Matthew Russell Lee is staring at three computer monitors, his back turned to the press room entrance of the Southern District of New York courthouse. He prefers this station to his actual cubicle, which is a few feet away, cluttered with spare shirts and notepads. One computer provides unlimited access to PACER, the database of federal court records, which he obsessively refreshes in between firing off tweets from an adjacent laptop. The third screen displays the media page for the United Nations, which banned him from its New York headquarters.
I find Lee at his makeshift desk in the anteroom on Wednesday afternoon, a pile of Halloween candy next to him. He graciously offers me some. He has one ear cocked to a television broadcasting a live feed of the Sam Bankman-Fried trial. Twenty-one floors above us, the FTX founder’s attorney, Mark Cohen, is delivering one final plea to the jury that his client was acting in good faith when he directed $8 billion in customer assets to luxury real estate, venture investments, and risky trades.
