The lobby of the Daniel Patrick Moynihan United States Courthouse in downtown Manhattan could double as a museum of malfeasance. Hanging on its white marble walls are dozens of infamous courtroom sketches, a curated gallery of some of America’s worst hits and weirdest trials.
As I wandered the hallways in October, I beheld the renderings, stylized in various oil pastels and watercolors, of Martha Stewart and Imelda Marcos. I saw murderous mafia kingpins and litigious tree-shaped car air freshener corporations. I smirked knowingly at the legendary Tom Brady face from Deflategate. I noted the familiar names and likenesses of some once-invincible financiers who had pled guilty to financial crimes, like the Ponzi-schemer Bernie Madoff and the don’t-call-him-a-junk-bond-king Michael Milken. And I wondered which drawing they’d one day use to represent the trial I was there to see, United States v. Samuel Bankman-Fried.
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