Lawyers for the U.S. Attorney’s office entered into evidence a series of photos featuring the $35 million penthouse where Sam Bankman-Fried and his fellow co-workers resided.
Source: SDNY
Sam Bankman-Fried has traded a luxury penthouse in the Bahamas for a decidedly different top-floor setting: a criminal courtroom in downtown Manhattan.
He’s roughly 1,100 miles away from the tropical paradise he called home until late last year, and is facing a potential lifetime in prison if convicted for financial crimes tied to the collapse of cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which was once valued at $32 billion.
Bankman-Fried, 31, is spending much of his time now on the 26th floor of 500 Pearl Street, one of two federal courthouses of the Southern District of New York. He sits just feet away from 12 jurors who will decide his fate.
Bankman-Fried, who faces seven federal fraud charges, has pleaded not guilty.
Lawyers for the U.S. Attorney’s office entered into evidence a series of photos featuring the $35 million penthouse where Sam Bankman-Fried and his fellow co-workers resided.
Source: SDNY
A big part of Bankman-Fried’s journey traces back to the $35 million Bahamian property he shared with nine people, including friends from high school, an ex-girlfriend, college roommates and top execs at FTX and sister hedge fund Alameda Research.
Many of his former bunkmates now comprise the prosecution’s star witness list. Gary Wang, the lesser-known co-founder of FTX and Alameda and a roommate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, took the stand last week and will appear again on Tuesday. Adam Yedidia, a senior FTX developer and also a roommate at MIT, testified last Wednesday and Thursday. And then there’s Caroline Ellison, who ran Alameda and had been Bankman-Fried’s girlfriend. She’s slated to appear on Tuesday.
Lawyers for the U.S. Attorney’s office entered into evidence photos featuring Sam Bankman-Fried and his fellow co-workers at their shared $35 million Bahamian penthouse.
SDNY
The group was cliquey, and became even more intimate during the Covid outbreak, as the 20-somethings fled Hong Kong to ride out the pandemic in the Caribbean. They freely mixed work with pleasure, and some reports of their shared time together on the island of New Providence chronicle sexual explorations.
During the first week of Bankman-Fried’s criminal trial, prosecutors were focused on how Bankman-Fried paid for the dwelling worth tens of millions of dollars.
Lawyers for the U.S. Attorney’s office entered into evidence a series of photos featuring the $35 million penthouse where Sam Bankman-Fried and his fellow co-workers resided.
Source: SDNY
Lawyers for the U.S. Attorney’s office entered into evidence a series of photos featuring the penthouse condo in a building dubbed the “Orchid,” where Bankman-Fried and his fellow co-workers resided. The 11,500-square foot apartment overlooks the marina and the Atlantic Ocean.
The defense tried to strike some of the images, concerned that photos featuring yachts in the background might be mistaken for property owned by Bankman-Fried. The request was denied by Judge Lewis Kaplan.
Lawyers for the U.S. Attorney’s office entered into evidence a series of photos featuring the $35 million penthouse where Sam Bankman-Fried and his fellow co-workers resided.
Source: SDNY
‘People of the House’
Yedidia, the second witness called to the stand by the government, testified that Bankman-Fried’s crypto hedge fund ultimately paid for their opulent surroundings.
In his testimony, Yedidia recalled a group Signal thread labeled “People of the House,” which referred to Bankman-Fried’s $35 million penthouse. In a screenshot of a text exchange, admitted as evidence by the government, Bankman-Fried said he’d “been assuming that it’s basically just Alameda paying for it in the end.”
Exhibit from the prosecution shows Signal thread called “People of the House,” referring to Bankman-Fried’s $35 million penthouse, where many employees lived.
Source: SDNY
A superseding indictment claims Bankman-Fried misused billions of dollars worth of customer money for his personal benefit, including purchasing more than $200 million on upscale real estate properties in the Bahamas and making more than $100 million in campaign contributions for the 2022 midterm elections.
Another estimate by Bahamian lawyers claims Bankman-Fried and Ryan Salame, a former top FTX executive, spent $256.3 million to buy and maintain 35 different properties across New Providence — real estate that Bahamian regulators wanted to retrieve in FTX’s U.S. bankruptcy protection proceedings.
Lawyers for the U.S. Attorney’s office entered into evidence a series of photos featuring the $35 million penthouse where Sam Bankman-Fried and his fellow co-workers resided.
Source: SDNY
Separate to the criminal case, the bankruptcy estate of FTX has independently alleged that Bankman-Fried’s parents, Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried, “explo