It was even Variety Jones—or perhaps, Clark—who invented the Dread Pirate Roberts handle that Ulbricht would use on the Silk Road starting in early 2012. In an IM chat that surfaced during the original Silk Road trial, Ulbricht had told Jones that he’d admitted to running the site to his ex-girlfriend, and to a college friend who’d helped him with the site’s programming. Variety Jones responded that the Dread Pirate Roberts name would better hide Ulbricht’s identity and create a sense that, like the fictional Dread Pirate Roberts in the Princess Bride book and film, the role was passed around by a rotating cast rather than a single person. “Start the legend now,” Jones wrote in the chat. “Clear your old trail – to be honest, as tight as you play things, you are the weak link from those two [previous] contacts.”

The next year, after Variety Jones had changed his name on the Silk Road to Cimon, he would also be the first to suggest that Ulbricht pay for the murder of Curtis Clark Green, an arrested employee they believed had stolen bitcoins from the site and who they worried might become an informant. “Enough about the theft,” the renamed advisor says in a chat log with Ulbricht. “Tell me about the organ donor.” Soon, he suggests killing Green more explicitly. “As a side note, at what point in time do we decide we’ve had enough of someones shit, and terminate them?”

A few minutes later, the Dread Pirate Roberts agrees to have Green killed, and his top advisor tells him he’s made the right decision. “You would have surprised me if you had balked at taking the step, of bluntly, killing Curtis for fucking up just a wee bit too badly,” Cimon, a.k.a. Variety Jones, writes. “Also, if you had balked, I would have seriously re-considered our relationship.” (In fact, Green was never killed. Instead his murder was faked by the Drug Enforcement Administration, for whom Green had already become a cooperating witness.)

Friday’s unsealed indictment against Clark, to be clear, makes no explicit mention of that murder plot. But the Department of Justice statement that accompanies it does accuse Clark of coaching Ulbricht on how to “use threats of violence to thwart law enforcement.”

Aside from his close relationship with Ulbricht, Clark in his alleged role as Variety Jones may also have run his own business on the Silk Road selling marijuana seeds. But that same character bragged to Ulbricht about years of experience running online drug operations, giving Ulbricht the sense that his advisor was a seasoned veteran of the narcotics trade who’d long stayed ahead of the police. Together they discussed the possibility of an entire Silk Road franchise, branching out well beyond drug sales to other encrypted or black market services. As Ulbricht wrote in his journal:

He has helped me see a larger vision. A brand that people can come to
trust and rally behind. Silk Road chat, Silk Road exchange, Silk Road
credit union, Silk Road market, Silk Road everything! And it’s been
amazing just talking to a guy who is so intelligent and in the same
boat as me, to a certain degree at least.

With Clark’s extradition to a New York court, he and Ulbricht may be in that boat together more than ever.

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