When plainclothes feds grabbed Ulbricht's laptop and put him in cuffs, the prosecution in Ulbricht's case says he was chatting online with an undercover agent who had infiltrated the staff of Silk Road, the massive online drug market Ulbricht is accused of creating. Now that undercover agent has told his story for the first time. And he's revealed that just before his fateful conversation with Silk Road's kingpin, he had been watching Ulbricht from less than a block away.

On the second day of Ulbricht's trial in a Manhattan courtroom, Department of Homeland Security agent Jared Deryeghiayan told the jury a detailed account of his final conversation with the Dread Pirate Roberts, Silk Road's owner and Deryeghiayan's boss for the three months the DHS agent spent as an undercover Silk Road staffer. As part of a coordinated law enforcement effort designed to prove that Ulbricht was the Dread Pirate Roberts and to seize his laptop before he could encrypt its hard drive, Deryeghiayan and a half dozen FBI agents surveilled Ulbricht as he left his apartment on October 1st, 2013, and walked to the Glen Park public library near his home. Then Deryeghiayan struck up a conversation with the Ulbricht over a dedicated chat system set up for Silk Road staffers, the better to catch Ulbricht red-handed in the act of managing the site.