After the demise of his FTX crypto empire in November, Sam Bankman-Fried portrayed himself as a hapless but well-intentioned chief executive who made a series of calamitous mistakes, but never knowingly committed fraud.

But a day after his arrest in the Bahamas, the US Securities and Exchange Commission, Department of Justice and Commodity Futures Trading Commission filed civil and criminal charges against Bankman-Fried, including that he had orchestrated a scheme to bilk equity investors out of more than $1.8 billion. The next week, prosecutors announced that two members of his inner circle had pleaded guilty to fraud charges.