The "need for speed” has become a rallying cry in the Manhattan federal prosecutor’s office over the past year, as U.S. Attorney Damian Williams and his staff grappled with the implosion of the FTX cryptocurrency exchange.
News stories in 2022 about possible fraud at the exchange had sparked market panic. Customers fruitlessly tried to withdraw billions of dollars. FTX’s once-lauded co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried was feverishly soliciting bailouts from Wall Street and beyond.
Williams and his team in the storied Southern District of New York (SDNY) sprang into action to investigate what would become one of the biggest financial crimes in U.S. history, identifying more than 50 witnesses and gathering 10 million pages of documents.