Bankman-Fried Appeals Attorney Clerked for Ginsburg, Wrote Novel

Sam Bankman-Fried has turned to a veteran appeals specialist, one-time novelist and former Ruth Bader Ginsburg clerk as he seeks to upend a 25-year prison sentence.

Alexandra Shapiro took Bankman-Fried’s case after she won US Supreme Court victories last year for clients Steven Aiello and Joseph Gerardi, who were convicted of fraud charges related to an upstate New York development known as the “Buffalo Billion.”

The criminal appeals lawyer launched her own New York firm more than a decade ago after departing Latham & Watkins, the world’s second largest law operation by revenue based on the 2023 American Lawyer rankings. Shapiro did not respond to an email seeking comment.

Bankman-Fried is appealing his sentence and conviction for committing a multibillion faud at the FTX cryptocurrency exchange he co-founded, according to a notice he filed Thursday in federal court in Manhattan. The filing listed Shapiro as his lawyer though it’s unclear what the appeal arguments will be.

Judge Lewis A. Kaplan last month sentenced Bankman-Fried to the 25-year term, noting there was a “risk” the 32-year-old could still be in a position “to do something very bad” after his release.

Shapiro clerked for Ginsburg for a year starting in 1993, between getting her degree at Columbia Law School and spending five years at the US Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York, according to her bio posted on LinkedIn. She worked at Latham from 2000 to 2008.

She founded what is now Shapiro Arato Bach in 2009 alongside former Gibson Dunn partner and Columbia Law School classmate Cynthia Arato. Jonathan Bach, a former Cooley partner who is Shapiro’s husband, joined the firm in 2019.

Shapiro published a novel in 2022 that follows the subject of a “wrongful” white-collar criminal prosecution involving a hedge fund employee. The book is titled “Presumed Guilty.”

“My hope is to educate readers about the fact that unfairness exists in the criminal justice system, and can affect anyone, including defendants who have the resources to hire good lawyers,” Shapiro said in an interview with the Women Criminal Defense Attorneys blog.

Bankman-Fried is not the first crypto defendant Shapiro has represented on appeal. She represents Nathaniel Chastain, a former employee of the NFT marketplace OpenSea. He was sentenced to three months in prison after being convicted in the first-ever insider-trading case involving digital assets.

In the Aiello and Gerardi case, Shapiro and a team of lawyers from her firm drafted the petition for certiorari as well as merit briefs in support of the co-defendants. The US Supreme Court decisions “substantially curbed” the government’s use of federal criminal fraud statutes and are likely to have “significant implications” for how those are interpreted in the future, the law firm said at the time they were issued.

The case is USA v. Bankman-Fried, S.D.N.Y., 22-CR- 00673, 4/11/24.