CEO of the bankrupt FTX, Sam Bankman-Fried will be in the Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center till his trial in October.
Sam Bankman-Fried will prepare for his fraud trial from the jail, where convicts ranging from the former president of Honduras to convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell have complained of poor living circumstances.
Bankman-Fried, the CEO of the now-defunct cryptocurrency exchange FTX, was ordered to jail on Friday by U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan in Manhattan for interfering with witnesses while out on $250 million bail at his parents’ house in Palo Alto, California.
Bankman-Fried will now be detained before his October 2 trial in MDC, a far cry from the opulent Bahamas resort where he resided until his arrest and extradition to the United States in December 2022. Bankman-Fried has pled not guilty to fraud charges related to FTX’s collapse.
Maggots in the inmates’ food and ongoing staffing shortages have been problems at MDC in recent years. A guard admitted guilt to receiving payments to carry drugs in earlier this year. Public defenders have referred to the circumstances as “inhumane.”
MDC, which opened in 1994, now houses 1,608 prisoners. After the Manhattan Correctional Centre closed in 2021 for improvements, it is now the jail housing inmates in New York City awaiting federal trials. In his MCC cell, Epstein committed suicide while he was awaiting his sex trafficking case trial.
