Sam Bankman-Fried is back in the public eye. He spoke with the New York Sun in February, has posted repeatedly on X, and sat for a video interview with Tucker Carlson in early March. But how is the cofounder and former CEO of the failed crypto exchange FTX (who is apparently undertaking a campaign, boosted by his parents and family friends, to win a pardon from President Trump) waging an unauthorized media blitz from behind bars?
Currently, the convicted fraudster remains detained on the fourth floor of the Brooklyn Metropolitan Detention Center in a section reserved for high-profile inmates like Sean “Diddy” Combs and Luigi Mangione. “This isn’t a f—ing camp,” Larry Levine, a federal prison consultant and former inmate, told Fortune. “You’re in a very, very confined space,” Sam Mangel, another prison consultant, said.
In the ordinary course of things, the BOP would have had to approve any media interview. But Bankman-Fried likely got around this requirement by passing Carlson’s interview off as a video call with his lawyer, says Levine, the prison consultant. “He probably called it a legal visit. They allowed him to use the system for an unmonitored video visit,” he guessed.
This is indeed what happened, according to a person familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly about Bankman-Fried.
The March video session with Tucker Carlson, a longtime Trump ally, earned Bankman-Fried a swift response from prison authorities, who had not approved the interview, according to the New York Times. According to the Wall Street Journal, the stunt landed the fraudster a day in solitary confinement.
The videoconference regime was introduced in many prisons during the COVID pandemic in 2020, because outside visitors were prohibited from entering. “Most inmates can now have in-person legal visits,” Kyle Sandler, another consultant who was released from federal prison a year ago, told Fortune. “But they still do Zoom meetings, especially for someone like [Bankman-Fried], who’s probably got a ton of legal stuff going on.”
Representatives for the BOP and Carlson did not respond to a request for comment. Mark Botnick, Bankman-Fried’s onetime spokesperson, didn’t know about the Carlson interview and stopped working with the FTX cofounder after it aired. He declined to comment further on the incident. Kory Langhofer, Bankman-Fried’s attorney, also declined to comment.
The BOP may sanction Bankman-Fried for the interview, according to Levine, Sandler, and Mangel. Federal authorities sanction, or punish, prisoners when they break prison policy. Prison violations run from “unauthorized physical contact” to “killing.” There’s also one for “unauthorized contacts with the public.”
Sanctions can range from severe penalties like increased time in prison to minor ones such as the loss of phone privileges, recreation time, commissary access, and visiting hours. Langhofer, Bankman-Fried’s attorney, declined to comment on whether the BOP was investigating his client.
“They’ll put a violation code on it, then they will place him under investigation, and then they will issue him a sanction for his violation,” Levine said.
Prison officials often place inmates who are under investigation for sanctions into solitary confinement, or what the BOP calls “special housing units,” according to the BOP’s website. That likely explains why Bankman-Fried was separated from the general prison population directly after the Carlson interview aired. About 2,700 federal prisoners under investigation for sanctions are in BOP special housing units as of Monday, per the agency.
Sandler said that it’s “extremely likely” the BOP will crack down on Bankman-Fried after his recent public appearance.
Levine was more blunt: He’s “screwed.”
