NEW YORK (AP) — Sean “Diddy” Combs was headed to jail Tuesday to await trial in his federal sex trafficking case, after a magistrate ordered him to be held without bail in a case that accuses him of presiding over a sordid empire of sexual crimes.

The music mogul pleaded not guilty Tuesday to racketeering conspiracy and sex trafficking. He’s accused of inducing female victims and male sex workers into drugged-up, sometimes dayslong sexual performances dubbed “Freak Offs.”

The indictment against him also alleges he coerced and abused women for years while using blackmail and shocking acts of violence to keep his victims in line. It refers obliquely to an attack on his former girlfriend, the R&B singer Cassie, that was captured on video.

Prosecutors wanted him jailed. His attorneys proposed that he be released on a $50 million bond to home detention with electronic monitoring. U.S. Magistrate Judge Robyn Tarnofsky sided with the government.

Combs, 54, took a long swig from a water bottle, then was led out of court without handcuffs. As he walked out, he turned toward family members in the audience.

“Mr. Combs is a fighter. He’s going to fight this to the end. He’s innocent,” his lawyer, Marc Agnifilo, said after court. As a start, he said he would appeal the bail decision.

The Bad Boy Records founder is accused of striking, punching and dragging women, throwing objects and kicking them — and getting his personal assistants, security and household staff to help him hide it all.

“Not guilty,” Combs told a court, standing to speak after listening to the allegations with his uncuffed hands folded in his lap.

Federal prosecutors called him dangerous.

“Mr. Combs physically and sexually abused victims for decades. He used the vast resources of his company to facilitate his abuse and cover up his crimes. Simply put, he is a serial abuser and a serial obstructor,” Assistant U.S. Attorney Emily Johnson told a court. She also said he had “extensive and exhaustive history of obstruction of justice,” including alleged bribery and witness intimidation.

Agnifilo acknowledged Combs was “not a perfect person,” saying he’d used drugs and had been in “toxic relationships” but was getting treatment and therapy.

“The evidence in this case is extremely problematic,” the attorney told the court.

He maintained that the case stemmed from one long-term, consensual relationship that faltered amid infidelity. He didn’t name the woman, but the details matched those of Combs’ decade-long involvement with Cassie, whose legal name is Casandra Ventura.

The “Freak Offs,” Agnifilo contended, were an expansion of that relationship, and not coercive.

“Is it sex trafficking? Not if everybody wants to be there,” Agnifilo said, arguing that authorities were intruding on his client’s private life.

Prosecutors, however, said in court papers that they had interviewed more than 50 victims and witnesses and expect the number to grow. They said they would use financial, travel and billing records, electronic data and communications and videos of the “Freak Offs” to prove their case.

Combs nodded his head at times as his lawyer spoke and occasionally leaned over to converse with them when they were not. The impresario watched other parts of the proceeding expressionlessly, looking straight ahead.

Combs was arrested late Monday in Manhattan, roughly six months after federal authorities conducting a sex trafficking investigation raided his luxurious homes in Los Angeles and Miami.

A conviction on every charge in the indictment would require a mandatory 15 years in prison with the possibility of a life sentence.

The indictment describes Combs as the head of a criminal enterprise that engaged or attempted to engage in sex trafficking, forced labor, interstate transportation for purposes of prostitution, drug offenses, kidnapping, arson, bribery and obstruction of justice.

Combs and his associates wielded his “power and prestige” to intimidate and lure women into his orbit, “often under the pretense of a romantic relationship,” the indictment says.

It says he then would use force, threats and coercion to get the women to engage with male sex workers in the “Freak Offs” — “elaborate and produced sex performances” that Combs arranged, directed, masturbated during and often recorded, creating dozens of videos.

He sometimes arranged to fly the women in and ensured their participation by procuring and providing drugs, controlling their careers, leveraging his financial support and using intimidation and violence, according to the indictment.

The events could last for days, and Combs and victims would often receive IV fluids to recover from the exertion and drug use, the indictment said.

It said his employees facilitated “Freak Offs” by arranging travel, booking hotel rooms, stocking them with such supplies as drugs and baby oil, scheduling the delivery of IV fluids and cleaning the rooms afterward.

During the searches of Combs’ homes earlier this year, law enforcement seized narcotics, videos of the “Freak Offs” and more than 1,000 bottles of baby oil and lubricant, according to prosecutors. They said agents also seized firearms and ammunition, including three AR-15s with defaced serial numbers — two of them, broken into parts, in his bedroom closet in Miami.

Combs’ lawyer said his client didn’t own the guns at his house, noting that he employs a security company.

The indictment portrays Combs as a violent man who choked and shoved people, hit and kicked victims and sometimes dragged them by their hair, causing injuries that often took days or weeks to heal. His employees and associates sometimes witnessed his violence and kept victims from leaving or tracked down those who tried, the indictment said.

It alleges that Combs sometimes kept videos of victims engaging in sex acts and used the recordings as “collateral” to ensure the women’s continued obedience and silence. He also exerted control over victims by promising career opportunities, providing and threatening to withhold financial support, dictating how they looked, monitoring their health records and controlling where they lived, according to the indictment.

As the threat of criminal charges loomed, Combs and his associates pressured witnesses and victims to stay silent, offering bribes and supplying false narratives of what happened, the indictment says.

In a court filing, prosecutors accused Combs and an unidentified co-conspirator of kidnapping someone at gunpoint a few days before Christmas in 2011 in order to facilitate a break-in at another person’s home. Two weeks later, they wrote, Combs set fire to someone’s vehicle by slicing open its convertible top and dropping in a Molotov cocktail.

All of this, prosecutors allege, was happening behind the facade of Combs’ global music, lifestyle and clothing business.

“A year ago, Sean Combs stood in Times Square and was handed a key to New York City. Today, he’s been indicted and will face justice,” Manhattan-based U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said at a news conference Tuesday.

Combs returned the key in June after Mayor Eric Adams requested it back.

Combs was recognized as one of the most influential figures in hip-hop before a flood of allegations emerged over the past year.

In November, Ventura filed a lawsuit saying he had beaten and raped her for years. She accused Combs of coercing her, and others, into unwanted sex in drug-fueled settings.

The suit was settled in one day, but months later, CNN aired hotel security footage showing Combs punching and kicking Ventura and throwing her on a floor. After the video aired, Combs apologized, saying, “I was disgusted when I did it.”

The indictment refers to the attack, without naming Ventura, and says Combs tried to bribe a hotel security staffer to stay mum about it.

Douglas Wigdor, a lawyer for Ventura, declined to comment Tuesday.

Combs and his attorneys denied similar allegations made by others in a string of lawsuits.

The AP does not typically name people who say they have been sexually abused unless they come forward publicly, as Ventura did.

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This story has been corrected to show that Combs is 54, not 58.

Michael Smith, 52, of Cornelius, North Carolina, was arrested on fraud and conspiracy charges that carry a potential penalty of up to 60 years in prison.

U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said in a news release that Smith’s fraud cheated musicians and songwriters between 2017 and this year of royalty money that is available for them to claim.

He said Smith, a musician with a small catalog of music that he owned, streamed songs created with artificial intelligence billions of times “to steal royalties.”

A lawyer for Smith did not immediately return an email seeking comment.

Christie M. Curtis, who leads New York’s FBI office, said Smith “utilized automatic features to repeatedly stream the music to generate unlawful royalties.”

“The FBI remains dedicated to plucking out those who manipulate advanced technology to receive illicit profits and infringe on the genuine artistic talent of others,” she said.

An indictment in Manhattan federal court said Smith created thousands of accounts on streaming platforms so that he could stream songs continuously, generating about 661,000 streams per day. It said the avalanche of streams yielded annual royalties of $1.2 million.

The royalties were drawn from a pool of royalties that streaming platforms are required to set aside for artists who stream sound recordings that embody musical compositions, the indictment said.

According to the indictment, Smith used artificial intelligence to create tens of thousands of songs so that his fake streams would not alert streaming platforms and music distribution companies that a fraud was underway.

It said Smith, beginning in 2018, teamed up with the chief executive of an artificial intelligence music company and a music promoter to create the songs.

Smith boasted in an email last February that he had generated over four billion streams and $12 million in royalties since 2019, authorities said.

The indictment said that when a music distribution company in 2018 suggested that he might be engaged in fraud, he protested, writing: “This is absolutely wrong and crazy! … There is absolutely no fraud going on whatsoever!”

Defense lawyers and some legal experts blame many of the endless delays on what they call the “original sin” haunting the military prosecutions: the illegal torture that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his co-defendants were subjected to in CIA custody. That years-old abuse has snarled the case, leaving lawyers to hash out legal issues two decades later in the now often-forgotten military courtrooms at the U.S. base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

An approved plea bargain sparing Mohammed and two co-defendants from the death penalty appeared to clear those hurdles and push the cases toward conclusion. But after criticism of the deal from some family members and Republican lawmakers, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Aug. 2 revoked the deal signed by the official he had appointed.

Austin said later he believed Americans deserved the opportunity to see the trials through. Pentagon deputy spokeswoman Sabrina Singh said Friday the case “will continue toward trial with pretrial proceedings as it has been.”

Asked for comment, a CIA spokesperson said that the “CIA’s detention and interrogation program ended in 2009.”

The events reflect the disconnect between the wish of many to see the defendants convicted and sentenced in their death penalty cases and the view of many experts that the legal obstacles caused by torture, disputes over evidence and other extraordinary government actions make it unrealistic to expect a conclusion anytime soon.

Relatives of some of the nearly 3,000 people killed in 2001 when al-Qaida recruits flew four hijacked airliners into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and a Pennsylvania field differed in their hoped-for outcomes for the prosecution. Yet there is shared frustration with its handling so far.

Some said they still want the death penalty imposed even though they know legal complications may make that impossible.

“They’ve been telling us this for years,” said Terry Strada, the leader of the group 9/11 Families United and one of the most vocal family representatives.

Strada said she is still willing to wait years for justice and for “the punishment to fit the crime. And that would be the death penalty.”

Brett Eagleson, whose father, Bruce, was among the World Trade Center victims, said families should not suffer the consequences of government failures.

“At the end of the day, if … they can’t prosecute them, or they can’t convict them, well, the blood’s not on our hands because all the evidence that they’ve obtained was illegal. That’s not our issue,” he said.

“That’s blood on the Bush administration’s hands and that’s blood on the CIA’s hands,” said Eagleson, the president of 9/11 Justice, a victims’ advocacy group. “That has nothing to do with us, and I think the juice is worth the squeeze here.”

Guantanamo defense lawyer J. Wells Dixon points to his own experience on how compelling revelations about the torture can be when cases reach trial. In 2021, seven of eight members of a military panel of officers serving as the jury at the Guantanamo trial of Majid Khan, a former al-Qaida courier whom Dixon represented, surprised the court by requesting clemency for him after hearing his account of mistreatment.

The torture in CIA custody “is a stain on the moral fiber of America; the treatment of Mr. Khan in the hands of US personnel should be a source of shame for the US government,” the officers wrote to the judge.

After more than a decade of pretrial hearings on the admissibility of torture-tinged evidence and other significant legal challenges, the 9/11 case “is further from trial now potentially than it was at the time that it was charged,” Dixon said. “And the reason for that is everything about this case is so tainted by torture.”

Mohammed and two co-defendants, Walid bin Attash and Mustafa al-Hawsawi, had agreed to plea deals that would have required them to answer questions about the attack from victims’ relatives.

A fourth defendant, Ammar al-Baluchi, did not agree to the deal, and is the only one proceeding in pretrial hearings while the others challenge Austin’s decision. The military judge at Guantanamo declared the fifth 9/11 defendant, Ramzi bin al-Shibh, mentally unfit last year, after a military medical panel diagnosed him with post-traumatic stress and psychosis after his torture and solitary confinement in CIA custody.

The abuse that the 9/11 defendants and other detainees underwent in CIA custody began in the stated interest of getting information urgently to stave off additional attacks. Critics question if what the George W. Bush administration termed “enhanced interrogation” techniques ever yielded information that prevented attacks.

They also attribute much of the delays to the administration’s decision to use World War II-era laws to create special military commissions to try foreign defendants.

In 2009, then-Attorney General Eric Holder announced plans to put Mohammed and the four others on trial in civilian court in New York City.

Those plans were stalled and ultimately shelved after opposition from members of Congress who imposed restrictions on the transfer of detainees to U.S. soil and from New York politicians who feared a trial would require exorbitantly costly security and be a burden on neighborhoods recovering from the attacks.

Other major challenges have piled up for the succession of four judges who have rotated through Guantanamo. If the 9/11 cases ever clear the hurdles of trial, verdicts and sentencings, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit would likely hear many of the issues in the course of any death penalty appeals.

The issues include the CIA destruction of videos of interrogations, whether Austin’s plea deal reversal constituted unlawful interference and whether the torture of the men tainted subsequent interrogations by “clean teams” of FBI agents that did not involve violence.

Eugene R. Fidell, who teaches military justice at Yale Law School, says the impact of torture on the case raises doubt that any death penalty would survive federal court review.

“I’m not an advocate for these defendants. I think the crimes they’re accused of are horrendous,” Fidell said. “But as a matter of the administration of justice, there’s a lot of problems here. And they seem to keep going.”

While some victims’ relatives have been vocal about wanting Mohammed and the others executed, others call the military commissions a travesty that should stop.

Elizabeth Miller, who was 6 when her firefighter father Douglas was killed at the World Trade Center, leads a group of 250 family members who oppose the death penalty. This month, Miller was signing up through a government portal provided as part of the plea deal to send along her many questions for Mohammed, including whether he feels remorse. Austin’s reversal of the plea agreement suspended that search for answers.

Sally Regenhard, co-founder of another group representing families of firefighters, urged that the prosecution be moved to Manhattan federal court just a few blocks from “the scene of the crime.”

“Put it on the fast track and stop with the years going by,” she said. “How many more parents are going to have to die, knowing they never had justice for their child’s murder?”

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Neumeister reported from New York

NEW YORK (AP) — U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez was convicted of all charges Tuesday in a sweeping corruption trial in which he was accused of accepting bribes of gold and cash from three New Jersey businessmen and acting as an agent for the Egyptian government.

A jury in Manhattan deliberated for parts of three days before finding the Democrat guilty of 16 crimes, including bribery, extortion, honest services fraud, obstruction of justice and conspiracy.

Prosecutor said he abused the power of his office to protect allies from criminal investigations and enrich associates, including his wife, through acts that included meeting with Egyptian intelligence officials and softening his position toward that country as he speeded its access to millions of dollars in U.S. military aid.

Menendez, 70, looked toward the jury at times and appeared to mark a document in front of him as the verdict was read. Afterward, he sat resting his chin against his closed hands, elbows on the table. He vowed to appeal as he left the courthouse.

“I have never violated my public oath. I have never been anything but a patriot of my country and for my country. I have never, ever been a foreign agent,” Menendez said before a collection of microphones before walking briskly to a waiting car.

Menendez did not testify at the nine-week trial, but insisted publicly that he was only doing his job as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He said gold bars found in his New Jersey home by the FBI belonged to his wife, Nadine Menendez. She too was charged, but her trial was postponed so she could recover from breast cancer surgery. She has pleaded not guilty.

The verdict potentially dooms Menendez’s chances of winning reelection as an independent.

The trial’s outcome prompted a chorus of Democrats to call on Menendez to resign, including Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, New Jersey’s junior senator, Corey Booker, and the party’s nominee to replace Menendez, Rep. Andy Kim.

“In light of this guilty verdict, Senator Menendez must now do what is right for his constituents, the Senate, and our country, and resign,” Schumer’s statement said.

New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy, who would appoint Menendez’s replacement, urged the Senate to expel him if he doesn’t resign. It’s not clear whether Schumer would be willing to hold those votes. Expulsion requires a two-thirds majority. A senator has not been removed from office in over a century.

Curtis Bashaw, the Republican candidate for the seat, also called on Menendez to quit, saying New Jersey deserves better than “corruption and made-for-tv political scandals, courtesy of Bob Menendez and the Democratic machine.”

The Senate Ethics Committee, meanwhile, will complete its own investigation of Menendez “promptly” and consider a “full range of disciplinary actions,” according to a statement from Democrat Chris Coons and Republican James Lankford, the committee’s chairman and vice-chairman.

Menendez faces the possibility of decades in prison. Judge Sidney H. Stein scheduled sentencing for Oct. 29, a week before Election Day.

This was the second corruption trial for Menendez. An earlier prosecution on unrelated charges in 2017 ended with a deadlocked jury.

“This case has always been about shocking levels of corruption, hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes in the form of cash, gold bars, a Mercedes-Benz. This wasn’t politics as usual, this was politics for profit. And now that a jury has convicted Bob Menendez, his years of selling his office to the highest bidder have finally come to an end,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams said outside the courthouse.

Two co-defendants were also convicted. The New Jersey businessmen, Wael Hana and Fred Daibes, were accused of paying bribes. A third businessman, Jose Uribe, pleaded guilty prior to trial and testified against the others.

Hana’s lawyer, Lawrence Lustberg, said he would file motions to set aside the verdict. The American system of justice “has, in his view, let him down,” Lustberg said. Daibes’ lawyer, César de Castro, also promised an appeal, saying: “We think the result was wrong.”

The trial took place in a federal courthouse a little more than a block from the state courthouse where former President Donald Trump was convicted in May of falsifying business records. The two powerful men were on trial simultaneously for weeks.

The jury’s decision followed a lengthy probe that included a June 2022 FBI raid on Menendez’s home in Englewood Cliffs, a wealthy community just across the Hudson River from New York City. FBI agents seized nearly $150,000 worth of gold bars and $480,000 in cash, mostly in stacks of $100 bills, stuffed stuffed in boots, shoeboxes and jackets. In the garage was a Mercedes-Benz convertible.

Prosecutors argued that the gold, cash and car were bribes. Menendez’s lawyers disputed that, arguing that the gold belonged to his wife and she had kept him in the dark about financial troubles so grim that she nearly lost the home to foreclosure. They said the senator habitually hoarded money because his parents escaped Cuba in 1951 with only the cash they had hidden in a grandfather clock.

More shocking, though, were allegations that Menendez had earned some of the treasure by using his powerful perch on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee to benefit Egypt, an important U.S. ally but one often subject to American criticism over alleged human rights abuses.

Prosecutors said Nadine Menendez held herself out as a conduit to her powerful husband, exchanging texts with an Egyptian general and helping to arrange a Washington visit by the chief of Egypt’s intelligence service. To one general she texted, “Anytime you need anything you have my number and we will make everything happen.”

Sen. Menendez, prosecutors said, took actions to ingratiate himself with Egyptian officials, including providing them with information about the staff at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo and ghostwriting a letter to fellow senators encouraging them to lift a hold on $300 million in military aid. The senator also told his wife to let her Egyptian contacts know he planned to sign off on $99 million in tank ammunition.

Prosecutors said serial numbers on the gold bars and fingerprints on tape that bound together the stacks of cash were traced to Hana and Daibes.

Prosecutors said Menendez took numerous actions to benefit the businessmen, including protecting Egypt’s decision to award Hana a lucrative monopoly to certify that meat sent to Egypt met Islamic dietary requirements. Menendez asked a U.S. agriculture official to drop his opposition to the monopoly deal despite concerns it would drive up prices.

Uribe testified at the trial that he paid for Nadine Menendez to get a Mercedes-Benz convertible in exchange for the senator’s help assuring that his insurance business would not be affected by New Jersey criminal probes of a trucking company belonging to his friend.

Prosecutors also said Sen. Menendez attempted to interfere in a federal criminal prosecution of Daibes, a politically influential real estate developer accused of bank fraud. The U.S. attorney for New Jersey, Philip Sellinger, testified at the trial that Menendez questioned him about the Daibes prosecution and said he believed he was “being treated unfairly.”

Prosecutors also presented evidence that Menendez took actions favorable to Qatar’s government to help Daibes secure a multimillion-dollar deal with a Qatari investment fund.

Menendez’s political career began in 1974 when, only two years out of high school, he was elected to the education board in Union City, New Jersey. He later served in the state legislature, then was elected to the U.S. House in 1992. He became a U.S. senator in 2006.

Menendez had the dubious distinction of being the only U.S. senator indicted twice.

In 2015, he was charged with letting a wealthy Florida eye doctor buy his influence through luxury vacations and campaign contributions. After a jury couldn’t reach a unanimous verdict in 2017, New Jersey federal prosecutors dropped the case rather than put him on trial again.

Voters accepted the mistrial as an exoneration and returned Menendez to the Senate.

After his second indictment last summer, Menendez claimed he was being persecuted, saying some people “cannot accept that a first-generation Latino American from humble beginnings could rise to be a U.S. Senator.”

The agreement cut short a potential day-long court hearing in Manhattan that was to feature witnesses.

As part of a deal struck during a 20-minute recess, lawyers for Trump and Knight Specialty Insurance Company agreed to keep the $175 million in a cash account that will gain interest but faces no downside risk. The account so far has grown by over $700,000.

The bond stops the state from potentially seizing Trump’s assets to satisfy the more than $454 million that he owes after losing a court case brought by the Democratic attorney general. She had alleged that Trump, along with his company and key executives, defrauded bankers and insurers by lying about his wealth.

The ex-president and presumptive Republican nominee denies the claims and is appealing the judgment.

Judge Arthur Engoron, who in February issued the huge judgment after concluding that Trump and others had deceived banks and insurers by exaggerating his wealth on financial statements, presided over Monday’s hearing and at times was caught in a testy exchange with Trump attorney Christopher Kise.

Engoron challenged Kise with examples of how the money Trump had posted might not be available for collection if the judgment were upheld, leading Kise to respond in one instance that the judge’s “hypothetical is … wildly speculative.”

At another point, Kise expressed frustration with the office of New York Attorney General Letitia James, saying: “It appears that no matter what we do they’re going to find fault with it.”

But Andrew Amer, an attorney for New York state, proposed settlement terms soon after he began speaking at the hearing. He said the state wanted extra assurances because Trump had raised the money with help from a relatively small out-of-state insurance company.

As part of the deal, Knight Specialty Insurance, a Wilmington, Delaware-based part of the Los Angeles-based Knight Insurance Group, will have exclusive control of the $175 million and will submit to the jurisdiction of the New York state court while agreeing not to move the money into mutual funds or other financial instruments.

Speaking to reporters in the hallway outside Trump’s separate criminal hush money trial, his attorney, Alina Habba, said Engoron “doesn’t even understand basic principles of finance.”

“We came to an agreement that everything would be the same, “ she said. ”We would modify terms and that would be it.”

Trump also railed against Engoron, accusing him of not understanding the case.

“He challenged the bonding company that maybe the bonding company was no good. Well, they’re good. And they also have $175 million dollars of collateral — my collateral,” he said.

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AP Writer Jill Colvin contributed to this story.

NEW YORK (AP) — Crypto entrepreneur Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced Thursday to 25 years in prison for a massive fraud on hundreds of thousands of customers that unraveled with the collapse of FTX, once one of the world’s most popular platforms for exchanging digital currency.

Though he described Bankman-Fried as “extremely smart,” U.S. District Judge Lewis A. Kaplan delivered a blistering analysis of Bankman-Fried and his crimes before announcing a sentence that was half of what prosecutors sought and less than a quarter of the 105 years recommended by the court’s probation officers.

“There is absolutely no doubt that Mr. Bankman-Fried’s name right now is pretty much mud around the world,” Kaplan said of the 32-year-old California man who seemed atop the cryptocurrency universe before his businesses collapsed in November 2022, leaving customers, investors and lenders short over $11 billion, which the judge ordered him to forfeit.

He was convicted in November of fraud and conspiracy — a dramatic fall from a crest of success that included a Super Bowl advertisement, testimony before Congress and celebrity endorsements from stars like quarterback Tom Brady, basketball point guard Stephen Curry and comedian Larry David.

Kaplan imposed the sentence in the same Manhattan courtroom where, four months previously, Bankman-Fried testified that he had intended to revolutionize the emerging cryptocurrency market with his innovative and altruistic ideas, not steal.

The judge said Bankman-Fried repeatedly committed perjury on the witness stand in testimony that was “often evasive, hair-splitting, dodging questions.”

Kaplan said the sentence reflected the risk that Bankman-Fried “will be in position to do something very bad in the future. And it’s not a trivial risk at all.” He added that the sentence was fashioned “for the purpose of disabling him to the extent that can appropriately be done for a significant period of time.”

Kaplan said he would advise the Federal Bureau of Prisons to send Bankman-Fried to a medium-security prison near San Francisco because his notoriety, his association with vast wealth, his autism and his social awkwardness are likely to make him especially vulnerable at a high-security facility.

Assistant U.S. Attorney Nicolas Roos had recommended a prison sentence of 40 to 50 years, saying it was the only way to ensure “the defendant doesn’t do it again.”

Prosecutors said tens of thousands of people and companies worldwide lost billions of dollars since 2017 after Bankman-Fried looted FTX customer accounts that he promised were safe to make millions of dollars of illegal political donations, bribe Chinese officials, make risky investments, buy luxury real estate in the Caribbean and live lavishly.

Kaplan agreed with prosecutors Thursday that Bankman-Fried should not be credited because some investors and customers might recover some money. He noted that customers lost about $8 billion, investors lost $1.7 billion and lenders were shorted by $1.3 billion.

When he spoke, Bankman-Fried stood and apologized in a rambling statement: “A lot of people feel really let down. And they were very let down. And I’m sorry about that. I’m sorry about what happened at every stage.”

He added, “My useful life is probably over. It’s been over for a while now, from before my arrest.”

Wearing his khaki-colored prison uniform and chained at the ankles, Bankman-Fried seemed to briefly get emotional as he spoke for about 20 minutes, expressing regret about “a lot of mistakes” but casting some blame onto others. His trademark messy and bushy hair had returned from the trimmer look he displayed at trial.

He praised some of his former executives and workmates, saying: “They threw themselves into it and then I threw all of that away. It haunts me every day.”

Kaplan later criticized Bankman-Fried’s remarks, saying he expressed “never a word of remorse for the commission of terrible crimes.”

As his misty-eyed client looked on, defense attorney Marc Mukasey said the portrayal of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate as an “arrogant greedy swindler who thought he would get away with fleecing the hard-earned money of hard-working people” was wrong.

“Sam was not a ruthless financial serial killer who set out every morning to hurt people,” Mukasey said in court after urging in court papers that any prison sentence be in the single digits. “Sam Bankman-Fried doesn’t make decisions with malice in his heart. He makes decisions with math in his head.”

The judge later criticized Bankman-Fried’s calculations, saying he was indeed “a math nerd, who looked at decisions in terms of math, expected value.”

He cited trial testimony in which Bankman-Fried’s former girlfriend and fellow executive Caroline Ellison said Bankman-Fried once told her that his willingness to embrace risk was such that he’d be happy to flip a coin if it came up tails and the world was destroyed — as long as if it came up heads, the world would be twice as good.

The judge said Bankman-Fried utilized that risk-taking nature at his companies, “betting on expected value” and weighing the risk of getting caught with the probability of large gains.

“That was the game,” Kaplan said. “It’s his nature.”

Bankman-Fried’s attorneys, friends and family had urged leniency, saying he was unlikely to re-offend. They also said FTX’s investors have largely recovered their funds — a claim disputed by bankruptcy lawyers, FTX and its creditors.

“Mr. Bankman-Fried continues to live a life of delusion,” wrote John Ray, the CEO of FTX who has been cleaning up the bankrupt company. “The ‘business’ he left on November 11, 2022 was neither solvent nor safe.”

One FTX customer, Sunil Kavuri, spoke at sentencing, saying he’d traveled from London on behalf of over 200 victims who had sent impact statements to the judge.

He said he’d spoken to other “victims just like myself who had their dreams destroyed” and had lived “the FTX nightmare every day for almost two years, every day, every night, a lot of crying, sleepless nights.”

Bankman-Fried’s parents, both Stanford Law School professors, did not speak as they left the courthouse Thursday, but later issued a statement: “We are heartbroken and will continue to fight for our son.”

Bankman-Fried, of Palo Alto, California, was once worth billions of dollars on paper as the co-founder and CEO of FTX, which was the second-largest cryptocurrency exchange in the world at one time.

FTX let investors buy dozens of virtual currencies, from Bitcoin to more obscure ones like Shiba Inu Coin. Flush with billions of dollars of investors’ cash, Bankman-Fried took out a Super Bowl advertisement to promote his business and bought the naming rights to an arena in Miami.

But the collapse of cryptocurrency prices in 2022 took its toll on FTX, ultimately leading to its downfall. FTX’s hedge fund affiliate, Alameda Research, had bought billions of dollars of various crypto investments that lost considerable amounts of value in 2022. Bankman-Fried tried to plug the holes in Alameda’s balance sheet with FTX customer funds.

Three people from Bankman-Fried’s inner circle pleaded guilty to related crimes and testified at his trial.

Besides Ellison, two onetime friends of Bankman-Fried — Gary Wang and Nishad Singh — testified they felt they were directed by Bankman-Fried to commit fraud.

NEW YORK (AP) — Donald Trump shook his head in disgust Tuesday as the judge in his New York defamation trial told would-be jurors that an earlier jury had already decided the former president sexually abused columnist E. Jean Carroll in the 1990s.

Trump left court before opening statements, jetting to a New Hampshire political rally as Carroll’s lawyer accused the Republican presidential front-runner of using “the world’s biggest microphone” to destroy her reputation and turn his supporters against her. Trump’s lawyer contended that Carroll has never been more famous and that she is blaming him for “a few mean tweets from Twitter trolls.”

Fresh from a political win Monday in the Iowa caucuses, Trump detoured to a Manhattan courtroom for the start of what amounts to the penalty phase of Carroll’s civil lawsuit alleging he attacked her at a department store in 1996. Trump departed Tuesday after the nine-member jury was selected.

He glared and scowled at times as the jury was being picked, slyly raising his hand at one point when Judge Lewis A. Kaplan asked if anyone felt Trump had been treated unfairly by the court system. The gesture drew laughs from some people in the courtroom and a retort from the judge, who said, “We know where you stand.”

Trump, the former president, and Carroll, the former longtime Elle Magazine columnist, sat at separate tables about a dozen feet (3.7 meters) apart, flanked by their respective legal teams. They didn’t appear to speak or make eye contact.

After Trump left, Carroll’s lawyer Shawn Crowley implored jurors to make him pay — potentially millions of dollars — for comments he made while president in response to her claims in a 2019 memoir that he sexually abused her years earlier at Manhattan’s Bergdorf Goodman store.

Trump “used the world’s biggest microphone to attack Ms. Carroll,” Crowley said in her opening statement. His comments, including claims that Carroll was lying to sell books, humiliated the writer and tore “her reputation to shreds,” the lawyer said.

“He said this from the White House, a place where presidents have signed laws, declared wars and decided the fate of the nation,” Crowley told jurors.

While the trial concerns what Trump must pay for his comments in the immediate aftermath of Carroll’s revelations, Crowley noted that his rhetoric about the writer hasn’t stopped. Trump maintains he never abused Carroll and says her allegations are a partisan smear.

From court Tuesday, Trump fired off a series of social media posts about the case. He wrote on his Truth Social platform that Carroll’s rape allegation was an “attempted EXTORTION” involving “fabricated lies and political shenanigans,” and he accused the judge of having “absolute hatred” for him.

Crowley told jurors their job was to answer the question about Trump: “How much money will it take to make him to stop?”

However, Trump attorney Alina Habba said he was “merely defending himself” and said evidence will show that Carroll’s career has prospered since accusing him. Carroll has been “thrust back into the limelight like she always has wanted,” Habba said in her opening argument.

Responding to Crowley’s assertion that Trump backers have sent Carroll violent threats, Habba said she sympathized with victims of sexual abuse but any backlash Carroll suffered was “simply a byproduct of the digital age.”

“Regardless of a few mean tweets, Ms. Carroll is now more famous than she has ever been in her life, and loved and respected by many, which was her goal,” Habba told jurors.

Testimony will begin Wednesday, when Carroll is expected to take the witness stand.

Trump did not attend the previous trial in the case last May, when a jury found he had sexually abused and defamed Carroll and awarded her $5 million in damages. The jury said Carroll hadn’t proven that Trump raped her. In light of that verdict, Kaplan said the trial beginning Tuesday would focus only on how much money, if any, Trump must pay Carroll for comments he made about her while president in 2019.

As the day began, Kaplan rejected the defense’s request to suspend the trial on Thursday so Trump could attend his mother-in-law’s funeral — part of a combative exchange in which Trump’s lawyers accused the judge of thwarting their defense with pretrial evidence rulings favorable to Carroll.

“I am not stopping him from being there,” the judge said, referring to the funeral.

Habba responded, “No, you’re stopping him from being here.”

Habba told the judge that Trump plans to testify. Kaplan said the only accommodation he would make is that Trump can testify on Monday, even if the trial is otherwise finished by Thursday. The judge previously rejected Trump’s request to delay the trial a week.

Trump watched attentively as several dozen prospective jurors filed into the courtroom and spent more than an hour responding to questions posed by the judge covering everything from their prior involvement with the judicial system to their political beliefs.

He twisted around in his chair and nodded at two prospective jurors — a man and woman — who stood when asked if they agreed with his false belief that the 2020 election was rigged, and again when three people in the pool indicated they felt the former president was being treated unfairly by the court system.

The process offered a window into the political beliefs of a microcosm of New Yorkers, drawn from a pool that includes Manhattan and northern suburban counties. One woman said she had done publicity for his daughter’s company. Another said her father provided moving services for some of Trump’s buildings. Neither made the cut.

Jurors selected for the trial will remain anonymous, even to the parties, lawyers and judicial staff, and will be driven to and from the courthouse from an undisclosed location for their safety, Kaplan said.

Trump has increasingly made his courtroom travails — including four criminal cases — part of his run to retake the White House, positioning himself as a victim of partisan lawyers, judges and prosecutors and capitalizing on news coverage that accompanies his court visits. Last week, he attended closing arguments in the New York attorney general’s fraud lawsuit against him — and ended up giving a six-minute diatribe after his lawyers spoke.

“I guess you’d consider it part of the campaign,” Trump told reporters last week.

Carroll plans to testify about damage to her career and reputation she says resulted from Trump’s public statements. She seeks $10 million in compensatory damages and millions more in punitive damages.

If Trump testifies, he will be under strict limits on what he can say. Because of the prior verdict, Kaplan has said, Trump cannot get on the witness stand and argue that he didn’t sexually abuse or defame Carroll.

Trump is appealing and hasn’t paid any of that previous award, though he placed $5.55 million in escrow to cover the verdict and other costs in the event he loses his appeal. One issue that wasn’t decided in the first trial was how much Trump owed for comments he made about Carroll while president. That will be the new jury’s only job.

NEW YORK (AP) — Michael Cohen can’t hold his former boss, ex-president Donald Trump, liable because he was jailed for what he claimed was retaliation for writing a tell-all memoir, an appeals court said Tuesday.

The 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Manhattan said in an order that it would not revive a lawsuit that a lower-court judge had tossed out because the law did not seem to provide a damages remedy for most claims that someone was jailed in retaliation for their criticisms of a president.

A three-judge panel concluded Cohen already obtained relief by getting a judge to order his release from imprisonment to home confinement several weeks after he was abruptly put behind bars when the government claimed he violated severe restrictions on his public communications. It said the law did not provide an outlet for more relief than that.

Cohen served over a year of a three-year sentence in federal prison after pleading guilty in 2018 to tax evasion, campaign finance charges and lying to Congress, saying Trump directed him to arrange the payment of hush money to a porn actor to fend off damage to his 2016 presidential bid.

Freed early to home confinement as authorities worked to contain the coronavirus outbreak in federal prisons, Cohen was returned to prison weeks later when authorities claimed he failed to accept certain terms of his release.

At the time, Cohen said he had merely sought clarification on a condition forbidding him from speaking with the media and publishing his book.

After serving 16 days in solitary confinement that Cohen said left him with shortness of breath, severe headaches and anxiety, he was eventually freed on the orders of a judge who said he’d been jailed in retaliation for his desire to publish a book critical of the president and to discuss it on social media.

Cohen sued Trump and then Attorney General William P. Barr, along with various prison and probation officials.

In a statement, Cohen said Tuesday that he’ll appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.

“The outcome is wrong if democracy is to prevail. A writ of habeas corpus cannot be the only consequence to stop a rogue president from weaponizing the Department of Justice from locking up his/her critics in prison because they refuse to waive their First Amendment right,” he said.

Trump’s lawyer, Alina Habba, said in a statement: “We are very pleased with today’s ruling. Mr. Cohen’s lawsuit was doomed from its inception. We will continue to fight against any frivolous suits aimed at our client.”

NEW YORK (AP) — Michael Cohen, Donald Trump’s onetime personal lawyer and fixer, says he unwittingly passed along to his attorney bogus artificial intelligence-generated legal case citations he got online before they were submitted to a judge.

Cohen made the admission in a court filing unsealed Friday in Manhattan federal court after a judge earlier this month asked a lawyer to explain how court rulings that do not exist were cited in a motion submitted on Cohen’s behalf. Judge Jesse Furman had also asked what role, if any, Cohen played in drafting the motion.

The AI-generated cases were cited as part of written arguments attorney David M. Schwartz made to try to bring an early end to Cohen’s court supervision after he served more than a year behind bars. Cohen had pleaded guilty in 2018 to tax evasion, campaign finance charges and lying to Congress, saying Trump directed him to arrange the payment of hush money to a porn actor and to a former Playboy model to fend off damage to his 2016 presidential bid.

Cohen, who was disbarred five years ago, said in a declaration submitted to the judge on Thursday that he found the citations by doing research through Google Bard and was unaware that the service could generate nonexistent cases. He said he uses the internet for research because he no longer has access to formal legal-research sources.

“As a non-lawyer, I have not kept up with emerging trends (and related risks) in legal technology and did not realize that Google Bard was a generative text service that, like Chat-GPT, could show citations and descriptions that looked real but actually were not,” Cohen said. “Instead, I understood it to be a super-charged search engine and had repeatedly used it in other contexts to (successfully) find accurate information online.”

Google rolled out Bard earlier this year as an answer to ChatGPT, which Microsoft has been integrating into its Bing search engine. The tools can quickly generate text based off prompts from a user, but have a tendency to make things up, also known as “hallucinations.”

Cohen blamed Schwartz, his lawyer and longtime friend, for failing to check the validity of his citations before submitting them to the judge, though he asked that the judge dispense mercy toward Schwartz, calling his failure to check the citations an “honest mistake” and “a product of inadvertence, not any intent to deceive.”

In a declaration filed with the court, Schwartz said he thought drafts of the papers to be submitted to the judge to dissolve Cohen’s probation early were reviewed by E. Danya Perry, a former federal prosecutor now in private practice who also represents Cohen. He said he never reviewed what he thought was another attorney’s research.

Perry, who discovered that the cited cases were bogus after seeing the court filing, said Schwartz’s claim that he came to “believe” that the citations came from Perry were “incorrect and I believe, far-fetched, as I had no involvement in any back-and-forth — not directly with Mr. Schwartz or his paralegal and not even indirectly through Mr. Cohen.”

When she learned of them, Perry reported the false case citations to the judge and federal prosecutors.

In her submission to the judge, Perry wrote, “Mr. Cohen engaged in no misconduct and should not suffer any collateral damage from Mr. Schwartz’s misstep.”

In discussing possible sanctions earlier this month, the judge noted that it was the second time this year that a judge in Manhattan federal court has confronted lawyers over fake citations generated by artificial intelligence. Two lawyers in an unrelated case were fined $5,000 for citing bogus cases that were invented by ChatGPT, the AI-powered chatbot.

In entering the 2018 guilty plea, Cohen did not name the two women who received hush money or even Trump, recounting instead that he worked with an “unnamed candidate” to influence the 2016 election. But the amounts and the dates lined up with $130,000 paid to porn actor Stormy Daniels and $150,000 that went to Playboy Playmate Karen McDougal to buy their silence in the weeks and months leading up to the presidential election, which Trump, a Republican, won over Hillary Clinton, a Democrat. Daniels and McDougal claimed to have had affairs with Trump, which he denied.

Earlier this year, Trump pleaded not guilty in New York state court in Manhattan to 34 felony charges alleging that he falsified internal business records at his private company to coverup his involvement in the payouts.

After his arrest, Trump said in a speech, “This fake case was brought only to interfere with the upcoming 2024 election and it should be dropped immediately.”

He has since pleaded not guilty to charges in three other criminal cases.

NEW YORK (AP) — An Indian government official directed a plot to assassinate a prominent Sikh separatist leader living in New York City, United States prosecutors said Wednesday as they announced charges against a man they said was part of the thwarted conspiracy.

U.S. officials became aware in the spring of the plot to kill Gurpatwant Singh Pannun, who advocated for the creation of a sovereign Sikh state and is considered a terrorist by the Indian government. The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration interceded and set up a sting, with an undercover agent posing as a hitman, after the conspirators recruited an international narcotics trafficker in the plot to kill the activist for $100,000.

The Indian government official was not charged nor identified by name in an indictment unsealed Wednesday, but was described as a “senior field officer” with responsibilities in security management and intelligence, said to have previously served in India’s Central Reserve Police Force.

The charges were aimed at a different person: Nikhil Gupta, 52, a citizen of India who was accused of murder for hire and conspiracy to commit murder for hire. The charges carry a potential penalty of up to 20 years in prison.

The indictment said Gupta was recruited in May by the unidentified Indian government employee to orchestrate the assassination of Pannun, who was only identified in court papers as “Victim.”

Gupta contacted a criminal associate to help find a hitman to carry out the killing, but that person happened to be a confidential source working with the DEA. The confidential source then introduced Gupta to a purported hitman, who was actually a DEA agent, the indictment said.

In June, the Indian government employee gave Gupta the home address of Pannun, his phone numbers and details about his daily conduct, including surveillance photos, which Gupta passed along to the undercover DEA agent, the indictment said.

It said Gupta directed the undercover agent to carry out the killing as soon as possible, without conflicting with anticipated engagements between high-level U.S. and Indian officials.

According to the indictment, Gupta told the undercover DEA agent the day after Nijjar’s killing in Canada that Nijjar “was also the target” and “we have so many targets.”

“The defendant conspired from India to assassinate, right here in New York City, a U.S. citizen of Indian origin who has publicly advocated for the establishment of a sovereign state for Sikhs, an ethnoreligious minority group in India,” U.S. Attorney Damian Williams, the chief federal prosecutor in Manhattan, said in a news release.

“We will not tolerate efforts to assassinate U.S. citizens on U.S. soil, and stand ready to investigate, thwart, and prosecute anyone who seeks to harm and silence Americans here or abroad,” he added.

The charges were the second major recent accusation of complicity of Indian government officials in attempts to kill Sikh separatist figures living in North America.

In September, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said there were credible allegations that the Indian government had links to the assassination in that country of Sikh activist Hardeep Singh Nijjar. India rejected the accusation as absurd, but Canada expelled a top Indian diplomat and India responded with the same measure.

Before the U.S. indictment was unsealed Wednesday, India announced it had set up a high-level inquiry after U.S. authorities raised concerns about preexisting knowledge of the plot to kill Pannun.

When the U.S. shared some information, India took it seriously, “since they impinge on our national security interests as well, and relevant departments were already examining the issue,” read a statement by External Affairs Ministry spokesperson Arindam Bagchi.

Gupta was arrested June 30 in the Czech Republic through a bilateral extradition treaty between the U.S. and the Czech Republic, prosecutors said. It was not immediately clear when he might be brought to the United States and whether he has secured legal representation there.

The case is particularly sensitive given the high priority that U.S. President Joe Biden placed on improving ties with India and courting it to be a major partner in the push to counter China’s increasing assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific and beyond.

The White House declined to comment directly on the charges against Gupta, but said administration officials acted quickly.

“When we were made aware of the fact that the defendant in this case had credibly indicated that he was directed to arrange the murder by an individual who is assessed to be an employee of the Indian Government, we took this information very seriously and engaged in direct conversations with the Indian government at the highest levels to express our concern,” White House National Security Council spokesperson Adrienne Watson said in a statement.

Trudeau said in a statement that Canadian authorities were working closely with American officials since August, and reiterated that “India needs to take this seriously.”

Pannun has been a leading organizer of the so-called Khalistan referendum, inviting Sikhs worldwide to vote on whether India’s Punjab state should become an independent nation based on religion. He is also general counsel with the Sikhs for Justice organization, which India banned in 2019.

“I’m not afraid of the physical death,” Pannun said in a telephone interview Wednesday with The Associated Press. If that’s the cost of running a campaign for an independent Sikh state, “I’m willing to pay that price,” he said.

Pannun said they had never used violence to achieve their goals.

“India has proved they believe in violence and bullets to stop” the campaign, he said, referring also to the assassination of Nijjar in Canada.

The White House first became aware of the plot in late July, according to a senior administration official.

The official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the sensitive exchanges with Indian government, said White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan met with his Indian counterpart, Ajit Doval, and underscored that India needed to investigate and hold those responsible accountable.

Sullivan also said the U.S. needed an assurance that this would not happen again, warning that another episode could permanently damage the trust established between our two countries, the official said.

Biden then asked CIA Director William Burns to contact his counterpart and travel to India to make it clear that the United States would not tolerate such activities.

Biden also raised the matter with Prime Minister Narendra Modi when they met at the Group of 20 Summit in September in New Delhi.

Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Sullivan raised the issue with Foreign Minister S. Jaishankar when he visited Washington in September.

In October, Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines travelled to India to share information with Indian officials to aid their internal investigation.

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Sharma reported from New Delhi. Associated Press writers Aamer Madhani and Eric Tucker in Washington, Rob Gillies in Toronto, Krutika Pathi in New Delhi, and AP Diplomatic Writer Matthew Lee in Brussels contributed to this report.