FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried, who faces decades in prison after being convicted of masterminding a multibillion dollar fraud, has brought in a new lawyer who helped secure a lenient sentence for another high-profile white collar defendant.
Bankman-Fried hired Marc Mukasey, a former federal prosecutor with a wealth of experience and connections in the New York legal community. He represented Nikola founder Trevor Milton, who was sentenced to four-years in prison, well below the 11 years prosecutors had sought.
Bankman-Fried is reshuffling his lawyers following a contentious trial where he and his lawyers frequently butted heads with Judge Lewis Kaplan. One of Bankman-Fried’s attorneys — who has since left the team — described his client as the “worst person I’ve ever seen do a cross examination.”
The 31-year-old was convicted late last year of stealing customer funds to splash on venture investments, trading, loans and real estate through FTX-sister hedge fund Alameda Research.
While Bankman-Fried may draw some optimism from Milton’s sentence, the former crypto executive’s fraud was much broader and ran into the billions of dollars. He is also before a judge, Kaplan, who frequently appeared frustrated with Bankman-Fried even before the trial and will be the one determining his sentence.
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Defendants often bring on new lawyers ahead of sentencing to cast fresh eyes on the case following an exhausting trial.
Mukasey and a spokesman for Bankman-Fried declined to comment. The attorneys who represented Bankman-Fried at trial, Mark Cohen and Christian Everdell, are still on the case while David Mills, a family friend who worked probono, has stepped away ahead of any appeal.
Mukasey is the son of Michael Mukasey, a former judge in the Southern District of New York, where Kaplan has sat since 1994. He has a robust history of defending white-collar cases, and represented Michael Gramins, one of three Nomura bankers charged in 2015 with lying to customers about the prices of bonds as part an effort to tame questionable tactics used in the trading of complex securities following the 2008 financial crisis. Gramins, the only trader charged in the crackdown to be convicted at trial, was sentenced to a term of probation in December 2020.
He represented Milton in a case where the former Nikola executive was convicted of lying to shareholders about the electric-truck maker’s progress.
He also won the acquittal of a former UBS Group AG precious metals trader, Andre Flotron, who was charged with scheming to manipulate futures markets through a practice known as spoofing. Mukasey was also part of the team advising former President Donald Trump’s company in the criminal case brought against it by Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance.
--With assistance from Bob Van Voris.
To contact the reporters on this story:
Ava Benny-Morrison in New York at abennymorris@bloomberg.net;
Chris Dolmetsch in Federal Court in Manhattan at cdolmetsch@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story:
Misyrlena Egkolfopoulou at megkolfopoul@bloomberg.net;
Anthony Aarons at aaarons@bloomberg.net
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