The first of Sam Bankman-Fried’s inner circle just received their punishment. On Tuesday, at the same Manhattan courthouse that saw the FTX founder undergo a brutal month of reckoning, a federal judge sentenced his former lieutenant, Ryan Salame, to 7.5 years in prison, even more than the five to seven years that prosecutors had requested.
Salame, who had risen through the ranks from FTX’s early days in Hong Kong to lead its Bahamas division, was always an outlier amid Bankman-Fried’s nerd empire. He went to UMass instead of MIT, partied instead of playing board games, and doled out tens of millions of dollars in (illegal) donations to Republican candidates, rather than Democrats. Right until the end, he deviated from counterparts Caroline Ellison, Nishad Singh, and Gary Wang, pleading guilty but refusing to cooperate with prosecutors by pleading the fifth. And he paid the price.
