The plot thickens (many similarities with the Walter White saga, both in the supposed facts and in the psychology related to them):
The Maryland charges stem from his alleged interactions starting in April 2012 with an undercover agent here. The agent began communicating with Ulbricht, court documents say, claiming to be a high-level drug smuggler who wanted to move inventory on Silk Road.
When one of Ulbricht's employees got arrested in January as a result of one their arranged transactions, authorities say Ulbricht worried that the employee would blow his cover.
Ulbricht allegedly asked the undercover agent to have the employee killed, saying he had "never killed a man or had one killed before, but it is the right move in this case."
The agent led Ulbricht to believe that the killing had been carried out, including staged photos of the employee being tortured, and on March 1 Ulbricht wired $80,000 from an account in Austrailia to an account controlled by authorities.
The series of events emboldened Ulbricht, according to separate documents filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Later in March, according to private messages reviewed by federal agents, a Silk Road vendor threatened to blackmail Ulbricht by exposing information about the site's users and transactions.
Ulbricht then reached out to a user to take care of the problem, according to court records.
"I would like to put a bounty on his head if it's not too much trouble for you," he wrote in a message on March 29, authorities say in court documents. "Necessities like this do happen from time to time for a person in my position."
Messages exchanged between Ulbricht and the user show they discussed prices between $150,000 and $300,000, depending on whether Ulbricht wanted it done "clean or non-clean." On April 1, the user told Ulbricht that his problem had been "taken care of" and sent a picture of the victim.
It's not clear whether such a killing occurred -- agents wrote that they could find no record of there being someone with the name of the victim that was exchanged. They said they contacted authorities in White Rock, British Columbia about whether a homicide had been committed on March 31.