This time last year, Sam Bankman-Fried was celebrated as an awkward but brilliant wunderkind, a young billionaire crypto mogul who wanted to do good in the world. He hobnobbed in shorts and rumpled T-shirts with Bill Clinton and Gisele Bündchen, was the second-largest donor to the Democratic Party (later, we found, also the second- or third-largest donor to the Republican Party), and because of his role in bailing out other failing crypto ventures, he was compared in the financial presses to towering figures like J. P. Morgan and Warren Buffett.

Most of all, he was one of the “good guys.” In an otherwise shadowy and scammy world run by crypto bros, Bankman-Fried, or “SBF” as he was affectionately called, presented himself and his empire as the most legit corner of the crypto industry. His crypto exchange, FTX, was touted as “the safest and easiest way to buy and sell crypto,” with executives even (falsely) implying that customer funds were FDIC-insured. And after all, SBF extolled the virtues of “effective altruism.” He just wanted to get filthy rich so that he could give his money away and make the world a better place.

Today Bankman-Fried is sitting in Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center (MCD), a nightmarish federal facility notorious for reports of abuse, violence, and the deprivation of food and health care, and which a few winters ago left inmates in dark, freezing cells. Among its seventeen hundred inmates, MDC has also housed a who’s who of high-profile villains like Jeffrey Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell and pharma bro Martin Shkreli.