Disgraced former cryptocurrency billionaire Sam Bankman-Fried is serving a 25-year sentence at the Metropolitan Detention Center in New York City. He is learning things like sports betting and a drug called “deuce,” and he misses his teddy bear Manfred very much.
In a big house, it all comes down to the little things. For example, pillows. When disgraced cryptocurrency kingpin Sam Bankman-Fried detailed his experience in a hellish Bahamian prison to Forbes After his arrest in December 2022, one of the first things he mentioned was that he had to crumple the navy suit he wore in court to find a place to rest his head.
SBF, who is now serving a 25-year sentence for fraud at the famous Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC) in Brooklyn, former residence of Bernie Madoff, Jeffrey Epstein and R. Kelly, is once again complaining about the lack of pillows in prison. “What the hell is going on? Don’t they let us have pillows? Are we allowed to sleep?” he writes in a prison diary that he is selling to the media.
In the diary, SBF complains at length that sleeping without a pillow or a stuffed animal, specifically a stuffed bear named “Manfred,” is almost impossible for him and has caused back pain. The former billionaire, who in 2021 had a fortune of up to $26.5 billion, always an entrepreneur, details how he gave two muffins to a fellow prisoner who was high and hungry in exchange for a pillow made from leftover mattress filling inside. of a t-shirt.
Forbes received three chapters of SBF’s prison diary via email from his father, Joe Bankman, who has hired Walter Pavlo, a Forbes contributor who writes and speaks on prison issues, and is himself a convicted white-collar criminal. , as a consultant to the fallen cryptocurrency titan. SBF’s motive for seeking a publisher for its newspapers is uncertain. It is certainly not monetary. As part of the verdict for his role in the FTX fraud, SBF faces the loss of $11 billion in addition to his two and a half decades in prison. The billions being returned to FTX victims during the bankruptcy process don’t count. So while your memoir could be worth up to a seven-figure advance to a publisher, according to one agent, you won’t see any money.
Much of SBF’s writing focuses on his cellmates, one of whom he calls Harry, a kind but loud and muscular homophobe paradoxically obsessed with the 2018 Freddie Mercury biopic. Bohemian Rhapsody . Harry and many of the inmates surrounding SBF spend much of their time watching sports and betting on games. Bankman-Fried, who stole billions of dollars from his investors to make massive bets on cryptocurrencies, writes about his sports bets with disdain: “One day, Harry came to me with a new betting strategy: he would bet $100. If he lost, he would bet $250, and then $600, etc., until he won, and eventually he would win, so he was almost certainly going to win. make money doing it. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that there was, in fact, a name for this strategy: “the gambler’s fallacy.”
Bankman-Fried’s prison diary also speaks of the “pathological” lack of clocks at the MDC. Bankman-Fried writes: “It’s easy to lose track of time in prison. In fact, it is difficult to keep track of time in prison. The minutes, hours, days, months, years and decades pass without anything marking them. It’s as if the prison wants to emphasize to you how irrelevant you are to the world of extroverts, and how irrelevant you are to you, now that you’re an introvert, making it clear to you that even the arbitrary temporal conventions of society no longer matter to your life. . Days are a concept for extroverts.”
Driven to distraction by the lack of stopwatches, SBF ended up using “a third” of the money he received from the prison commissary to buy a digital watch (which costs $42.25 according to a 2020 price list). To put it in context, commissary donut sticks were selling for $1.70 and Spam was selling for $1.55. According to Joe Bankman, SBF meets with a paralegal almost every day as he prepares for his appeal. He also has access to a computer and has daily video calls with his father, a lawyer.
Perhaps because Bankman-Fried has not yet assimilated her new reality, her prison diaries have the distinctive tone of Jane Goodall recounting her life among chimpanzees or a Victorian anthropologist observing a foreign culture.
“Most people become prisoners,” Bankman-Fried writes, referring to other inmates. “They will go to war for a banana and sell everything they have to get high once again.”
In Bankman-Fried’s diary, he highlights two other groups: one with long sentences who “have consciously renounced life” and a third group with which he seems to identify. “How can you rebel against the system, when the first thing the system takes away from you is the freedom to rebel? How can you be true to your true self when your true self has been deemed such a danger to society that you need to be locked in a cage until you finally give it up?”
Bankman-Fried devotes a large portion of a chapter to the widespread abuse of a drug called deuce, although he says he does not use it. It is not clear what the substance is, only that it is smuggled into the prison soaked in normal-looking paper and turns the inmates who smoke it into zombies every night. He recounts how his blatant deuce smoking caused the guards to confiscate all contraband from his cell block.
“Tonight I lost my pillow, so tonight I’ll lay my head half-heartedly on a combination of towels and prison jumpsuits. It doesn’t work very well; My neck already hurts,” says Bankman-Fried, who continues to remember his childhood stuffed animal. “Since I got a stuffed dog when I was two, I have slept with it almost every night of my life, often using it as a makeshift pillow, one that my neck has become accustomed to. He traveled with me, from Stanford, where I was born; to university, in Boston; to work in New York; to Berkeley, where I founded Alameda; to Hong Kong, where I founded FTX; to the Bahamas, the headquarters of FTX; and back to Stanford, when he was under house arrest. “I miss Manfred.”
Editor’s note: The story was updated from the original to clarify certain facts, including the date of SBF’s arrest, his access to the Internet and his relationship with consultant Walter Pavlo.
This article was originally published by Forbes US.
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