Witnesses
The witness list includes a number of unknown names; in appearance order, I did not recognize:
- "Thomas Kiernan" (only criminal case in PACER for 2006 thus probably irrelevant)
- "Darren Critten" (nothing in PACER)
- "Benedickt Grandad" (*)
- "Christopher Heesen" (*)
- "Richard Beles" (*; actually 'Richard Bates', UTexas CS student? see comments)
- "Michael Duch" (see below)
- "Brian Shaw" (2 criminal cases for people of that name, 2011 and 2013/2014; counterfeit goods and child pornography, respectively; the former seems to have nothing to do with DNM, and the latter was conducted over Gmail/Mediafire/Sendspace/DepositFiles etc and so also seems to have no connection; neither seems like a good candidate for a SR1 trial witness; could he be this marijuana activist?)
Particularly intriguing is one mention of who one of the witnesses will be:
The prosecution also claims Ulbricht lured in ​vendors who had never sold drugs before with the ease and anonymity of Silk Road. One of those vendors will testify in the case.
Ars is more specific:
Another was a drug dealer who sold heroin on Silk Road, who would provide "an inside view of how Silk Road operated," promised Howard. "He ran his own business but it was overwhelmed by his addiction." The man turned to selling drugs on Silk Road and was soon making serious cash. "Almost overnight he was able to become a big time drug dealer on Silk Road," said Howard. "The defendant made it possible for this man, who had never sold drugs before in his life, to sell to literally thousands of around the country."
Perhaps this vendor is one of the unknown names? Let's see.
Duch PACER case
Me and Moustache have figured out one of them: "Michael Duch" appears nowhere relevant in Google, but he does appear in PACER.
He was arrested 1 October 2013 on charges of distributing clonazepam. The two PACER entries (7:13-mj-02352-UA & 7:13-mj-02352-UA) include some seizure paperwork which expand the accusations to selling heroin and hydrocodone. The dockets are confusing and the complaints seem to be sealed, but it seems he was in rehab for a while. It also seems that he has agreed to a plea bargain, very recently, on 10 December 2014:
Minute Entry for proceedings held before Judge Vincent L. Briccetti: Deft. present with attorney Louis Fasulo; AUSA Maimin also present. Arraignment as to Michael Duch (1) Count 1s held on 12/10/2014. Plea entered by Michael Duch (1) Guilty as to Count 1s., As to Michael Duch. Deft. is remanded. ( Sentencing set for 3/13/2015 at 10:30 AM before Judge Vincent L. Briccetti.) (jm) (Entered: 12/12/2014)
It is near-certain that Duch is one of the unaccounted-for SR1 arrests, and it seems likely given the plea deal & date that he may be the vendor who will testify.
Dockets: https://www.dropbox.com/s/79m9i3jprrp2w9d/duch.maff?dl=0 (also in RECAP)
Seller identification
Duch is highly likely the SR1 seller "deezletime".
We are looking for a USA-based seller who was busted simultaneously with SR1, who sold heroin, hydrocodone, and clonapezam (not necessarily all at once), and was still operating when SR1 went down (because investigations like to catch sellers in the act to get hard evidence, not attack someone who's cleaned house); ideally they'd be fairly high-volume to make backtracking packages easier - they can't all be as incompetent as MDPro.
Examining the StExo profile dump for pages with case-insensitive hits for any 2 of "heroin", "clonapezam", or "hydrocodone", I get the following:
- http://antilop.cc/sr/vendors/473991b399.htm Maestro
- http://antilop.cc/sr/vendors/4810e759a3.htm greendaddy888
- http://antilop.cc/sr/vendors/55a737f699.htm kingcopkilla
- http://antilop.cc/sr/vendors/61cec7fefd.htm caligirl
- http://antilop.cc/sr/vendors/7dca6cc7fe.htm ITALY
- http://antilop.cc/sr/vendors/ae616ce100.htm cartel del norte
- http://antilop.cc/sr/vendors/b54698f8da.htm MarijuanaIsMyMuse
- http://antilop.cc/sr/vendors/c7e75786ee.htm theXchange
- http://antilop.cc/sr/vendors/f70952f167.htm deezletime
Of these, several can be excluded immediately because they ship from the UK or Canada or Europe. "caligirl" can be excluded because we already know about that bust. That leaves basically: Maestro, greendaddy888, kingcopkilla, & deezletime.
The only one to offer those 3 products and only those 3 products is deezletime, an American vendor with a fair amount of sales, who writes:
Currently we are offering:
4 Heroin East Coast Style Stamps
5mg Hydrocodone Pills (Vicodin)
.5mg Clonazepam (Klonopin)
deezletime also ships from the USA. A 2013-09-15 crawl of SR1 confirms that deezletime was still selling almost right before the bust, and it also includes some interesting bits: he had banned new customers, rotated his PGP key, and was requiring all PMs be encrypted. Why did he seem to be scared? When we look to see if deezletime resumed selling on other markets, we find Redditors worrying about him going silent and speculation he had been busted, although no one in the linked case was named 'Duch' so that part of the speculation seems to have been wrong. (There may also've been speculation on SR2F, but I didn't want to unpack my archives to check.) And finally, as Moustache points out, in the evidence list:
Exhibit #700: Silk Road transaction spreadsheet maintained by Silk Road Vendor deezletime
That answers that.
Tea leaves
But here's another interesting question: Duch is witness #9, and #10 is Inigo, and the final #11 is an unknown; so if a flipped seller is third-to-last, and an actual site employee is second-to-last, what is this best that they're saving for last? Who is Brian Shaw? Here's a thought: the prosecution is bragging about a friend who will testify that Ulbricht told him about running SR1:
We've learned one of the witnesses is a friend of Ulbricht's from college, who apparently gave him programming advice, but we need to confirm the name
and
However, the prosecution claims to have at least one witness who knew Ulbricht in real life: an old college friend who said he helped Ulbricht with programming the site, and later forced Ulbricht to admit to him what he was doing.
The Brian Shaw on Bitcointalk is a pro-marijuana-legalization activist from California, where Ulbricht lived for much of SR1's tenure, and marijuana was Ulbricht and DPR1's favorite drug; could this Brian Shaw be the right Brian Shaw and the friend? That would provide a bang to the prosecution's parade of witnesses, starting from some random agent doing package seizures, to a friend declaring 'he told me he did it'. EDIT: no, Bates turned out to be the friend and testified Thursday 22 January 2015; Brian Shaw remains a mystery, although there is speculation Shaw may be connected somehow with the bizarre Redandwhite loan incident recounted in Ulbricht's 2013 journal released as an exhibit.
How about that fucking guy SRthrowaway2468 with one fucking post and he was on the money with his theory on deezletime fucking detective