![]() ![]() At times, two of the people said, Ellison expressed personal and professional resentment toward Bankman-Fried. The black notebook, described as a diary, belonged to Bankman-Fried’s on-and-off girlfriend, Caroline Ellison, a former top lieutenant in his business empire, three people familiar with the matter said.Įllison, who was CEO of FTX’s sister company, the hedge fund Alameda Research, also recorded observations about Bankman-Fried in a series of electronic documents that have circulated among lawyers in the case, three people with knowledge of the matter said. While much of what prosecutors have gathered is typical corporate fare, other material points to the unusual personal dynamics at FTX. One person who got a subpoena said prosecutors had wanted every document related to FTX and dispatched a group of data experts who took days to extract the information from a set of devices. Almost as soon as the exchange folded, prosecutors started gathering documents, sending subpoenas to FTX employees and seeking records from the political campaigns that Bankman-Fried financed. The investigation began in November, after FTX’s collapse sent the crypto market into turmoil. But in Bankman-Fried’s case, interviews and a review of recent court filings have offered an early glimpse of the idiosyncratic array of records that the FTX prosecutors have collected. Typically, the evidence in a criminal case remains largely secret until right before trial. “It is a massive amount to sift through, and sometimes you can find incredibly useful information,” said Moira Penza, a former federal prosecutor who’s now in private practice. At a hearing in March, Nicolas Roos, a federal prosecutor investigating FTX, said the government had obtained a laptop crammed with so much information that the FBI’s technicians were struggling to decipher all of it. With the trial set for October, prosecutors have gathered evidence ranging from phones and laptops to the contents of Bankman-Fried’s Google accounts, which amounted to 2.5 million pages alone. The diversity and growing volume of materials in the FTX case underscore the legal challenges facing Bankman-Fried, 31, who is charged with 13 criminal counts, including accusations that he misappropriated billions of dollars in customer money, defrauded investors and violated campaign finance laws. Sign up for The Morning newsletter from the New York Times In the 2004 securities fraud prosecution of Martha Stewart, for example, prosecutors produced 525,000 pages of evidence to the defense team, but the numbers have increased significantly in recent years. The mountain of evidence ranks among the largest ever collected in a white-collar securities fraud case prosecuted by federal authorities in Manhattan, according to data provided by a person with knowledge of the matter. The documents include crypto transaction logs and encrypted group chats from Bankman-Fried’s collapsed exchange, FTX, as well as strikingly personal reflections recorded by a key witness in the case. And a small black notebook, filled with handwritten observations.įor months, federal prosecutors building the criminal case against fallen cryptocurrency executive Sam Bankman-Fried have assembled a vast and unusually varied array of evidence. More than 6 million pages of emails, Slack messages and other digital records. Prosecutors investigating Sam Bankman-Fried, the cryptocurrency exchange’s founder, have accumulated more than six million pages of documents and other records.
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