Welcome back to Puck.

Last night, Sam Bankman-Fried offered the opening salvo of his defense against the charges filed against him late last year by federal prosecutors. But I’d argue that the more significant action in the case, as of late, is what has been happening to former FTX executive Ryan Salame, and his girlfriend Michelle Bond.

Today, a look at the storyline that unites S.B.F. with George Santos with Donald Trump Jr., Jeff Roe, Elise Stefanik, Paul Singer and more. Why, exactly, was the Salame-Bond house raided by federal agents last month?

As always, if you know more, just reply to this note and ask for my number.

Teddy

Salame (pronounced like the witch trials, not the deli meat) was not in Bankman-Fried’s inner circle, but S.B.F’s fate now appears to depend, in part, on his relationship with the Salame-Bond couple. On April 27, a team of F.B.I. agents executed a dawn raid on the suburban Maryland home that Salame and Bond typically used for poolside bashes and other parties. The raid shocked neighbors, of course, but also those following the S.B.F. legal travails. The search warrant, I’m told, allowed law enforcement to obtain certain phones that prosecutors had in their sights. Others involved in the case believe it was also a scare tactic, meant to rattle the confidence of Salame and Bond and, presumably, engender their greater cooperation with the Southern District of New York.

Whether Salame will become the latest FTX executive to flip on S.B.F. is one of the biggest outstanding questions in the case. Salame has not been charged with a crime, but prosecutors have fingered him in court filings, portraying him (or “co-conspirator two” in the lingua franca of jurisprudence) as the Republican face of a sprawling operation to influence lawmakers and regulators, all while being illegally reimbursed by S.B.F in what prosecutors describe as a straw-donor scheme.

For months prior to the raid, I had been talking with lawyers connected to the case about why Salame had been so conspicuously silent, especially after his colleague Nishad Singh (“co-conspirator one”) pleaded guilty to wire fraud, conspiracies to commit fraud and money laundering, and—most worryingly for Salame—violating campaign finance laws. Until April 27, Salame’s fate was largely a mystery. The raid, of course, along with interviews with others in the couple’s orbit, suggests there is more conflict to come.

Both of them had long journeys to this purgatory they’ve found themselves in today. Salame was raised in the Berkshires and became something of a hometown hero, with his business success and restaurant openings chronicled closely by local media. As a kid, he practiced Tae Kwon Do, earning a 4th degree Black belt and competing in South Korea, and was proud of his work at local restaurants—washing dishes at a local diner, servicing tables, catering at a restaurant that he’d later buy. He stayed local after high school, enrolling at UMass Amherst with ambitions to become an accountant at Ernst & Young, then spent a few years making some good money at the crypto startup Circle, which is how he met the crew behind FTX and Alameda Research, S.B.F.’s crypto trading firm. He joined the leadership of the companies a few years later and became something of a utility player, using his social skills to schmooze Bahamian regulators and set up their subsidiary in the country, though he could strike colleagues as aloof.

Like Bond, Salame was described as a true crypto believer. It was through crypto circles, at various points in 2021, that people began to notice that Salame and Bond were not just FTX allies but were dating. Bond had a traditional Washington policymaker background—a few years in Big Law; counsel at the S.E.C.; a regulatory-affairs gig at Bloomberg LP—before she was chosen in 2020 to lead a new crypto trade group called the Association for Digital Asset Markets, of which FTX was a founding member. The two quickly became inseparable: Bond was frequently seen in the Bahamas, and Salame was spending a ton of time in Washington. He was very devoted to Bond’s two kids from a previous marriage. In 2022, Bond and Salame were spotted on TikTok participating in the Gumball 3000, the affected cross-country, 3000-mile luxury car race, which FTX sponsored.

Bond grew up in Port Jefferson, Long Island, and in the early summer, she decided that she’d try her luck at running for the congressional seat vacated by Lee Zeldin. It was a last-minute decision—she registered to vote in the state just a few days before the filing deadline—and the campaign lasted all of ten weeks. But the first-time candidate made up for her lack of preparation and political experience with her crypto connections—including Salame’s money. She hired Axiom, the powerful and expensive G.O.P. consulting firm led by Jeff Roe, who would effectively run her campaign along with a super PAC funded with $1 million from Salame, called Stand for New York. Friends previously understood her politics to be mostly bipartisan, and were confused when she ran as an ultra-MAGA America First candidate with endorsements from Trump Jr, Ric Grenell and Ted Cruz. Salame, for his part, didn’t just underwrite the effort. He was by her side every step of the way, like Jack-and-Jackie—appearing on campaign literature with her kids, convincing his network of friends and family to donate, and participating on campaign conference calls with her staffers. He was spotted all over the district that Long Island summer, marching in July 4th parades, visiting Greek festivals, and pressing the flesh with Tommy Tuberville and Trump Jr. You wouldn’t know they weren’t married.

It was a traditional, if lavishly-funded, House primary campaign, without a whiff of any scandal beyond some rookie struggles common to first-time candidates, according to people who worked on it. The closest controversy was the George Santos angle to this whole bid, which could be a legitimate issue for Bond given the D.O.J.’s pending campaign-finance charges against Santos. Earlier that summer, Bond had received some encouragement from allies of Kevin McCarthy to run against a, shall we say, problematic Santos in Long Island’s 3rd District—a less reliable Republican seat in a general election, but one where there was no strong candidate like McCarthy-favored Nick LaLota. But Bond, partially dissuaded by Elise Stefanik’s support for Santos, demurred, and decided to challenge LaLota instead. Santos and Bond ended up in an alliance that summer, of sorts: In fact, I’m told that the Santos and Bond campaigns ended up doing a so-called donor swap, wherein they encouraged one another’s max-out backers to donate to the other. (That’s why Salame’s parents, for instance, are also max-out contributors to Santos.) Alas, she got crushed by 20 points. Bond was stricken by the size of the loss.

Deaton, a linebacker-built, gay, Southern-reared operative who had worked for groups backed by Paul Singer, made introductions to key Republican super PACs and leaders, effectively serving as a proxy for the ascendant FTX executive. Nowadays, people closely tracking the case believe that Deaton could very well be ensnared in the FTX campaign-finance mess too, given how closely he and Salame worked together in 2022. Deaton hasn’t commented publicly, including for this story, but in one private conversation a few months ago with a well-wisher, Deaton told a confidante that he just hoped that Salame or Bond didn’t end up in jail.

Neither Salame nor Bond have said anything publicly since FTX’s collapse. It is unclear whether Bond will end up receiving any real prosecutorial scrutiny—she didn’t work for FTX full-time—but she is tied at the hip (and shares the same raided home, of course) with one of the top targets of investigators. Both Salame and Bond are also shepherded by the same lawyer, Jason Linder of Mayer Brown, who has tried his best to keep the two low profile. Linder didn’t return requests for comment on his clients’ behalf for this story.

Prosecutors may find it difficult to coax Salame, who was described by some former FTX colleagues as more obstinate and less able to be intimidated than, say, Singh. Can Salame be flipped? The core question for Deaton, Salame, Bond and the entire Republican side of the FTX political operation is whether that $25 million or so publicly donated by Salame in the 2022 midterms was actually his—or instead was the fruits of a straw-donor scheme, lubricated by the $55 million that Salame received in loans from Alameda Research. On Monday evening, Bankman-Fried’s lawyers offered their first defense against the campaign-finance and other allegations: “The allegations relating to [Salame] are also self-contradictory to the point of being incomprehensible and give no notice of what is actually being alleged.” Bankman-Fried’s lawyers asked in one of their many motions for more information on what exactly he and Salame were actually being accused of.

In the aftermath of FTX’s collapse following Election Day, Bond—who had taken a few months of leave from her lobbying group to run for Congress—formally resigned from the firm amid the scandal, recognizing the water she had taken on after the FTX blowup and her highly-partisan campaign. Salame, for his part, still has his half-dozen restaurant empire in downtown Lenox, at least until FTX debtors come calling. Most of all, the two of them still have each other: They share identical Twitter cover photos, featuring the two of them side-by-side like they’re atop a wedding cake.