| Sam
Bankman-Fried
on Stand Spins
Shorts and
Trashes
Caroline and
KC Royals
Crypto Creeps
by
Matthew Russell Lee, Patreon Book
Substack
LITERARY SDNY,
Oct 27 -- Twenty seventh day
of October and SBF was finally
on the witness stand. In front
of the jury. It was, as it
should be when a defendant
testifies, a complete counter
narrative, another way of
telling the story.
From an
Airbnb in Berkeley to a small
suite in Hong Kong, before the
garish Bahamas condo.
The image too:
Mark Cohen asked Sam why he
always appeared in shorts and
T-shirts. "It's comfortable,"
Sam replied. Would the jury be
convinced?
Caroline Ellison
had said it was all an act,
that Sam bragged that his hair
got him bonuses at Jane
Street. What did that say
about Jane Street?
Cohen
presented Jane Street as the
arbiter of what front-running
is, and got Sam to say of
course he was against
frontrunning. What about
misappropriation? The question
of course didn't come up on
direct.
Judge Kaplan told
Cohen to return at 1:30 pm
with a estimate of how much
longer he'd be. When he
did, he said... into Monday
morning.
This trial
was now stretching on. Who
would remember, when it was
over, what Caroline much less
Adam Yedidia and the cocoa
broker had said?
By late
afternoon the strategy
emerged: Sam said Caroline was
a good manager, but implicitly
dissed her trading,
specifically hedging. She had
refused to hedge, he said. But
why then hadn't he fired her?
And how could these sh*tcoins,
as some now called the FTT
token, be hedged?
With the
jury gone for the day, Judge
Kaplan asked both sides for
their time estimates. AUSA
Sassoon said while no one
would benefit from a day and a
half of cross (!) she would go
from midday Monday into
Tuesday.
Each side wanted
two to three hours for closing
arguments, not including the
government's rebuttal. Then
there was the charging
conference, which Kaplan
predicted would be long, and
the the reading of the charge
to the jury: several hours,
Judge Kaplan said.
So the
jury wouldn't get the case to
deliberate until a full week
from Sam's direct, the next
Friday. And unlikely to reach
any decision that day. So into
another week. And what could
happened by then?
More on this on
Substack here
More book sample
on Substack here.
Extended on Patreon here.
Book here
***
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