The reason it was fast with Madoff wasn’t the confession, per se, it was that it came with the telegraphed (and actual) intent to surrender to the authorities.
Though I suspect SBF’s inability to control his public statements is an indicator that it is likely to be quicker to line up things against him than it was against Lay, its not going to be as easy as with someone who was burned out and done fighting like Madoff.
Definitely some people are more equal than others. And I realize he is in the Bahamas.
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re: premise below
There is plenty of non-fabricated probable cause for SBF.
A search warrant needs to specify a particular place to search and particular things to search for. So, even if there was an LEO that was going to fabricate evidence to support such a warrant…what would they fabricate evidence to point toward that would actually be useful?
Also, while it may not have mattered to the LEO fabricating evidence against you–assuming your story is accurate–it may be that the particular folks involved in the SBF investigations are less willing to commit crimes of their own to advance it, if not for ethical reasons, potentially because the attention to the case and the resources likely to be deployed by the defense make it rather more likely than in your case that either (1) such a crime would result in criminal consequences for the government agent committing it, or (2) manufacturing evidence would compromise any prosecution of SBF.
Ken Lay was Dec 2001 -> July 2004
Madoff was very quick from the collapse to arrest (December 2008 for both), but that’s largely because he confessed to his sons and told them he planned to surrender to authorities, who talked to the FBI, who visited Madoff who then confessed that it was “all one big lie” to them.