The US Attorneys made a lot of publicity out of the murder-for-hire conspiracy allegations against Ulbricht in their indictments and in pre-trial media ("although there is no evidence that these murders were actually carried out." as the indictment itself obliquely says).
Ulbricht's defense could have come up with a plausible alternative explanations that he knew redandwhite was a scammer trying to extort him with a story involving nonexistent people, and was just playing along with him for whatever reasons.
[*] If the prosecution had not actually dropped those charges at trial, it would have been confirmed at trial which of the six identities were fictitious/nonexistent and whether all the accounts were managed by the same DEA agents. Hard to imagine that at least one juror wouldn't have formed a skeptical opinion about government agents extorting a person to conspire to kill fictitious people (why didn't the indictment just focus on nailing him on the lesser charges?). If this wasn't a Turing Test on when is an alleged conspiracy not a real conspiracy, then someday soon we'll see one.
ArsTechnica covered these facts in 2015:
[0]: "The hitman scam: Dread Pirate Roberts’ bizarre murder-for-hire attempts. On the darkweb, no one is who they seem." 2/2015 https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2015/02/the-hitman-scam-...
[1]: Silk Road’s alleged hitman, “redandwhite,” arrested in Vancouver https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/11/silk-roads-alleg...
Given that he is now free, and may have access to substantial cryptocurrency wealth, I think it would probably be best under the circumstances if everyone forgot about these allegations and just left him alone to live a quiet life.
[0] gives a timeline and fills in lots of details.
Article [1] describes Bridges:
> Bridges was a cryptocurrency expert [... with offshore entities, including one that he had created after pleading guilty in this case]. According to AUSA Haun, his involvement with digital currency cases across the country caused a “staggering” number of investigations to become tainted, and subsequently shut down. She told the judge at Bridges’s sentencing that the corrupt agent had been looking out for opportunities to serve seizure warrants and somehow profit from it.
> The prosecutor also said that bitcoins were still missing, and they weren’t sure if he had worked with other corrupt agents. The US Attorney’s Office seemed to imply that there had been a lot of weird (but not necessarily chargeable) stuff that was still unaccounted for.
Article [2] describes Force:
> [Force's mental health issues]... his previous undercover assignments had ended disastrously. An assignment in Denver in 2004 had ended with a DUI. A second undercover assignment in Puerto Rico had ended in 2008 with a complete mental breakdown. Force was institutionalized, and did not return to his job until 2010. He was on desk duty until 2012, when he was assigned to investigate the Silk Road.
[0]: "Investigating The Staged Assassinations Of Silk Road" 11/2021 https://bitcoinmagazine.com/culture/inside-silk-road-staged-...
[1]: "Great Moments in Shaun Bridges, a Corrupt Silk Road Investigator" 2/2016 https://www.vice.com/en/article/great-moments-in-shaun-bridg...
[2]: "DEA Agent Who Faked a Murder and Took Bitcoins from Silk Road Explains Himself" 10//2015 https://www.vice.com/en/article/dea-agent-who-faked-a-murder...
[1] was previously posted on HN 2/2016: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11037889
UPDATE: apparently I'm wrong that "factual impossibility" is not a defense [0]. But Bridges and Force's criminal behavior tainted the prosecution case on this charge. Presumably why the prosecution made sure those two agents were not mentioned in the trial.
[0]: https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/62360/can-you-charge...