Raheim Hamilton, the 30-year-old co-creator of the Empire Market darknet bazaar, was sentenced Monday to 40 years in federal prison and a $5 million fine, and he agreed to forfeit about 1,230 bitcoin now worth roughly $100 million, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois.
Judge Steven C. Seeger handed down the term in Chicago. Hamilton, of Suffolk, Virginia, pleaded guilty earlier this year to a drug conspiracy charge. His co-defendant Thomas Pavey, 41, of Ormond Beach, Florida, pleaded guilty in 2025 and will learn his own sentence later this month. Pavey has already agreed to give up 1,584 BTC plus several physical assets.
Two years, $430 million, four million deals
Empire ran from February 2018 to late 2020 and quickly became the largest Western darknet market after AlphaBay’s takedown. Prosecutors say it handled more than four million transactions worth over $430 million, with drug sales alone reaching nearly $375 million. At its peak in August 2020 the site counted about 1.68 million registered users, more than 5,000 vendors and some 360,000 buyers.
The scale of the narcotics is laid out in the Justice Department statement: at least 13,314 grams of fentanyl, 446,683 grams of cocaine, 71,992 grams of methamphetamine and 103,396 grams of heroin. The platform also sold stolen account credentials, hacked personal data, counterfeit currency and hacking tools. Hamilton and Pavey required every transaction to settle in cryptocurrency and steered users toward tumbling and mixing services to hide the trail. Buyers could rate vendors on how well they disguised what they shipped, a detail prosecutors highlighted as proof the operators knew exactly what their rating system was rewarding.
Undercover work closed the case. Federal agents made repeated covert buys between April 2019 and May 2020, including at least 143.5 grams of methamphetamine and 105.4 grams of heroin, and intercepted a package containing 443.5 grams of meth ordered through the site. Homeland Security Investigations New York led the probe that unsealed the charges, working alongside the FBI and the Postal Inspection Service.
Empire was built and marketed as an AlphaBay clone, reachable only through TOR browsers, and between June 2016 and July 2017 Hamilton had already sold there under the same ZeroAngel handle he later used on Empire, where he was known as Sydney. When the site went dark in 2020 amid sustained DDoS extortion, users never got the chance to withdraw escrow funds, and exit-scam rumors trailed the operators for years before charges landed. Blockchain analytics firm TRM Labs, which helped trace the operation, noted the platform rose within months of AlphaBay’s 2017 shutdown and filled the vacuum at the top of the Western darknet economy. Analysts there have long argued that marketplace seizure cases now depend less on server captures and more on payment graphs, and Empire is a textbook exhibit.
Where the confiscated bitcoin goes
Forfeiture has become a routine endgame in darknet prosecutions, and this case is the biggest confirmation of that. The bitcoin rarely stays in government hands for long: the U.S. Marshals Service has auctioned criminal-case coins in batches since the Silk Road seizures of 2014, and each new forfeiture feeds that same pipeline. The Empire coins are expected to follow the same route once the appeals window closes, and at bitcoin’s current level near $82,000 the eventual auction proceeds could run well past the valuation prosecutors recorded at sentencing. Hamilton’s 24.4 ETH, roughly $60,000, and three Virginia properties round out his forfeiture package, while Pavey’s 1,584 BTC pledge makes his the larger surrendered stash of the two.
Government wording matters here. The forfeiture is measured in coins, not dollars, so the Treasury keeps the asset risk on its own books until sale, both up and down. When the Marshals auctioned batches of Silk Road bitcoin in 2014 and 2015, buyers paid between $300 and $1,000 a coin, and the early lots are now studied as some of the worst selling decisions in the asset’s history. A repeat auction at today’s prices would make the Empire haul one of the most valuable single-marketplace forfeitures in U.S. history.
A long sentence, and a familiar pattern
The 40-year term ranks among the harshest yet for a U.S. darknet market operator. Cases such as Hydra, the Russian-language bazaar taken down by German authorities in 2022, and the convictions of AlphaBay-era operators set earlier benchmarks, but few defendants faced fentanyl quantities like Empire’s, which drive statutory minimums sharply higher. Prosecutors in the Northern District of Illinois have made crypto-enabled drug markets a specialty, and the sentencing calculations leaned heavily on that fentanyl volume in the guideline worksheets.
The timing also tells its own story. Hamilton was seized years after his platform died, once blockchain tracing had worked through the tumblers his users were pushed toward. Chain-analysis tools built for these prosecutions are the same ones regulated exchanges now deploy for compliance, and every large forfeiture reinforces the argument regulators make when they press for tighter on-chain surveillance. Hamilton’s team did not contest the cryptocurrency forfeiture, which spared the court any fight over whether the tracing evidence was sound and preserved the government’s full claim on the coins.
The sentencing closes out one of the last major marketplace cases of the AlphaBay generation. Hydra fell in 2022, Genesis Market in 2023 and the successor bazaars that followed have grown smaller and shorter-lived, often collapsing within months as law enforcement pressure compounds. The pattern holds: bitcoin settles the trade, the analytics follow the coins, and years later a courtroom in Chicago converts the immutable ledger into 40 years.