Sam Bankman-Fried’s final con game
If you are a 31-year-old who is charged with major crimes, the normal course of action is to take a plea deal in order to reduce the sentence, and then hope for the best before the judge. You will probably also resign yourself to spending decades in prison. Unless you are rich and connected, of course. Then you may try a different strategy.
Take Sam Bankman-Fried. Even though he faced a mountain of evidence showing he committed one of the biggest frauds in U.S. history, he chose to roll the dice on a three-week trial. For his trouble, Bankman-Fried got rung up by a jury in less than four hours. And now that he faces a maximum sentence of 100 years or more when he goes before a judge next month, he is doing something else only wealthy and entitled people can do. He is trying to spin his way out of the whole mess.
As the New York Times reported on Tuesday night, Bankman-Fried has hired "a new lawyer known for courtroom showmanship" and another high-flying attorney to work on a long-shot appeal. He also has his law professor parents—the Bay Area power couple known as "Barb and Joe" to fellow denizens of Stanford's campus—working on legal issues, and arranging a sympathy campaign to show why everyone is wrong about the poor lad.
All of this is a "long-shot strategy orchestrated by Mr. Bankman-Fried’s family and friends to reverse his conviction and engineer a public reappraisal of his leadership at FTX." The Times doesn't acknowledge it is a vehicle for this strategy—as evidenced by Bankman-Fried's team waiting for its sympathetic article to drop before filing a trove of letters and arguments in court to amplify their position. And nor does its article raise the awkward question of how the Bankman-Fried clan is paying for those gold-plated lawyers and a PR firm whose monthly retainers start at $50,000.
The likely answer is that Bankman-Fried's parents are footing the bills with the help of $10 million they pressed him to pay his father for legal work—money that came from the treasuries of the crypto companies that collapsed under a mountain of fraud. This is bad enough but even more obnoxious when you read things like this: "His lawyers said Bankman-Fried wasn’t motivated by greed but by a desire to better the world through philanthropic giving. Material items and extravagance did nothing for him, they said."
Really? Recall this is the same guy who lived in a luxury villa and liked to jet around the world, rubbing shoulders at lavish events with the likes of Tom Brady or Katy Perry. Nothing material or extravagant about that. And let's not forget Bankman-Fried's parents are being sued by the FTX estate not only for the return of the $10 million (in the case of his father) but for a $16.4 million mansion in the Bahamas that is in their name.
All of this makes the parents' current attempt to "engineer a public reappraisal" of their Sam so galling. They remind us at all turns how Sam should not be punished for robbing his customers because he is on the spectrum or because he has been the victim of cruel media caricatures. And so on. What they won't say is that Sam is a 31-year-old man who grew up with every privilege in the world, and has shown every indication of being a liar and a sociopath.
You can't fault Barb and Joe for doing all they can to protect their child. Any parent would do the same. But if they really wanted to show their love and help their son, they could—just once—stop telling Sam how special he is.
Jeff John Roberts
jeff.roberts@fortune.com
@jeffjohnroberts
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com