JUST WHEN THE Silk Road's saga of dirty money and double-dealing seemed to be winding down, one of the federal agents who investigated the site has added an audacious footnote: What looks like a brazen attempt to flee the United States after he was convicted and sentenced to prison for corruption in his handling of the case.

Former Secret Service agent Shaun Bridges was re-arrested on Thursday of last week, just a day before he was scheduled to turn himself in at a Baltimore prison to begin serving a 71-month prison sentence. Bridges pleaded guilty in October to charges of money laundering and obstruction of justice and was released on bail; he confessed that as part of the team investigating the Silk Road anonymous drug market he had secretly stolen around $800,000 worth of bitcoins from the site and placed them in his own account. Federal agents seized hundreds of thousands of dollars in his possession, and he was sentenced to pay another half a million dollars in restitution.

But despite his guilty plea, Bridges may have planned to escape his prison sentence and leave the country, potentially taking more hidden wealth with him. According to a filing from prosecutors in the Northern District of California last week, the agents who arrested Bridges found that he'd packed his passport, a cell phone, documents related to his wife's application for citizenship in another country, and corporate records for at least three "offshore entities" in Belize, Nevis and Mauritius (including one that had been created after his guilty plea) into two briefcases. They also found a MacBook with its serial number scratched off and bulletproof vests, at least one of which prosecutors believe Bridges stole from the Secret Service.