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American Kingpin: The Epic Hunt for the Criminal Mastermind Behind the Silk Road Hardcover – Illustrated, May 2, 2017
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In 2011, a twenty-six-year-old libertarian programmer named Ross Ulbricht launched the ultimate free market: the Silk Road, a clandestine Web site hosted on the Dark Web where anyone could trade anything—drugs, hacking software, forged passports, counterfeit cash, poisons—free of the government’s watchful eye.
It wasn’t long before the media got wind of the new Web site where anyone—not just teenagers and weed dealers but terrorists and black hat hackers—could buy and sell contraband detection-free. Spurred by a public outcry, the federal government launched an epic two-year manhunt for the site’s elusive proprietor, with no leads, no witnesses, and no clear jurisdiction. All the investigators knew was that whoever was running the site called himself the Dread Pirate Roberts.
The Silk Road quickly ballooned into $1.2 billion enterprise, and Ross embraced his new role as kingpin. He enlisted a loyal crew of allies in high and low places, all as addicted to the danger and thrill of running an illegal marketplace as their customers were to the heroin they sold. Through his network he got wind of the target on his back and took drastic steps to protect himself—including ordering a hit on a former employee. As Ross made plans to disappear forever, the Feds raced against the clock to catch a man they weren’t sure even existed, searching for a needle in the haystack of the global Internet.
Drawing on exclusive access to key players and two billion digital words and images Ross left behind, Vanity Fair correspondent and New York Times bestselling author Nick Bilton offers a tale filled with twists and turns, lucky breaks and unbelievable close calls. It’s a story of the boy next door’s ambition gone criminal, spurred on by the clash between the new world of libertarian-leaning, anonymous, decentralized Web advocates and the old world of government control, order, and the rule of law. Filled with unforgettable characters and capped by an astonishing climax, American Kingpin might be dismissed as too outrageous for fiction. But it’s all too real.
- Print length352 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherPortfolio
- Publication dateMay 2, 2017
- Dimensions6.3 x 1.2 x 9.3 inches
- ISBN-101591848148
- ISBN-13978-1591848141
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Editorial Reviews
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—The Globe and Mail
"Unbelievably riveting."
—CASEY NEISTAT
“I dare you not to read this book in one sitting. Masterfully reported and written, Bilton’s book drops you hard into the dark heart of the most famous Internet crime to date. A first-rate thrill.”
—JOSHUA COOPER RAMO, author of The Seventh Sense
“Nick Bilton has issued a fantastic modern true-crime thriller. The book moves at a stunning pace while packed full of exquisite reporting and detail. It delivers a vivid picture of what happens when genius, ambition, and depravity collide, as well as a study on the complex interplay between good and evil.”
—ASHLEE VANCE, author of Elon Musk
“Engrossing, addictive, suspenseful, riveting—this book hooked me on page one and I could not put it down. American Kingpin is the best thing I’ve read in ages. I can’t recommend it highly enough.”
—DAN LYONS, author of Disrupted
“In American Kingpin, Nick Bilton again proves why he’s one of tech’s best storytellers with a stunningly researched and very scary portrait of the creator of a marketplace gone mad, and the oddly uncoordinated officers who took him down.”
—STEVEN LEVY, author of Hackers and In the Plex
“You’ll never forget Bilton’s portrait of the brilliant and brazen Ross Ulbricht, even after you sacrifice sleep in a sprint to the final pages and to see justice served.”
—BRAD STONE, author of The Everything Store and The Upstarts
“A rollicking, deftly reported tale of the Dark Web. I couldn’t put it down.”
—CLIVE THOMPSON, author of Smarter Than You Think
“Bilton’s investigation of the Silk Road is dramatic and, at times, nearly unbelievable. It puts your favorite thriller novels to shame.”
—STEVEN PRESSFIELD, author of Gates of Fire
“Nick Bilton is the only writer who could tell this suspenseful story. American Kingpin is engrossing at every turn, right up to its pulse-racing ending.”
—ADAM LASHINSKY, author of Wild Ride
“American Kingpin is both a staggering feat of investigative journalism and a triumph of edge-of-your-seat storytelling. This is what true-crime writing should be.”
—BRYAN BURROUGH, author of Days of Rage
"A fast-paced, readable true-crime tale that frames the likely future of the underground economy."
—Kirkus Reviews
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Pink Pill
Pink.
A tiny pink pill with an etching of a squirrel on either side. Jared Der-Yeghiayan couldn't take his eyes off it.
He stood in a windowless mail room, the Department of Homeland Security badge hanging from his neck illuminated by pulsing halogen lights above. Every thirty seconds, the sound of airplanes rumbled through the air outside. Jared looked like an adolescent with his oversize clothes, buzz cut, and guileless hazel eyes. "We've started to get a couple of them a week," his colleague Mike, a burly Customs and Border Protection officer, said as he handed Jared the envelope that the pill had arrived in.
The envelope was white and square, with a single perforated stamp affixed to the top right corner. heir offen, read the inside flap. Below those two words was the English translation, open here. The recipient's name, typed in black, read david. The package was on its way to a house on West Newport Avenue in Chicago.
It was exactly what Jared had been waiting for since June.
The plane carrying the envelope, KLM flight 611, had landed at Chicago O'Hare International Airport a few hours earlier after a four-thousand-mile journey from the Netherlands. As weary passengers stood up and stretched their arms and legs, baggage handlers twenty feet below them unloaded cargo from the belly of the Boeing 747. Suitcases of all shapes and sizes were ushered in one direction; forty or so blue buckets filled with international mail were sent in another.
Those blue tubs-nicknamed "scrubs" by airport employees-were driven across the tarmac to a prodigious mail storage and sorting facility fifteen minutes away. Their contents-letters to loved ones, business documents, and that white square envelope containing the peculiar pink pill-would pass through that building, past customs, and into the vast logistical arteries of the United States Postal Service. If everything went according to plan, as it did most of the time, that small envelope of drugs, and many like it, would just slip by unnoticed.
But not today. Not on October 5, 2011.
By late afternoon, Mike Weinthaler, a Customs and Border Protection officer, had begun his daily ritual of clocking in for work, pouring an atrocious cup of coffee, and popping open the blue scrubs to look for anything out of the ordinary: a package with a small bulge; return addresses that looked fake; the sound of plastic wrap inside a paper envelope; anything fishy at all. There was nothing scientific about it. There were no high-tech scanners or swabs testing for residue. After a decade in which e-mail had largely outmoded physical mail, the postal service's budgets had been decimated. Fancy technology was a rare treat allocated to the investigation of large packages. And Chicago's mail-sniffing dogs-Shadow and Rogue-came through only a couple of times a month. Instead, whoever was hunting through the scrubs simply reached a hand inside and followed their instincts.
Thirty minutes into his rummaging routine, the white square envelope caught Mike's eye.
He held it up to the lights overhead. The address on the front had been typed, not written by hand. That was generally a telltale sign for customs agents that something was amiss. As Mike knew, addresses are usually typed only for business mail, not personal. The package also had a slight bump, which was suspicious, considering it came from the Netherlands. Mike grabbed an evidence folder and a 6051S seizure form that would allow him to legally open the envelope. Placing a knife in its belly, he gutted it like a fish, dumping out a plastic baggie with a tiny pink pill of ecstasy inside.
Mike had been working in the customs unit for two years and was fully aware that under normal circumstances no one in the federal government would give a flying fuck about one lousy pill. There was, as every government employee in Chicago knew, an unspoken rule that drug agents didn't take on cases that involved fewer than a thousand pills. The U.S. Attorney's Office would scoff at such an investigation. There were bigger busts to pursue.
But Mike had been given clear instructions by someone who was waiting for a pill just like this: Homeland Security agent Jared Der-Yeghiayan.
A few months prior, Mike had come across a similar piece of illicit mail on its way to Minneapolis. He had picked up the phone and called the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Homeland Security Investigations office at the airport, half expecting that he would be laughed at or hung up on, as usual. But the HSI agent who answered was surprisingly receptive. At the time, Jared had been on the job for only two months and frankly didn't know any better. "I can't fly to Minneapolis to talk to a guy about one single pill," Jared said. "So call me if you get something in my area, in Chicago. Then I can go over there and do a knock-and-talk."
Four months later, when Mike found a pill destined for Chicago, Jared rushed over to see it. "Why do you want this?" Mike asked Jared. "All the other agents say no; people have been saying no to meth and heroin for years. And yet you want this one little pill?"
Jared knew very well that this could be nothing. Maybe an idiot kid in the Netherlands was sending a few friends some MDMA. But he also wondered why one single pill had been sent on such a long journey and how the people who mailed such small packages of drugs knew the recipients they were sending them to. Something about it felt peculiar. "There may be something else to this," Jared told Mike as he took the envelope. He would need it to show his "babysitter."
Every newbie agent in HSI was assigned one-a training officer-during their first year. A more seasoned officer who knew the drill, made sure you didn't get into too much trouble, and often made you feel like a total piece of shit. Every morning Jared had to call his chaperone and tell him what he was working on that day. The only thing that made it different from preschool was that you got to carry a gun.
Unsurprisingly, Jared's training officer saw no urgency to a single pill, and it was a week before he even consented to accompany his younger colleague on the "knock-and-talk"-to knock on the door of the person who was supposed to receive the pill and, hopefully, talk with them.
That day, as Jared's government-issued Crown Victoria zigzagged through the North Side of Chicago, the small Rubik's Cube that hung from his key chain swung back and forth in the opposite direction. His car radio was dialed into sports: the Cubs and White Sox had been eliminated from contention, but the Bears were preparing for an in-division contest against the Lions. Amid the crackle of the radio, he turned onto West Newport Avenue, a long row of two-story limestone buildings split into a dyad of top- and bottom-floor apartments. Jared knew this working-class neighborhood well. He'd followed the baseball games at nearby Wrigley Field when he was a kid. But now this was Hipsterville, full of fancy coffee shops, chic restaurants, and, as Jared was now learning, people who had drugs mailed to their houses from the Netherlands.
He was fully aware how ridiculous he might look in the eyes of his grizzled training officer. They were in one of the city's safest precincts to question someone about a single pill of ecstasy. But Jared didn't care what his supervisor thought; he had a hunch that this was bigger than one little pill. He just didn't know how big-yet.
He found the address and pulled over, his chaperone close behind. They wandered up the steps and Jared tapped on the glass door of apartment number 1. This was the easy part, knocking. Getting someone to talk would be a whole different challenge. The recipient of the envelope could easily deny that the package was his. Then it was game over.
After twenty seconds the door lock clicked open and a young, skinny man dressed in jeans and a T-shirt peered outside. Jared flashed his badge, introduced himself as an HSI agent, and asked if David, the man whose name was typed on the white envelope, was home.
"He's at work right now," the young man replied, opening the door further. "But I'm his roommate."
"Can we come inside?" Jared asked. "We'd just like to ask you a few questions." The roommate obliged, stepping to the side as they walked toward the kitchen. As Jared took a seat he pulled out a pen and notepad and asked, "Does your roommate get a lot of packages in the mail?"
"Yeah, from time to time."
"Well," Jared said as he glanced at his training officer, who sat silently in the corner with his arms crossed, "we found this package that was addressed to him and it had some drugs inside."
"Yeah, I know about that," the roommate replied nonchalantly. Jared was taken aback by how casually the young man admitted to receiving drugs in the mail, but he continued with the questions, asking where they got these drugs from.
"From a Web site."
"What's the Web site?"
"The Silk Road," the roommate said.
Jared stared back, confused. The Silk Road? He had never heard of it before. In fact, Jared had never heard of any Web site where you could buy drugs online, and he wondered if he was just being a clueless newbie, or if this was how you bought drugs in Hipsterville these days.
"What's the Silk Road?" Jared asked, trying not to sound too oblivious but sounding completely oblivious.
And with the velocity of those descending airliners at O'Hare, the skinny roommate began a fast-paced explanation of the Silk Road Web site. "You can buy any drug imaginable on the site," he said, some of which he had tried with his roommate-including marijuana, meth, and the little pink ecstasy pills that had been arriving, week after week, on KLM flight 611. As Jared scribbled in his notepad, the roommate continued to talk at a swift clip. You paid for the drugs with this online digital currency called Bitcoin, and you shopped using an anonymous Web browser called Tor. Anyone could go onto the Silk Road Web site, select from the hundreds of different kinds of drugs they offered and pay for them, and a few days later the United States Postal Service would drop them into your mailbox. Then you sniffed, inhaled, swallowed, drank, or injected whatever came your way. "It's like Amazon.com," the roommate said, "but for drugs."
Jared was amazed and slightly skeptical that this virtual marketplace existed in the darkest recesses of the Web. It will be shut down within a week, he thought. After a few more questions, he thanked the roommate for his time and left with his colleague, who hadn't said a word.
"Have you ever heard of this Silk Road?" Jared asked his training officer as they walked back to their respective cruisers.
"Oh yeah," he replied dispassionately. "Everyone's heard of Silk Road. There must be hundreds of open cases on it."
Jared, somewhat embarrassed at having admitted he knew nothing about it, wasn't deterred. "I'm going to look into it anyway and see what I can find out," he said. The older man shrugged and drove off.
An hour later Jared bounded into his windowless office, where he waited for what seemed an eternity for his archaic Dell government computer to load up. He began searching the Department of Homeland Security database for open investigations on the Silk Road. But to his surprise, there were no results. He tried other key words and variations on the spelling of the site. Nothing. What about a different input box? Still nothing. He was confused. There were not "hundreds of open cases" on the Silk Road, as his training officer had claimed. There were none.
Jared thought for a moment and then decided to go to the next-best technology that any seasoned government official uses to search for something important: Google. The first few results were historical Web sites referencing the ancient trade route between China and the Mediterranean. But halfway down the page he saw a link to an article from early June of that year on Gawker, a news and gossip blog, proclaiming that the Silk Road was "the underground website where you can buy any drug imaginable." The blog post showed screenshots of a Web page with a green camel logo in the corner. It also displayed pictures of a cornucopia of drugs, 340 "items" in all, including Afghan hash, Sour 13 weed, LSD, ecstasy, eight-balls of cocaine, and black tar heroin. Sellers were located all over the world; buyers too. You've got to be fucking kidding me, Jared thought. It's this easy to buy drugs online? He then spent the entire rest of the day, and most of the evening, reading anything he could about the Silk Road.
Over the weekend, as he drove between antique fairs (his weekly ritual) near Chicago with his wife and young son, he was almost catatonically consumed with the drug Web site. Jared realized that if anyone could buy drugs on the Silk Road, anyone would: from middle-aged yuppies who lived on the North Side of Chicago to young kids growing up in the heartland. And if drugs were being sold on the site now, why not other contraband next? Maybe it would be guns, bombs, or poisons. Maybe, he imagined, terrorists could use it to create another 9/11. As he looked at his sleeping son in the rearview mirror, these thoughts petrified him.
But where do you even start on the Internet, in a world of complete anonymity?
Finally, as the weekend came to a close, Jared started to formulate an idea for how he could approach the case. He knew it would be laborious and tedious, but there was a chance that it could also eventually lead him to the creator of the Silk Road Web site.
But finding the drugs and the drug dealers, and even the founder of the Silk Road, would be easy compared with the challenge of persuading his supervisor to let him work this case based on a single tiny pink pill. Even if he could convince his boss, Jared would also have to cajole the U.S. Attorney's Office into supporting him in this pursuit. And there wasn't a U.S. attorney in all of America who would take on a case that involved one measly pill of anything. Exacerbating all of this was the fact that thirty-year-old Jared was as green as they came. And no one ever-ever!-took a newbie seriously.
He would need a way to convince them all that this was bigger than a single pink pill.
By Monday morning he had come up with a scheme that he hoped his boss would not be able to ignore. He took a deep breath, walked into his supervisor's office, and sat down. "You got a minute?" he said as he threw the white envelope on the desk. "I have something important I need to show you."
Product details
- Publisher : Portfolio; Illustrated edition (May 2, 2017)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 352 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1591848148
- ISBN-13 : 978-1591848141
- Item Weight : 1.25 pounds
- Dimensions : 6.3 x 1.2 x 9.3 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #100,962 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #125 in Organized Crime True Accounts
- #229 in Criminology (Books)
- #328 in Crime & Criminal Biographies
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
British born Nick Bilton is Special Correspondent at Vanity Fair, where he writes about technology, business and culture, and a contributor at CNBC. He was a columnist for The New York Times for almost a decade. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, son, and dog, Pixel.
Customer reviews
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Learn more how customers reviews work on AmazonCustomers say
Customers find the story engaging and suspenseful. They praise the writing style as well-written and easy to follow. The book provides detailed research and context for the story. Readers describe it as an exciting and entertaining read that keeps their attention. Many consider it a great crime drama with case-breaking detective work. The pacing is described as fast-paced and hard to put down.
AI-generated from the text of customer reviews
Customers find the story engaging and hard to put down. They describe it as a suspenseful tale full of twists and turns. The book is well-written, using different vantage points to tell the story.
"Great, quick, easy read. Incredible story, and well told. Your mouth will be hanging open in disbelief. Get this book" Read more
""American Kingpin" by Nick Bilton is a gripping and fascinating true story that reads like a thriller novel...." Read more
"...That being said, the story it tells is utterly fascinating and very well done...." Read more
"...The individual stories are fascinating also; from Ross himself (The Dread Pirate Roberts) to interesting profiles of a handful of the government..." Read more
Customers find the writing style engaging and easy to follow. They describe the book as a gripping page-turner that reads like fiction. The author does a good job of making a complex story easy to understand and follow.
"Great, quick, easy read. Incredible story, and well told. Your mouth will be hanging open in disbelief. Get this book" Read more
"...Bilton's meticulous research and engaging writing style make it easy to become fully immersed in the story...." Read more
"...That being said, the story it tells is utterly fascinating and very well done...." Read more
"...I can't recommend this book highly enough. It is thorough, easy to read, and suspenseful...." Read more
Customers appreciate the book's depth. They find it well-researched, offering enough details for context. The writing is succinct, explaining the research methods and timeline reconstruction. Readers learn fascinating information and are comfortable understanding the plot.
"...Bilton's meticulous research and engaging writing style make it easy to become fully immersed in the story...." Read more
"...The concept of The Silk Road is so simple, yet so completely illicit. The "Amazon of illegal drugs."..." Read more
"My favorite book. The details of the Silk Road are on point but the stars of the story are the people involved. Beautifully written...." Read more
"...The story about Ulbricht is incredible and very important, but much of Bilton's writing is tabloid-ish and clearly motivated by Bilton's desire..." Read more
Customers enjoy the engaging story. They find it exciting, suspenseful, and hard to put down. The book keeps their attention from start to finish. Readers appreciate the informative and entertaining true crime account.
""American Kingpin" by Nick Bilton is a gripping and fascinating true story that reads like a thriller novel...." Read more
"...It is thorough, easy to read, and suspenseful. Too often, non-fiction writers forget that even non-fiction can be suspenseful and engaging...." Read more
"...What happens is suspenseful and intriguing. I imagine all who read it will enjoy it and consider themselves fortunate to have found it." Read more
"Kept me hooked from the start" Read more
Customers find the book an engaging true crime story that blends facts and fiction. They describe it as a fast-paced mystery thriller that exposes the dark underbelly of the internet. The book is described as educational and well-crafted, with a good blend of facts and fiction.
"Fast-paced mystery thriller that exposes the dark underbelly of the internet and tells the fascinating story of one of its major pioneers." Read more
"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...." Read more
"...From what I learned American Kingpin is a very interesting and thorough book...." Read more
"...for taking your mind off current "current events" and into a real-world investigation that seemed almost like a work of fiction...." Read more
Customers find the book's pacing good. They say the story moves along at a good pace, and they finish it in two days. The author does a great job of keeping the book moving along at a good speed with clear prose that races along without wasted words.
"Great, quick, easy read. Incredible story, and well told. Your mouth will be hanging open in disbelief. Get this book" Read more
"Brilliant young man who I am still unsure whether he did anything openly illegal or not...." Read more
"...agencies pursuing Ross Ulbrecht, and in general the story moves along at a good pace...." Read more
"...is a good summer read if you want something interesting that moves at a fast pace...." Read more
Customers find the book engaging from the start. They describe it as a captivating and thought-provoking read that keeps you hooked until the end.
"...Overall, it's a captivating and thought-provoking page-turner that will keep you hooked until the very end!" Read more
"This is a page turner that is easy to read a very gripping story. A very fun book to read." Read more
"This was a literal page-turner, ok page-swiper, but I could not step away from this story. With each chapter, my mouth fell further open...." Read more
"...of LA verbiage into the story of a brilliant young Texan, the book is a page turner." Read more
Customers find the book engaging and hard to put down. They say it's well-written, interesting, and easy to follow along with.
"A must read. A very hard book to put down. As addictive as Silk Road Merchandise. Now on to more Nick Bolton works." Read more
"...Engaging read. Hard to put down! Finished in a day." Read more
"...It was funny, interesting and not too complicated to follow along...." Read more
"Hard to put down. Modern day saga of one of the most notorious villain on earth. A bit creepy as a lot of activities online can be traced back." Read more
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Top reviews from the United States
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- Reviewed in the United States on October 17, 2024Great, quick, easy read. Incredible story, and well told.
Your mouth will be hanging open in disbelief. Get this book
- Reviewed in the United States on March 10, 2024"American Kingpin" by Nick Bilton is a gripping and fascinating true story that reads like a thriller novel. The book tells the tale of Ross Ulbricht, the mastermind behind the online drug marketplace Silk Road. Bilton's meticulous research and engaging writing style make it easy to become fully immersed in the story. The book is a wild ride, taking you from the depths of the dark web to the highest echelons of the DEA. With its themes of innovation, rebellion, and the blurred lines between good and evil, "American Kingpin" is a must-read for anyone interested in technology, crime, or human psychology. Overall, it's a captivating and thought-provoking page-turner that will keep you hooked until the very end!
- Reviewed in the United States on December 15, 2023The 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.
- Reviewed in the United States on August 22, 2018I sort of stumbled upon this book while searching true crime, and boy am I glad I did. The dark web is something I've heard exists, but know nothing about it. The concept of The Silk Road is so simple, yet so completely illicit. The "Amazon of illegal drugs." That no one thought about it earlier than Ross Ulbricht is almost a bigger crime than what he did.
This was an engrossing read. It is so well-written that I didn't want to put it down. It reminded me of the old Batman TV show from the '60s - how are they going to get out of this one?!? Ross dodged bullets in the form of investigations by no less than four different government agencies. On the other hand, I wondered how on Earth the likes of the FBI (the 'feebs') could possibly catch him since the TOR browser and Bitcoin are completely anonymous.
The individual stories are fascinating also; from Ross himself (The Dread Pirate Roberts) to interesting profiles of a handful of the government agents trying to catch him. Sometimes you would start to feel bad for Ross, but then he'd do something awful like order a hit.
I can't recommend this book highly enough. It is thorough, easy to read, and suspenseful. Too often, non-fiction writers forget that even non-fiction can be suspenseful and engaging. Not this time.
- Reviewed in the United States on June 25, 2024I tend to enjoy complicated stories written by traditional magazine feature writers.
This book fits the mild.
A fascinating story, written in an entertaining style.
- Reviewed in the United States on November 10, 2024Fast-paced mystery thriller that exposes the dark underbelly of the internet and tells the fascinating story of one of its major pioneers.
- Reviewed in the United States on December 2, 2022A well told story, but could have used more detail.
There are two mistakes where the author refers to PGP and an encrypted chat application. PGP or Pretty Good Privacy is an encryption algorithm and not a chat application.
So in this book Ross makes fun of Jeremy Hammond for using simple passwords and reusing them, but he is using the same cheap Samsung laptop for clear web and dark web work? He is worried about OpSec but he uses Facebook? Even before the Snowden info this was stupid.
If I would have been a millionaire like him I would have a nice 17 inch loaded Panasonic ToughBook for work and a nice 17 inch Alienware machine loaded for personal stuff.
- Reviewed in the United States on November 9, 2024A must read. A very hard book to put down. As addictive as Silk Road
Merchandise. Now on to more Nick Bolton works.
Top reviews from other countries
- William Gregg KiserReviewed in Canada on February 25, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars Fabulous
Cyber crime thriller but true!
- MGFReviewed in Spain on February 3, 2024
5.0 out of 5 stars Breathtaking and unbelievably detailed and well researched
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
- Danesh ZakiReviewed in India on August 23, 2023
5.0 out of 5 stars Engrossing!
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!
- MaxiReviewed in Germany on September 29, 2022
5.0 out of 5 stars Thrilling 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 ! :)
- Ovidiu suciuReviewed in the United Arab Emirates on March 31, 2022
5.0 out of 5 stars ...
Great book