Cryptocurrency bad boy Sam Bankman-Fried might want to read up on Jeffrey Epstein, now that SBF is in jail.
Bankman-Fried, who’s been making the media rounds painting himself as something of a clueless sort who didn’t intend, or abet, the theft of investors’ capital in his failed cryptocurrency exchange and affiliated hedge fund, ran out of rope this week. That’s just figuratively speaking about the rope.
Why should Bankman-Fried know about Epstein? Simple. Epstein was in prison for alleged sex trafficking involving minors and, so the story goes, a lot of big names were nervous about what his trial might reveal not only about Epstein, but about them.
It all came to a quick end when Epstein’s second suicide attempt in jail was successful. He used bedsheets, not a rope, to hang himself. That was Aug. 10, 2019, and the sighs of relief from Epstein’s fellow partyers on his pleasure island produced gale force winds.
How convenient, cynics thought, that this man who might have brought down so many, silenced himself. Either Epstein was, or wasn’t on suicide watch, according to conflicting reports. If he was, the guards apparently took it too literally and watched him commit suicide. Or not.
Of note, Epstein’s confidant and eventually co-defendant, Ghislaine Maxwell, reported threats on her by jail personnel in New York before she was transferred to the low security Florida prison where she is to serve her 20-year term for sex crimes involving minors.
Notably, Maxwell has stressed she is not suicidal, just in case anything happens to here while in prison.
In a curious intersection, Bankman-Fried reportedly has hired one of the lawyers who represented Maxwell.
The same skeptics who questioned Epstein’s reported suicide, observed that it was curious timing that Bankman-Fried would be nabbed just on the eve of him testifying before Congress and perhaps spilling some dirt on all the famous people he associated with while constructing his alleged fraud scheme.
Now he’s on ice, figuratively not literally.
Perhaps fearing he might commit “suicide,” Bankman-Fried is not agreeing to extradition from The Bahamas, where he was arrested on many charges of securities fraud. Bankman-Fried was denied bail as a flight risk.
Translation: Let’s keep him where we can reach him quickly, just in case he needs a hand tying the bedsheets and all that.
Were I Bankman-Fried, I’d be sleeping with one eye open and writing “I will not commit suicide” hundreds of times on the cell walls.
Here’s a novel idea to help investors get back some of the $6 billion they were said to have lost to Bankman-Fried. Allow them to take out short-term life insurance policies on SBF, valid until his scheduled Feb. 8 trial date.
They just have to be sure those policies are not invalidated by “suicide.”
Sam Ross Jr's site 