LONG READ: How John Karony went from visionary to convicted fraudster

By admin On May 29, 2025

On the afternoon of Wednesday, May 21, 2025, in a windowless, high-ceilinged courtroom in Brooklyn, Judge Eric Komitee read the jury’s verdict.

On the charge of conspiracy to commit wire fraud: guilty.

On the charge of conspiracy to commit money laundering: guilty.

On the charge of conspiracy to commit securities fraud: guilty.

Former SafeMoon CEO Braden John Karony had been convicted of a conspiracy to defraud investors in the notorious token. Karony, tall and bearded, sat through the trial in a razor-sharp blue suit, absorbing evidence against him with calm detachment.

He barely reacted to the verdict.

By contrast, former SafeMoon investors around the world celebrated wildly. For them, Karony’s conviction was vindication after a nearly four-year struggle to prove they’d been ripped off.

Over the course of a 12-day trial, government prosecutors had convinced a jury that Karony and his co-conspirator had lied about SafeMoon’s features and finances, while extracting as much as $200 million in what could be described as a “slow rug-pull.”

Now Karony faces as long as 45 years in prison — though his sentence is likely to be much less. Indeed, former FTX head Sam Bankman-Fried only got 25 years for a fraud nearly 50 times larger.

That’s just one index of SafeMoon’s relative insignificance. Most crypto veterans regarded it as a bit of a joke even at release, and its dramatic collapse under scandalous fraud allegations was overshadowed by larger and more shocking frauds, like Three Arrows Capital, Celsius, and the aforementioned FTX.

However, the SafeMoon saga, in all its low-rent absurdity, bitter infighting, grandiose delusion, and sheer incompetence, may be a better encapsulation of crypto’s maximum-fraud era than those slick, respectable-looking cons.

If Su Zhu and Alex Mashinsky flew too close to the sun, Karony and his co-conspirators barely got off the ground — but still managed to crash back down at full speed.

Now, Karony is about to be what SafeMoon’s liquidity never really was: locked up.

Here’s how it all went down.

Inside the Eastern District

Every courthouse is a self-contained world, a little island strangely insulated from the 21st century.

The Eastern District of New York courthouse sits on the edge of a picturesque park in a quiet pocket near downtown Brooklyn, where children privileged beyond most people’s wildest dreams play soccer on a flawless green.

Any member of the public can watch a trial like Karony’s, but you first have to give up your smartphone.

At the Southern District of New York in Manhattan, you hand it over in exchange for an ancient stamped-metal chip, like a subway token. At the EDNY, they give you a numbered block of wood.

The phone check-ins (and metal detectors and bag-scans) are manned by US Marshals, but you won’t bump into Raylan Givens at the EDNY. Most Marshalls here are greying, jovial retirees from the NYPD or Federal law enforcement — friendly in the laconic way of people who are used to respect by default.

Rumor has it that the former Feds and former cops maintain a good-natured rivalry.

Judge Komitee’s courtroom is on the sixth floor of the expansive EDNY building, at the far end of an echoing hallway. Down one side corridor are a half-dozen chrome phone booths, now stripped of hardware.

One imagines journalists of an earlier era furiously filing updates down the wire.

Now, the booths are a handy place to stash a cup of coffee — banned from the courtrooms themselves.

Komitee’s courtroom is, in a word, cavernous — as wide as a basketball court, with two-storey ceilings. The judge, appointed in 2018, looms above the fray at the far end. He’s youthful for a Federal judge, resembling Ben Affleck only with bigger ears.

From the trial’s opening moments, Karony appeared at a disadvantage. Partly because he was being tried in the Eastern District in the first place: Federal prosecutors generally seek jurisdiction to try financial crimes in either the EDNY or SDNY, where judges and lawyers have been putting away con-men like Bernie Madoff for many decades.

This reflects the reality that New York is the hub of American banking and finance: nearly all transactions worldwide touch the ground here in one way or another. Jurisdiction galore.

It also means that everyone here is exceptionally good at this financial crime stuff — the prosecution most of all.

There’s another side effect that would also tend to advantage the prosecution: a jury pool of New Yorkers, breathers of Wall Street air, swimming in complex financial schemes, NFT bullshit spray-painted on the walls of Williamsburg.

Karony’s jury, in a box on the left side of the courtroom, sat at attention for most of the trial, even through some truly interminable wrangling about the minutiae of decentralized finance. Nearly all took detailed notes.

One alternate’s incredible lineup of outfits taught daily lessons about menswear.

Five lawyers and aides sat at the prosecution’s table, just in front of the jury. Notably, the lead prosecutors were all women, including Assistant US Attorney Jessica Weigel and AUSA Dana Rehnquist, who would deliver a bruising closing statement.

Weigel, petite and understated, delivered the government’s opening.

“John Karony lied to investors so he could get rich,” she said. “He wanted the public to buy [his] project, so he told them it was different… he told them it was safe. It was right there in the name.”

SafeMoon’s main pitch, Weigel recounted, had been a promise to “lock” a liquidity pool that guaranteed users could always sell. “That was a lie,” Weigel told the jury.

SafeMoon did lock some of the tokens that flowed into the pool from a “tax” on transactions, she added — “enough to calm investors’ nerves, to cover their tracks.”

Weigel told the jury they would hear about this in detail, and in person, from Thomas “Papa” Smith, the former SafeMoon CTO. Smith had been charged alongside Karony but pleaded guilty, choosing to testify against his former boss.

A third conspirator had also been charged — Kyle Nagy, aka SafeMoonDev, had fled to Russia rather than face trial.

The three needed to cover their tracks because, the government would argue, “from the very beginning, [they] had been stealing from the pool.” Money generated from SafeMoon fees had gone, not to support investors’ tokens, but to fund extravagant purchases by the co-conspirators.

In the classic vein of tasteless, impulsive nouveau-riche scammers, they splurged on Porsches, multiple Audi R8s, at least one McLaren, multiple houses, and bag after bag of luxury clothes.

Karony’s mother was partial to Louis Vuitton — and she was far from alone.

Karony’s other clear handicap was the size of his defense team — just one lawyer, Nicholas Smith, and a law clerk. Karony’s previous legal representation, from the firm Petrillo, Klein & Boxer, had asked to be removed from the case in February of 2024, after SafeMoon shut down and stopped paying Karony’s legal fees.

Judge Komitee at the time directed Karony to seek legal aid through the Criminal Justice Act, which provides public funding for defendants unable to pay for their own lawyers.

Despite constrained resources, Karony clearly got lucky with Nicholas Smith as his fill-in. A slight and boyish man with a knowing smirk and glasses, Smith came to court with a full-sized chip on his shoulder, taking hammer and tongs to every possible seam in the prosecution’s case.

“The government has made a mistake,” he declared in his opening statement. Their evidence would “seem impressive and thorough,” but Smith guided the jury to “ask yourself two questions.”

First, “did John Karony agree with someone else to deceive someone? Or did he repeatedly disclose the information he’s accused of hiding?” Second, “did the [SafeMoon] team agree? Or did they constantly disagree? If it’s the second, you have to ask yourself … is that a conspiracy?”

These were pillars of Smith’s surprisingly credible defense. Many of the deceptive claims about SafeMoon’s liquidity pool were first made by Nagy, who named the project and created a whitepaper and website before Karony joined.

In fact, within days of joining SafeMoon, Karony directed changes to these documents that softened some of Nagy’s lies. Because Karony was charged with conspiracy, these finer distinctions of responsibility might not have been exculpatory in legal terms — but they stood a chance of influencing the jury.

While portions of SafeMoon’s messaging continued to claim that the pool was “locked,” Nicholas Smith also highlighted multiple instances where Karony or “Papa” Smith seemed to acknowledge that the locking was incomplete.

Smith would emphasize these sometimes-indirect acknowledgments while emphasizing the role of liquidity withdrawals in legitimate business activities, such as funding SafeMoon trading on new exchanges.

Finally, Nicholas Smith told the jury that John Karony barely understood the words coming out of his own mouth when he was allegedly defrauding SafeMoon investors. When he joined SafeMoon, Smith said, Karony knew “next to nothing about cryptocurrency or liquidity pools.”

Incompetence is rarely a great defense against financial fraud charges, but in Karony’s case, it had the benefit of being true.

Employees would later describe Karony, with remarkable consistency, as a genuinely nice person whom they enjoyed working with.

However, he had little actual business experience, was also “easily manipulated,” and was “a narcissist.” In one particularly egregious screwup, a SafeMoon app didn’t launch on the announced day because no one was aware of the long approval process for software on the Apple App Store.

One staffer later reported catching Karony watching a YouTube video titled “How to Be A Better CEO.”

What was SafeMoon… Really?

The prosecution’s first witness, on May 6, was William Maurer, an architect from Southern California who invested in SafeMoon starting in May of 2021.

Prosecutors used Maurer to walk the jury through SafeMoon’s whitepaper, technological claims, and promises of “safety.”

SafeMoon’s token was launched on the Binance Smart Chain on March 3, 2021. It was created by Nagy, and thanks to influencers, wash trading, and a devilishly seductive hook, it became a nearly overnight sensation.

It was a fork of something called Bee Token, with, Nagy wrote in a readme file:

“Some added benefits. First, the dev has minted the tokens — sent the balance to DxSale for fair launch — and then burned the remainder of the tokens. Dev had to partake in presale.

“Second, utilized the DxSale protocol to foster trust in the community by auto-locking liquidity for 4 years… 100% community owned and driven — no rug is possible. #safemoon join us on our journey safely to the moon!”

Prosecutors had Maurer guide the jury through SafeMoon’s core design feature: a 10% “tax” on all token sales through the BSC-based PancakeSwap DEX.

This was meant to both discourage speculative trading and provide a backstop for the token’s price — half of the tax, or 5% of all sales, was sent into that “auto-locking” liquidity pool.

The other half of the tax might be more interesting, not financially, but psychologically. Five percent of the Safemoon “exit tax” became “reflections” that redistributed fees to current holders.

So not only were SafeMoon sellers punished on the way out the door, but everyone who stuck with the group got a little bit richer.

The tax-and-lock dynamic was the basis for the whitepaper’s reassurances of “100% safety.” The idea was to get all the price appreciation that seemed to happen to any crypto token, as if by magic, and to eliminate the risks of price crashes or “exit scams” by simply punishing people for selling.

“Safely to the moon” became an often-repeated slogan — and later, the title of a fascinating retrospective podcast by former SafeMoon sales staff, which was a source for some of what follows.

While intuitively appealing, the tax-and-lock model is fundamentally flawed. Barriers to selling might seem to help SafeMoon retain value… but why exactly would it have any value in the first place?

SafeMoon was frequently accused of being a memecoin because, beyond the tax, it had no utility or features. In fact, the “tax” arguably harmed SafeMoon’s most immediate utility by making it an inefficient medium of exchange.

After SafeMoon, a strange subsection of the crypto world has come to consider “tokenomics” a synonym for this sort of “tax on selling.” This is dangerously misleading: “tokenomics” is a much more general term for the economic dynamics of a decentralized system in which a token is embedded.

For example, Bitcoin’s emission of tokens to proof-of-work miners, and the relationship between real-world price and mining difficulty adjustment are an elegant economic loop.

SafeMoon’s tax system was just a distracting gadget attached to a token that fundamentally did nothing.

At a higher level, SafeMoon’s promises of safety were just as much of a red flag. Financial instruments, especially those that appreciate rapidly, are inextricable from risk, and attempts to engineer away risk never do more than hide or displace it.

The core SafeMoon team probably didn’t know any better, though: they had no professional finance experience between them. It’s quite plausible to assume that the players had a naive but genuine faith in their ability to create a revolutionary financial instrument out of thin air.

In his cross-examination of Maurer, Nicholas Smith hammered themes that he would develop throughout the trial. He led Maurer to point out that none of the statements Maurer read about SafeMoon’s “safety” had come directly from Karony — instead, they were in the whitepaper.

Smith also established that Maurer had made his purchases through BitMart, setting up the argument that liquidity pool funds were used for the legitimate purpose of funding expansion to other exchanges.

Weigel then asked Maurer one last question on redirect, bringing the real core of the case back into focus.

“If you knew the SafeMoon team was draining the liquidity pool, would you have invested?” Weigel asked.

“I would not,” Maurer replied.

Here we have the biggest problem with SafeMoon’s tax-and-lock design. Though Nagy’s initial claims were that liquidity from sales was “auto-locking,” the liquidity lock was entirely manual and under the direct control of the small core group of developers.

Though it claimed to be a “DeFi” project, SafeMoon was in this sense substantially centralized. Liquidity would be locked only a handful of times during SafeMoon’s existence, with Karony arguing strongly against some of the locks.

After April of 2021, prosecutors would show the jury, liquidity was never locked again.

The SafeMoon Army

There was an audience of roughly 20 people for the prosecution and defense’s opening statements, largely lawyers working on other cases, dropping by for some quick rubbernecking.

However, after openings and continuing throughout most of the trial, there were only six or seven onlookers who weren’t officers of the court.

On that first day, I introduced myself to one of them — let’s call him Gabe. Wearing sunglasses and a puffer vest with a hoodie, he was obviously not a lawyer. I assumed he was a victim, there to watch Karony meet justice.

I was both right and wrong.

Gabe explained that he was indeed a SafeMoon investor — but he was there to support Karony, who he believed had been “framed,” possibly by the US government. SafeMoon’s tax-and-lock tokenomics, he said, was the project’s key innovation — and, he intimated, a threat to the fiat dollar.

Gabe told me he made SafeMoon-themed music in support of the project, and I realized his hoodie bore the SafeMoon logo. The SafeMoon community, he said, was “more active than ever.”

This was far from the only member of the “SafeMoon Army” still cheering Karony on. SafeMoon attracted one of the most intense cults crypto had ever seen, and while many former SafeMoon investors were immensely supportive of my trial coverage, there were still plenty of die-hards who reflexively declared every word “biased” or “FUD.”

They reminded me of those apocryphal Japanese soldiers trapped on some remote island for decades after World War II, still fighting a long-lost war.

On that first day, two other onlookers stuck around, sitting in the first row of seats, directly behind the defense table. One was a bald, bespectacled, long-limbed man in his early sixties, who could be played in the entirely plausible SafeMoon Movie by Arrested Development’s Jeffrey Tambor.

Sitting close and occasionally whispering to him was a red-haired, designer-dressed woman with more than a little of Lucille Bluth to her. For every day of the trial, I’d find them back in their seats, rarely betraying any emotion but a kind of mildly amused shock.

I began to suspect who they might be: Karony’s parents, Bradford and Jennifer Karony. But it was hard to be sure. Bradford is a former Central Intelligence Agency staffer, and there are very few available images of the pair.

One of the few is this video of Bradford discussing careers in intelligence, but the pudgy man in that video looked nothing like the lean, wizened figure faithfully showing up to court.

Then, a source close to the family cracked the case for me: Bradford and Jennifer Karony had gone on Ozempic.

Bradford and Jennifer’s presence in the courtroom was striking. Though it barely surfaced in the court proceedings, SafeMoon had opened up deep rifts within the Karony family, particularly between John and his mother.

John had used liquidity pool funds to make a $5 million investment in Emanations Communication Group (ECG), a firm founded by Jennifer, just months after joining SafeMoon. ECG became a key player in a later stage of SafeMoon’s story, but things didn’t go well, ultimately leading to Karony filing suit against his own mother.

But perhaps that was all water under the bridge. Bradford and Jennifer, like Gabe, would attend every day of the trial. When Karony was convicted, I would glimpse the intelligence-linked parents deep in a heartfelt conversation with the anti-government conspiracist.

The White Wizard

John M. Griffin, an expert witness for the prosecution, then walked the jury through the details of liquidity pools and blockchain. Nicholas Smith took the opportunity on cross-examination to ask Griffin about the use of block explorers to identify blockchain transactions, part of making the case that nobody was hiding the unlocked liquidity pool.

He also walked Griffin through the convenience benefits of centralized exchanges, building the case that “seeding” exchange trading was a legitimate use of liquidity pool funds.

The prosecution’s star witness was next — Thomas “Papa” Smith, the CTO of SafeMoon during its peak, and nearly as much the face of the project as John Karony.

But when he took the stand, Smith’s trademark beard and long hair had gone from salted black to shockingly, completely grey: it was as if his November 2023 arrest and subsequent dealings with the Feds had literally sucked the life out of him.

He had taken a plea deal to testify against Karony.

Smith was strikingly relatable on the stand, and seemed genuinely, at times movingly contrite and regretful about what he had done — and he laid out exactly what that was for the jury. “We misrepresented our use of a liquidity pool… we lied to the public.

“We would say we were going to use the money for development, then not do that.”

SafeMoon, Thomas Smith told the jury, had largely grown from something called Tano, a company Karony had founded to make games. According to another former SafeMoon staffer, one of its projects had been called “Goat Racing Simulator,” a riff on the popular “Goat Simulator” games.

It seems to have been a shoestring operation — according to Smith, he was paid a mere “$2,000 to $3,000” per month at Tano, and Smith claimed the company was funded entirely from Karony’s credit card.

It must have felt like salvation, then, when Kyle Nagy called Smith on March 8, 2021, to ask for help with SafeMoon. The token had already started taking off. Smith was immediately excited, joined up as a developer, and quickly brought Karoni along to run operations.

Not long after, Nagy gave Thomas Smith $500,000 worth of SafeMoon tokens. Huge “bonuses” were handed out to Hank Wyatt and Trevor Church at the same time.

While Nagy claimed these were SafeMoon tokens he’d bought with real money during the presale, they had actually been taken from the liquidity pool — the earliest example of a recurring habit.

Thomas Smith’s description of what happened when he suddenly had half a million dollars was easily the most poignant testimony of the trial.

“I cried,” Smith said. “I didn’t have to worry about bills, I didn’t have to worry about how I would eat. I wasn’t able to save my grandmother’s house [from foreclosure], but I had completely changed in that moment.

Everything you are, what makes you, is because you’re working towards something. And [when you get it], you change. You can’t help it.”

He added, “Previously, I had a very strong moral compass. After I had the money, I stopped asking questions, I stopped fighting back. I cared deeply about the amount that I had… I became that monster I was talking about.”

Smith went on to describe just how willing he became to bend his ethics. This included using obfuscating techniques to hide his sales of SafeMoon tokens through PancakeSwap, while gleefully celebrating imminent “Castle Money” in DMs with other SafeMooners — most of all, John Karony.

Smith also suddenly became a fierce warrior against “FUD,” or “fear, uncertainty, and doubt.” In AMAs or in Discord chats, Smith would “brush off” what turned out to be fairly justified and reasonable concerns.

“I paid a lot more attention to FUD after that… it could spiral out of control. If there was an incredible amount of selling, the [value of the] amount that I had could go down.”

Smith testified that one way SafeMoon calmed down FUD was to “post a new lock” of a tranche of the liquidity pool.

This became a particular point of tension after April 21, 2021, when a game-changing Tweet from an account called War on Rugs claimed, accurately, that “Owner owns more than 50% of the liquidity and refuses to fix it. He could pull LP and sell tokens, creating a rug pull. Likeliness of losing all funds: Absolute.”

Smith described how he and Nagy had tried to convince Karony to respond by locking about $250 million worth of liquidity. By this point, as they argued, SafeMoon was generating plenty of fees to pay any ongoing expenses.

But, in Discord messages shown by the prosecution, Karony initially refused. “No. I veto. No locking it.”

Notably, though, this huge lock eventually did go through, over Karony’s initial objection. Defense lawyer Nicholas Smith would later cannily suggest that these performative locks actually revealed to users that the liquidity pool wasn’t as locked as had been advertised.

Thomas Smith also described another portion of the fraud alleged against Karony, involving the BitMart exchange. SafeMoon’s “tax” system didn’t work when it was sold through centralized exchanges (which one might see as a pretty fundamental failing), but Karony had convinced BitMart to replicate its mechanics.

However, Smith testified that instead of tax payments going back into the liquidity pool, they went directly into a “market-making” account controlled by Karony.

It was at this stage of the trial that I had my first direct interaction with Karony. During a break, I was in the courtroom talking to a fellow reporter. Karony walked up to us, smiling, hand extended. “Thanks for covering this,” he told us.

Maybe it just showed that Karony was, as some former employees would maintain, a genuinely nice guy. But it was undeniably bizarre — in years of court experience between us two reporters, nothing like it had ever happened.

Over the following 10 days of the trial, other prosecution evidence would establish the conspiracy and its goals even more definitively.

In a very early AMA talk, Karony was seen lying to the SafeMoon community that he and the team were being paid “a little bit,” and that he only held about $30 worth of SafeMoon himself — despite having been gifted 5 trillion SFM tokens, worth millions of dollars.

Prosecutors presented another video that they said Karony had made of himself, on the phone or a video chat with someone who sounds like Thomas Smith. They’re discussing money and payroll when Karony refers to “bonuses that don’t exist.”

More fraudulent statements came after the War on Rugs tweet in April. In a series of all-caps X posts, Karony told the community that the liquidity pool funds might be used for “EMERGENCIES” but that “WE WILL PUBLICLY GO TO THE COMMUNITY” ahead of time if that was necessary.

In fact, LP funds would continue being pulled out for any number of non-emergency applications, and the community was never notified ahead of any of it.

“There is no coming back from this lie,” as Rehnquist would declare in her closing.

Financial details also continued to emerge. In the end, “Papa” Smith received more than $2 million worth of assets for his role. Another top staffer named Hank Wyatt got $800,000 for less than a year’s work.

Withdrawals from the liquidity pool continued well after SafeMoon’s brief period in the sun had passed: a forensic accountant testified that between September and mid-December of 2021, $43 million was pulled out.

In another set of Discord messages, Nagy asks Karony if they should “be honest with the team” about having tapped the liquidity pool. Karony replies that they “need to talk about how to message that properly.”

Ultimately, that meant never disclosing it at all. Instead, Karony suggested taking out more money.

As Dana Rehnquist would declare in her closing statement for the prosecution: “That’s the conspiracy.”

The defense

Though he didn’t come out on top, Nicholas Smith did some impressive lawyering throughout the trial. One particularly strong example came in his cross-examination of his namesake “Papa” Smith.

Thomas Smith had described receiving a $500,000 gift, but Nicholas Smith made sure he clarified for the jury that this gift was from Nagy and had nothing directly to do with Karony.

He got Thomas Smith to acknowledge that there was substantial disagreement, both in DeFi in general and within SafeMoon, about whether it was acceptable to tap a liquidity pool for expenses (if this was ever actually a widespread debate in DeFi, I missed it at the time, but the answer is now pretty clearly “no”).

More pointedly, Nicholas Smith highlighted a March 19, 2021, video AMA in which Thomas Smith mentioned that a portion of the liquidity pool was not locked, explaining that this is because locking the entire pool would make it harder to fix problems.

“If you’re trying to lead people to believe that the entire liquidity pool was locked,” Nicholas Smith asked, “This isn’t very effective, is it?”

On the one hand, this was a very effective line of questioning. But Nicholas Smith’s energetic style had a downside: the defense lawyer seemed, now and at other points, smarmy and superior.

Over the course of the trial, he would regularly clash with Judge Komitee while arguing procedure — sort of in the job description for defense lawyers, but not entirely ideal.

Smith also didn’t succeed in mounting a very robust defense when it came time to call his own witnesses. Jake Hammock, former SafeMoon VP of product, testified to the reality of later planned SafeMoon products, such as a decentralized exchange and an encryption tool called Orbital Shield.

These products were never released despite big promises from the SafeMoon team, but they weren’t a focus of the fraud charges.

Hammock also testified that he found Karony to have a law-abiding character. But on cross-examination, this gave the prosecution an opening to ask Hammock whether he knew that in 2021, despite making millions of dollars, Karony “did not file or pay taxes,” or that Karony had “bribed Gambian officials.”

That last allegation was first put forth in proceedings between Karony and his mother.

Smith also questioned a seemingly satisfied SafeMoon investor named Nicholas Ranalli. A grey-haired auto plant worker from Canada, Ranalli had acted as a moderator on SafeMoon’s Facebook page, and testified that Karony had indeed disclosed that the liquidity pool was being used — and that Ranalli didn’t have any problem with that.

Ranalli admitted to prosecutors, though, that he was still holding all of his SafeMoon, and “hoping the price will go up.”

Karony’s defense had a forensic expert of its own, Rutgers economics professor Bruce Mizrach. Mizrach primarily charted SafeMoon’s price against the announcement of new liquidity “lock” announcements, which showed these “locks” happening after price declines, and being followed by price rises.

I was unclear of the goal here — Mizrach’s chart seemed primarily to support Thomas Smith’s earlier claim that making a lot of noise about liquidity locks was a good way to distract the SafeMoon Army from bad news.

In his closing statement, Nicholas Smith reiterated the pillars of his defense: That Karony didn’t write the initial deceptive SafeMoon whitepaper or website; that he barely understood crypto; that SafeMoon leaders had disclosed that the liquidity pool was not “locked” (albeit indirectly); that the team had disagreed about whether to use the liquidity pool.

“Conspiracy requires agreement,” Smith argued.

Smith also played up SafeMoon’s sources of cash other than the liquidity pool, including merchandise sales, and equated claims that SafeMoon was “safe” to a salesman’s puffed-up pitch: something no reasonable person would take literally.

It was all solid lawyering — but it didn’t make a difference to the verdict.

The jury deliberated for roughly three hours. John Karony was guilty, guilty, guilty.

Conviction

After the jury returned their verdict, things weren’t quite over.

The prosecution and defense now made arguments about a forfeiture judgment against $1.8 million in proceeds from the sale of his Utah mansion, as well as $107,000 that forensics had traced from the SafeMoon liquidity pool to the down payment on Brandon and Jennifer Karony’s home.

When the jury retired to deliberate on the forfeiture, I stepped out for some water. On my way back, I crossed paths with Karony and Nicholas Smith, seemingly headed to the bathroom.

I walked past the now-convicted man without acknowledging the pair. But then, from behind me, came Karony’s chummy shout.

“David, they’re not back yet!” He seemed light, blithe, pleasant — not at all like someone who had just been convicted of a crime that might send them to prison for four decades.

I was raised right — to look people in the eye, offer a firm handshake, to say please and thank you. But I was so stunned by the strangeness of it (and frankly, so anxious about appearing friendly towards Karony) that I didn’t respond at all.

Totally icing someone isn’t really my way. It was rude.

But I can’t say I feel too bad.

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