by Matthew Russell Lee, Patreon Book Substack
LITERARY SDNY, Oct 31 -- Thirty first day of October and ghoulishly the SBF testimony and trial evidence came to an end.
How had he not known that $8 billion were gone? Smaller bore but more telling, why had he offered to Bahamas authorities that Bahamians could withdraw from FTX even as others couldn't, could take their money out before the bankruptcy freeze?
He was asked: did you give courtside tickets in the Miami Heat Arena to the prime minister of the Bahamas? He didn't think so, Sam answered.
But here was a message where he bragged about it, where the PM and his wife were right then. Had he helped the son of the Bahamas Attorney General, to whom he made the "Bahamians First" offer?
Not asked: why hadn't the prosecutors asked Sam's Bahamas lawyer Krystal Rolle about these gratuities, and the way things seemed to work in the Bahamas. It's better in the Bahamas, an old ad used to say. Better for some...
DOJ had then deferred to the Bahamas - that is to say, the Miami Heat PM or Help My Son AG - and dropped US campaign finance violations and China bribery charges against SBF.
And hadn't China opened up one of its largest embassies / spy stations in the Bahamas? The Belt and Road, it now appeared, ran straight through Foley Square.
The re-direct was short; the rebuttal witnesses were dropped. By lunch the jury was excused for the day and soon the charge conference began. An SBF lawyer named Stephen Dick dicked around about conscious avoidance (hadn't Sam started avoiding meetings about the hole? Hadn't he overheard about the bug and done nothing about it?) and the legal instructions were finished, or nearly so.
Team SBF put in a one-page letter just before five, and the prosecutors if they filed one didn't docket it. Things were coming to a close...
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