The Day the Chips Fell
Reading Time: 5 minutesI Was There When Sam Bankman-Fried Was Found Guilty. I Think I Know Why He Did It., What I saw in the courtroom as Sam Bankman-Fried was found guilty., Sam Bankman-Fried guilty verdict: I was there in the courtroom. I think I know why he did it.
This is part of MediaDownloader’s daily coverage of the intricacies and intrigues of the Sam Bankman-Fried trial, from the consequential to the absurd. Sign up for the MediaDownloaderst to get our latest updates on the trial and the state of the tech industry—and the rest of the day’s top stories—and support our work when you join MediaDownloader Plus.
Maybe it was just me, but I don’t think too many people entered the Southern District of New York on Thursday morning assuming that this would be the day Sam Bankman-Fried confronted his fate. While planning out the day’s schedule, Judge Lewis Kaplan allowed for the possibility not only that the then-pending jury deliberations could run well into the evening, but that we might even spill over into next week. Made sense: The defendant was facing seven serious criminal charges, and we were still a ways away from the jury even beginning to grapple with them. It all moved slowly, then suddenly: Not even 11 hours later, Bankman-Fried would be found guilty on all counts. It was a long, nervous day, and it ended before we could even process it.
It’s obvious and an understatement to say that this was expected. In the year that followed the sudden collapse of his crypto businesses—digital exchange FTX and crypto hedge fund Alameda Research—Sam Bankman-Fried, for perhaps the first time in his life, found himself completely powerless. The businesses he’d built up were in the hands of someone best known for cleaning up the Enron mess; members of his inner circle quickly struck deals with the feds; the Bahamian paradise that had once welcomed him ended up putting him behind bars; he had to give up his freedom of movement, both physically and digitally, in order to return to his childhood home; he was shoved into one of New York’s worst jails after flouting his strict bail conditions. Within the confines of the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center, Sam Bankman-Fried—a former multibillionaire who’d hobnobbed with celebrities and former heads of state, and even proposed a sweeping overhaul of U.S. financial governance—awaited trial in the court of law, having already been deemed guilty in the court of public opinion. Pretty much everyone (with the exception of one rather esteemed author) thought he’d done what he’d been accused of and more: embezzling FTX customer funds for his own purposes while telling everyone he wasn’t like those other crypto scammers, that he was in this for the good of humanity. And while the mogul known as SBF could talk his way out of just about anything else, he would soon find that his gift of gab had little effect here.
The Thursday countdown to SBF’s downfall was nothing too thrilling. Assistant U.S. Attorney Danielle Sassoon gave a final rebuttal to the defense, taking on attorney Mark Cohen’s claims that the federal government was determined to paint Bankman-Fried as a ‘monster’ without proof. ‘Telling your customers to trust you with their money, telling your customers that their assets are safe, segregated, safeguarded, held in custody, and then taking that money and spending it on yourself, on your business—on the same business that you’ve told your customers is separate, walled off, treated no differently from any other account—that is not a reasonable business decision. That is fraud.’ The SBF defense team, long hampered by its defendant’s intransigence and the stack of evidence against him, had nowhere to go from there.
As I took a midday break from the courtroom, I thought Bankman-Fried’s best hope was, perhaps, a hung jury on a couple of charges. But I figured it would take a while to reach either the best- or worst-case scenario. The jury started deliberating at 3:15 p.m., and about an hour later, it had made clear it would stay into the evening if it had to. Workers in the SDNY cafeteria, which normally closes at 3, would have some pizza ready for the jurors by 6. Those of us who’d returned to the courthouse stuck around the emptied courtroom while awaiting dinner; reporters ordered pizza in the cafeteria too.
At 7, it was back to the courtroom, where we’d soon find out whether we’d be back yet again next week. The jury was getting into details: Kaplan stepped in to inform counsel that the jurors had requested transcripts of testimony from two FTX investors turned witnesses, along with a copy of the original indictment as well as ‘some highlighter pens and some Post-its, please.’ Those were provided, and we watched the minute hand slink toward 8.
But before it did, large groups of suited attorneys, stern U.S. Marshals, and other observers began flowing into the courtroom. By 7:40 p.m., the judge’s deputy clerk told us the jury had reached a verdict.
I don’t know what Bankman-Fried’s face looked like when the verdict came down—like everyone else behind the wooden partition, I was seated far behind him. I flashed back, instead, to the faces I’d seen from him earlier that day on the media-overflow-room monitors: a brow-furrowing frown during Sassoon’s rebuttal, a nervous scan of the courtroom while the judge read out his charges for the jury, a blank gaze whenever he walked into the courtroom to hear updates from the jury.
I caught his eye a couple times but couldn’t get a read. However, I think his emptiness of expression helped me to make some sense of all this. Sam Bankman-Fried, known as a math nerd and effective altruist, saw the world in probabilities and calculations, going so far as to figure out he had a ‘5 percent chance of becoming president someday,’ per his ex-girlfriend and most damning witness, Caroline Ellison. What did he think were the odds he could get away with losing billions of dollars of fiat and cryptocurrency capital from customers, investors, and friends who’d trusted him? Maybe the exact number doesn’t matter, and never did; SBF presented himself as someone willing to bet on just about anything, even if such a bet gambled with the entirety of human existence. If there were a nonzero chance of a truly positive outcome, no matter how dire the alternative, it might have been a chance worth taking. SBF clearly thought he had a worthy-enough shot at a lot of things—at ballooning his wealth and influence in perpetuity, at remaking significant aspects of the world in the way he deemed best, at getting himself out of any scrapes along the way. Yet in the long term—ha?—he overplayed his hand and destroyed himself, as well as a lot of other people’s savings and livelihoods. In the end, that was just the cost of some ill-fated gambling. It’s not really a tragedy, but it’s not a farce either. It’s kinda just pathetic.
After thanking the jurors and discharging them, Kaplan turned to what came next. There’s putatively a second trial in March, one that will concern the remaining charges against Bankman-Fried regarding foreign bribery and other improper political spending; the government has until February to confirm whether the case would go forward. SBF’s prison sentence would come down on March 28. (The judge smiled when noting that his deputy clerk knew his calendar better than anyone, but even though many of us had laughed with Kaplan in the prior weeks, I saw no one flash a smile this time.) Of course, there’s also the bankruptcy suit and the civil charges. Bankman-Fried has many more questions to answer yet.
At the end of it, we all departed the court to hear from U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York Damian Williams. Lead SBF lawyer Mark Cohen distributed the defense’s statement digitally, expressing its ‘disappointment.’ Those who weren’t crowding the front of the courthouse to get glimpses of the key players were scattered around the area, preparing to file or broadcast their stories. It was all over, just like that.
When I got my phone back from security and I logged on to Twitter, I received at least a couple of notifications regarding crypto-themed spam accounts in my mentions. Some things never change.
Ref: slate
MediaDownloader.net -> Free Online Video Downloader, Download Any Video From YouTube, VK, Vimeo, Twitter, Twitch, Tumblr, Tiktok, Telegram, TED, Streamable, Soundcloud, Snapchat, Share, Rumble, Reddit, PuhuTV, Pinterest, Periscope, Ok.ru, MxTakatak, Mixcloud, Mashable, LinkedIn, Likee, Kwai, Izlesene, Instagram, Imgur, IMDB, Ifunny, Gaana, Flickr, Febspot, Facebook, ESPN, Douyin, Dailymotion, Buzzfeed, BluTV, Blogger, Bitchute, Bilibili, Bandcamp, Akıllı, 9GAG