Jailed Safemoon CEO’s legal troubles grow as expensive lawyers back out.

I haven’t posted on Safemoon in what feels like ages! That’s a good thing as there’s a fair few things to treat you all with.

Hopefully as you know, John Karony was finally arrested on October 31st 2023 as a result of a 2 year investigation from the FBI, assisted by the SEC, DOJ, HMRC and IRS.

He’s been in Jail in Utah since then, getting transferred to NY at the end of December.

To start with, he hired a lawyer called Clayton Simms who played himself on “Real Housewives” a trashy reality tv show.

This lawyer was trying to arrange John’s bail, but forgot to tell Salt Lake Jail when Johns hearing was. The hearing started but John was still sat in his cell unaware that he was supposed to be infront of a judge. That pissed the judge off and the hearing was rescheduled.

At the second bail hearing, the DOJ successfully managed to argue against Johns proposed bail conditions, convincing the judge he was a major flight risk due to his ability to access crypto resources and his ties to other countries (John has spent much of the last two years living in the UK). The judge also ruled against John using a lawyer to post bail, claiming that a surety should be someone from Johns family, to motivate John to turn up to further court sessions if he is released on bail - otherwise someone in his family gets punished for it.

The SLIGHT problem with that is that John spent much of 2022 and 2023 suing his own mother in court over a civil matter, which has had the spectacularly predicable effect of turning his entire family against him.

So Johns mom makes contact with John in jail, and says “drop the lawsuit against me and we will see if we can post your bail”. John instructs his civil lawyers (which he spent a considerable sum on) to drop the lawsuit against his Mom, so things looked like they were finally falling in to place for his third bail hearing…

Except now the Department of Justice argued that Johns parents aren’t suitable sureties as he has a history of litigation against them… and the judge accepted that argument.

Thats where we were at, up until yesterday, when Johns expensive criminal trial lawyers submitted a motion of withdrawal, citing a lack of funds:

a limited retainer payment was made on behalf of Mr. Karony to the firm, and that payment has been exhausted by legal fees incurred to date.

He intended to keep paying these lawyers from the sale of his mansion, but unfortunately for him the US Government determined it was bought using proceeds of fraud and have seized the payment.

I would say John is now fully in the ‘Find out’ stage of ‘Fuck around and find out’

So what’s next? John will have to make do with a court-appointed public defendant, who likely won’t understand crypto, to try and argue why the fraud he did wasn’t fraud.

Just a reminder that he is up for potentially 45 years behind bars for his crimes and, had he sensibly taken a plea deal at the start, could have been looking at starting his reduced sentence now instead of looking at nearly half a century behind bars.

Ah well!