Silk Road's Dread Pirate Roberts vs The Princess Bride's Dread Pirate Roberts

On October 1, 2013, FBI agents caught the man responsible for a black market website, Silk Road, which provided people around the world with easy access to drugs and hitmen. This man is, in fact, today's Dread Pirate Roberts. (Lost? Watch this video :) )

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In The Princess Bride, the Dread Pirate Roberts is fearsome, ruthless, and unfailingly polite. Even when his true love tells him he could die and she wouldn't care, his response is, “as you wish.” (Spoiler alert: He doesn’t die, they end up kissing and riding horses into the sunset, and Fred Savage’s character learns to appreciate the mushy parts of love stories. It really is a great movie--one of my favorites).

The Dread Pirate Roberts of the online black market Silk Road, a.k.a. Ross William Ulbricht, actually bears some resemblance to his fictional ancestor. The FBI profile report of him describes a man who is easy to please as he gives instructions how to seal drugs properly or offers a consumer support option through which the site’s employees “will take care of you personally.”

This pirate is especially gracious when offering hitmen for free--yea, he will personally pay someone to kill a man whether or not this man has a wife and three children. Oh, and at his arrest, Ulbricht seems almost to be reciting from the movie’s script as he tells law enforcement that he “wouldn’t mind if he was executed.” (See "as you wish" in the second pararaph).

The most relevant parallel in these two pirates is how the Dread Pirate Roberts of the movie refers not to a person, but to a job. In the Princess Bride, the men holding the title periodically decide to retire, secretly passing the torch down to their successors while helping obscure the fact that a change has taken place. With Ulbricht indisposed, such an orderly handoff seems improbable, but definitely not impossible.

What's in store for the future of internet drug trafficking? Well, all the essential elements remain in place: a worldwide web of computers, software for obscuring identities, and a healthy desire to buy and sell drugs. Though non-druggie Americans can say we had a big win in this capture, a sequel is likely in the works.