Sam Bankman-Fried headed to jail on Friday after a judge sided with a request by federal prosecutors to revoke the FTX founder’s bail over alleged witness tampering. Bankman-Fried was remanded to custody directly from a court hearing in Latest York and sent to Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center, Bureau of Prisons records show.
Judge Lewis Kaplan denied Bankman-Fried’s request for delayed detention pending an appeal. Unless the appeal is successful, he is predicted to remain in custody until his criminal trial, which is due to begin on Oct. 2.
“My conclusion is there’s probable cause to imagine the defendant tried to tamper with witnesses no less than twice,” said Judge Kaplan during his ruling.
Because the court marshals took Bankman-Fried into custody at the tip of the hearing, the defendant took off his blazer, tie, emptied his pockets, and appeared to remove his shoes. Bankman-Fried’s parents were each within the gallery. His mother had her face buried in her hands for much of Judge Kaplan’s lengthy ruling.
The federal government had requested that Bankman-Fried be remanded to a jail in Putnam, Latest York, where he’d have access to a laptop with web access for defense preparation, as opposed to sending him to the Metropolitan Detention Center, the power closest to the courthouse which has limited web access for prisoners.
Courtroom scene during hearing for Samuel Bankman-Fried in Latest York, August 11, 2023.
Since his arrest in December, Bankman-Fried had been out on a $250 million bail package which requires him to remain at his parents’ Palo Alto, California house.
Bankman-Fried’s court appearance on Friday is the newest in a series of pre-trial hearings related to the ex-billionaire’s continued dealings with the press – exchanges which the Justice Department characterizes as a “pattern of witness tampering and evading his bail conditions.”
Judge Kaplan previously issued a direct and stern warning to Bankman-Fried in July over his conversations with the media.
Members of the press, including counsel for The Latest York Times and the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, had filed letters objecting to Bankman-Fried’s detention, citing free speech concerns. Defense attorneys had similarly argued that Bankman-Fried was asserting his first amendment right and didn’t violate any terms of his bail conditions by speaking with journalists.
The defense had also been hoping that the invention process would help Bankman-Fried’s case.
Lawyers representing the previous FTX chief stipulated that with Bankman-Fried jailed, he wouldn’t give you the option to properly prepare for his trial due to the mountainous amounts of discovery documents only accessible via a pc with web access.
Within the motion requesting Bankman-Fried’s detention, the federal government said that, over the last several months, the defendant had sent over 100 emails to the media and had made over 1,000 phone calls to members of the press. The ultimate straw, according to prosecutors, was Bankman-Fried leaking private diary entries of his ex-girlfriend, Caroline Ellison, to the Latest York Times. Ellison pleaded guilty to federal charges in December 2022.
Ellison, who can also be the previous chief executive of Bankman-Fried’s failed crypto hedge fund, Alameda Research, has been cooperating with the federal government since December and is predicted to be a star witness for the prosecution.
During his 33-minute ruling, Judge Kaplan walked through his rationale as to why probable cause for witness tampering had been met by the prosecution, adding that Bankman-Fried’s contribution to the Ellison story was designed to “hurt” and “discredit” a witness.
“Faced with a series of conditions meant to limit the defendant’s use of the web and the phone, the defendant pivoted to in-person machinations,” the prosecution said of Bankman-Fried, whose revised bail conditions include restricted web access and a ban from smartphone use.
The federal government added that Bankman-Fried had over 100 phone calls with one in all the authors of the Times story prior to publication – a lot of which lasted for about 20 minutes.
The prosecution described the trouble by Bankman-Fried – who faces several wire and securities fraud charges related to the alleged multibillion-dollar FTX fraud – as an attempt to discredit Ellison, characterizing it as a “technique of indirect witness intimidation through the press.”
It’s an argument that proved sufficient to persuade Judge Kaplan to send Bankman-Fried to jail ahead of his trial.
The prosecution has had to cull charges twice to comply with an extradition agreement inked with The Bahamas – where Bankman-Fried was previously held in custody. The federal government told the Judge in a letter that next week it plans to file a latest superseding indictment.