Mentor to ‘Silk Road’ Online Drug Trafficker Gets 20 Years (1)

A Canadian man who mentored drug trafficker Ross William Ulbricht and helped run his Silk Road online marketplace was sentenced Tuesday in New York to 20 years in prison.

Roger Thomas Clark, 61, known online as “Variety Jones,” was arrested in Thailand in 2015, extradited to the US in 2018 and pleaded guilty in 2020 to conspiring to distribute narcotics. Ulbricht, whose alias was “Dread Pirate Roberts,” already is serving a life sentence for creating the sprawling black-market bazaar on the Internet.

US District Judge Sidney H. Stein rejected Clark’s plea for no more than the seven-and-a-half years he already ...