Rapper Drake, in New Album, Calls To ‘Free’ Sam Bankman-Fried, but the Crypto Mogul’s Lane to Liberty Looks Bleak

The rapper Drake is on a hot streak — and appears to have a new cause célèbre. This week he became the first artist ever to hold the top three spots on the Billboard 200 albums chart. His latest first-place finish, for the album “Iceman,” is his 15th, which ties pop icon Taylor Swift for the most ever.One of the tracks, “Dust,” on “Iceman,” contains a surprising reference — a call to liberate the imprisoned crypto mogul, Sam Bankman-Fried. Drake raps “an FTX penthouse high-riser, yeah / Samuel Bankman, free all my guys up, yeah.” Mr. Bankman-Fried is serving a 25-year sentence following the implosion of his FTX cryptocurrency platform and an associated hedge fund and his conviction on seven counts of fraud and conspiracy.Not immediately clear is the relationship between the Toronto-born Drake and Mr. Bankman-Fried. The reference to the “penthouse” appears to be the FTX founder’s $35 million, 11,050-square-foot residence in the Bahamas. Fortune reports that the home “consisted of five bedrooms and included a private elevator, a spa, a pool, a grand piano, and Italian marble floors. A private balcony looked out onto the gleaming blue-green ocean below.”Just after Drake’s reference to Mr. Bankman-Fried the artist raps “I’m with the mob at Graycliff.” A Google Maps search discloses that the Graycliff hotel is about a 45-minute drive on the island of Nassau from the location of Mr. Bankman-Fried’s erstwhile penthouse at the Albany Resort. Drake also calls himself a “BTC crypto big-timer,” a reference to Bitcoin, the world’s first and largest decentralized digital currency.Drake is not the first musical artist to cross paths with Mr. Bankman-Fried. Post Malone was paid to tout FTX in a 2021 music video, “One Right Now,” that he produced with The Weeknd. Snoop Dog and Steve Aoki were both paid to promote FTX. A more intimate acquaintance unfolded between Mr. Bankman-Fried and Sean “Diddy” Combs when the two were incarcerated together at the Metropolitan Detention Center at Brooklyn.Mr. Bankman-Fried told the podcaster Tucker Carlson that Combs, who was sentenced to 50 months on prostitution-related charges, was “kind to people in the unit” and that he has “been kind to me.” Mr. Bankman-Fried told Mr. Carlson that prison is a “weird environment” because it’s a “combination of a few other high-profile cases and then a lot of ex-gangsters, alleged ex-gangsters.” He added that many of them are “surprisingly good at chess” in that “soul-crushing place.”Last April, Mr. Bankman-Fried was moved to the Federal Correctional Institution at Terminal Island, in California. In November, his request for a new trial was heard by a panel of the Second United States Appeals Circuit. The appellate court appeared skeptical of Mr. Bankman-Fried’s argument that he was “presumed guilty” and that he was deprived of the opportunity for a fair trial. The panel noted that there was “very substantial evidence” underlying Mr. Bankman-Fried’s conviction.While the Second Circuit has not yet ruled on Mr. Bankman-Fried’s petition, the trial judge, Lewis Kaplan, has rebuffed him at every turn. Last month Judge Kaplan denied Mr. Bankman-Fried’s separate pro se motion for a new trial, calling the arguments “baseless on multiple independently sufficient levels.” That filing was complicated by Mr. Bankman-Fried’s admission that his mother, a distinguished legal scholar, assisted with his motion.Judge Kaplan, who also presided over the sex and romance writer E. Jean Carroll’s sexual abuse and defamation cases against President Trump, determined that Mr. Bankman-Fried’s allegations that the government prevented him from mounting an effective defense by intimidating witnesses was “wildly conspiratorial and entirely contradicted by the record.” Mr. Bankman-Fried has filed another motion asking that Judge Kaplan be recused from the case for bias.Mr. Bankman-Fried, his lawyers, and his mother contend that FTX, which was ruined by a bank run triggered by the chief executive officer of rival cryptocurrency exchange Binance, Changpeng “CZ” Zhao, suffered from a liquidity rather than a solvency crisis. Back of the envelope calculations suggest that Mr. Bankman-Fried’s venture capital bets and asset holdings, which included stakes in companies like Anthropic and SpaceX, would now be worth some $100 billion. A partner at Scale Venture Partners, Rory O’Driscoll, told Forbes earlier this month that Bankman-Fried’s early investments in Anthropic and Cursor were “astonishing.” Mr. O’Driscoll adds that “to pick two of the most important companies in the post-’21 crash and nail it …What a talent, what a willingness to look at new stuff.”

Rapper Drake, in New Album, Calls To ‘Free’ Sam Bankman-Fried, but the Crypto Mogul’s Lane to Liberty Looks Bleak

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