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

This is a page turner that is easy to read a very gripping story.A very fun book to read.

This may be the best book I've read in a while. It's the true story of the rise and fall of the Silk Road and it's founder the Dread Pirate Roberts (Ross Ulbricht). Its packed full of mystery, intrigue, clandestine operations and suspense. It really is a great read.

The writing style and general feel makes this book read a little like a generic children’s book, but with more swearing. That being said, the story it tells is utterly fascinating and very well done. Would recommend it for anyone interested in learning about law enforcement or radicalism.

Very interesting and keeps you on the edge of your seat. Can't wait to see the movie! What makes it crazier is that it is a real story. Hollywood can't even make this stuff up!

Kept me hooked from the start

American Kingpin is the best sort of nonfiction book. You get inside the antihero’s head enough to understand, though not necessarily empathize, with him. In the course of the book, Ross Ulbricht goes from a smart nobody who lives in someone's basement to the creator of the Silk Road, which brings in millions of dollars per day and becomes the locus of an Internet-based global drug empire.Ulbricht would have been a more sympathetic character were he to have just admitted he was a very successful drug dealer and had not tried to pose as some sort of Libertarian political symbol. If Libertarian preaching has to be done (and it doesn’t), surely there must be a better symbol to hold up other than a drug dealer who also hired hit men for people who threatened his drug business. The guy was a smarter-than-average dope pusher, not a freedom fighter. (Of course, some Libertarian gun extremists have also held up David Koresh as a martyr, and he was a child molester who thought he was Jesus, so this at least seems like an improvement.)You also understand the motivations of the law enforcement personnel after him, as well as the creativity and amount of work that went into catching him. His arrest, an ambush with undercover decoys in a public library, caught him in the act on his Silk Road site with an open laptop. It was a scene straight out of a movie, and the book would make a good one. The book also follows an undercover DEA agent named Carl Force, who impersonated an Internet drug trafficker to help catch Ulbricht. Force also stole hundreds of thousands of dollars electronically from Silk Road and almost successfully framed another person and sent them to prison for it.Force is now in prison along with Ulbricht, but if nothing else from the point of view of a screenplay, "Carl Force" is the perfect name for a bad guy.

Some things you just never knew existed or happened until you pick up the book. This book read very easy and very much like a novel.

This book was selected for our non-fiction book club. All i can say is - "WOW!" (and maybe our naive i've been about the dark web.)

Cyber crime thriller but true!

I came across this book probably out of my interest in cryptocurrencies and cybercrime in general while reading the first chapters of Andy Greenberg's "Tracers in the dark". But American Kingpin is by no means limited to those topics, it's way more than that, including politics, some culture, and even a couple of good history lessons thrown in for good measure.It goes into many details, even some technical aspects but I'm willing to bet the fast pace of the writing will keep you glued to its pages even if you don't care much about those details. For the number of facts and insights that packs, it is a surprisingly short book (or maybe I just enjoyed it so much it felt short).It's one of those books you can read for entertainment (and it will certainly entertain you) but after you finish it you'll feel somehow wiser, with your understanding of how the world works greatly increased.If I have to say something on the downside, I did miss some more references and background material at the end and an index in case I want to double-check something in the future.I found this book similar to these titles (in case you are looking for more books or just to check if your taste is in any way similar to mine; there is no particular order on this list and most books deal with related topics but not all of them are about crime; all would be rated 5 stars in my opinion):-Dark mirror, by Barton Gellman-No place to hide, by Glenn Greenwald-Countdown to Zero Day, by Kim Zetter-Masters of Deception, by Michelle Slatalla and Joshua Quittner-Kingpin, by Kevin Poulsen-The cuckoo's egg, by Cliff Stoll-The spy in Moscow station, by Eric Haseltine-Crypto, by Steven Levy-The smartest guys in the room, Bethany McLean and Peter Elkind-Disrupted, by Dan Lyons-Masters of Doom, by David Kushner-The Other Pandemic, by James Ball-Money Men, by Dan McCrum-The man who solved the market, by Gregory Zuckerman-Numer go up, by Zeke Faux-Going infinite, by Michael Lewis (and many others from the same author)-Lying for money, by Dan Davies-The soul of a new machine, by Tracy Kidder-Most books written by Ben Macintyre

The book is written extremely well. Highly engrossing and hard to put down especially towards the end. It explains the web without going into too much technical details. A must read!

I really enjoyed reading this book, it not only describes The Silk Roads rise , but also Ross as a person and gives you insights why he did what he did, and how he felt with it.I would recommend ! :)

You might think that writing a book about as fascinating a subject as the inventor of the 'Silk Road' website - where anything you might want was sold - on the Dark Web would be an easy task, but I have read many a book in which a subject just as apparently interesting is done in a less than optimal fashion (writing is one of those things that because most people can actually write something with relative ease - like a postcard or a letter, for instance - they think that writing something such as a book, or an article for that matter, is easy: try it, it isn't).This book could easily have fallen into this trap in which the writer thinks the basic story and characters involved are so interesting that he just needed to go through the motions and get it down to meet his publisher's deadline but it is not: it is a very well written book, very well structured and utterly riveting.As mentioned at the beginning, it deals with the creation - and creator - of the 'Silk Road' website that was designed with the intent of allowing people to buy and sell drugs freely via the Dark Web, without fear of apprehension by any law enforcement agencies, or indeed being subject to the dangers of buying or selling drugs on the streets.The idea was born from the broadly libertarian philosophy of a very clever chap (the word 'genius' is so shockingly overused nowadays that it has lost much of its meaning and impact, but this guy is close to a real one).Shortly after its launch, it became not just enormously successful, as might have been predicted, but it also attracted sellers and buyers of lots of other items, such as weapons, notably, whereupon lots of bad things began to happen to lots of very idealistic people.In short, excellent.