
Sam Bankman-Fried has traded his luxury penthouse in the Bahamas for a decidedly different top- floor setting: a criminal courtroom in downtown Manhattan. He's located about 1,100 miles away from the tropical paradise he called home and faces a possible lifetime in prison if convicted of financial crimes related to the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which was valued at $32 billion. Bankman-Fried, 31, is spending most of his time now on the 26th floor of 500 Pearl Street, one of two federal courthouses in the Southern District of New York. He sits just feet away from 12 jurors who will decide his fate. Bankman-Fried has pleaded not guilty to seven federal fraud charges.
A big part of Bankman-Fried's journey traces back to the $35 million Bahamian property he shared with nine people, including friends from high school, an ex-girlfriend, college roommates and top execs at FTX and sister hedge fund Alameda Research. Many of his former bunkmates now comprise the prosecution's star witness list. Gary Wang, the lesser-known co-founder of FTX and Alameda and a roommate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, took the stand last week and will appear again on Tuesday. Adam Yedidia, a senior FTX developer and a roommate at MIT, testified on Wednesday and Thursday. And then there is Caroline Ellison, who ran Alameda and had been Bankman-Fried's girlfriend. She is scheduled to appear on Tuesday, according to the Hollywood Reporter.
The group was cliquey, with the 20-year-olds fleeing Hong Kong to ride out the pandemic in the Caribbean. They freely mixed work and pleasure, and some reports of their shared time on the island of New Providence chronicle sexual explorations. In the first week of Bankman-Fried's trial, prosecutors were pondering how Bankman-Fried paid for the house's worth of hundreds of millions.
lawyers for the United States Attorney's office entered into evidence a series of photos featuring the penthouse condo in a building dubbed the 3 million to buy and maintain 35 different properties across New Providence - real estate that Bahamian regulators wanted to retrieve in FTX's U.S. bankruptcy protection proceedings.
The bankruptcy estate of FTX has independently claimed that Bankman-Fried's parents, Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried, exploded their access and influence within the FTX enterprise to enrich themselves, directly or indirectly, by millions of dollars. Bankman-Fried's lawyers have asked the court to sue Bankman-Fried's parents in an attempt to claw back the luxury property and'millennia' in illegally transferred and misappropriated funds. The suit alleges that Bankman and Fried discussed with their son the transfer of a $16.4 million estate in the Bahamas.
The Orchid is renowned as the crown jewel of the Albany, an oceanside resort that spans 600 acres and boasts a collaboration of celebrity backers, such as Tiger Woods and Justin Timberlake. The residents of New York, who live in the expensive neighborhood, ride around in golf carts, moving from their home to one of the many restaurants and then to the beach or padel courts, where they can play a sport that is a mix of tennis and squash. The penthouse included en suite bathrooms, walk-in closets, Venetian plaster walls, and Italian marble floors, along with a balcony-lined perimeter with its own private spa, outdoor pool, and jacuzzi.
A CoinDesk journalist, who visited the apartment in September 2022, described the scene as a cross between a luxury dorm room and a jury-rigged trading floor, adding that the curved marble living room was rimmed with computer desks, each supporting various configurations of conjoined monitors. One of Bankman-Fried's iconic bean bags that he used for napping was apparently kept under the baby grand piano in the room that defense lawyers have compared to the common area of a dorm room. Bankman-Fried's attorney, Mark Cohen, said in his opening statement that his client was a'math nerd who didn't drink or party'. In his book, Lewis says, donning a glass of wine was tantamount to an act of hedonism. For the epic views, Lewis said, Bankman-Fried and his housemates'seldom so much as glanced' at them.
In June 2022, Yedidia submitted a report to Bankman-Fried on Signal that showed 8 billion dollars in customer cash held in an internal database linked to an Alameda account called 'fiat at ftx.com' was missing. While Bankman-Fried appeared nervous or nervous, Yedidia said he trusts Bankman-Fried and Ellison to handle the situation. Yedidia testified that he had not spoken to Bankman-Fried or seen him in person since November. In the days before FTX filed for bankruptcy, Yedidia resigned after a colleague told him that Alameda had used FTX customer deposits to pay back creditors.