King Mides is credited with this phrase: “I want everything I touch to turn to gold.” And so they say it happened. The gold overflowed him and around him.
This happened approximately 700 years before Christ. Over the centuries there have been other imitators. The latest version, totally fraudulent according to the justice of the United States, responds to the name of Sam Bankman-Fried, who, at the age of 32, received a 25-year prison sentence this Thursday for defrauding customers by appropriating their money to lead an existence of luxury and lust. In part, a success: the Prosecutor’s Office asked for three more decades of closure.
From the 35 million penthouse in the Bahamas, and the falsity of suffrage for just causes, to the cell of a penitentiary in Brooklyn, where he has been there for some time as a preventive measure, after at the end of 2022 he his house of cards collapsed and a great fortune evaporated, more than 8,000 million dollars, although it is still difficult to quantify the sum.
Behind SBF, as he was known, is this young financial prodigy, founder of the FTX company, cover of magazines, king of cryptocurrency (modern representation of Mides) who turned out to be a swindler chasing their wealth at the expense of the greed and naivety of many.
Its fall caused an earthquake in the digital currency exchange sector and ruined quite a few families. “My life has been destroyed,” one of Bankman-Fried’s victims wrote to the Justice Department ahead of a sentencing hearing Thursday in Manhattan court, where a jury in November found him guilty of seven crimes
“He had two children, the second born shortly before the fall of FTX. I have lost all my money and happiness, the ability to get out of bed and the will to live. My wife suffers from depression and suicidal tendencies,” insisted this victim in a letter that the prosecutor presented to federal judge Lewis A. Kaplan to strengthen his request for 50 to 60 years in prison, although below the more than 100 that you could have requested. The defense downgraded it from five to six years.
At the oral hearing, Bankman-Fried showed no remorse. This time, as he played his fate, he showed an apologetic tone in front of the judge. “I made a series of selfish decisions. A lot of people are really disappointed,” he lamented.
“They built something beautiful and I made it small”, he said, referring to his colleagues at FTX. “This haunts me every day”, he assured. And he continued in his plea for benevolence: “It has been unbearable to see how all this unfolds. Customers don’t deserve this pain. I was the director of the company and I was responsible for it”.
His message seemed to take root in the judge, who opted for a much lower sentence than the one requested by the prosecutor, although it is much higher than the one requested by the defense, in addition to the payment of 11,000 million of compensation
But he dedicated harsh words to her. “I knew that what I was doing was serious and that they were criminal actions,” he said before handing down his sentence. “He regrets that he made bad bets, but he does not admit anything”, he continued. “There is a risk that this man will be in a position to do something very bad in the future. And it is not a trivial risk”, he pointed out.
Bankman-Fried was the founder and CEO of FTX, the cryptocurrency exchange platform from which he was hailed as a titan of the industry. He went on to amass, at least on paper, a fortune of approximately $26 billion and the glory of genius types. Until the house of cards collapsed and he was arrested in December 2022. There the story of “greed and arrogance” was discovered, according to the prosecutor.
