Book notes: ‘American Kingpin` by Nick Bilton
Published in
1 min readMar 27, 2019
Nearly every character in American Kingpin seems to have wandered in from one Coen brothers movie or another — Ulbricht’s girlfriend is a born-again Christian who runs an erotic photography business; one of his chief confidantes is an undercover DEA agent who begins stealing from him; and the man who discovers his true identity is a nerdy IRS agent who reads every sentence three times.
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American Kingpin is written as a drama, but so many events in Ulbricht’s life read as farce. His over-the-top conversion to libertarianism; a disastrous early experience as a psychedelic mushroom farmer; his paying hundreds of thousands of dollars for revenge murders that never happened; and his ultimate discovery at the hands of his email address
