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Drug Addiction

Heroin dealer testifies about Silk Road sales

Kevin McCoy
USA TODAY
This artist rendering shows Ross William Ulbricht appearing in San Francisco federal court after his Oct. 2013 arrest.

NEW YORK – The dark side of Ross William Ulbricht's alleged role as the Silk Road mastermind entered his criminal trial Wednesday via a heroin dealer who testified he used the drug-trafficking site to sell the drug to scores of other "dopesick" addicts across the country.

Michael Duch, 40, a stocky and bearded Orange County, N.Y. man clad in a black jail-inmate outfit, told Manhattan federal court jurors he turned to dealing in April 2013 because he could no longer afford to support his $2,000-to-$3,000-a week heroin addiction.

After seeing publicity about Silk Road, a darknet marketplace that attracted anonymous drug sellers and buyers from around the world, Duch signed up as a Silk Road vendor under the user name "Deezletime."

Duch said he never communicated with Ulbricht, 30, who allegedly used the name Dread Pirate Roberts to run the underworld drug bazaar. There was no need.

"I saw the relative ease that came with it. there was a perceived level of safety and anonymity," said Duch. "I felt I could get away with it."

He told jurors he bought heroin from a street-level dealer in Passaic, N.J. Then he doubled the price he'd paid and advertised the drug for sale on Silk Road. "East Coast style heroin," his online ads proclaimed, offering 50 small bags, a quantity he said was known in the drug trade as a "brick," for $345.69.

He followed Silk Road online instructions for vendors to carefully wrap the heroin in moisture-barrier packets and ship the drugs in nondescript mailing containers — the better to avoid detection by drug-sniffing dogs or suspicious government investigators.

Duch also offered same-day U.S. Post Office shipping. That was a crucial selling factor for his buyers, because he said many battled withdrawal symptoms if they went without heroin for long.

An August 2013 Silk Road email message a buyer using the name "wigglyworm" urged Deezletime to speed delivery, "otherwise, I'm gonna be sick."

"I am extremely dopesick and need something by tomorrow," emailed another customer.

"I am throwing up, the worst of the worst," wrote yet another.

Duch said he received such messages "every day." Fueling the drug addiction of others bothered him, he testified. But Duch told jurors his computer consulting business had fallen off, and he needed Silk Road sales income to buy his own heroin supply and fend off withdrawal.

Within six weeks of signing up on Silk Road, Duch testified he was selling up to 600 small bags of heroin a day and collecting an estimated $60,000 a month from sales. All of the sales were transacted in the bitcoin electronic currency required by Silk Road.

But Duch said he didn't get rich. "Most of it was used to either support my habit" or reinvest in the burgeoning drug business, he testified.

Duch's operation crashed to a halt in Oct. 2013, the same month government agents arrested Ulbricht in San Francisco.

The dealer testified that investigators nabbed him outside a post office in Monroe, N.Y., about 50 miles northwest of New York City, as he attempted to ship approximately 25 packages of heroin. He immediately agreed to cooperate with the government.

Ulbricht sat at the defense table, with no immediately apparent reaction, during Duch's testimony.

But his lead attorney, Joshua Dratel, sought to undercut the potential impact from the dealer's testimony could have on jurors with cross-examination that showed Duch faces a minimum prison term of five years for his crimes. The punishment conceivably could be decades longer, despite a cooperation agreement Duch signed with federal prosecutors in December.

The cross-examination was scheduled to resume Thursday.

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