- Sam Bankman-Fried, 31, is currently awaiting his sentence inside New York’s Metropolitan Detention Center after being convicted of stealing from his FTX customers
- The former crypto boss has brought in his parents, former FTX colleagues, law professors and Trump’s former lawyer in an effort to avoid a 110-year sentence
- The former billionaire will first seek a lenient sentence before preparing to formally appeal his conviction
Sam Bankman-Fried is pulling out all the stops in a last-ditch effort to avoid a possible 110-year prison sentence.
The cryptocurrency fraudster has brought in his parents, former FTX colleagues, law professors and Trump’s former lawyer in a bid for a lenient sentence and in preparation for appealing his conviction for fraud.
Bankman-Fried, 31, is currently awaiting his sentence inside New York’s Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn after being found guilty of stealing from his customers at the now-folded crypto currency exchange he founded.
The former billionaire will be sentenced by Judge Lewis Kaplan on March 28, with a possible 110-year sentence on the cards.
As well as preparing an appeal the former crypto mogul’s lawyers are scheduled to file a legal memo in the U.S. District Court in Manhattan on Tuesday, arguing that their client doesn’t deserve to go to prison for the rest of his life.
The appeal for leniency in sentencing is part of a long-term strategy to appeal the fraud conviction and change the public perception of Bankman-Fried’s activities at the collapsed crypto exchange.
However, Miriam Baer, vice dean at Brooklyn Law School has predicted that even if Kaplan decides against imposing the maximum sentence he could still serve 30 years behind bars.
The judge ‘could still give a very serious sentence given how young Mr. Bankman-Fried is; say, a 30- or 35-year sentence,’ Baer told the New York Times.
Bankman-Fried has hired attorney Marc Mukasey, who once represented Donald Trump, to oversee his sentencing and another lawyer, Alexandra Shapiro to handle the appeal.
Mukasey has garnered a reputation for being a showman in the courtroom.
Bankman-Fried’s parents, the Stanford University law professors Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried, have also been involved in the defense, helping line up people to write letters for their son that will be included in the memo.
Among those to speak sympathetically of Bankman-Fried to the judge is his former assistant Natalie Tien.
‘I don’t have grudges over him, and I do feel bad for his parents,’ Tien told the New York Times.
Tien told the Times she was contacted by a friend of Bankman-Fried’s a month ago asking if she would consider assisting with the sentencing memo.
She then received an email from Bankman-Fried’s parents, urging her to her to write ‘from the heart’ about their son.
They were ‘kind of like testing the waters,’ Ms. Tien told the Times.
‘I pretty much just said “yes” right away.’
Yale Law professor Ian Ayres and Stanford Law professor John Donohue, both family friends of Bankman-Fried’s, have also written sympathetically in the memo.
‘Whatever else might be said about Bankman-Fried, he was a brilliant businessman,’ Ayres and Donohue wrote.
Bankman-Fried was found guilty in November of all seven counts of fraud he was charged with. The jury took less than five hours to reach their verdict.
His conviction marked the finale of his $10 billion fraud trial linked to the spectacular collapse of his crypto empire in November 2022.
Prosecutors argued that Bankman-Fried built a ‘pyramid of deceit’ through FTX and his sister company Alameda Research to ‘steal’ billions of dollars in customer assets in pursuit of ‘money, influence and power‘.
At its height, FTX was worth $32 billion and Bankman-Fried was lauded as the future of finance appearing on the cover of Forbes magazine and on event stages with the likes of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.
The ‘house of cards’ came crashing down in 2022 amid tumbling crypto prices and media reports raising questions about how much of the $32 billion valuation was based on FTT, FTX’s own crypto token.
As customers tried to withdraw their money, it created the crypto equivalent of a run on a bank, and FTX shut down.
Federal prosecutors quickly built their case against Bankman-Fried with the assistance of his inner circle who took plea deals with the prosecution in exchange for cooperation.
