Sam Bankman-Fried’s Desperate Campaign to Get Free

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Sam Bankman-Fried is incarcerated at a federal prison in Lompoc, California, which sits northwest of Santa Barbara and is dubbed “the City of Arts and Flowers.” Once or twice a week, he calls me, and we talk for the allotted 15 minutes, at which point the line abruptly goes dead. “Hey!” he’ll say brightly when I pick up the phone, a note of forced cheer in his voice that belies his current station in life, as well as what he calls his anhedonia, which is the inability to feel happiness. Even in his wizard-prince heyday running the cryptocurrency exchange FTX, Bankman-Fried would pliantly chat with journalists about virtually any topic, and he has kept up this agreeable PR strategy in prison. He maintains his innocence, and will comprehensively relitigate his case when prompted, but always defers when I ask what he wants to talk about, saying something like, “Um, I’m flexible!” When I ask how his day is going, he’ll respond, “Mostly boring, mostly usual.”

In the two years since he received a 25-year sentence for fraud and conspiracy, Bankman-Fried has retained many of his pre-prison characteristics. Now as then, he takes meds for clinical depression and ADHD: an Emsam adhesive patch, which he collects in “pill line,” along with his daily dose of Adderall. He is still a vegan on animal-welfare grounds, which means he doesn’t eat at chow hall, instead cobbling together ingredients from the commissary list (e.g., dehydrated refried beans at $2.60 a pouch; rice at $1.75 a pack; Goya-brand sazón at $2.45 a box) and finding ways to prepare them by his bunk. To that end, he has put together a tongue-in-cheek “Vegan Prison Cookbook,” which includes instructions such as “If the hot-water machine is broken, instead pour in lukewarm-water-that-tastes-a-bit-odd and microwave it. You will overcook it and it will taste bad.”

Even in the understimulating, internet-less environment of prison, Bankman-Fried, 34, has found ways to indulge his old propensity for distracted multitasking. For the cost of about $135 at commissary, he bought a SCORE 7T tablet. The name stands for Secure Commitment to Offender Re-entry and Enablement and it bills itself as “a robust, purpose-built, locked-down computing device that helps persons-in-custody (PICs) pass their time constructively, improve themselves and prepare to re-enter society.” On it, one can make purchases from an eclectic selection of entertainment options, like the second movie in the Divergent trilogy or a single season of Chicago Fire. The tablet’s gaming options are “mostly really dumb,” Bankman-Fried says, with the passable exception being Shattered Pixel Dungeon, which he has now played roughly 6,000 times, almost always as the “Mage” and, according to one of his prison friends, with an unheard-of nine “challenges” running simultaneously. Often when we are talking on the phone, Bankman-Fried confesses, he is on his tablet playing the game, just as he was on his computer half-playing Storybook Brawl virtually until the moment he was arrested at his Bahamas apartment complex in December 2022.

Talking to Bankman-Fried is enjoyable. Because he is suspicious of experts and conventional wisdom, he’s willing to evaluate almost any subject from first principles. At the height of its influence, FTX had endorsement deals with Tom Brady and Stephen Curry and held the naming rights to the Miami Heat’s arena. I once asked him why he had paid to display FTX patches on the uniforms of MLB umpires and not the athletes people are watching play. For a TV spectator to notice a logo on some team’s uniform, he figured, “there has to be a player on the right team, facing the right direction toward the camera, and not moving so fast that it gets blurry,” whereas umpires made great billboards because they just stand there. During another call, Bankman-Fried was arguing that incarceration doesn’t effectively rehabilitate criminals. I asked how a society without prisons might disincentivize crime. “We could just do what Singapore does, right — give people, like, 30 lashes or whatever,” he countered. “Lashes are pretty bad, and then we don’t lose members of society for decades.”

One day in April, not long after he had arrived at Lompoc, he told me a story. “Oreos are one of the more surprisingly vegan foods,” he said. “When I got here at Lompoc, commissary had Oreos. And you know, there’s part of me that was excited about that. And then another part of me cringed that that was something I cared about. Given, like, I don’t enjoy eating Oreos. It’s not going to make my life any better. It’s such a pale shadow of what the outside was.” I suggested that it was okay to get excited about Oreos given the lack of other things he had to get excited about. “It isn’t that I object to the stimulation from the Oreo,” he said. “I object to that becoming a thing that I’m training too much of my brain on. I don’t want to be replacing important neurons with, like, more duplications of seek-out-Oreo neurons.”

He pointed me to chapter 22 of Manfred, “Chat L’esponge.” Manfred, named for a childhood stuffed animal, is the serialized prison memoir Bankman-Fried has been writing since before his 2023 trial, which he sends to a small cohort of friends and family via the prison email service CorrLinks. Bankman-Fried’s parents had sent me a collated copy of his entries and then I started receiving entries in real time once he added me to his Listserv. (Corr-Links, also referred to as TRULINCS, allows prisoners to correspond with up to 30 contacts.) “Chat L’esponge,” like much of Manfred, is allegorical and surprisingly humorous considering the subject matter. The chapter imagines a powerful AI trained only on one stupid thing: the characters in SpongeBob SquarePants. “So, each day, you feed ChatGPT’s training algorithm terabyte after terabyte of pictures of Patrick the Star and hours upon hours of audio from Squidward’s clarinet; and you don’t ever feed it any other new data.”

And then when you ask ChatGPT “what is the best argument against abortion,” instead of saying something about the sanctity of life or parents who regret having abortions, it will say “if Patrick were aborted then SpongeBob would be sad.” If you ask it what the best electric guitar is, it will respond “Squidward’s best clarinet solo came in the 4th season, episode 5,” because that is the closest thing to an electric guitar that it still remembers anything about.

Bankman-Fried was trying to explain that what crushes him about prison is the reorientation of his mind toward triviality and therefore the sapping of his latent usefulness as a human being. He didn’t want to become Chat L’esponge. To explain prison life, Bankman-Fried draws on a concept from another TV show, Severance, in which people’s identities are “severed” between their “Innie” work selves and their “Outie” off-work selves. The way Bankman-Fried sees it, to fantasize about something as pedestrian as commissary Oreos is to become a prison Innie. And to become a prison Innie is to succumb to the world’s assessment that he is a criminal.

Bankman-Fried was convicted of misappropriating roughly $8 billion in FTX customer deposits by plowing them into his hedge fund, Alameda Research, which collapsed. He was also found guilty of defrauding lenders and investors. Bankman-Fried contends all this was mostly the result of an innocent accounting glitch and that in any case Alameda was legally allowed to borrow as much as it wanted from FTX. The jury did not buy his argument, deeming him to have engaged in straightforward fraud on a historic scale. The mission of Bankman-Fried’s life now is to free himself from prison, either by legal means or presidential pardon. These efforts have become conspicuous over the course of Donald Trump’s second term, during which Bankman-Fried has unveiled a new identity as a Republican. Last year, he organized an unsanctioned video interview from prison with Tucker Carlson. As punishment, Bankman-Fried was sent briefly to solitary confinement at the Metropolitan Detention Center in Brooklyn, where he was jailed at the time. After that, he revived his mostly dormant X account and through a proxy — his father, Joseph Bankman — started using it to post pro-Trump messages and frame himself as a victim of the Biden administration’s crackdown on the crypto industry.

Meanwhile, Bankman-Fried’s mother, Barbara Fried — retired now from teaching at Stanford Law School — has been fighting for his freedom in public. Beginning in the fall, she started posting essays, some lawyerly, some personal, seeking to complicate the case against her son. Lately, she has been getting slapped on the wrist for various desperate motherly infractions. The judge in his case demanded she stop calling his chambers, and prosecutors in New York’s Southern District noted a legal motion purportedly mailed by her incarcerated son had in fact been FedExed from a location near her home. Mysterious X accounts agitate for his release, as does an anonymously run website called freesbf.org, whose apparent administrator — on X they go by Sam Bankman Freed — stopped replying to my DMs when I asked if they could hop on the phone. On June 12, real-life Bankman-Fried lost his official appeal, narrowing his legal options.

Trump’s soft spot for felons has created a brazen new class of clemency lobbyists and gives Bankman-Fried hope for a pardon that would have been unthinkable under the administration that prosecuted him. His parents have hired two GOP operatives to lobby the administration for his release, and on June 8, news broke that Bankman-Fried had officially filed a bid for a presidential pardon. On Polymarket, his chances of receiving one before 2027 doubled to about 14 percent.

The typical response to a social-media post by Bankman-Fried is some variation of “Rot in jail forever, dude.” Still, some revisionist SBF commentary has been popping up in mainstream outlets such as CNN and Puck. In May, after Drake dropped a song with the lyric “Samuel Bankman, free all my guys up,” Bankman-Fried’s account tweeted at him, “when I get out, I can loan you my bean bag chair.” As of this spring, FTX’s estate has disbursed more than $10 billion to victims via bankruptcy proceedings and is sitting on several billion dollars more in recovered assets. As Bankman-Fried has been using his PR offensive to point out, this means a vast majority of defrauded customers are being paid back with interest. He is also egging on the semi-ironic SBF boosters who now hail him as a venture-capital legend based on his pre-downfall portfolio of investments in start-ups such as Robinhood and Anthropic. The nearly 8 percent, $500 million stake Alameda purchased in the then-little-known AI lab in 2021 would now be worth something like $80 billion if it hadn’t been sold off in bankruptcy.

The SBF story was compelling long before his arrest. The son of academics, Bankman-Fried was a believer in utilitarian philosophy and the star benefactor of the effective-altruism movement, which has evolved from its origins in mosquito nets and kidney donation to grander ambitions to prevent pandemics and mitigate the risks of artificial intelligence — in short, to save humanity. The movement sought to solve these problems in part through its “earn to give” ethos, which involved young idealists reaping profits on Wall Street to maximize their philanthropic potential. Bankman-Fried excelled at the “earn” part of the equation — at one point he was declared the richest person in the world under 30 — which turned this couch potato with crazy hair into a Democratic megadonor and magazine-cover star. He was possessed with the conviction that he was put on earth to sit at a computer and make enough money to personally fund EA’s most grandiose goals and whichever politicians might prioritize them. The SBF version of “Greed is good” struck many liberals as a plausibly benevolent worldview. All of it came tumbling down when he was convicted, leaving Bankman-Fried open to accusations that his ethical-capitalist persona was, like his sudden conversion to Trumpism, insincere.

As fraudsters went, he didn’t have Bernie Madoff’s froideur or Elizabeth Holmes’s charismatic-founder act or the bad-boy notoriety of Martin Shkreli — or really any of the standard “crook” vibes that would seem to translate to prison life. His absent-minded tendencies and Plushie-like physique suggested physical vulnerability. What made him dangerous, in the eyes of the justice system, were the same qualities that underwrote his rise: his unique mind and his conviction in his own ability to determine, through high-stakes bets, what was right for the world. “There is a risk that this man will be in a position to do something very bad in the future, and it’s not negligible risk,” Judge Lewis A. Kaplan said at Bankman-Fried’s sentencing in March 2024. “So, in part, my sentence will be for the purpose of disabling him.”

He has resisted disablement. There’s a passage in Manfred in which Bankman-Fried argues against what he calls the “‘anti-cruel’ line of thinking.” “There is an undercurrent of people who argue that I should be released from prison in less than 25 years because to do otherwise would be cruel,” he writes, summing up this view as “SBF should be released at an age where he can still settle down to a quiet life somewhere, they say; get married, have kids. Write stories, sometimes, about readjusting to society as an ex-con. Slow down; get off his meds. Detox from a frantic working environment. Be healthy and safe.” To be clear, he adds, “I do think I should be released in less than 25 years!” Just not on those grounds.

Over email, he tells me what is wrong with this line of thinking: “It presumes that my goals in life are to find some semblance of personal happiness and fulfillment, rather than still trying to have positive impact on the world.” Because he maintains he did nothing wrong, Bankman-Fried rejects the idea that the story of his life should follow some standard redemptive arc. Not only does he not wish to exit prison as a changed person, it is more or less his greatest fear.

Bankman-Fried’s First significant experience behind bars came at the Metropolitan Detention Center, a pair of orange-and-sand-colored buildings in Sunset Park, where he was held from August 2023, shortly before his trial, until March 2025. MDC is sometimes described as one of the worst prisons in the country, full of violent maniacs and abysmal conditions, but the unit Bankman-Fried was placed into is a best-case scenario. It’s a dorm-style protective-custody unit called 4 North, reserved for inmates who might be endangered living among the general population: celebrities, political figures, cooperating witnesses, and sex offenders, the last two categories representing “bad paperwork” cases that occupy the lowest social strata in prison life. Often defendants are sent there before they face trial or to await sentencing in one of New York’s federal courts. This is where the rappers 6ix9ine and Diddy passed through and where captured Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro reportedly now lives.

“What was that movie, Full Metal Jacket? It’s almost like a Marine Corps barracks,” says Carmine Simpson. Simpson, 31, is an ex-NYPD cop from Long Island who last year was sentenced to 23 years in prison for soliciting sexual images and videos from minors and is now serving the rest of his term at a low-security prison in Virginia. He was awaiting sentencing in 4 North when Bankman-Fried arrived.

From Virginia, Simpson mailed me a sketch he drew of the MDC dorm using a blue ballpoint pen on a lined sheet of paper. At the top of the page was a bank of telephones and CorrLinks terminals and a kitchenette. Below that, running down the center of the room, were three pole-mounted televisions, surrounded by tables. To one side of the TVs there were ten rows of bunk beds. Simpson estimated the room had capacity for 120 people but never housed more than about 30. Simpson, Bankman-Fried, and eventually Diddy and 6ix9ine were all placed in the same row. On the other side of the TVs were sinks, toilet stalls, and showers.

Inmates were expected to keep their living space tidy, a norm Bankman-Fried sometimes struggled to see the point of. Bankman-Fried’s description of his top bunk: “Most of the time, you can find, perched on top, a half-eaten package of food, waiting to be fully consumed; a few dirty dishes (read: Tupperware bowls and plastic spoons) waiting for the nightly (or, you know, most-nightly) washing; the book I read most recently; and the book I’m going to read next. (I could note that some of that mess is not actually mine — those around me often ‘cook’ on my bunk, since it’s in the middle of the row — but, I mean, usually most of it is mine.)”

Other inmates who overlapped with Bankman-Fried in 4 North included Gene Borrello, a onetime soldier for the Bonanno crime family; a former Bloods gang member and rapper from the Bronx who goes by G Lock; Miles Guo, the Steve Bannon ally awaiting sentencing on a fraud conviction; Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras who was extradited in 2022 on narco-trafficking charges and later pardoned by Trump; and a number of less famous inmates whom Bankman-Fried, Simpson, and others wouldn’t tell me the names of, usually claiming they couldn’t remember them but perhaps because of a prison honor code.

Along with Hernández (or “El Presidente,” as many called him), Simpson was Bankman-Fried’s best buddy at MDC. They were relative outliers in the unit. For one, many other inmates were gang affiliates. Two, the three friends were not “spiceheads.” A sizable percentage of the unit was busy finding ways to smoke K2, a synthetic drug colloquially called spice or deuce. The smell of it was a constant. “Somebody almost died because of these K2 drugs. It was a guy, a very strong guy, and he was with seizures, so they took him quickly to the infirmary,” Hernández recalled on a Zoom call. The drug is smuggled in via liquid droplets on pieces of paper, seemingly by mail or from prison guards or visitors to MDC who find a way to hand it over during visiting hours. “Either in the visit they put it in they ass and bring it back, or from an officer,” G Lock explained once in an interview with crypto influencer Tiffany Fong after he was released from MDC. Inmates typically managed to smoke it by using a wire or piece of foil to short-circuit a battery and ignite the paper. Batteries were valuable commodities as a result.

Nonsmokers had a relative advantage in that they could trade various prized items to smokers at good rates. Every prison has a currency — often canned mackerel or books of stamps — and MDC ran in large part on individually plastic-wrapped muffins. Muffins became doubly valuable when spiceheads got the munchies, and Bankman-Fried once managed to trade two lowly muffins for a jury-rigged pillow made out of ripped clothes and mattress innards, which was coveted because pillows are technically not permitted at MDC.

Bankman-Fried would never smoke deuce or anything else. But he’s sympathetic to those who numb themselves to prison life. “I asked Boo why he smokes it, even though it usually causes him to burst into tears, become paranoid, and vomit,” Bankman-Fried wrote in the memoir, referring to an inmate by a pseudonym. “He said that it was when he thought of his broken relationship with his kids.”

Despite his fear of becoming an Innie, Bankman-Fried found his own ways to wall himself off from reminders of the outside world, which he called “cracks in the blinds.” In addition to Shattered Pixel Dungeon, Bankman-Fried’s forms of diversion included a two-person spadeslike card game he and Simpson invented called Churchill and Ping-Pong matches against Hernández. Prison boredom also forced Bankman-Fried to abandon his infamous prejudice against books, most of which he believes should be no longer than blog posts. The books he reads are escapist. Relatively early in his incarceration, he estimated he had read 13 books about Navy SEALs, 27 space operas, 12 fantasy novels, two true-crime books, and one romance novel. Reminders of anything real were unwelcome. Once, Simpson handed Bankman-Fried a copy of Wired that mentioned him. “That sucked. I read an article about Elon and Grimes; that sucked, too.”

He was intrigued, if not tempted, by the ways the other inmates kept themselves entertained, particularly their gambling on sports that played on the prison TVs. One inmate would act as a bookie, placing bets with someone on the outside via prison telephone. “It’s not a job, per se — usually you make money in a job — but they’re thinking and strategizing,” Bankman-Fried wrote in Manfred. “They’re hurriedly thumbing through their handwritten score histories, they’re theorizing about who has a hot hand and who is due; if you saw them out of context, you might think they were devoting their energy to building something great. And, yeah, their bets are all bad, but realistically what are they supposed to be devoting their energy to? They’re in prison.” Eventually, the correctional officers cracked down on gambling, which, in Bankman-Fried’s estimation, spiraled the dorm back into depression and deuce usage.

There is no outdoor access at MDC, which means for a year and a half, Bankman-Fried didn’t see sky. There is, however, a roughly 20-by-20-foot “recreational” area just off the unit, where people would play soccer or basketball and Bankman-Fried would walk around briskly for exercise. This area was of special interest for a different reason. 4 North is technically housed on the female side of MDC. A parallel women’s rec area lies below it. “The deck is all indoors, and there’s kind of, like, a small iron grate on the bottom of it,” Simpson explains. “And if you lay down and look, you could see the top of the female grate, and guys would lay there for hours screaming down and trying to talk to their prison girlfriends. I mean it’s so insane. People were having fistfights because they were trying to claim, like, ‘slots.’”

Bankman-Fried didn’t have a girlfriend, but he could have had one. He caused a minor sensation by rebuffing the advances of a woman prisoner who sent him letters and tried to flirt with him by sending chess moves his way. He wrote back that he was not interested, which drove all the other guys nuts. He couldn’t figure out why, until he realized they didn’t want her to stop sending photos of herself — photos that Bankman-Fried ignored and they scooped up to divide among themselves. “At that point, I saw true fear strike the heart of a group of very large, very intimidating grown men. Guns, needles, prison, knives — those were the reality of their day-to-day lives,” Bankman-Fried observed. “But the threat of a rare bikini picture in a sea of men being taken back from them was horrible.”

He engendered an amused fascination among his fellow prisoners. “He’s a straight vegan. He doesn’t eat anything unless it’s rice and beans or peanut butter and jelly, which is his favorite. He eats it all day. He can’t stop eating it,” G Lock told Fong. “Ten, 15 sandwiches a day.” Inmates tend to describe Bankman-Fried as an appealingly placid character. “You tell him, ‘Yo, Sam, you bustin’ ass at Ping-Pong,’ he be like, ‘Yep,’” G Lock said (Bankman-Fried is adept at racket sports). Many respected him on billionaire grounds alone, bombarding him with predictable questions about crypto and investing, and felt protective of their awkward new friend. “How can y’all give somebody life that you can’t even make eye contact with?” said G Lock. “What y’all think, he’s some kind of gangsta?”

He earned goodwill by helping inmates prepare for trial or otherwise work on cases he felt their lawyers were screwing up. He drafted questions for Hernández’s lawyers to ask witnesses (most of which they did not use), helped a drug dealer named Jesus Carasco file a Rule 33 motion for a new trial, and encouraged Simpson to try to claw back the length of his sentence. “We use a word in Spanish, we say servicial, meaning that he helps everybody,” Hernández told me.

A long-running leitmotif in Bankman-Fried’s life is his feeling that professionals are too hidebound or risk-averse to be trusted. In Manfred, he refers to his prison friends’ attorneys with sardonic names like “Chuck the Real Lawyer” and “Pablo the Overworked Public Defender.” He writes repeatedly about his frustration with those who elect not to take a huge gamble when taking a huge gamble might be the only thing that improves their long odds — much as Bankman-Fried did when he testified in his own defense, equivocating and filibustering in maddeningly pedantic ways, a disastrous performance he doesn’t regret.

Bankman-Fried became further radicalized against the Department of Justice during his time at MDC. He came to believe the DoJ had wrongfully prosecuted Hernández and Diddy, whose infamous “Freak Offs” Bankman-Fried was suspicious merited the federal RICO charges the Feds brought against him. (Diddy’s jury agreed, though he was still convicted of lesser charges.) For a while, Bankman-Fried wondered why he was meeting so many conspiracy theorists in prison. Eventually, he decided they had good reason to distrust the system. As he wrote to me in an email, “Many of the inmates have, in fact, quite literally been the target of a multi-agency government conspiracy, so their priors are shaped by that.”

He was living in 4 North before and after his trial. In early 2024, as he awaited sentencing, prosecutors got hold of a document Bankman-Fried had written while on house arrest outlining potential strategies to tilt public opinion in his favor. It was titled “Note: these are all random probably bad ideas that aren’t vetted; CONFIDENTIAL.” Potential gambits included:

Go on Tucker Carlsen, come out as a republican

Come out against the woke agenda

Focus almost exclusively on the fact that we could give value back to customers and the Chapter 11 team is destroying it

Come out as extremely pro crypto, pro freedom

MDC wasn’t a bad place to start plotting his release for the mundane reason that there he had access to a laptop for 30 hours a week to work on his appeal as well as a “discovery computer” in the unit to review case files — privileges that likely wouldn’t be available at ordinary prisons. After sentencing, his lawyers made the unusual request of asking the court to let him stay at MDC while he worked on his appeal. As he wrote in his memoir, “If I have to choose between better food, and more access to my legal work — bring on the rice and beans.”

Bankman-Fried remained in Brooklyn through the 2024 election and into the first few months of Trump’s second term. The president’s crypto-friendly, pardon-happy start had invigorated his quest to get free. Along with January 6 defendants, one of Trump’s first pardon recipients was the first-generation cryptocurrency outlaw Ross Ulbricht. In March 2025, Bankman-Fried pulled off his Tucker Carlson interview with technology typically used for legal conferences.

There was a side benefit to staying as long as possible at MDC. The more years someone has left to serve, the higher-security prison they’re sent to. When MDC finally sent him packing after the Carlson appearance, Bankman-Fried had shaved off just enough time to avoid a more violent prison, winding up instead at a low-security facility in Southern California, FCI Terminal Island.

The day Bankman-Fried arrived, René Ruiz had no idea who he was. “I see Sam carrying his mattress, looking distraught, out of it, his hair all messed up,” says Ruiz, a longtime member of the Vagos, a biker gang, who has spent most of his adult life in and out of jail. “It’s an old beat-up mattress, three-by-eight-foot, looks like one of those dog things. He’s got that over his shoulder, struggling, has a mesh bag with all his clothes.”

Terminal Island is located in San Pedro, near the Port of Long Beach. Bankman-Fried remained there for a year, until it shut down this spring owing to failing infrastructure. The prison was divided into North and South sections. Bankman-Fried lived in a dorm-style unit on the North side and spent much of his time on the rec yards of the South side, which faced Princess and Royal Caribbean cruise ships and featured baseball fields, pickleball and basketball courts, a running track, a weight pile, a hobby room, and a library. In some of the dorms, seals and dolphins were visible from the windows by the inmates’ bunks.

Ruiz, 58, had landed at TI for the felony of assaulting a federal officer. (He is now out of prison, living in the San Diego area.) He went by “Superman” and acted as a self-appointed majordomo to the local population, specializing in acclimating new or high-profile inmates by fixing them dinner or tailoring their clothes or whatever they needed: “I took care of Michael Avenatti. I took care of Sunny Balwani. He was the one who made that blood test.” (Balwani is Theranos founder Elizabeth Holmes’s former business partner and ex-boyfriend. Avenatti is Stormy Daniels’s now disbarred lawyer.)

“He says, ‘Hi, I’m Sam,’” Ruiz remembers. “I asked him, ‘Are you a toucher or a clicker?’” Terminal Island housed a lot of white-collar criminals, but inmates estimate that a plurality of its nearly 1,000-person population was there for sex offenses. Not knowing who Bankman-Fried was yet, Ruiz needed to ascertain if he was a chomo, a.k.a. a sex offender, and if so which type: Was he in for child pornography (clicker) or had he also committed sexual acts (toucher)? “Sam didn’t know what I was talking about,” Ruiz says.

Bankman-Fried was about to get introduced to prison politics. 4 North was highly unusual in its lack of tribal hierarchies. At Terminal Island, as in many federal pens, virtually every aspect of day-to-day life was structured according to what racial group, or “car,” you belonged to — as in, who you ride with. These were not criminal organizations like MS-13 or Latin Kings but literally just groups of people organized by race. While each car had its own personality, a common rule among all of them was never to fraternize with bad-paperwork cases, and that included sex offenders of any kind. “There are only three cars that really matter,” according to Ruiz. There’s the Woods, which is the white car. Its name derives from peckerwoods, originally a derogatory name for poor whites, since reclaimed by white-supremacist gangs. There are the Sureños, also known as Southsiders or homies, which is what Ruiz belonged to. These are English-speaking Hispanics. Finally, there is the Black car. Lower down Ruiz’s social hierarchy are Paisas, a large group chiefly composed of Spanish-speaking immigrants, then the smaller cars: Asian and Pacific Islander, Muslim, and Native American.

The chomos fraternized mostly among themselves, out of necessity. There were also the independents, a car of people who refused to join the main cars. Being independent meant missing out on certain privileges, such as being able to watch television, since each of the prison’s TV rooms is controlled by a different car.

By default the prison bunked Bankman-Fried with a Wood. Deprived of his meds for the first few weeks, he basically sat on his bed staring into space and neglected to eat, according to Ruiz: “He was looking really bad, you know.” Ruiz scored vegetables from his buddies in the kitchen and started cooking food for Bankman-Fried using the bottom of an iron. He also screened his mail. “He was getting a nice stack, at least seven a day from strangers, people asking for interviews, people from Canada, really weird, like, ‘Helter Skelter’ people cutting letters out of magazines,” Ruiz said. “People were telling him they lost their inheritance or their kids invested in him.”

TI was by virtually any measure a more pleasant prison than MDC: great weather, a view of the ocean, actual outdoor space. But Bankman-Fried still preferred MDC with its access to a laptop. At TI, nobody gets a laptop, so his life revolved around trying to visit one of two CorrLinks/TRULINCS stations, which was made complicated by the set times of day during which he could make a “move” — when inmates are allowed to walk from one part of the prison to another. He broke down his routine for me:

6:05 a.m.: wake up

6:15 a.m.: pill line

6:25 a.m.: TRULINCS

6:40 a.m.: back to unit/bed; toss and turn, read a little

8:00 a.m.: go to layover TRULINCS during move

8:10 a.m.: return to unit, lie down, read some

9:00 a.m–9:10 a.m.: move, go to recreation (“South Yard”)

9:10 a.m.–9:25 a.m.: TRULINCS

9:25 a.m.–9:40 a.m.: walk around yard, daydream

9:40 a.m.–9:55 a.m.: TRULINCS …

He used CorrLinks to correspond with his network (whose other members he did not disclose to me) and draft Manfred chapters. Last fall, from Terminal Island, he ramped up his posting on X. Typical post: “S&P 500 hit another ATH yesterday: 7,365. +22.8% since @realDonaldTrump’s second inauguration. How about same point in Biden’s term? +7.0%.” He’s cagey about any activity related to his “pardon striptease,” as Puck’s William D. Cohan put it. As best as I can tell, he’s got a Pony Express–like method in which he CorrLinkses drafts of his X posts to his father, who posts them on his behalf, then sends him back various replies to engage with.

Throughout the past year, in a blizzard of activity, he also drafted a document called “Where Did the Money Go?” designed to bolster his long-standing argument that FTX was in fact solvent. In his telling, FTX merely faced a temporary liquidity crisis akin to a bank run, and he could have paid users back their missing billions if given only a bit more time to secure investors or sell off assets stashed in this coin or under that rock — only he claims he could have done it in mere weeks, not the several years it has taken FTX’s estate. (“Mr. Bankman-Fried conveniently skips over the fact that he took client money without consent,” says a spokesperson for the FTX estate. “He has refused to accept any responsibility for the damage he caused.”)

He also worked on a pro se motion for a new trial and judge that included an affidavit by FTX’s then-head of data science, who made the same argument. Bankman-Fried also alleges that Sullivan & Cromwell, one of the firms retained by FTX as outside counsel, helped the prosecution investigate him, then inappropriately profited by turning around and running the bankruptcy, a framing that some journalists and legal observers have found credible. (A Sullivan & Cromwell spokesperson strongly denies this, saying the accusation has been “thoroughly investigated and debunked.”)

This is all in addition to his official appeal, in which Bankman-Fried argued Judge Kaplan unfairly blocked his lawyers from presenting evidence for some of these claims at trial. In one of her Substack posts, Barbara Fried would lay out a case that Kaplan was biased against her son from the start. “Kaplan’s hatred of Sam was instantaneous, visceral, and immune to facts and reason,” she wrote. “He was Captain Ahab and Sam was his Moby Dick, an avatar of evil rather than a real, live, human being.” Kaplan is also the judge who presided over E. Jean Carroll’s civil sexual-assault case against Donald Trump, a fact Bankman-Fried hopes the president will notice.

Bankman-Fried’s constant CorrLinksing became a subject of bemusement at Terminal Island. “I was like, ‘All you gotta worry about right now is just relax. You can’t do nothing if your billion dollars couldn’t do nothing,’” says Ruiz. “He was always writing down numbers. Always working on something. Don’t know what the hell he was doing. I used to call him Rain Man.” David Bunevacz, 57, an entrepreneur from Calabasas, California, met Bankman-Fried at TI while serving a 17-and-a-half-year sentence for defrauding investors in a cannabis start-up. He told me, “I don’t think he has come full circle with the understanding that he has a decade more to do in prison.” It will probably be closer to 20 years, minus any time he could get shaved off for good behavior and other sentence-reduction credits he accrues.

Bankman-Fried, of course, felt Ruiz’s suggestion was indicative of Innie tendencies. “Almost _every_ inmate gives me that advice — that I should focus more on just building a good life in prison, on getting comfortable, etc., rather than on fighting my case,” he wrote a few weeks into his time at Terminal Island. He added, “And similar to that, I almost _never_ hear prisoners expressing the hopelessness or despair I expect many of them feel. Sometimes they talk about how _in the past_ they did, but always in the context of ‘but then I figured out how to do better in prison.’”

Bankman-Fried estimates he spends one or two hours a day playing cards, usually a Magic: The Gathering–inspired game called Mindbug. (I learned from TI’s Mindbug clique that the gameplay material was mailed in by Adam Yedidia, Bankman-Fried’s best friend at MIT and one of the FTX employees who testified against him at trial. Yedidia is the only ex-FTX figure I learned of who has visited Bankman-Fried in prison.) At Terminal Island, Bankman-Fried taught a chess class and pickleballed compulsively.

As Bankman-Fried acclimated to life at there, everyone wanted to know what car he’d join. Initially, the Woods claimed him, which wasn’t an ideal arrangement. “Look at the people that are in that car. They’ve got their whole face covered with tattoos, and they, like, smoke dope. Are you kidding me? Sam’s a nerd; that’s not the right choice for him,” said one TI friend, who wished to stay anonymous to not piss off Woods at his new prison. One time, Bankman-Fried woke up freezing and realized his windowpane was missing. It turned out his Wood bunkmate had sold it for deuce. “He would eat his food, he would take his shit, he would sell it for deuce. And Sam never said anything,” the TI friend said. “I was so angry one day, and I’m like, ‘Are you fucking serious? This has been going on for how long, Sam?’ And he’s like, ‘Man, it’s like, $5 or $10 a day. What’s that compared to the $20 billion the government took from me?’”

You also had to follow a car’s rules to belong to it. Even a low-security prison’s arbitrary-seeming rules — when you could use CorrLinks and for how long, what times of day you needed to be wearing long pants — never stopped chafing at Bankman-Fried. Car strictures would demand even more conformity. “One day, Sam was playing pickleball, and there were some sex offenders playing,” says Jason Riggs, who served a brief term at TI after being convicted in 2023 for dealing LSD and ran independent. “He was confronted by the Woods. He didn’t like the way he was confronted; he didn’t quite know the rules.” The fact that Bankman-Fried played chess with members of the Black car had also caused tension with the Woods. He decided to run independent.

“So that was a big deal,” says Bunevacz, a Wood who was the lead clerk at TI’s recreation center. “It’s like, ‘You’re a white dude, and you have clean paper, meaning you didn’t tell on anyone and you’re not a sex offender, so you should be with us.’ And he said, ‘No, I might just do my own thing.’ And that’s Sam.” Nobody seemed to resent him too much for his decision. Bunevacz ended up getting him an undemanding job filling out payroll time sheets for the rec department, and the two of them teamed up to win a TI pickleball tournament.

One of the interesting things about talking to people who served with Bankman-Fried is how much more they like him compared to people on the outside. “Avenatti and I were very close friends, and we would just sit back and watch all these guys suck up to Sam like he was like a demigod,” Bunevacz says. “Sam always walked the track by himself. And then it was like that scene in Rocky II when Rocky’s going up the steps and all these people start to run behind him.” One inmate named Jason Todd Mogler got wind of my reporting and sent me a rapturous 1,619-word essay titled “Walking the Yard With Sam Bankman-Fried: The Man Behind the Headlines.” René Ruiz eventually bought Bankman-Fried a pair of sunglasses so he could ignore people on the yard more politely.

It wasn’t just his unassuming personality and billionaire cachet his prison buddies were drawn to but the unusual way his mind worked. One of the Mindbug crew, John McLaughlin, 49, serving for drug-related offenses, says his time with Bankman-Fried was “transformational,” teaching him to think more deliberately and analytically. “I’m not going to comment here on actual, technical guilt because it is irrelevant to me,” he told me. But he was sure Bankman-Fried’s intentions were good. “He’s just entirely too rational to ever consciously choose a path of self-destruction.”

Naturally, not everybody in prison was so charmed. Bunevacz says Avenatti and Bankman-Fried were cordial but never friends. “Mike’s a very, how do I put it, in-your-face type of guy, and Sam’s the complete opposite. In between pickleball sets, he’d be reading his book in the corner by himself.” According to Bunevacz, Avenatti recommended he read not just Michael Lewis’s sympathetic book about Bankman-Fried, Going Infinite, but Bloomberg journalist Zeke Faux’s more skeptical treatment of SBF and the crypto industry, Number Go Up. Avenatti recently went public with his critiques on X, claiming misleadingly that he and Bankman-Fried were bunkmates (TI sources say this was true only for a day or two) and accusing him of acting aloof from prison life. “In his mind, he was never actually one of us. The rules, the labels, the consequences — those were for us little people,” Avenatti posted.

Chris Lazenby, 35, was released from Terminal Island after serving close to seven years for dealing drugs on the dark web. “I know that there’s this cliché of ‘In prison, everyone claims their innocence.’ In reality, it’s super-rare; 99 percent of people admit the crime they did,” Lazenby says. “The people who say they are innocent are sort of laughed at or not really believed. As smart as he is, I just don’t buy that he had no knowledge of what was going on. That effective altruism, this modern-day -technocratic Robin Hood figure — I just don’t buy it.”

Bankman-Fried was accused of stealing customer money in two ways. First, in the spring of 2022, a couple of crypto coins called terra and luna collapsed, tanking the market and biting a chunk out of Alameda’s value. When some of Alameda’s lenders asked for their money back, Alameda didn’t have the cash. Instead, it drew on a privileged, effectively unlimited line of credit it kept at FTX, using a few billion in customer deposits to pay back the loans — an act of “borrowing” Bankman-Fried insisted was legally permitted by the terms of the exchange. Alameda CEO Caroline Ellison, Bankman-Fried’s ex-girlfriend, testified at trial that he instructed her to mask Alameda’s debt to FTX customers by fudging a bunch of balance sheets.

Second, early in FTX’s life, legitimate banks didn’t want anything to do with cryptocurrency. So FTX had customers wire deposits to Alameda, which was able to open a bank account. Eventually, FTX got its own bank accounts, and both Alameda and FTX became very valuable. Bankman-Fried says he literally lost track of the money from the old account, which added up to about $8 billion. (He insists this oopsie also qualified as legal “borrowing.”) But by the time many of FTX’s depositors tried to get their money back in November 2022, it was not there. Alameda had seemingly spent the funds on crypto tokens, or real estate, or political donations, or its venture investments. Michael Lewis called this hopelessly commingled pot of money the “Bank of Sam”: This bank “invested in far riskier assets than banks typically buy. It was totally unregulated. It had no deposit insurance or other protections usually offered to customers. And its depositors were unaware of the bank’s existence.” And then it failed.

At trial, the prosecution argued that it was implausible this awesomely brilliant MIT math nerd could have simply misplaced so many dollars. But many of his new prison friends hear this general story and feel it comports with their view that Bankman-Fried didn’t possess criminal intent in a malicious sense. “He took money from one company and wired it to another without asking permission. And then used it to buy a bunch of coins or whatever? Is that basically it?” Bunevacz asks. “That’s exactly his personality. He definitely is not the type of person that is going to try and enhance himself, as far as, you know, jewelry or houses or stockpiling cash in his house.”

They also wonder if he really could have just lost $8 billion of other people’s money. “He has no organization skills whatsoever,” says Ruiz, who, in addition to cooking for Bankman-Fried and sorting his mail, tidied his locker for him. For his prison job at the rec department, Bankman-Fried was paid $5.25 a month. According to Bunevacz, he never remembered to come to work. “I would always have to go out and grab him on the pickleball court, which is right outside my office, and say, ‘Hey, Sam, I need you to come in here to do payroll,’” Bunevacz says. “He’d be like, ‘Yeah, yeah, okay, oh yeah, sure.’ You know, he’s like a kid in a lot of ways. I’ve never quite met anyone like him, in that street smarts, common-sense-wise, he’s not really there.”

As for Bankman-Fried’s insistence that the missing money was always somewhere: FTX customers are in fact being made whole, bolstering his claims that the Bank of Sam was not as broke as it looked. At the same time, his crypto stash and venture investments may be valuable now, but they weren’t when his depositors asked for their money back. It is partly thanks to the post-SBF boom in crypto prices that FTX’s estate has ballooned in value. Rightly or wrongly, the matter of FTX’s solvency is probably legally moot: At trial, the court ruled that it was immaterial if customers eventually got repaid. Kaplan argued at Bankman-Fried’s sentencing hearing that a thief who steals a bunch of money and then makes a fortune gambling it in Las Vegas isn’t any less of a thief. Bankman-Fried’s real hope is to convince a different judge, perhaps even on the Supreme Court, or someone in the White House that his punishment no longer fits the crime.

In July, Bankman-Fried walked over to a baseball diamond on Terminal Island, where a kickball game was in progress. After watching for a while, he decided the smart play was to weakly bunt the ball to third base because the fielder would probably chuck it into right field trying to peg the runner from across the diamond. Except bunting looked pathetic, so inmates kept trying to kick the shit out of the ball, invariably resulting in useless pop-ups.

Here was one of Bankman-Fried’s favorite topics: the vanities and blind spots and social pressures that make people act against their own interests. It’s a theme he returns to repeatedly in Manfred, almost to the point of mania. A few weeks after the kickball game, he wrote with frustration about a warrior in a science-fantasy novel who ends up accidentally causing the death of 1 billion people by doing misguidedly noble things, like prioritizing his family over everybody else. In another passage, he critiques hypothetical animal-welfare advocates for refusing to work high-paying jobs that would allow them to give more to animal-welfare causes, as he had. This is the idée fixe that undergirds Bankman-Fried’s utilitarian worldview: outcomes over process, no matter how unseemly the process.

There are two schools of thought when it comes to the role Bankman-Fried’s philosophy played in his downfall. The first school says it was all a smoke screen to mask ordinary motives like power and influence. The second school, more compelling as Greek tragedy, says that Bankman-Fried was the victim of his own moral framework. In this telling, he regarded innocent FTX depositors or burdensome accounting practices as stick figures in a trolley problem whom he would toss onto the tracks if he decided doing so might improve the universe down the line. At trial, a picture emerged of a crime committed not in spite of Bankman-Fried’s altruistic pose but as the logical extension of his belief system.

Bankman-Fried, for what it’s worth, rejects both schools of thought. When I asked whether EA-driven proclivity for big risky bets led him down the path to fraud, he returned to his bottom line: He never risked anybody else’s money because he never lost anybody’s money.

In a way, Bankman-Fried is living out a utilitarian thought experiment. On the one hand, he’s eager to combat the public perception that he is an amoral, dishonest person, which is why he agreed to talk to a journalist willing to sift through his prison memoir and speak to his prison friends. On the other hand, he is laying on thick his appreciation of Trump to maximize his chances of clemency. If Bankman-Fried truly believes that his best chance to do good in the world is to get himself out of prison, but can do so only by pretending he’s MAGA, what’s the right thing to do?

His bind becomes obvious when our conversations turn to politics. I asked his opinion of America’s war on Iran. He replied, “Mostly it seems like, if you’re going to go after Iran, this is a smart way to do it — surgical, effective, quick, not as much long-term bogging down or casualties as other approaches.” Zohran Mamdani? “Don’t know details because of lack of info in here. But generally socialist candidates would be really bad for America.” These answers were typical: Trump-friendly but maybe not technically dishonest. When Bankman-Fried really doesn’t want to discuss a subject, he’ll say something polite-ruminative like “It’s a good question” and then make a meaningless word salad familiar to anyone who observed him testify at trial. (As one journalist wrote at the time, he has a “vast vocabulary of weasel phrases.”) I’m sure Bankman-Fried would have loved to boost his prescient investment in Anthropic, but the company has been feuding with the Department of Defense. On that subject, he would ask to speak off the record.

He’s even more twisted up about the odd online activity taking place in his name or at least in support of his cause. When I ask him if he can tell me who is really behind freesbf.org, he goes nearly mute, refusing to say anything noteworthy on or off the record. Similar questions about the X accounts clamoring for his freedom went unanswered. Is his family running this internet campaign? His lobbyists? A secret friend? All of this possible activity fuels the long-standing perception he’ll do whatever it takes to achieve his desired result. (His mother denies having anything to do with the site or any other online efforts besides her own.)

In April, his long-shot motion for a new trial and new judge, in which he represented himself, was denied. Kaplan, with whom he’s been feuding since before his trial, shot him down with an 11-page ruling reprising his usual exasperation with Bankman-Fried’s DIY gambits and insouciance before the court. Bankman-Fried’s motion, Kaplan argued, was just “one part of a plan to rescue his reputation” he’d hatched years earlier, beginning with his “come out as a Republican” brainstorming document. And in June, a panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit rejected his official appeal.

Earlier this year, a reporter for the New York Times asked Trump if he would pardon Bankman-Fried. “I don’t know him at all,” the president replied, adding, “No, I don’t plan to.” When news of Bankman-Fried’s pardon request dropped in June, the administration referred reporters back to that quote. None of the Trump allies I called, including people who’d worked on other pardon cases, told me they’d heard differently. Bankman-Fried’s parents say they have hired two people to lobby on their son’s behalf: Bryan Lanza, a lobbyist at Mercury Public Affairs who worked as an adviser on Trump’s 2024 campaign, and Kory Langhofer, a former Trump campaign lawyer who filed suit challenging the 2020 vote count in Arizona before reportedly clashing with the president over that effort.

Given the chaos and graft that fuel Trump’s Washington, to say nothing of the president’s susceptibility to flattery, nobody really knows if Bankman-Fried has a shot. But the odds are steep. The ex-Democrat has few identifiable allies left in politics or the crypto industry and no organic connection to the MAGA movement. This puts him at a disadvantage compared with someone like former Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao, who shrewdly triggered the customer panic that led to FTX’s collapse and received his own pardon from Trump following a money-laundering conviction. CZ’s exchange effectively props up the Trump family’s cryptocurrency concern, World Liberty Financial. Republicans have made clear what they think of the political upside of pardoning SBF. “I hope the president doesn’t fall for that,” Senator Cynthia Lummis, a pro-crypto Wyoming Republican, said earlier this year of Bankman-Fried’s public campaign.

Bankman-Fried says his biggest regret isn’t starting FTX, or getting into effective altruism, or committing any of the transgressions he was accused of but relinquishing control of FTX shortly after its collapse. “I mean, by far the biggest thing is just, like, letting the lawyers take over the company. Like, I got gaslit. And part of me knew I was, or at least suspected I was getting gaslit,” he said. “I was really weak in that moment, and part of me knew I should have kept fighting.”

He did not look like somebody who was meekly capitulating: Bankman-Fried was frantically trying to raise money and pleading his case to any journalist who would listen. Behind the scenes, he says, FTX lawyers were exerting pressure on him to cede his exchange to a takeover specialist, John Ray III, who would guide the company through bankruptcy. He was highly reluctant, since he, perhaps delusionally, thought he could still save it. But then, he says, he thought about the scene from The Wolf of Wall Street when Leonardo DiCaprio’s character defiantly refuses to cut a deal with the Feds compelling him to leave his firm and everybody on the trading floor goes wild, after which he went down anyway. In Manfred, he describes his decision to hand over the reins as a conversation with a superego entity named Moloch, referred to with the godlike pronouns He and Him:

He put on his Honor and Humility Mustaches, and reminded me of that speech from The Wolf of Wall Street and said don’t let yourself become that. He put on his Acceptance and Agreement Mustaches, and reminded me that FTX was Regulated and that the Regulators were the Adults in the Room and that now they were stepping in and so it was time for me to step aside … I had gotten my wish — I was the fall guy. But of course, as was completely predictable, I couldn’t fall in isolation, and everything that ultimately matters took the fall with me.

In Bankman-Fried’s telling, his tragic flaw wasn’t that he had obeyed his moral code to a fault but that he hadn’t obeyed it enough.

Another popular entertainment he reaches for in explaining his worldview is Everything Everywhere All at Once, which he watched while awaiting trial at his childhood home on Stanford’s campus. The movie imagines a multiverse in which any number of random microevents dramatically alter the life trajectories of different characters, suggesting an extreme degree of randomness underlying the stories we tell about ourselves. The movie comforts Bankman-Fried. What happened to FTX isn’t the essence of who he is.

There’s “the Sam who never got into crypto in the first place” and “the Sam who had gone into journalism.” And, “of course, there was me — the Sam from the universe we happen to live in — wearing an ankle monitor.” He writes, “All those Sams are me, and I am all of them. Butterflies flapped their wings, and I branched out through the multiverse, but it’s still the same me. But whereas some Sams got the benefit of the doubt every single time, even when they didn’t deserve it, this Sam wasn’t ever getting it, even when he had proof.”

In early 2026, the Bureau of Prisons started shipping inmates out of a deteriorating Terminal Island. Bankman-Fried left in March after packing up some of his possessions: seven pairs of socks, five shorts, six T-shirts, beans, dates, barbecue-sauce packets, a Mindbug set.

Bankman-Fried got a good placement: the low-security prison FCI Lompoc, a complex of low-rises set in farmland that is a couple of hours closer to his parents. In April, I requested an in-person interview, which was granted, and I visited him there in May. After clearing security and passing through two heavy doors, I emerged on prison grounds. The correctional officer who oversees Bankman-Fried’s unit walked me the few yards to the visiting area. Deeper into the complex, I saw inmates throwing around a baseball on the diamond. In the distance behind them, there were mountains. The visiting area is indoor-outdoor. When I arrived, Bankman-Fried was chatting with a CO at a picnic table in a patio area. I asked him if he preferred to sit inside or outside. He said he was indifferent. I decided we’d go indoors and bought us a couple $5 Aquafinas from the vending machine.

Bankman-Fried looked well: about 30 pounds lighter than he was on the outside and tanned from months of pickleball in the yard. He wore Nikes he had bought at commissary and a uniform of brown khaki pants and a brown khaki short-sleeved shirt. The COs call him “Bankman.” He displayed physical tics familiar to anybody who knew him prior to his conviction, like his right leg chronically pumping up and down as we spoke. We sat on opposite ends of a low table. The two COs loosely monitored us from a guard station in the middle of the room, but otherwise nobody was around.

We talked about his new living arrangement, which is a six-person unit rather than the dorm-style setup he had been used to. I asked him what he’d tell the president if he had a direct audience. He replied that the president had been the victim of politically motivated prosecution and “he’s not the only one.” He praised Trump for unleashing the crypto industry and undoing Biden’s crypto-unfriendly policy of “regulation by prosecution.”

I asked him how being in prison had changed his worldview. He gave me a stock answer about the venality of federal prosecutors. He also said something funnier and more classically SBF. Given that most office jobs in the world were so dead end and soul-crushing, he riffed, he understood why so many of the guys he was in with turned to a more exciting life of drug dealing.

For several months now, we’d been talking on the phone. I realized I had been wondering what he thought about right before he called me. I was one of four or five people he spoke to on the outside. Did he have my number memorized? Was every call purely strategic, or did it offer some reprieve from prison drudgery? And if it was purely strategic, what did that say about the premise of my project, that Bankman-Fried’s is a criminal mind worth understanding in all its paradoxes and complexities?

He answered carefully, as though not to hurt my feelings. When he first decided to talk to me, his only calculus was whether he thought it could help or hurt his cause to do so. But now, he said, he sometimes thought about whether calling me was more interesting than whatever other thing he could be doing in prison at that very moment.

Toward the end of our conversation, a small bird flew into the visiting room. Then it couldn’t figure out how to get out, repeatedly ramming itself beak-first against a window. Pretty much any detail about prison life can take on maudlin significance, but the trapped-bird visual felt especially overdetermined. The room froze, and all four of us winced, praying the bird would get out before hurting itself too badly. Bankman-Fried and one of the COs made half-hearted pushing motions at the bird until it finally managed to find an open window.

David Bunevacz, the rec guy at Terminal Island, told me he’d asked Bankman-Fried what he would do if he got out of prison. “Sam always goes, ‘David, to make real money, you have to start with real money, you know, $50 million, $100 million, and then you can start a real business, and then you can really go for it.’ ‘So what are you gonna do when you get out?’ Sam goes, ‘Start my own coin, and everyone’s gonna jump on it.’” He was probably kidding. And they probably wouldn’t. But you never know.