Former FTX Executive Ryan Salame Sentenced to 90 Months in Prison
justice.gov
justice.gov
7.5 years doesn't seem bad compared to what SBF got(25 years).
Close to a quarter of the sentence for helping the prosecution and signed a plea deal rather than go to court.
There are a few other former FTX employees who are a probably not very happy today. That's more than what the prosecution asked for in terms of length.
> . As part of his plea deal, he agreed to forfeit over $1.5 billion, which included fines, restitution to FTX debtors, and the surrender of several properties and assets (CoinDesk) (Cointelegraph) .
SO he had to give back almost all his assets as well.
[0] https://apnews.com/article/ftx-sam-bankman-fried-ryan-salame...
I couldn't remember the list of testifiers.
> salame ftx forfeit over $1.5 billionIf they were earned through fraud then they were never really his in the first place.
But they also did some really dumb delusional things, at least SBF seemed to actually get high on his own supply
I’m sure there was a smartest man or person in the room like with Enron and we’ll find out in a movie half a decade later
Almost eight years is a long time to hold onto a phrase in memory. You would want to repeat it to yourself every day, and not aloud. You would probably want to make sure someone who really cared about you had a copy.
On the other side, that is also a long time for crypto. If your chosen currency crashes or evaporates in the meantime, what was the point over stashing it somewhere in cash or some other liquid or easily liquidated collateral?
Perhaps “buying your mom” a load of extremely valuable jewelry that for some reason is still in the box and lives in the basement would be another gamble without as much risk.
So let's take your right to remain silent. You are SPECIFICALLY protected from exercising that right being used against you to assume guilt/impact the process. But with your right to a trial, somehow it is totally OK for the government to punish you for exercising your right. Twist it all you want. We don't punish people for exercising their right to remain silent. You should not be punished for exercising your rights.
Again, the court is REQUIRED to ask and you are REQUIRED to attest during a plea that you weren't coerced, even though everyone in the room knows you were threatened with the trial tax (often times in the tens of years of addition time in prison, which also brings your security classification up because classification is partly based on sentence length, meaning you will also then go to much rougher prisons), yet everyone just lets the entire process be one big lie.
So the process you promote 1. Takes away rights (you can't be said to truly have a right if the government can, at their whim, punish you for using it with tens of years in prison and with being sent to a much rougher prison). 2. Subverts the courts mechanisms to ensure fairness in that it turns the entire 'must ensure there wasn't coercion of a plea' into a giant lie by omission with everyone pretending they don't see it.
How rational are the economics? How much did the trial cost the taxpayer compared to how much is it going to cost to provide food, accommodation, recreation facilities, and round-the-clock security to someone for 25 years?
Bureau of Prisons suggests the incarceration will cost $1m ($40k * 25y): https://www.justice.gov/d9/2023-03/bop_se_fy_2024_pb_narrati...
That feels like an unusually long sentence but it was also an unusually long trial — 23 calendar days by my count, or one day per year of sentence, so maybe the trial costs versus prison cost match up if lesser crimes have shorter trials and shorter sentences.
They don’t just steal the customer money and buy themselves luxury real estate.
The fix guys are in trouble because they were both very corrupt and very bad at creating even the thinnest veneer of plausible deniability.
They were operating a shadow bank and unregulated securities exchange in the Bahamas and Hong Kong.
The media and regulators were willing to take a sympathetic view to all of the openly illegal banking and securities violations while times were good, but they were performing a highline act with no safety net the whole time.
I'm guessing you're not very familiar with games of chance.
So as you said the commingling was a large part of their crime.
But they did commit a bunch of straight up theft of customer funds to pay for marketing, political donations or stuff like houses for the employees.
The game you’re thinking of is roulette. Blackjack doesn’t have colors to bet on.
Putting it all on black is only theft if you lose. FedEx’s founder famously bet half his employee payroll on black and won.
FTX eventually lost.
I definitely consider it akin to theft even if people don't quite want to use the word.
And importantly even if you ignore the fact that people aren't being made whole by the bankruptcy's 100% claim, people still won't have gotten their money back for years. So people are still significantly harmed despite the criminal winning some illicit bets.
The money in your checking account or savings account isn't sitting in a vault, it's being loaned out to other customers of the bank immediately. But when you put money in an FDIC-insured bank account, you have the US Government guaranteeing that you'll get your money back even if the bank's investments of your money go bankrupt. Also, there's a complex set of regulated and audited independent counterparties with transparency and collateral agreements to separate custody, trade settlement, etc.
When you put money into a Bahamas based entity that is simultaneously the bank, exchange, broker, and hedgefund, you get none of these things, and so you just have to wait until it collapses and then hope to get your money back after bankruptcy court in a few years.
But yes, it's frequent enough that I hope it dissuades at least some would-be scammers not to risk it.
SBF put a ceiling on the sentencing because he was very guilty, fully in charge, and showed no remorse.
Edit: it’s 54 days per year, not 90%
> The Act amended 18 U.S.C. § 3624(b) so that federal inmates can earn up to 54 days of good time credit for every year of their imposed sentence rather than for every year of their sentenced served. For example, this change means that an offender sentenced to 10 years in prison and who earns the maximum good time credits each year will earn 540 days of credit.
Here’s a 45 minute video if you really want to know more
I know the "85%" meme that HN parrots incessantly but that’s not the fully story (not sure why anyone would expect programmers to be experts on federal incarceration nuances… I only am after a friend wound up in federal prison)
So if the gummint's legal eagles say that the past tense of "plead" is "pled", I guess that settles it ?
https://www.thehardylawfirm.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018...
$ bc
(90/12) * 365
2737.50000000000000000000> For persons convicted under civilian federal law after November 1, 1987, federal parole has been abolished, but the parole statutes continue to apply to prisoners who were grandfathered in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_parole_in_the_United_S...
However, there are other options for early release, namely the First Step Act.
> The Act amended 18 U.S.C. § 3624(b) so that federal inmates can earn up to 54 days of good time credit for every year of their imposed sentence rather than for every year of their sentenced served. For example, this change means that an offender sentenced to 10 years in prison and who earns the maximum good time credits each year will earn 540 days of credit.
1 year in halfway-home, pre-sentencing, drug program , up to fifteen percent time reduction for good behavior. it works out to only 80 percent of the sentence served.
- Age when sentenced/age when released with expected 'good behavior'
- Amount of money hidden away that the prosecution couldn't find
- Where you are serving your sentence.
7.5 years (~5 after time served/good behavior) when you're 30 years old and >$100MM in hidden assets after serving time at a non-pound-me-in-the-ass-playground might be worth it to some--obviously not you, but maybe some.
This is false. He agreed to forfeit over $1.5B in assessts. I doubt he has much if anything left at this point.
https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2023/09/07/ex-ftx-executive-...
EDIT
:) Fine
https://downloads.coindesk.com/legal/2023.09.07%20Signed%20M...
Page 2 second paragraph....
It says "Could " Do people even read the headlines they link to? The DOJ link did not mention giving up everything. It said restitution of millions.
> The defendant hereby admits the forfeiture allegation with respect to Count Two of the Information and agrees to forfeit to the United States, pursuant to Title 18, United States Code, Section 982(a)(1), a sum of money equal to $1,555,186,143 in United States currency, representing property involved in said offense (the "Money Judgment"
https://downloads.coindesk.com/legal/2023.09.07%20Signed%20M...
I don't think it's possible for a billionaire to cease being rich.
It's the same situation here. He took money that was due to one group of people and paid some of it to another group of people. This idea that if people make a net profit then it's basically ok even though he took some of their money is totally unsuported by the law for good reason.
This is an example of his character:
A new drug comes before the FDA for approval, and it is opened up for comment. Shkreli lodges an objection to approval of this drug.
Why? Because it's unsafe? No - trials thus far have shown it to be safer than the existing drug options.
Why? Because it's less effective? No - it's also been shown to be more effective than existing drugs.
Perhaps it's more expensive? No - cost of R&D and production, and estimated retail costs are expected to be lower than existing drugs.
Huh, odd. So why in this case would Shkreli oppose this drug getting to the market?
The only reason he lodged an appeal with the FDA had nothing to do with the drug, but was because he and his company had just bought the patent to one of those 'existing drugs' referenced, and this new drug coming to market would crater the demand for his drug, and torpedo the profitability of his investment in buying the patent.
Fuck Martin Shkreli.
Legitimate Source? Your link says that he _could_, multiple times. The article from the Justice Dept in OP says about 11 million.
Edit: Patent edited for a source, but still, Salame didn't pay the full $1.5B, as per parent's article:
> Should Salame pay the $6 million and turn over the various properties by the set deadlines – referred to as the substitute assets – he will be off the hook for the full amount, a DOJ filing said. "Upon receipt of the payment ... the [U.S.] shall accept the Payment and Substitute Assets in full satisfaction of the Money Judgement," the filing said.
So, he _didn't _ actually pay $1.5B. He may have agreed to forfeit it, but he still didn't have to pay that much, which was the point of GP's comment.
> Should Salame pay the $6 million and turn over the various properties by the set deadlines – referred to as the substitute assets – he will be off the hook for the full amount, a DOJ filing said. "Upon receipt of the payment ... the [U.S.] shall accept the Payment and Substitute Assets in full satisfaction of the Money Judgement," the filing said.
> In addition to the prison term, SALAME, 30, of Potomac, Maryland, was sentenced to three years of supervised release and ordered to pay more than $6 million in forfeiture and more than $5 million in restitution.
Salame was not extradited, so in his case, the US prosecutors could proceed with the campaign finance charges. That process ended with a guilty plea rather than a trial.
People will speculate about a conspiracy to keep the campaign stuff away from trial, but it all seems pretty routine to me.
And in general his sentencing was about whether they were going to put him away for a defacto life sentence or not. And I'm not sure that more charges for the same crime spree would affect that.