The last we saw of Sam Bankman-Fried, he was not at his best. He’d been in court for some six weeks watching a parade of his former best friends — as well as his ex, Caroline Ellison — point him out as the mastermind of a $14 billion fraud scheme. For as long as he was in the courtroom, though, he had been in a Brooklyn jail cell for even longer — since August 11 — after he admitted to leaking Ellison’s diary entries to the New York Times. He looked twitchy, cantankerous; the baggy suit he wore looked like it made him uncomfortable, and the strange helmetlike jailhouse haircut he’d received some six weeks earlier was only starting to grow in. After all that, the jury took less than five hours to find him guilty on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy — a decision that could potentially land him in prison for the remainder of his life.
Now we can see what just six months of jail time has done to a former crypto billionaire.
Over the weekend, crypto influencer Tiffany Fong posted a picture of SBF that, she says, was taken on December 17 and was provided by a former fellow inmate of his who goes by G Lock. The picture shows him looking thin, with his arms and legs appearing bony. He’s sporting a scraggly beard and wearing basketball shorts and a gray T-shirt. In an interview with Fong, the former inmate makes it sound like SBF is having a rough time in prison — he’s lost a lot of weight and doesn’t shower much. The snippets of the interview with Fong also allude to “one incident” of apparent violence — he didn’t elaborate on that in the clip — and that SBF has a good reputation as someone who doesn’t snitch on fellow inmates. Fong also goes on to say that in the full interview, G Lock told her that SBF watched the 60 Minutes interview with Michael Lewis just days before the trial started.
It turns out this is going to be a busy week for SBF. On Wednesday, the convicted fraudster will appear before Judge Lewis Kaplan for a hearing about one of his failed legal arguments with his new counsel, Marc Mukasey and Torrey Young, according to filings earlier this month. And in a separate federal case, brought in Florida court, lawyers for his victims revealed that Ellison has been cooperating to expose even more about SBF’s financial schemes, including a complicated deal to allegedly profit off selling the stablecoin Tether.
SBF’s next big hearing is on March 28, when Judge Kaplan is set to deliver his sentence. Although he could face more than 100 years in prison, he probably won’t receive that much — white-collar fraudsters typically see only a fraction of the maximum sentence.
