Since Sam Bankman-Fried was convicted of fraud last year, he has hired a new lawyer known for showing off in court. A group of sympathetic law professors has pressed for a reconsideration of his actions. And his parents have turned to former employees of FTX, the doomed cryptocurrency exchange he founded, for help.
From a federal detention center in Brooklyn, Mr. Bankman-Fried, 31, has continued to fight his case behind the scenes as he aims for a lighter sentence and prepares to appeal his conviction. On Tuesday, his lawyers filed a legal brief in US District Court in Manhattan, arguing that he should be sentenced to between five and a quarter and six and a half years in prison.
Mr Bankman-Fried is “deeply, deeply” sorry for “the pain he has caused over the past two years”, the note said. “His sole focus after the collapse of FTX was to make customers whole.”
The testimony was a crucial step before Mr. Bankman-Fried’s sentencing on March 28, when the federal judge overseeing his case, Lewis A. Kaplan, will decide how long to jail the onetime billionaire on charges that carry a maximum prison term. 110 years old. But it was only one point in a strategy orchestrated by Mr. Bankman-Fried’s family and friends to overturn his conviction and create a public reappraisal of his leadership of FTX.
Since last year’s trial, Mr. Bankman-Fried has hired Marc Mukasey, who once represented former President Donald J. Trump, to oversee his sentencing, as well as a separate lawyer at the law firm Shapiro Arato Bach to handle the appeal. His parents, Stanford University law professors Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried, have also been involved in the defense, helping people write letters vouching for their son’s character included in the sentencing memorandum.
In an interview, Natalie Tien, a former assistant to Mr. Bankman-Fried at FTX, said she had written a letter about the memo after exchanging emails with Mr. Bankman and Ms. Fried.
“I don’t hold a grudge against him and I feel bad for his parents,” Ms Tien said.
A spokesman for Mr. Bankman-Fried declined to comment. Representatives for Mr. Bankman and Ms. Fried did not respond to requests for comment.
Federal prosecutors are set to outline their own sentencing recommendation on March 15. But according to Mr. Bankman-Fried’s memo, a probation officer has already recommended a 100-year sentence, a sentence his lawyers call “barbaric.”
Even if Judge Kaplan decides not to impose the maximum sentence, Mr. Bankman-Fried could face decades behind bars.
The judge “could still impose a very serious sentence given how young Mr. Bankman-Fried is — say, a 30- or 35-year sentence,” said Miriam Baer, ​​an associate dean at Brooklyn Law School.
A spokesman for Damian Williams, the US attorney for the Southern District of New York, declined to comment.
Before the collapse of FTX in November 2022, Mr. Bankman-Fried was one of the most prominent figures in the renegade crypto industry, a widely famous billionaire whose face was plastered on billboards and magazine covers.
In October, a federal jury convicted him of stealing $8 billion from FTX customers to fund political contributions, investments in other companies and luxury real estate purchases.
Mr Bankman-Fried has maintained his innocence and pledged to appeal. This month, he replaced his lawyers, Mark Cohen and Christian Everdell, with Mr. Mukasey, who is representing another deposed crypto tycoon in a separate case and has a reputation for dynamic court presentations.
Last year, Mr. Mukasey scored a victory defending Trevor Milton, the founder of electric truck maker Nikola, who was sentenced in 2022 for defrauding investors. A federal judge sentenced Mr. Milton in December to four years in prison, far less than the 11 years prosecutors had sought.
Working alongside Mr. Mukasey is an appellate attorney and former prosecutor, Alexandra Shapiro, who is a partner at Shapiro Arato Bach. Mr. Bankman-Fried is expected to file his appeal after sentencing.
Mr. Bankman and Ms. Fried have also played a behind-the-scenes role. Last month, Ms. Tien said, she received a message from one of Mr. Bankman-Fried’s supporters asking if he would help with the memo. She then received a follow-up email from the FTX founder’s parents explaining the sentencing process and urging her to write “from the heart” about their son.
It was “kind of like testing the waters,” Ms. Tien said in an interview. “I almost said yes immediately.”
Ms. Tien was one of 29 people who wrote letters for the memo, including Mr. Bankman-Fried’s parents, his younger brother and several former colleagues. She called him kind and compassionate and said he “never acted out of greed or self-interest.”
In the deposition, Mr. Mukasey cited the letters to paint Mr. Bankman-Fried as a hard-working, altruistic billionaire who avoided the trappings of fame and fortune. He also argued that some oddities in the tycoon’s behavior could be explained by “neurodiversity”.
Mr. Bankman-Fried has “outward features typical of neurodiversity, such as inconsistent eye contact,” the memo said. “May be perceived as abrupt, dismissive, evasive, aloof, or indifferent.”
Outside the formal court process, law professors who know Mr. Bankman-Fried’s parents have also pressed his case.
In January, two close family friends, Yale Law professor Ian Ayres and Stanford law professor John Donohue, wrote an essay for the Project Syndicate website arguing that “all along” FTX had enough assets to make its customers complete. Mr. Mukasey echoed the memo.
“Whatever else can be said about Bankman-Fried, he was a brilliant businessman,” wrote Messrs. Ayres and Donohue.
Another law professor, Jonathan Lipson at Temple University, said in an interview that he was working with David Skeel of the University of Pennsylvania law school on an academic paper critical of Sullivan & Cromwell, the law firm overseeing the FTX bankruptcy. .
In September, Mr. Lipson wrote a brief in the bankruptcy case arguing for the appointment of an independent examiner to look into Sullivan & Cromwell’s actions, including its close cooperation with federal prosecutors. He said he had spoken to Mr. Bankman-Fried and his mother last year after another Stanford law professor contacted him about the case and offered to put them in touch.
In their op-ed, Mr. Lipson and Mr. Skeel argue that Sullivan & Cromwell “may have perverted the criminal justice process” by giving prosecutors broad access to FTX’s resources and data, according to an unpublished draft shared with New York Times.
A spokesman for Sullivan & Cromwell declined to comment. In court filings, prosecutors described the sharing of information as “standard practices by companies cooperating in an investigation.”
Mr. Bankman-Fried faces great odds. Criminal convictions are rarely overturned on appeal.
Since last summer, he has been housed at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where he has spent much of his time working on the case, a person with knowledge of the matter said. Mr. Bankman-Fried also shared crypto-buying tips with the watchdogs, the person said, suggesting investments in Solana digital currency.
This month, Mr. Bankman-Fried left the detention center for his first public appearance since the trial, a hearing to authorize his new legal representation. In a Manhattan courtroom, he appeared clean-shaven and wearing a loose brown prison uniform. Sometimes he turned and smiled at reporters sitting in the gallery.
J. Edward Moreno contributed to the report.
