prior to the Silk Road’s creation. He covered his tracks, according to online posts, by wearing driving gloves while mailing packages and using post offices outside of his hometown.
Special Report: Mapping The Silk Road
The Silk Road garnered over $1.2 billion in sales and left behind a global footprint.
Conveying himself as a drug connoisseur on the Silk Road forums mainly through the chronicpain account, Green details various exploits with everything from heroin to methadone despite claiming he “never used illegal drugs” in a statement following his guilty plea. In one post he said that his main reason for interacting on the Silk Road forums was “harm reduction” so that a person buying and taking drugs for the first time wouldn’t overdose.
Green could not be reached on Friday and calls to his attorney Scott E. Williams went unanswered.
