The author of this piece has done business journalism at a lot of big-name properties and where many journos would be thrilled by a once-in-a-lifetime Gerald Loeb Award
Joe Nocera at The Free Press, October 31:
“Did you say in private, ‘Fuck regulators?’”
The first audience members started arriving around 10 p.m. on Sunday night, even though the event wouldn’t begin for another eleven and a half hours.
The people in line weren’t waiting for Taylor Swift tickets, or some new Apple device, but for a coveted seat in U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan’s courtroom in lower Manhattan, where alleged fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried was on trial. Only 21 seats were reserved for the press and the public, and it was first come, first served. If you wanted to be in that courtroom—to be able to see the reactions of SBF’s parents, say, or Kaplan’s expression as he chastised the defendant (which he did regularly)—there was no such thing as getting to the courthouse too early. By midnight, all the seats had been accounted for.
The rest of us had to make do with the overflow courtroom. Or rather, two overflow rooms, since one wasn’t enough to accommodate the 80 or so reporters covering the trial.
Friday, my first day at the trial, had been devoted to gentle questioning from SBF’s lawyer, Mark Cohen, as he tried to present his client as someone who had been done in by his subordinates—three of whom had offered devastating testimony against Bankman-Fried earlier in the trial. By the time Friday’s session ended, Cohen’s direct examination was nearly completed, after which, we all knew, would come the main event: prosecutor Danielle Sassoon’s cross-examination on Monday, which was bound to be brutal for SBF, and highly entertaining for the rest of us.
In the overflow rooms, the televisions offered a split screen, with one camera focused on SBF in the witness box and another pointed down at the three long tables where the lawyers were seated. The only time we caught a glimpse of the jurors was when they walked past Bankman-Fried on their way in and out of the courtroom. It was painful to see how studiously they averted their gaze from him, while he did just the opposite, staring balefully at each of them as they walked by. I couldn’t help wondering if any of them found him persuasive, or even sympathetic.
I had my doubts.
It’s no secret that defense lawyers hate putting their clients on the stand, because it exposes them to cross-examination. But what choice did Cohen have? When FTX, the crypto exchange SBF founded in 2019, collapsed in November 2022, resulting in big losses for many of its customers, the Justice Department filed eight criminal charges against him. These included wire fraud, money laundering, and conspiracy to commit fraud. The central allegation, though, was that Bankman-Fried embezzled around $8 billion that belonged to FTX customers, and used it to cover up losses at his hedge fund Alameda Research. He also used the money to make risky investments, buy a couple of private jets, pay stars like Tom Brady to promote FTX, and purchase naming rights for the stadium that hosts the Miami Heat, which was briefly known as FTX Arena. If convicted of all eight charges, SBF faces up to 110 years in prison.
Put in simpler terms: imagine if your broker bought herself a new house with money you’d given her to invest. On a far grander scale, that’s what SBF is accused of doing.
Did SBF move the money knowingly? Or was it some kind of innocent mistake—maybe something his underlings did when he wasn’t paying attention? If SBF hoped to avoid being convicted, he would have to convince the jury of the latter. On the stand, his primary tactic was to portray himself as a hapless victim of Alameda’s CEO, Caroline Ellison, with whom he had a weird relationship. (They slept together occasionally, and while Ellison desperately wanted more from Bankman-Fried than sex, he seemed incapable of giving her that.)....
....MUCH MORE
And more Nocera, this time paired up with Bethany McLean at New York Magazine:"COVID Lockdowns Were a Giant Experiment. It Was a Failure. A key lesson of the pandemic."
