The Endless Downfall of a Crypto Power Couple

 

The Endless Downfall of a Crypto Power Couple

 

Ryan Salame, an FTX executive, and Michelle Bond, a crypto policy advocate, were once a Washington power couple. Now they both face prison time.

 

David Yaffe-Bellany

By David Yaffe-Bellany

David Yaffe-Bellany, who has extensively covered FTX’s collapse, reported from Potomac, Md.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/10/technology/ftx-ryan-salame-michelle-bond.html

Oct. 10, 2024

 

He was a wealthy cryptocurrency executive with a shiny white Porsche and a luxury condo in the Bahamas. She was a crypto policy expert with political ambitions, advocating for the industry in Washington.

 

A romance blossomed after they were brought together by an unlikely matchmaker: Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the collapsed FTX crypto exchange.

 

Two years ago, the FTX executive Ryan Salame and the crypto advocate Michelle Bond were an industry power couple. Mr. Salame gave tens of millions of dollars to conservative politicians, who celebrated him as a “budding Republican megadonor,” while Ms. Bond ran for Congress, drawing support from Donald Trump Jr.

 

But this tale of crypto boy meets crypto girl has turned into a legal nightmare. Mr. Salame, 31, once a top lieutenant to Mr. Bankman-Fried, is set to report to federal prison in Maryland on Friday to start a sentence of seven and a half years, after he pleaded guilty to campaign finance fraud. In August, Ms. Bond, 45, who lives with Mr. Salame and their infant son in Potomac, Md., was also charged with campaign finance violations linked to FTX.

 

The two were married last month in a small ceremony in Nevada. But their $4 million house in Potomac, purchased in 2022 at the height of FTX’s success, is set to be sold, with all the proceeds surrendered. Mr. Salame has gone from meeting with politicians to skirmishing on X with anonymous trolls. After FTX failed in late 2022, Ms. Bond resigned as the head of a prominent crypto trade group and became a target of federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, the same office that pursued her husband.

 

“Being in a relationship with me was going to be a problem,” Mr. Salame said in an interview at their house in September. “It hasn’t been great for her, having me in her life.”

 

The closely linked cases against Mr. Salame and Ms. Bond show that the legal impact of FTX’s implosion is still widening. The exchange fell apart after $8 billion in customer savings went missing — money that Mr. Bankman-Fried was later convicted of stealing to finance venture investments, real estate purchases and political contributions. He is serving a 25-year prison sentence.

 

Mr. Salame was the first of Mr. Bankman-Fried’s FTX colleagues to receive prison time. A second top executive, Caroline Ellison, was sentenced to two years in prison at a hearing last month, and two others are to be sentenced this fall.

 

Seated in his study, Mr. Salame said he was “horrifically sorry” about FTX’s collapse. He has long maintained that he was unaware that Mr. Bankman-Fried was looting customer accounts.

 

But in the interview, Mr. Salame also said he wasn’t guilty of the crimes he had admitted to committing in court — including making campaign donations under his name that actually came from FTX’s coffers. He said that lawyers at FTX had approved those donations, and that he had filed his guilty plea based on bad legal advice from the white-collar defense lawyers at the law firm Mayer Brown who represented him.

 

“They were more in bed with the S.D.N.Y. and the government than I think I would want,” he said of his lawyers. “They’re not fighters.”

 

Mr. Salame’s lawyers at Mayer Brown did not respond to a request for comment. A lawyer for Ms. Bond, Eric Breslin, declined to comment.

 

A native of the Berkshires, Mr. Salame (pronounced Salem) graduated from the University of Massachusetts Amherst with a dual degree in accounting and economics. He started working for Mr. Bankman-Fried in 2019, when FTX’s headquarters were in Hong Kong. Mr. Salame carved out a role as the office extrovert: He knew how to schmooze clients and would remind his perpetually unkempt boss to shower and change into fresh socks.

 

Mr. Salame’s role at FTX put him in the same circles as Ms. Bond, who ran the Association for Digital Asset Markets, a crypto trade group. Mr. Bankman-Fried connected Ms. Bond and Mr. Salame over text to discuss a collaboration between FTX and her organization, and the pair met at a group dinner during a crypto conference in Miami in 2021.

 

Mr. Salame spent the evening cracking sarcastic jokes, he said. In a recent court filing, Ms. Bond said Mr. Salame had struck her as “a stereotypical young, attractive, finance-type whom I hoped I would not have to interact with much.” But they met again at a crypto event in Portugal and started dating in November 2021.

 

The relationship became serious almost right away. That year, Mr. Salame moved to the Bahamas to help FTX open a headquarters there. Ms. Bond had been separated from her husband since 2020, and she flew down to visit Mr. Salame, bringing her two young children from that marriage. Mr. Salame said that he was attracted to her intelligence and sense of humor — and that they had connected over their shared affection for Mr. Bankman-Fried.

 

At the time, Mr. Salame was becoming more politically active, pushing to “weed out anti crypto dems for pro crypto dems and anti crypto repubs for pro crypto repubs,” as he put it in a text to a member of his family. As FTX grew, Mr. Salame had spent much of his growing crypto wealth on luxury purchases, like the Porsche, and invested in several restaurants in the Berkshires. With the 2022 midterm elections approaching, he also gave $24 million in political contributions, mostly to Republican candidates, making him one of the biggest donors in the country.

 

One of the Republicans he supported was Ms. Bond. In February 2022, she was preparing to run for a vacant House seat in eastern Long Island. Mr. Salame paid $3,000 to a consulting firm that was working with her. Ms. Bond expressed her gratitude in a text, according to court filings.

 

“If you’re thanking me for that,” Mr. Salame responded, “the expenses on you actually running going to get me so much love <3.”

 

“You’re going to get the love regardless,” Ms. Bond wrote.

 

Around the time Ms. Bond started her campaign in May, Mr. Salame instructed an FTX colleague to create a “consulting agreement” for her — $100,000 a year, plus a $400,000 signing bonus, according to prosecutors. When the employee asked who would oversee Ms. Bond’s work for the company, Mr. Salame responded, “Me!”

 

Ms. Bond spent the money on her congressional campaign, the prosecutors said. She lost the Republican primary in August 2022, collecting only 27 percent of the vote.

 

Three months later, Mr. Salame joined Mr. Bankman-Fried in Florida for a meeting with the Republican governor, Ron DeSantis. Afterward Mr. Bankman-Fried flew straight back to the Bahamas, where a crisis was brewing. Within a week, FTX was bankrupt, and Mr. Salame was a target of criminal investigators. He never saw Mr. Bankman-Fried again.

 

According to court filings, prosecutors investigated Mr. Salame for a range of possible crimes — distributing narcotics, bribing Bahamian officials to obtain immigration papers for FTX employees and “paying for prostitutes, including for FTX V.I.P. clients.”

 

Ultimately, Mr. Salame pleaded guilty in September 2023 to the campaign finance violation and a separate count of operating an unlicensed money transmitting business. (In the interview, Mr. Salame said the other accusations were “crazy.”) He was forced to forfeit the restaurants, but prosecutors allowed him to keep the Porsche — it wasn’t valuable enough to be worth seizing.

 

Mr. Salame’s case also became a factor in Ms. Bond’s divorce, according to legal papers. In court last year, her ex-husband, Daniel Bond, accused Mr. Salame of funneling “illegal campaign contributions” to Ms. Bond. In his own filing, Mr. Salame claimed that Mr. Bond had demanded more than $2 million in exchange for a promise that he wouldn’t “write any articles/books” about Mr. Salame. (Mr. Bond declined to comment.)

 

Mr. Salame was sentenced in May. Prosecutors told Judge Lewis A. Kaplan that Mr. Salame had withdrawn more than $5 million from his FTX account just as the exchange was starting to crumble.

 

“It was me first — I’m getting in the lifeboat first,” Judge Kaplan said as he handed down the sentence. “To heck with all those customers.”

 

In August, the prosecutors charged Ms. Bond, saying her consulting deal with FTX was a “sham” designed to circumvent campaign finance disclosure requirements. Ms. Bond pleaded not guilty.

 

Mr. Salame said he couldn’t discuss her case in detail. But the same month she was charged, he filed a request to void his plea agreement, claiming that he had admitted his guilt based on an “implied commitment” from prosecutors that they wouldn’t pursue a case against his partner.

 

“It was presented to me in a way that if I played ball, Michelle was going to be fine,” Mr. Salame said in the interview. (Prosecutors called that claim “outright false,” and Mr. Salame eventually withdrew the request.)

 

Ms. Bond and Mr. Salame have tried to resurrect their lives. This summer, Ms. Bond announced that she was starting a think tank, Digital Future, to promote crypto and artificial intelligence. Mr. Salame took the law school entrance exam; he got a decent score, he said, “but it wasn’t the Harvard, Yale level.”

 

“Of the many lessons I’ve learned, I would have preferred a much better understanding of the law myself,” Mr. Salame said. “Relying on other people didn’t work out very well.”

 

The couple’s house in Potomac is cluttered with toys and books, as well as some reminders of FTX’s fall. Mr. Salame owns three copies of “Going Infinite,” Michael Lewis’s account of the saga, and he still uses a cup emblazoned with the FTX logo.

 

He is apparently unable to stop talking about the company. He has posted hundreds of times on X since his sentencing, airing old grievances. At times, he has defended Mr. Bankman-Fried and attacked Ms. Ellison, who was the FTX founder’s on-and-off girlfriend.

 

“If some crazy woman becomes obsessed with you and then destroys your company that’s 100% your fault?” he wrote this month.

 

Mr. Salame is also reckoning with the prospect of irrelevance. He wrote a memoir of his FTX career, titled “Go Directly to Jail,” but initial interest from publishers has dried up. In July, he visited Nashville during the annual Bitcoin conference, where Ms. Bond was promoting her think tank.

 

Mr. Salame is widely reviled in the crypto world. But no one in Nashville even bothered to heckle him.

 

“I didn’t see anyone that seemed to care,” he said.

 

Danielle Kaye contributed reporting from New York. Alain Delaquérière contributed research.

 

David Yaffe-Bellany writes about the crypto industry from San Francisco. He can be reached at davidyb@nytimes.com. More about David Yaffe-Bellany