SBF’s Clemency Letters are a Rogues Gallery

From a pedophile cop to his dumbest pet scientists, SBF’s late-game supporters truly reveal the quality of his character - and their own.

Apologies for the slight lateness of this, what would normally have been a Sunday update. I’m still recovering from ETHDenver, and from the deadly cocktail of illnesses that every attendee seems to have contracted there. We will return to our regular Tuesday-Sunday schedule after this week.

This is a post for paid supporters, though you can read a good bit of it for free. It’s part of my research and writing of a book, The Boy Who Wasn’t There. Other highlights in the series include my analyses of Barbara Fried’s philosophical work, and of how SBF knowingly played into tech-genius stereotypes. You can also check out the Dark Markets Podcast, specifically my conversation with Tiffany Fong.

Sam Bankman-Fried is set to be sentenced in a hearing at the Southern District of New York on March 28. He has been convicted of crimes carrying a sentence of potentially more than 100 years, though the growing consensus seems to be that he’s more likely to face 30 to 40 years in prison. As part of the sentencing process, Judge Lewis Kaplan has received, and will presumably diligently read, more than two dozen letters from character witnesses hoping to convince him that, despite his mistakes, Bankman-Fried is still a good person.

I’ve read through all of the letters. I commented on basically all of them in brief in a thread here. I don’t believe they’re going to have a significant impact on Judge Kaplan’s sentencing decisions, because so many of the letters either repeat tropes that Kaplan has already specifically rejected in court; are extremely tepid discussions of how SBF was nice to people in the past; or are from people who could plausibly be described as either beneficiaries of, or actual accessories to, Bankman-Fried’s crime.

Several of the letters are from family friends who knew Sam as a child, and amount to little more than “he seemed like a nice kid.” What we don’t see, notably, are many letters from friends of Sam himself. The main exceptions are a letter from Matthew Nass, who again was a *childhood* friend of Sam’s; and a one from Ross Rheingans-Yoo.

Rhengans-Yoo’s letter is genuinely thoughtful and heartfelt, but unfortunately he is also deeply conflicted, as a former FTX Foundation employee and brother of one of the cofounders of Modulo Capital. The level of conflict in these letters is really remarkable. Sam thought he could buy people off with money, and it’s clear that in many cases, he was right.

In one remarkable instance, a recipient of $18 million dollars in funding from FTX fails to disclose this fact as he discusses how smart and good and cool Bankman-Fried is. Other letters seem mainly aimed at exonerating the letters’ author, at least in their own minds.

The letters are, however, incredibly useful as a window into Sam Bankman-Fried’s world, including the kinds of people who are still committed to the narrative of his goodness. Those mostly seem to include people who got money from him; his parents and their friends (but few if any actual friends of his own); and last but not least, a scattering of absolute freaks – one of whose endorsement is particularly fascinating.

SBF is Jail Friends with a Pedophile Cop

Carmine Simpson - Former NYPD cop, credibly accused pedophile, and SBF jail buddy.

The most dramatic letter in the “certified weirdo” category is from one Carmine Simpson [CourtListener login required]. Simpson says he has “had the honor to have gotten to know Sam Bankman-Fried over the past six months” in jail at the Metropolitan Detention Center. He says Sam has been helpful and friendly to other prisoners, and admires Sam’s commitment veganism.

But here’s the rub. Bankman-Fried has been in protective custody within the MDC for much if not all of his stay. That means most of the people he’s gotten to know are either informants, or people likely to be harmed if placed in the general population.

Carmine Simpson is in the latter category, for two different reasons: he’s both a former NYPD cop, and an accused pedophile, of a spectacularly vile sort. Not only is Simpson accused of soliciting sexual material from minors online, he reportedly told his NYPD partner that he was having sex with a 13 year old, and bragged that he coerced people into sex using his service revolver.

I don’t know if Judge Kaplan is likely to do rigorous due diligence on these letters. But he might already be familiar with Simpson’s case, and if so, the fact that Bankman-Fried has been buddying up to him in jail is absolutely not going to be to Sam’s benefit at sentencing.

Barbara Fried and Joe Bankman

Naturally, Bankman-Fried’s parents wrote letters on his behalf. That in itself is natural enough. But unsurprisingly, these letters – and Barbara’s in particular – largely double down on the absurd special pleading about Sam’s precious uniqueness that, as I’ve argued, may have eased his slide into criminality in the first place.

I don’t want to be too hard on them – it’s unsurprising that a parent would see their child through rose-tinted glasses even after his conviction as one of the biggest fraudsters in history. But some of the points are far too disgusting, and far too revealing of the Bankman-Fried family’s core moral decrepitude, to completely give a pass.

Joe Bankman’s letter contains one interesting factoid. In his book, Michael Lewis writes that it was Bankman-Fried family policy not to give gifts to any of the children, and that the kids had to ask for something if they wanted it. Joe contradicts this, saying that was only true for Sam, and it was Sam’s idea. Considering just how much Lewis got wrong on substance, I’m inclined to believe Joe here, which frankly makes the family seem a good bit less insane.

Of course, Bankman also describes the $34 million Orchid penthouse as a “bare bones place … in keeping with Sam’s commitment to egalitarianism,” so we’re pretty much right back to “fuck all these people.”

Barbara Fried’s letter is vastly more infuriating, and there’s a real possibility it pisses off Judge Kaplan. One real highlight is when Barbara writes that "prison has afforded Sam few opportunities to do good in the world," which truly speaks to the level of delusion here. She also claims that "Sam lived an exemplary life in every way prior to the events that brought #FTX down," which is simply false: Sam was a serial sex pest who nearly got kicked out of his own company in 2018 for repeated deceptions.

Some of what Barbara writes is just silly, like the part where she tells the story of Sam as a child helping another kid who had fallen and hurt themselves, and a stranger in the park telling her “You have an unusually empathetic child.” This adds to the “what happened to him later” mystery, but it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans for sentencing purposes.

Far more infuriating is Barbara’s effort to conflate Sam’s sentencing with the larger prison-industrial policies of the United States. She cites his case as another example of how the U.S. justice system "consigns young lives with so much promise to the trash heap.”

But this is absurd, and in fact deeply offensive, if you think about it for even a second. The carceral system targets *poor people,* not those who can afford to hire Ghislaine Maxwell’s defense team, as Sam did. Furthermore, the money used to do that was itself stolen from FTX customers – a fact Judge Kaplan is no doubt fully aware of.

So it seems quite plausible that Barbara’s letter, too, will blow up in her son’s face as another example of his entire universe’s lack of a genuine moral center, or even the slightest self-awareness.

Conflicted as Sin

Another letter that deserves to be singled out for scrutiny comes from Edward Mills, a Health Sciences professor at McMaster University. Mills’ letter is typical of the submental reasoning at play in most of these pleas, arguing that sentencing Sam too harshly would deter “conscientious leaders” from trying to “effect significant change in the world.”

I can literally hear Judge Kaplan’s derisive laughter.

But here’s what’s really staggering about Mills’ letter: