The first of Sam Bankman-Fried’s inner circle just received their punishment. On Tuesday, at the same Manhattan courthouse that saw the FTX founder undergo a brutal month of reckoning, a federal judge sentenced his former lieutenant, Ryan Salame, to 7.5 years in prison, even more than the five to seven years that prosecutors had requested.
Salame, who had risen through the ranks from FTX’s early days in Hong Kong to lead its Bahamas division, was always an outlier amid Bankman-Fried’s nerd empire. He went to UMass instead of MIT, partied instead of playing board games, and doled out tens of millions of dollars in (illegal) donations to Republican candidates, rather than Democrats. Right until the end, he deviated from counterparts Caroline Ellison, Nishad Singh, and Gary Wang, pleading guilty but refusing to cooperate with prosecutors by pleading the fifth. And he paid the price.
The surprising crackdown by the judge seems to be a response to an unclosed chapter from Bankman-Fried’s crimes—the lingering question of campaign finance violations, which was one of the worst such cases in history and was meant to be the focus of a second trial against Bankman-Fried that never materialized. In Salame’s sentencing memo, where he asked for no more than 18 months in prison, the prolific donor admitted to taking loans from Alameda coffers to funnel to politicians with no intention of paying the company back.
Salame clearly was not pleased with the judge’s severity. Echoing Bankman-Fried’s ill-fated posting spree following the collapse of FTX, Salame took to X to voice his grievances. “Hot damn, this is going to get interesting quickly,” he (apparently) tweeted just a few hours after the decision, later mocking one of his own tweets from November 2022 where he seemed to voice support for Bankman-Fried. (Salame also tweeted asking who should get his first public interview. This reporter humbly reached out but has not received a response yet.)
With Ellison, Singh, and Wang likely escaping any prison time, it’s a fair consideration whether Salame’s sentence was befitting of his crime, especially because he claimed to not know about Alameda stealing customer deposits, while the others did. He also revealed in his sentencing memo that he recently had a child with Michelle Bond, a crypto lobbyist and one-time congressional candidate.
For those left seeking justice for FTX’s blatant abuse of the U.S. campaign finance system, Salame’s sentence may offer some consolation. If and when Salame does give his first public interview, there will certainly be unanswered questions regarding the empire’s dark money operation, whose scale is still unknown. After all, Bankman-Fried claimed that he gave just as much to Republican candidates as Democrats, albeit through undisclosed channels. One of the few people who may have details has a new reason to talk. “Got to have a careful balance here,” Salame tweeted this morning. “Trust me.”
Leo Schwartz
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@leomschwartz
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