Raheim Hamilton was 30 years old when a federal judge in Chicago handed down the sentence on Monday: 40 years in prison, a $5 million fine, and the loss of everything the government could find. The man from Suffolk, Virginia, had co-run Empire Market, one of the largest dark web marketplaces ever dismantled, a site where drugs and stolen credentials moved for years behind layers of encryption.
The Justice Department disclosed the sentence two days later, on October 7. Between 2018 and 2020, prosecutors said, Hamilton and his partner Thomas Pavey built Empire Market into a machine that processed more than four million transactions worth upward of $430 million, nearly $375 million of it from drug sales.
The market ran entirely on cryptocurrency. Buyers and sellers used it for every deal, and the operators encouraged users to run funds through mixing services that scramble the trail of a payment, the kind of tool that makes investigators’ work slow and expensive. Such mixers, sometimes called tumblers, pool many people’s coins and pay them back out in different amounts, so a payment cannot be followed from buyer to seller. Federal agents spent years working backward through those pools, a process that helps explain why charges only became public in 2024, four years after the site went dark.
Empire Market sat in a long line of such sites. The first and most famous, Silk Road, was shut down in 2013 and its founder, Ross Ulbricht, sentenced to life in prison before a pardon in 2025. Each takedown spawned successors, and Empire Market rose as one of the largest after earlier markets folded, running until its operators pulled the plug in 2020. The takedown is part of a wider campaign. In 2022, German and American authorities shut down Hydra, a Russian-language market then considered the largest in the world, and seized millions of dollars in bitcoin. Each closure pushes users and operators to the next site, and each new site pushes investigators to start again.
Hamilton pleaded guilty in January to a drug conspiracy charge. As part of the deal, he agreed to forfeit about 1,230 bitcoin, worth roughly $101 million at current prices, plus 24.4 ether and three properties in Virginia. Pavey, 41, of Ormond Beach, Florida, pleaded guilty last year and agreed to give up about 1,584 bitcoin, gold bars, three vehicles and two Florida properties. He is set to be sentenced later this month.
Together, the two men’s coins total about 2,814 bitcoin, worth around $234 million at bitcoin’s price of roughly $83,000. At the time of seizure, investigators valued the digital currencies they recovered at about $75 million, and bitcoin’s climb since then has roughly tripled the hoard. That is what puts the case at the center of a policy fight in Washington.
A March 2025 executive order directs that bitcoin forfeited in criminal and civil cases be moved into the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, a federal stockpile that cannot be sold. The order allows exceptions, including returning funds to identifiable victims of the underlying crimes. The Justice Department’s release did not say where Empire Market’s coins will end up.
Congress has been moving in the same direction. In September, a House committee voted 28 to 21 to advance a bill that would require forfeited bitcoin to be held in the reserve for at least 20 years. The measure is part of a broader push by lawmakers who want the government to hold digital assets the way it holds gold. The reserve itself is a recent creation. It already holds bitcoin forfeited in other cases, and its supporters argue that treating seized crypto as a stockpile mirrors the way Washington has treated gold over the years. Its critics answer that forfeited proceeds should go to victims and taxpayers, not into a government investment portfolio.
The Empire Market case has been years in the making. Federal authorities, working through the FBI and other agencies, first described the charges in detail in June 2024, after an investigation that followed the coin trails through mixers and exchanges to identify the operators. The long gap between the market’s shutdown and the sentencings reflects the difficulty of untangling a marketplace built to resist investigation.
The site itself was a study in the economics of the dark web. Empire Market charged fees on every transaction, and its operators lived off the spread while the anonymity of the platform did the rest. The four million transactions it processed make it one of the largest such markets ever prosecuted, and the sentence reflects how seriously the government has come to treat the people who build them.
For Hamilton, the sentence is effectively a life term, and the forfeiture strips away the fortune the market produced. For the government, the case is a test of a newer question: whether the coins seized from a dead market belong in a national reserve, held against the price of the asset, or returned to the people the market harmed. The answer, for now, sits with the court.
