Sam in the Slam
FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried invests in beans and rice
“I do not like them, Sam-I-Am. I do not like green eggs and ham.” - Dr. Seuss
The first jailhouse interview is out and we’ve learned that FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried has discovered the currency of the future, or at least his future: Beans and rice.
The fuzzy-headed vegetarian – now known as inmate 37244-510 in the Metropolitan Detention Center, Brooklyn – gave his first post-conviction interview to William D. Cohan of Puck, published May 9, and it sounds like his multibillion-dollar fintech machinations have been blasted back to the Bronze Age.
“The rice he buys at the prison commissary has become one of the currencies of the realm inside MDC,” Cohan writes. “We joked briefly about how the arbitrage opportunities in jail were better than anything he experienced trading crypto at Jane Street Capital or buying and selling assets at Alameda.”
Jane Street Capital was where Bankman-Fried honed his quantitative crypto-currency trading skills and Alameda, an early-stage venture capital firm, was where he illegally stuffed billions of dollars of FTX customer funds.
On March 28, Bankman-Fried, 32, received a 25-year prison sentence and a court order to forfeit $11 billion following his conviction on seven counts of fraud, conspiracy and money laundering.
Bankman-Fried gave Cohan a jailhouse interview that was about as bland as his diet – particularly compared to say, Ponzi magnate Bernie Madoff, who bemoaned the damage he’d done to his family in his first jailhouse interview in 2011 with New York Times reporter Diana Henriques.
Madoff, who had always acknowledged his guilt, said he couldn’t believe how long he’d gotten away with his crimes without the banks ratting him out. “They had to know,” Madoff told Henriques. “But the attitude was sort of, ‘If you’re doing something wrong, we don’t want to know.’ ”
All Cohan got was Bankman-Fried’s adamance on innocence, regrets about listening to his lawyers, and hopes for a long-shot appeal filed in April.
“We didn’t talk about his trial strategy or whether he intentionally siphoned off the $8 billion of FTX customer funds into Alameda.”
Cohan wasn’t allowed to bring a recording device or even a notepad into the 75-minute interview, so his piece doesn’t even have a pithy quote from Bankman-Fried.
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