Later today, a man who has recently turned 32 will be hauled in front of a Manhattan judge. Already convicted of huge fraud, he knows he’s going to prison. The only question is for how long. If the US government gets its way, he will not emerge before his 80th birthday.

This is the final disgrace of Sam Bankman-Fried. The judge, politicians and the world’s press will declare him one of the biggest swindlers in American history. They will note how within three years he built a marketplace for digital currencies, or crypto, that was worth around $32bn – and made himself the world’s richest person under 30. Still it wasn’t enough. He spent perhaps $8bn of his customers’ savings on luxury homes, risky investments and whatever else took his fancy.

But remember this. Those same groups who today come to bury the boy billionaire yesterday praised him without qualification – and took as much of his cash as they could. While battling Donald Trump in 2020, Joe Biden received about $5m from Bankman-Fried. He wasn’t alone. Mitt Romney, Cory Booker, Paul Ryan, Nancy Pelosi: they and so many other Democrats and Republicans accepted collectively tens of millions.

Also on the payroll to endorse Bankman-Fried’s trading exchange, FTX, were celebrities and sports stars, from Larry David (who got a reported $10m to make one ad) to Gisele Bündchen and her then partner, the quarterback Tom Brady, the tennis player Naomi Osaka and the basketball legend Shaquille O’Neal. If these high-rollers had the faintest qualm about taking huge sums from a young man who had dropped out of nowhere to........

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