A darknet club drug kingpin — who sold the likes of ecstasy, ketamine and generic Xanax in a hard-to-access internet marketplace — will spend eight years behind bars and fork over roughly $2 million worth of Bitcoin in the first such federal forfeiture of its kind in Massachusetts.
“This sentence sends a clear message to Dark Web criminals: the federal government is entering this space. We will find you and you will be held accountable,” said Massachusetts U.S. Attorney Rachael Rollins in a statement. “Thanks to the incredible work of our law enforcement colleagues, there is one less cybercriminal hiding in the shadows.”
Binh Thanh Le, 25, of Brockton, was only 22 years old when he started the “EastSideHigh” storefront on the Wall Street Market illegal marketplace on the darknet. That’s a part of the internet unreachable by standard web searching that requires special software — the Tor, originally called The Onion Router, encrypted and anonymizing internet relay network — to access.
The operation was a rousing success for a while. Le had netted 59 Bitcoins — a cryptocurrency heralded for its pseudonymous operations that criminals like for its easier use in illicit transactions — that as of 3 p.m. Saturday was worth roughly $2.3 million, well up from the $200,000 it was worth when the feds seized access to Le’s electronic Bitcoin wallet in a March 2019 currency exchange sting operation at a hotel in Norwood. He also had another $114,680 in cash and another $42,390 from the sale of his gray 2018 BMW M3, a performance sedan that originally retailed starting at $66,500.
Le was ordered to forfeit all of that, in addition to his eight years in federal prison followed by three years of supervised release, Judge Rya Zobel ordered Thursday in federal court in Boston.
Le was indicted in June 2019 with two other Brockton men, Steven McCall and Allante Pires — who the feds say drove a black Mercedes S550, which retailed in 2017 starting at nearly $97,000, while working in the enterprise — for conspiracy to manufacture and distribute the drugs. Authorities seized more than 20 kilos — or 44 pounds — of ecstasy, more than 7 kilos — or 15.4 pounds — of ketamine and more than 10,000 generic Xanax pills during the investigation, according to prosecutors. The others have pleaded not guilty to the charges.
It wasn’t a lack of high-tech prowess that saw the end of Le’s empire, but the simple fact that physical substances like drugs still have to go through the low-tech mail system to reach their destination. But the drug entrepreneur, who manufactured and distributed the drugs out of a rented office in Stoughton, got creative even on that front, using the fictitious names “Dajour Cox” and “Duane Freeman” as recipients to the medley of post office boxes his operation used around the area.
“Cox” and “Freeman” would get packages from such run-of-the-mill businesses like “Robins Office Supply” of Irving, Texas, that really held drugs, according to the complaint affidavit filed by a postal inspector. Federal agents also seized packages destined for the monitored addresses and names coming from foreign distributors in the Netherlands, Belgium and Canada.
Perhaps the most intriguing were the packages marked “Lego box for kids,” which indeed contained a Lego box, according to the court document, but replaced the colorful plastic bricks with vacuum-packed bags that contained a powder that field-tested for MDMA, the drug known as ecstasy or molly.
