In the beginning of February a remorseful Paul Leslie Howard, 32, stood in front of a judge in Melbourne and pleaded guilty to charges of selling meth, LSD, amphetamines, and pot, as well as importing distribution-level quantities of MDMA and cocaine.
Howard, a heavyset man who worked the door at night clubs, seemed genuinely remorseful. He was not a career drug dealer. He and his wife were having money problems when he read an article about Silk Road, a secret online black market where thousands of drugs are for sale. He registered for an account a year ago. Thanks to the site, he’d been living like a kingpin for about six months.
“He wanted to be the big man around town and for a while he got that, because he supplied the best party drugs around,” said Eiley Ormsby, the Australian journalist who runs a blog called All Things Vice.
"He supplied the best party drugs around."
Howard was convicted of running what the judge called a “smorgasbord drug-market operation.” He was sentenced to three years and six months in prison, making him the first known Silk Road user to be convicted.
Silk Road is a simple storefront resembling eBay in 1998. It has a long, cryptic address that can only be accessed through Tor, a decentralized network of servers that encrypt and relay traffic in order to obfuscate a user’s online activity.
Silk Road is run by the pseudonymous Dread Pirate Roberts, along with an unknown number of engineers and customer service reps. Buyers and sellers on Silk Road have always been maximally paranoid about police crackdowns, and the site’s not-infrequent outages never fail to prompt whispers