The Parent Trap

Inside Sam Bankman-Fried's family bubble.

- By Sheelah Kolhatkar

"Sam will never speak an untruth", Barbara Fried said. "It's just not him."

The Magistrates Court of the Bahamas, in Nassau, is situated in an imposing pink-and-white building edged with palm trees. On December 13, 2022, Sam Bankman-Fried, the former C.E.O. of the now bankrupt cryptocurrency exchange FTX, arrived there to ask for release on bail after being indicted on eight criminal charges. Bankman-Fried typically wears T-shirts and shorts, no matter the occasion; on this day, he wore, like armor, an ill-fitting navy-blue suit. He’d spent the previous night in jail, where he hadn’t been given the medication he normally took for his depression. But of greater concern was the indictment, unsealed that morning in the United States, which accused him of fraud, conspiracy to commit money laundering, and other crimes that could lead to more than a hundred years in prison.

The evening before, he and a colleague had been working on their laptops in the oceanfront penthouse of a resort where he lived when his parents, who were visiting, called him into a bedroom. Minutes later, according to the colleague, a group of Bahamian law-enforcement officers, accompanied by members of the resort’s staff, strode into the apartment. One officer had a warrant for Bankman-Fried’s arrest.

When the officers entered the bedroom, Bankman-Fried asked for a drink of water and seemed to gird himself for what was ahead. “I can give you my passport,” he told a broad-shouldered officer, who in turn suggested that he might want to bring a jacket with him. Passing his phone, wallet, and college class ring to the colleague, whom he’d asked to try to keep his parents calm, Bankman-Fried raised his wrists to be cuffed.