Was Silk Road Founder Framed for Murder By Corrupt Cops?

And nobody quite knows, okay, who is it that inherited it? And there are those people who say, hey, this wasn't Ross that ordered these hits. This was like, nobody knows who's behind the keys at the time anything has happened. So there are those people who completely deny, his family completely denies the culpability and who knows? We'll never know. That is a problem when you're dealing with corrupt cops too, right? Like they literally could have faked him doing that. We don't know. What has he denied that he called hits? We should explain to people that haven't seen the film. Spoiler alert. It goes off the rails for Ross, for young Ross. And at one point in time, one of his guys working with gets busted and rats him out. And then the cops are using that guy's account and communicating with him. And he orders a hit on that guy. And the guy gets to see it. And it's like, holy shit, I can't believe this. Who knows how much of that is real and how much is not. But the problem is you're dealing with corrupt cops. And if the corrupt cops wanted to frame him for something that's going to put him away for a long time, just running the website and allowing people a portal where they can do this and sell things is not quite good enough. But if you can get a guy to literally call for murder, not once but twice, then you've really got him locked up. We don't know though. Did he deny that he called those hits? Not only did he deny it, but what happened was, so to back up a step, basically the corrupt cop in the movie, the corrupt cop at a certain point sets out to bust Ross. And then at a certain point, he's like kind of getting cock blocked by his superiors and whatever. But he says, okay, I'm going to rip this kid off instead. If I can't bust him, I'm going to steal the money and I'm going to use it for my own purposes. But what ends up happening is, and all of that information, by the way, the fake murder of his employee and the photographs that were taken of it, all of that stuff is true. That's all in the real story. And as we're shooting the movie, we have access to the actual faked murder photos where like it looks like it's available online. Can we see it? Yeah, it's available online. We need to see that right now. See if you can find the... Curtis Clark Green murder photos, fake murder photos. What was his online name? Chronic pain, appropriately enough. Did he look like that guy, the fat guy with the crocs? He does, and I love that. That actor is amazing. Amazing. He was in... Eastwood put him in Richard Jewell, and he was in Spike Lee's last movie. He's one of those guys... Did he play Richard Jewell? Yeah, he played Richard Jewell, and he's fantastic. Really good. It seemed like the quintessential internet couch monster. Working with that guy was so fun, because again, we had information about the real guy, and what happened was when that guy gets busted, when chronic pain gets busted, in this article it said he had a chihuahua, and the chihuahua's going batshit, barking crazy as the feds are kicking in the door or whatever. And we're sitting there and I'm thinking like, man, chihuahua going batshit on set, that's going to screw up the dialogue. What do we do? And Paul's like, what if we give him a ferret instead? And I'm like, ferret, let's go ferret. And then the other brilliant thing that Paul did was he said, all of this online chatter where it's you're typing on the computer and then the other person types back, he's like, what if the dude's a mumbler? So he's kind of saying this shit out loud the whole time that he's talking, and he starts talking to himself. So once he had the ferret and made the guy a mumbler, he had the keys to the character. Yeah, he nailed it. It was great. Everything, down to the fanny pack, it was beautiful. So the dialogue between all the dialogue that you show on screen was actually a real dialogue. So in the movie, you have Ross calling for this guy's murder. Did you struggle with that at all? If Ross says he never did that and he believed... What was his theory? Well, I think, okay, so there's a couple of important points. One is the feds never charged him with attempted murder. They put it, you know, Ross ended up getting sentenced to two life sentences plus 40 years without the possibility of parole. And this is a crazy fact, which is considerably harsher than what El Chapo was sentenced to. Right? Jesus Christ. And so they really, you know, they threw the book at this guy and buried him. Did they offer a plea? He was offered a deal at a certain point and he turned it down because... What was the deal? I think it was 10 years. Jesus Christ, kid. I know. And this is a crazy story. So starting out with, you know, you had asked me if I had reached out to him. So I reached out to him when he was locked up in MCC in New York awaiting sentencing. And then all the way through, he was hoping, you know, the case was working its way through the appeals process. And then finally he was hoping that Trump was going to pardon him. And there was a big kind of hullabaloo. Okay, is Trump going to pardon him on his last day in office? And he didn't. And I was sitting there watching the news waiting to see if he would. And I woke up the next day and I was like, man, I'm going to look it up. And so I went on to the Bureau of Prisons website and I typed in Ross's name and it comes up, you know, Tucson Penitentiary. And then it said release date, colon life. And it just like it hit me, you know, this kid's 36 years old. He's 10 years younger than I am. And just staring down the barrel of that. And so I sat down, even though the movies, you know, coming out or whatever at the time, and I decide, you know what, I owe this guy and some fun, like just human being man to man. So I write him a letter and I said, listen, man, I've made this movie and this is my portrait of you and my portrait of your story and of Silk Road. And it's, you know, it's coming out into the world. But if you ever want to tell your version of the story in any form or fashion, you want to do it as a Rolling Stone interview. You want to do it as a documentary. You want to do it any way you want. You tell me and I will be there in person to sit down with you because I do feel like there's some kind of, I don't know, I guess like spiritual contract between me and him. Like when you enter into a story like this, you're, you're in somebody else's life in a real way. Yeah, it we, it's almost like we do need to hear his version of it. Right. And we don't, we just, especially when you're dealing with lawyers in a court case where it's, you know, they're withholding some testimony if they think it'd be detrimental to his case or you know, once all said and done, I wonder why Trump didn't pardon him. I don't know. And then who knows, you know, the way it was reported that he was closely considering it. But in the kind of last days of the, you know, chaotic into the administration or whatever, it didn't happen. But I was, I was, you know, because no matter what you think of Ross's politics or what he did as a, you know, or Silk Road, even, there is this thing where like, I'm a believer in second chances, man. You know, I've screwed up a million things in my lifetime and, and I feel like somebody like that hopefully has something to give the world, you know, and isn't thrown away. It's just crazy that they were offering him 10 years and instead they gave him two life sentences plus 40 years with no possibility of parole. Like why? You know, there's this, there's such a disparity. Well it's, I think in some way or another, it was like, this changed the drug war, right? It changed the way the drug game happened and it changed the way the drug war was fought. Suddenly it's like, it's almost an existential threat to the drug war when it's not by busts and hand to hand and all the street stuff that we've seen, you know, since, you know, Nixon unleashes DEA, you know, in 73 or whatever the year is. Suddenly it's, wait a minute, all happening online anonymous, DHL, USPS, people are delivering it. Nobody even knows that they're carrying it. It was like, it was an existential threat to the US government, to the DEA, to the drug war and so he got the book thrown at him. Crazy. So what was the motivation for offering him 10 years as a plea? You know, I don't know and I wonder, you know, looking back on it, it's always kind of hindsight is 20-20 but he had been beating the system for a long time, right? He was like one dude with a laptop that unleashed this thing that kind of metastasized and went over the whole world and he was winning for a while. He was ahead of the feds. He was ahead of the US Attorney's Office. He had Chuck Schumer there, you know, calling for his head and yet he continued to kind of game the system and beat him by just being nimble and being able to throw his laptop in his backpack and roll on to the next location. So maybe, you know, maybe he thought he'd be able to continue beating the system. I don't know. God, just, I mean, I just, he'd be out. He'd be out. He'd be out now, full 10 years later. Well, and the crazy thing, you know. You tweeted this two hours ago, kind of convenient. I put Silk Road on the tour network about 10 years ago. I've been thinking about what was going through the mind of my 26 year old self back then in 2011. So much has changed. If only I could turn back time. Wow. So he's got a Twitter account. 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