The Silk Road was once synonymous with criminal activity on the online “dark web,” and today its number two organizer, Roger Thomas Clark, aka Variety Jones, was sentenced to 20 years. Clark’s sentence was, according to cabling, he most I could have faced as part of his plea agreement.
Clark was extradited to the US from Thailand nearly five years ago and had been detained in Thailand for nearly three years prior to that. According to the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, he was charged with “conspiring to distribute massive quantities of narcotics.” At the time of the extradition, Clark gloated that there was no hard evidence against him and that being sent to the United States would be “an impossible circumstance.”
Authorities said Clark served as general counsel to Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht regarding Internet drug market operations and that he goaded Ulbricht into hiring a hit man to murder someone for $ 80,000. In addition to his sentence in the US, Clark, 61, was sentenced to “three years of supervised release” and handed over more than $1.6 million.