From there the thread becomes darker and more tangled. In January 2013, a Silk Road employee apparently stole bitcoins from users, thenmanaged to get arrested on another charge. Roberts, displaying a side investigators hadn’t seen before, allegedly contracted with a Silk Road customer to have the employee tortured until he or she returned the bitcoins, then killed. This was the work not of a libertarian idealist but of a sociopath. Roberts was unaware that the hit man he was dealing with was an undercover FBI agent who had bought drugs on Silk Road as part of a sting operation. The agent sent Roberts faked photographic proof of the murder. Satisfied, Roberts wired $80,000 from an Australian money-transfer exchange.