Crypto Criminal: The Conviction of Sam Bankman-Fried

As live tweeted and investigated from inside the SDNY courthouse

By: Matthew Russell Lee

Narrated by: Virtual Voice

When at last the Sam Bankman-Fried trial started on October 3, 2023 with jury selection, after Sam had been remanded to the MDC jail, the courtroom on the 26th floor was full, and an overflow room established on the 23rd.

The author went back and forth between them, and down to the Press Room he'd been admitted to after six months of covering cases here, after he was thrown out of the UN and took on this new identity.

Between the three locations he began to paint of picture of the trial, of Sam and the world around him. The portrait was made up of tweets or Xs, of vlogs filmed out on Foley Square and at the prisoners' entrance on Park Row.

An industry had grown up around the trial: journalists in from Australia, book authors, directors planning documentaries. In this it was like the Ghislaine Maxwell trial, except there was more money and zeitgeist in it, the protagonists younger and the intersection with culture more mainstream: Tom Brady, Larry David, Shaq; Amazon, Airbnb, the Miami Heat and the Kansas City Royals.

What did all this greed, all this willful blindness, say about the state of the nation and the world? He decided to write another, the one you are beginning reading now. He did not know then how it or he would turn out. It could have been called, Crypto Houdini. But it wasn't.