Sam Bankman-Fried, the convicted crypto mogul who is serving the first year of his 25-year prison sentence at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn—and who now shares accommodations with P. Diddy—has long argued that his former lawyers at Sullivan & Cromwell screwed him over. Namely, according to the S.B.F. worldview, S&C, now the counsel for the FTX debtors, urged him to file for bankruptcy and then worked too closely with both the debtors and federal prosecutors in the ongoing case against him, enriching themselves with exorbitant fees in the process. Was it duplicitous? Ass-covering? Or perfectly legal and righteous, as Judge Lewis Kaplan has suggested? S&C denies all of Sam’s allegations against the firm, of course, a position also affirmed by FTX’s court-appointed examiner, Robert Cleary. Regardless, the Sullivan & Cromwell argument is perhaps S.B.F.’s meatiest bone to pick in his ongoing effort to overturn his conviction and/or to get a new trial. 

Sam has argued that his FTX empire was not insolvent at the time of the bankruptcy filing, per se, but was rather facing a liquidity crisis that he was trying to address by attempting to raise an additional $4 billion in fresh capital. A distinction without a difference, perhaps, in the case of a bank run. But according to S.B.F., he was unable to raise more money not because the market had frozen him out, but due to other pressures. He has asserted repeatedly that the rug was pulled out from under him in the early morning hours of November 10, 2022, when John J. Ray III, the bankruptcy specialist who famously salvaged Enron, urged him—in concert with S&C and Sam’s own attorneys at Paul Weiss—in the strongest possible terms to sign documentation that would make Ray the new C.E.O. of FTX. “They also called many of my friends, coworkers, and family members, pressuring them to pressure me to file, some of whom were emotionally damaged by the pressure,” Sam explained in a draft of testimony he planned to give to Congress on December 12, 2022. (He was arrested instead.) “Some of them came to me, crying.”