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The U.S. attorney’s office has already negotiated guilty pleas from four of Bankman-Fried’s former top lieutenants, and three of them will be testifying against him. This suggests Bankman-Fried’s lawyers have their work cut out over the course of what is set to be a six-week trial.
The 31-year-old’s stunning rise to become the multibillionaire face of a new industry was nearly as dramatic as his fall just 11 months ago.
He went from hobnobbing with world leaders, corporate titans and celebrities from his home base in a $40 million Bahamian penthouse to subsisting on peanut butter and bread in a notoriously squalid Brooklyn jail.
The self-described effective altruist who said he was going to use his riches to secure humanity’s future now stands accused of orchestrating one of the biggest financial frauds in history. Federal prosecutors, financial regulators he once courted, and a handful of his former top lieutenants all say he used customer money from FTX, his crypto trading platform, to cover bad bets by his hedge fund, make real estate purchases, and contribute lavishly to political candidates.
He has pleaded not guilty to a sweeping set of charges, including conspiracy, fraud and money laundering.
Ellison is expected to be a central figure in Bankman-Fried’s trial as the head of Alameda Research. The trading firm allegedly traded away billions of dollars in FTX customer funds, resulting in the exchange’s insolvency and subsequent collapse.
She is also the former romantic partner of Bankman-Fried and lived with him and other top FTX executives in the now infamous Bahamian penthouse.
After Bankman-Fried leaked Ellison’s private diary entries to the New York Times in August, presiding Judge Lewis A. Kaplan ruled he had violated his house arrest and engaged in witness tampering, which led to his jailing.
Along with FTX co-founder Gary Wang (see below), Ellison pleaded guilty to fraud in December and has been cooperating with prosecutors, U.S. attorneys say. She has publicly expressed regret for defrauding FTX customers and investors.
Bankman is the father of Sam Bankman-Fried and a longtime Stanford law professor, specializing in tax law and policy.
Bankman was an involved member of the FTX enterprise. A recent lawsuit against him and his wife, fellow law professor Barbara Fried, alleges that he helped coordinate the company’s philanthropic efforts, oversaw hundreds of millions of dollars in loans given to top employees, and assisted in the cover up amid allegations of money laundering and price manipulation.
Bankman lives with his wife in their Palo Alto home, which housed their son in the months leading up to trial before he was jailed for witness tampering.
He is an active member of Stanford’s faculty but will not teach courses this year.
Fried also teaches law at Stanford and is considered a leading scholar of legal ethics. Like her husband, she is not slated to teach courses this year but remains an active member of the faculty.
According to the recent lawsuit against both parents, Fried oversaw FTX’s political donations and coached her son and other executives on how to skirt federal disclosure requirements. A Department of Justice investigation alleges Bankman-Fried routed over $100 million to both Democratic and Republican candidates, in part through donations made by his top two lieutenants that were later reimbursed.
Fried is also alleged to have accepted millions of dollars in gifts from her son’s crypto exchange, but at no point was she an official employee of FTX.
A federal judge for the Southern District of New York, Kaplan is no stranger to high-profile cases and notorious defendants. He has overseen E. Jean Carroll’s trial against former president Donald Trump, Virginia Giuffre’s trial against Prince Andrew, the first case against a Guantánamo Bay detainee and a number of cases involving New York mafia members.
He has served as a federal judge since 1994, when he was appointed by President Bill Clinton.
Two years into the job as arguably the most important federal prosecutor in the country, the first Black U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York has already overseen several well-known cases.
They include the successful prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell, corruption charges against former New York lieutenant governor Brian Benjamin, and most recently, bribery charges against Sen. Bob Menendez (D-N.J.). He has placed an emphasis on speed, indicting Bankman-Fried just over a month after his firm collapsed, and he has promised a “relentless” focus on financial misconduct.
Williams’s case against Bankman-Fried — for what the prosecutor called one of the biggest financial frauds in history — may be his biggest test yet.
The former federal prosecutor has experience facing off against Williams, defending Ghislaine Maxwell in the criminal case against her. Williams triumphed in that showdown, which resulted in a sentence for Maxwell of 20 years on sex trafficking charges for aiding Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse of underage girls.
Cohen is now leading the defense of Bankman-Fried and already has experienced setbacks, including Kaplan’s order last August to send the defendant to a Brooklyn jail.
The former co-CEO of FTX’s Bahamian subsidiary was among the latest of Bankman-Fried’s former lieutenants to plead guilty to criminal charges. In a Manhattan courtroom in September, he admitted to operating an unlicensed money-transmitting business and violating campaign-finance law.
Salame had become one of the top Republican donors in the country, doling out more than $23 million in the 2022 elections. In pleading guilty, Salame admitted that FTX illegally reimbursed him for the donations.
He agreed to forfeit $1.5 billion, pay $5.6 million in restitution to FTX and another $6 million as a fine, and give up property and a Porsche.
But unlike the other three former top FTX executives, Salame is not cooperating with prosecutors and will not be testifying on their behalf against Bankman-Fried. He faces up to 10 years in prison and will be sentenced in March.
A high school friend of Bankman-Fried’s younger brother, Singh co-founded FTX and went on to serve as engineering chief.
He pleaded guilty in February to six charges, including making millions of dollars in political contributions to Democrats and left-leaning groups for which he was later reimbursed, in violation of federal campaign finance law.
His lawyers released a statement at the time saying he was “deeply sorry” and “wants to do everything he can to make things right for victims.” He has been cooperating with the prosecution and is expected to testify on its behalf.
A lesser-known member of Bankman-Fried’s inner circle, Wang was a co-founder and chief technology officer of FTX.
When Bankman-Fried left the Wall Street firm Jane Street in 2017 to start his crypto exchange and trading firm, Alameda Research, Wang left Google to join him. The two had been fraternity brothers and roommates at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Wang, along with Ellison, pleaded guilty to fraud in December, and has since been cooperating with federal authorities, U.S. attorneys say.
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