Based on the conflicting pre-sentencing reports submitted to the judge who will sentence Sam Bankman-Fried on Thursday on seven fraud counts, you might think this is a complicated case.

After all, the submissions paint drastically different pictures of Bankman-Fried. His lawyers say, in effect, that there are no victims in the case, because no one lost any money in the collapse of his FTX cryptocurrency exchange.

If there's a victim here, they say, it's Sam. The federal prosecutors cast him "as a depraved super-villain" in order to promote "a medieval view of punishment to reach what amounts to a death-in-prison sentencing recommendation."

The prosecutors, indeed, describe Bankman-Fried as anything but an innocent. "He stole money from customers who entrusted it to him," they write; "he lied to investors; he sent fabricated documents to lenders; he pumped millions of dollars in illegal donations into our political system; and he bribed foreign officials."

Federal sentencing guidelines would warrant a maximum sentence of more than 100 years.

Bankman-Fried asserts that a prison sentence of 5¼ to 6½ years would do the trick of punishing him for his misdeeds and returning him to society so he can do more good; the government says a sentence of 40 to 50 years is necessary to protect the public and deter him and others from committing similar crimes.

To federal Judge Lewis A. Kaplan of New York has fallen the task of cutting a path through these jarringly incompatible pictures.

A few things may have helped him find the way. One is that as the trial judge, he already got a ground-level view of Bankman-Fried's character. That happened in August, when Kaplan received evidence that Bankman-Fried had engaged in witness-tampering while awaiting trial (his attorneys argued that his actions were within the 1st Amendment). He revoked Bankman-Fried's bail and sent him to wait out the pre-trial period in jail.

Kaplan has had more help from John Ray III, who took over as chief executive of FTX when it declared bankruptcy on Nov. 11, 2022, and from more than 100 statements from victims of the fraud.

More on that in a moment. First, a primer on Bankman-Fried and FTX.

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