Sam Bankman-Fried’s fate is now officially in the hands of a jury of his peers.
Over the past four weeks in a Manhattan federal court, the 12 jurors and five alternates have sat through more than 60 hours of testimony about the rise and fall of a multibillion-dollar crypto business empire and the person at the center of it all.
On Thursday, after delivering about three hours of dense oral instructions to the jury, Judge Lewis Kaplan released the alternate jurors and sent the 12 jurors to begin deliberations.
Kaplan said jurors are allowed to deliberate until 8 pm ET Thursday, but that they are under no obligation to do so.
Prosecutors have told the jury that 31-year-old Bankman-Fried orchestrated a yearslong fraud — building a “pyramid of deceit” — that ultimately crumbled when the market soured and his luck ran out.
They’ve called up witnesses who were longtime friends and business partners who, as part of their plea agreements, pointed the finger directly at Bankman-Fried as the guy calling the shots at his crypto firms, FTX and Alameda Research.
Their alleged crimes — stealing money from customer accounts and lying about it — were done at the direction of Bankman-Fried, they said.
Bankman-Fried has pleaded not guilty to seven federal counts of fraud and conspiracy, and he has broadcast to just about anyone who’ll listen his version of the events that landed both companies in bankruptcy. According to him, the mistakes that brought down FTX and Alameda were problematic, perhaps, but not illegal — the kind of sloppy errors that startups are prone to.
Chief among those errors, according to his own testimony, was was not hiring a dedicated risk management team.
“I made a number of small mistakes and a number of larger mistakes,” Bankman-Fried said on the stand last week. “By far the biggest mistake was we did not have a dedicated risk management team, we didn’t have a chief risk officer.”
But on Thursday, US Assistant Attorney Danielle Sassoon described that as a strategy rather than a mistake.
“When you’re embezzling customer money, of course you’re not going to hire a risk officer,” she said. “You can’t walk into a jewelry store, steal a diamond necklace, then walk out and say there was no security guard.”
Lead defense attorney Mark Cohen has told the jury that the government’s portrayal of his client as a “movie villain” is wrong. Although Bankman-Fried made mistakes, he never defrauded anyone, Cohen told jurors.
“In the real world — unlike the movie world — things can get messy,” Cohen said. “Poor risk management is not a crime.”
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