The Final Days of S.B.F. & FTX

s.b.f sam bankman-fried
The more I read about the chaos at FTX, the more I got the sense that it was a freewheeling operation run by a group of kids who pretty much had no idea what they were doing most of the time. Photo: Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc/Getty Images
William D. Cohan
September 29, 2024

Sam Bankman-Fried, the convicted crypto mogul who is serving the first year of his 25-year prison sentence at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn—and who now shares accommodations with P. Diddy—has long argued that his former lawyers at Sullivan & Cromwell screwed him over. Namely, according to the S.B.F. worldview, S&C, now the counsel for the FTX debtors, urged him to file for bankruptcy and then worked too closely with both the debtors and federal prosecutors in the ongoing case against him, enriching themselves with exorbitant fees in the process. Was it duplicitous? Ass-covering? Or perfectly legal and righteous, as Judge Lewis Kaplan has suggested? S&C denies all of Sam’s allegations against the firm, of course, a position also affirmed by FTX’s court-appointed examiner, Robert Cleary. Regardless, the Sullivan & Cromwell argument is perhaps S.B.F.’s meatiest bone to pick in his ongoing effort to overturn his conviction and/or to get a new trial.