SBF maintains his innocence while selling rice in prison.

FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried has maintained his innocence despite serving 25 years in prison for fraud, and as he plans his appeal, he's taken to commodity trading – namely bags of rice.

In the year Speaking to the media for the first time since his August 2023 incarceration at Brooklyn's Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC), Bankman-Fried spoke with Puck News' William Cohan in an interview published May 9. Bankman-Fried's mother, Barbara Fried, was involved in organizing it.

A former FTX CEO's diet sees fellow inmates finding vegan food they think is “just right”. [smell] Like shit” so he subsists on beans and rice – the latter “has become one of the state currencies in the MDC”.

The co-founder of trading house Jane Street Capital and trading firm Alameda Research reportedly joked about how much better his trading opportunities were in prison compared to his previous career as a frequency trader.

Banman-Fried was “a very thin” 25 pounds (11 kilograms) down and “no bags under his eyes,” a pudgy, slightly manic, coward, Puck reported.

He looked Cohan in the eye “the whole time”, during the interview – something he had done “rarely” before – but the jailed founder admitted he would be “good at pretending” he was doing well.

Bankman-Fried is being held with 35 other male inmates — half of whom are state-sponsored murderers — in a large dorm-style unit in an MDC unit mostly for female inmates.

He is said to be very bored with only four televisions and a tablet that is not connected to the internet on which he plays games.

He's not worried about his safety, but he doesn't sleep well when the other inmates wake him up because they want to use him to sell the bag of rice.

SBF thinks he is a “fall guy”.

Last month, Banman-Fried announced he would appeal the fraud and money laundering charges, which his attorneys said he would do if he was found guilty in November.

He talks with his new attorney “almost every week for an hour or so” and is “obviously thinking” about the approved prescription, Cohan said.

The former head of the exchange told Cohan that he was prepared to “be the fall guy” for FTX's failure – the only slip-up was negligence that left FTX “vulnerable to bank runs and the machinations of its competitors.” “A reasonable penalty increase is a civil, not a criminal, penalty.

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Cohan Bankman-Fried “still does not believe he committed any crime” and portrayed himself as an innocent bystander and never had a chance to plead with prosecutors.

He was also “not exactly apologetic” about the nearly $8 billion in customer money he was accused of helping to misappropriate.

Bankman-Fried has blamed an army of lawyers who betrayed FTX for the company's failure. Had the former CEO stayed at the helm of FTX, he believed it would not have gone bankrupt, but rather become an $80 billion company.

He added that he should have tried harder to find someone other than ex-girlfriend Caroline Ellison to run Alameda after his lawyers determined it was a conflict of interest to run the business and FTX at the same time, or ignore them. .

Bankman-Fried has asked to remain at MDC pending an appeal, which is due in July. But he could be moved at any time and placed in a facility near his parents – on the other side of the country in California.

If this happens, it is said that he could be on a prison bus for up to four months, picking up prisoners and traveling to the United States.

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