In the big house, it comes down to the little things. Take pillows. When the disgraced crypto kingpin Sam Bankman-Fried detailed his experience in a hellish Bahamian prison to Forbes after his arrest in December 2022, one of the first things he mentioned was that he had to crumple up the navy blue suit he wore to court for a place to rest his head.
Sam Bankman-Fried, disgraced cofounder of FTX cryptocurrency exchange, is now serving time in federal prison. Photographer: Stephanie Keith/Bloomberg
Now serving a 25-year sentence for fraud at Brooklyn’s notorious Metropolitan Detention Center (MDC), the former residence of Bernie Madoff, Jeffrey Epstein and R. Kelly, SBF is once again bemoaning the lack of pillows in prison. “What the actual fuck, we’re not allowed to have pillows? Are we allowed to sleep?,” he writes in a prison diary he is shopping to media outlets.
In the diary, SBF complains at length that sleeping without a pillow or stuffed animal, specifically a teddy bear named “Manfred,” is nearly impossible for him and has led to back pain. Ever the entrepreneur, the former billionaire, who was worth as much as $26.5 billion in 2021, details how he traded two muffins to a fellow inmate who was high and had the munchies in exchange for a pillow made from ripped-up mattress stuffings inside of a t-shirt.
Forbes received three chapters of SBF’s prison diary via email from his father, Joe Bankman, who has hired Walter Pavlo, a Forbes contributor who writes and speaks on prison topics, and is himself a convicted white-collar criminal, as a consultant to the fallen crypto titan. SBF’s motive in seeking a publisher for his diaries is uncertain. It’s certainly not monetary. As part of the verdict for his role in the FTX fraud, SBF faces forfeiture of $11 billion in addition to his two and half decades in prison. The billions being restored to FTX’s victims as during the bankruptcy process do not count. So even though his memoir could be worth as much as a seven-figure advance to a publisher, according to one agent, he will not see any money.
Much of SBF’s writing is focused on his cellmates, one of whom he calls Harry, a kind but loud, muscular homophobe paradoxically fixated on the 2018 Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody. Harry and many of the inmates around SBF spend much of their time watching sports and betting on games. Bankman-Fried, who stole billions from his investors to make massive bets on cryptocurrencies, writes about their sports gambling contemptuously, “One day, Harry came to me with a new betting strategy: he would bet $100. If he lost, he would bet $250, and then $600, etc., until he won, and eventually he would win, so he was almost certainly going to make money doing it. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that there was in fact a name for this strategy: “the gambler’s fallacy.”
Bankman-Fried’s prison diary also sounds off about MDC’s “pathological” lack of clocks. Writes Bankman-Fried, “It’s easy to lose track of time in prison. In fact, it’s hard to keep track of time in prison. The minutes, and hours, and days, and months, and years, and decades pass by, with nothing to mark them.
“It’s as if the prison wants to emphasise to you just how irrelevant you are to the outie’s world, and how irrelevant it is to you, now that you’re an innie, by making it clear that even society’s arbitrary time conventions don’t matter to your life anymore. Days are a concept for outies.”
Sam Bankman-Fried
Driven to distraction by the lack of chronometers, SBF eventually used “one-third” of his prison commissary money to purchase a digital watch (costing $42.25 according to a 2020 price list). For context, commissary donut sticks went for $1.70 and Spam is listed at $1.55. According to Joe Bankman, SBF meets nearly every day with a paralegal, as he prepares for his appeal. He also has access to a computer and has daily video calls with his attorney father.
Perhaps because Bankman-Fried has not yet come to grips with his new reality, his prison diaries have the distinct tone of Jane Goodall recounting life among the chimpanzees or a Victorian anthropologist observing a foreign culture.
“Most people become innies,” writes Bankman-Fried, referring to other inmates.“They will go to war over a banana, and they will trade everything they have to get high one more time.”
In Bankman-Fried’s diary he highlights two other groups, one with long sentences that have “self-consciously given up on life” and a third group he seems to identify with. “How can you rebel against the system, when the first thing the system takes away is your freedom to rebel. How can you be true to your true self when your true self has been deemed a danger to society so great you need to be locked in a cage until you finally give up on it.”
Bankman-Fried devotes a large portion of one chapter to widespread abuse of a drug called deuce, though he says he isn’t a user. It’s unclear what actual substance this is, only that it is smuggled into the prison soaked into ordinary looking paper and turns the inmates who smoke it into zombies each night. He recounts how flagrant deuce smoking caused the guards to confiscate all of the contraband in his cell block.
“I lost my pillow tonight. And so tonight I am propping my head up halfheartedly with a combination of towels and prison jumpsuits. It doesn’t work very well; my neck hurts already,” says Bankman-Fried, who goes on to reminisce about his childhood plushy. “Ever since I got a stuffed dog when I was two years old, I’ve slept with him nearly every night of my life, often using him as a makeshift pillow, one my neck has gotten accustomed to the feel of. He traveled with me, from Stanford, where I was born; to college, in Boston; to work in NYC; to Berkeley, where I started Alameda; to Hong Kong, where I founded FTX; to The Bahamas, FTX’s headquarters; and back to Stanford, when I was on house arrest. I miss Manfred.”
Editor’s Note: The story was updated from the original to clarify certain facts including the date of SBF’s arrest, his internet access and his relationship with consultant Walter Pavlo.
This story was originally published on forbes.com.
