“And now you know, the rest of the story.” The words of the late, great broadcaster Paul Harvey who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by George W. Bush.
I’m channeling him today for two reasons. A pair of famous stories where many think they know what happened when in fact, there is more to understand.
Sam Bankman-Fried was 32 when, in 2024, he was convicted on seven counts of fraud, conspiracy, and money laundering. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison. His parents are two esteemed law professors who’ve not sat for a television interview until giving me that opportunity in their home last month. Our conversation was nearly 2 hours long. The edited, 15-minute version of the interview aired Saturday on my CNN program, but not until today at 9am ET will that link be available for online viewing at CNN.com.
My initiation to and interest in the SBF case stems from having interviewed Michael Lewis (“Money Ball”, “Liar’s Poker”, “The Blind Side”, etc.) in 2024 regarding his book about SBF called “Going Infinite: The Rise and Fall of a New Tycoon”. Listen on Apple Podcasts.
Had you asked me about the case before I read the Lewis book, I’d have said that SBF was just a younger, crypto version of Bernie Madoff. But Lewis, who spent a great deal of time with SBF just as everything was hitting the fan, gave me a new perspective. In the paperback reissue of “Going Infinite”, he included an afterword. His view: a “young person with an intellectually defensible but socially unacceptable moral code makes a huge mistake by trying to live by it”, as distinguished from “a criminal on the loose in the financial system”. I think that captures the nuance of this complex case.
SBF’s parents, Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried, are eager for the world to know that customers of FTX, the crypto exchange founded by Sam, were made whole with interest. I think that will come as a surprise to many. They assert that the crisis was one of FTX illiquidity, not insolvency, and that Sam was not enriched, nor did he squirrel anything away. Rather, he was attempting to live a life of effective altruism. I afforded them ample opportunity make these points while also responding to my pointed questions, including the Howard Baker question: what did you know [about the fraud] and when did you know it? Were you enriched? As the judge said, isn’t a thief who takes his loot to Vegas and gambles it well still a thief? And when Barbara Fried asserted that his prosecution was political, I said “this is going to sound to some like a jailhouse conversion”. I found them forthright, earnest… and heartbroken.
I have no doubt that SBF made serious mistakes with custodial funds that should have been hands-off, but whether he possessed the requisite mens rea, or criminal intent, is less clear to me. Unlike Madoff, he was building a legitimate business that, at its height, was worth $32 Billion. The extent of his largesse was to buy a $30 Million condo in the Bahamas that functioned as a corporate flop house, like a scene from the movie “Social Network” about the founding of Facebook. Mostly, after immersing myself in the case, I question the length of the sentence imposed for a 32-year-old nonviolent offender with no prior criminal record. (After watching the CNN interview, a friend who is famous in the boxing world – a name you’d know – emailed me to say he thought SBF deserved everything he got. My response: Mike Tyson was convicted of rape and served 3 years.) Judge Lewis Kaplan, who imposed that sentence, is the same judge who presided over E. Jean Carroll’s civil case against President Trump, a point not lost on SBF’s parents, as you will see. I hope you will watch the interview.
The second story is “Lone Survivor”. Few books have transfixed me like Marcus Luttrell’s best seller published twenty years ago. I devoured the book and then hosted Luttrell on radio, and then again in front of a sold-out live audience of 1,000 listeners who gobbled up the tickets to watch our conversation at the Scottish Rite Auditorium in Collingswood, NJ. You could have heard a pin drop as he told that part of the story when his SEAL team had to decide whether to kill the goat herders who happened upon them during a clandestine recognizance mission in the Hindu Kush mountains in Eastern Afghanistan. If you read the book or watched the Peter Berg-directed movie starring Mark Wahlberg as Luttrell, you know how it ended and why Luttrell titled his book.
Well, last week in Politico Magazine, R.M. Schneiderman and Ed Darack published a massive re-examination of Operation Red Wings under the headline “This Military Tragedy Became a Blockbuster Movie. Here’s What it Didn’t Tell You.”
Suffice it to say there are differing accounts of what happened in the fog of war. I want to make clear that I still admire Luttrell and regard him as a hero. Likewise Matthew Axelson, Michael Murphy, and Danny Dietz – as well as the 16 servicemen we lost in a rescue operation gone south. The entire story is just so damn sad.
I knew I’d released one of my Luttrell interviews from two decades ago as a Smerconish Book Club Podcast, but I wasn’t sure if it was short form from radio or the live event. When Dan Henning reported that it was the one-hour live event version, I was thrilled. This is worth a listen.
R.M. Schneiderman, coauthor of the Politico piece, will be a guest on my radio program today. The conversation should be illuminating.
“Paul Harvey… Good day!”
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