SBF’s Lawyer Says Client Was ‘Worst’ Witness He Has Ever Seen (1)

Sam Bankman-Fried went off-script when he took the stand.

That’s the view of David Mills, the behind-the-scenes architect of the FTX co-founder’s defense at trial. The once high-flying crypto mogul repeatedly veered away from his lawyers’ strategy, including on how to handle prosecutors’ tough questions on cross-examination.

“He may be at the very top of the list as the worst person I’ve ever seen do a cross examination,” says Mills, a Stanford Law School colleague and a close friend of Bankman-Fried’s parents.

Bankman-Fried’s parents arrive at a New York courthouse on Oct. 5.

Photographer: Stephanie Keith/Bloomberg

Not that Mills, 76, thinks a better performance by Bankman-Fried would’ve prevented the jury from finding him guilty of stealing billions of dollars from FTX customers—which it did in a matter of hours. Mills says pre-trial rulings by the judge and powerful testimony by prosecution witnesses made the case practically unwinnable for the defense.

The verdict was inevitable, Mills says, but he doesn’t believe the trial was fair. “I think he is innocent because he didn’t form the intent to do anything wrong,” he says.

It’s a rare defeat for Mills, who cut his white-collar defense teeth in the sprawling 1980s securities fraud case against Michael Milken and Drexel Burnham Lambert and, more recently, says he turned down Theranos Inc. founder Elizabeth Holmes when she asked him to advise on her defense against fraud charges. He says the grueling trial and the high stakes for his close friends—Joseph Bankman and Barbara Fried—have caused him to rethink his future in criminal law.

“I’m not going to get myself emotionally involved on a very deep personal level in a case like this again,” he says. “I’m just not going to do it.”

RUIN: Money, Ego and Deception at FTX

Mills, a Newark, New Jersey, native, cuts an unusual figure in the legal community, flitting among lecture halls, courtrooms and corporate boardrooms. His legal work isn’t confined to criminal cases—he recently represented venture capital firm Benchmark Capital in its efforts to oust Travis Kalanick as Uber Technologies Inc.’s chief executive officer and also advised pioneering Apple Inc. designer Jony Ive on his exit from the company.

And the law isn’t his only career—he’s also a managing director at Fortress Investment Group, and he helped launch what he describes as a “hugely successful” private investment firm, Harbourton Enterprises. He declined to comment on his wealth but confirmed he’d donated at least $10 million to Stanford Law School and millions more to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. When Mills first flew to the Bahamas, where Bankman-Fried was arrested and jailed before extradition to New York, he did so in his own jet.

Yet despite all that, Mills has kept a relatively low profile.

“It’s partly humility, modesty and self-efficacy,” says Ive, who tapped Mills to be general counsel of his design firm, LoveFrom. “But he is also so consumed by the work, he doesn’t have time or regard for self-promotion.”

“I’m not going to get myself emotionally involved on a very deep personal level in a case like this again,” Mills says. “I’m just not going to do it.”

Photographer: Christopher Lee/Bloomberg

Mills is proudest of his philanthropic efforts. At a recent meeting in his Manhattan apartment overlooking the High Line, Mills wore tie-dyed socks and a khaki cap emblazoned with the number “3419,” representing the number of people he’s helped get out of prison. Mills was a major driver and financial backer of the effort to reform California’s controversial Three Strikes law, which succeeded in 2012.

In the course of the campaign, Mills bonded with “Three Striker” Sajad Shakoor, who was given a life sentence for two burglaries and instigating a fight, for focusing him on the cause. After Shakoor was released, he found himself invited to Mills’ 2013 Napa Valley wedding to Anne Devereux, which was officiated by Senator Cory Booker.

“I was the only non-millionaire, non-captain of industry there,” Shakoor jokes. Now a University of California at Berkeley graduate who leads a chain of 40 falafel restaurants, Shakoor every year caters a Stanford class Mills teaches on the Central Park Five.

Bankman-Fried won’t be number 3420 for Mills, who says he’s not going to be involved in any appeal by the FTX co-founder. His breach with Bankman—who Mills says first pushed Stanford to hire him to teach criminal law in 1997—and Fried clearly pains him.

“I’m concerned, when you believe in your child’s complete innocence, that you need to blame someone,” he says, “and I am a likely candidate.”

In a statement, Bankman and Fried said, “We love David Mills. He has been a fantastic lawyer for us. He has also been an amazingly steadfast friend and will be grateful to him for being with us in a dark time, forever.”

When Bankman first called Mills in November 2022, it wasn’t for legal advice. Knowing his friend had contacts on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, Bankman was seeking possible financial backers for FTX, which was on the verge of collapse due to its exposure to losses at Alameda Research, a crypto hedge fund mostly owned by Bankman-Fried.

“We’re having a run on the bank,” Bankman said, according to Mills.

Mills provided a list of names, though he says neither he nor Fortress ever invested in FTX. It wasn’t until he flew to the Bahamas in December 2022 that he decided to become involved in Bankman-Fried’s criminal defense. Mills told Bankman and Fried that he would “see this through for you and do my best,” he recalls. He didn’t charge any money for his work.

“It was out of friendship, pure unadulterated friendship,” Mills says. “Well, that’s not true—88% friendship, 12% ‘I love criminal law.’”

Right away, though, he realized the case would be an uphill battle. Several law firms he approached to work on the case turned him down before Mark Cohen and Christian Everdell agreed to act as trial counsel.

“I would say, ‘I’m representing the most hated person on earth but not Donald Trump,’” he says. Most people guessed he was talking about Bankman-Fried.

Even before the trial kicked off in October, US District Judge Lewis Kaplan limited the defense, ruling that it couldn’t argue Bankman-Fried relied on legal advice at FTX or that the exchange was authorized to access customer deposits by its terms of service.

Meanwhile, Mills knew Bankman-Fried would be facing at least three powerful prosecution witnesses—Alameda Chief Executive Officer Caroline Ellison, FTX co-founder Gary Wang and FTX engineering chief Nishad Singh. All three testified that Bankman-Fried directed them to commit fraud.

“I thought it was almost impossible to win a case when three or four founders are all saying you did it,” Mills says. “Even if they’re all lying through their teeth, it’s really, really hard to win a case like that.”

Bankman-Fried departs court in New York.

Photographer: Stephanie Keith/Bloomberg

If he’d had his way, Mills says, the defense would have admitted to everything the witnesses and prosecution said and focused on convincing the jury that it was all part of a good-faith effort to save FTX.

“That’s not how Sam remembers things, to put it kindly,” Mills says. “I thought there was a really good story there. But he can’t tell the story that all these people are lying. You got five people who say one thing, one person says another thing. Well, you’ve got no shot—zero.”

A spokesperson for Bankman-Fried declined to comment.

After the jury heard from Ellison, Wang and Singh, Bankman-Fried really had no choice but to testify himself, Mills says. But rather than admitting to statements he’d previously made in the media or attributed to him by the witnesses, he quibbled over prosecutors’ phrasings and claimed repeatedly not to remember making damning statements, coming across as evasive. His cross-examination became a death by a thousand cuts as the prosecutor showed those statements to the jury one by one.

Mills says he eventually had enough. He wasn’t there when the jury delivered its verdict with striking swiftness.

As for his relationship with Bankman and Fried, Mills says, “My sadness for them is extreme, and I don’t know that our friendship will survive this.” —With Gillian Tan

Read next: How Sam Bankman-Fried’s Elite Parents Enabled His Crypto Empire

(Updates with Mills comment on verdict in fifth paragraph.)

To contact the author of this story:
Ava Benny-Morrison in New York at abennymorris@bloomberg.net

To contact the editor responsible for this story:
Anthony Lin at alin364@bloomberg.net

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