Original author: Andy Greenberg
Original translation: BitpushNews Tracy, Alvin
As a U.S. federal agent, Tigran Gambaryan pioneered the modern cryptocurrency investigation. Later at Binance, he got caught between the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange and a government determined to make it pay.
At 8 a.m. on March 23, 2024, Tigran Gambaryan woke up on his couch in Abuja, Nigeria, where he had been dozing since predawn prayers. The house around him, which usually hums with the sound of a nearby generator, was eerily quiet. In that silence, the harsh reality of Gambaryan’s situation had been flooding back to him every morning for nearly a month: He and his colleague Nadeem Anjarwalla, who worked at the cryptocurrency company Binance, were being held hostage, without access to their own passports. They were being held under military guard in a barbed-wire compound owned by the Nigerian government.
Gambaryan rose from the couch. The 39-year-old Armenian-American was dressed in a white T-shirt, with a solid, muscular build and Orthodox tattoos covering his right arm. He usually had a shaved head, and his neatly trimmed black beard was short and scraggly from a month’s absence. Gambaryan approached the compound’s cook and asked if she could buy him some cigarettes. Then he walked into the house’s inner courtyard and began pacing restlessly, calling his lawyer and other Binance contacts and resuming his daily efforts to, as he put it, “fix the fuck out of this thing.”
Just the day before, the two Binance employees and their cryptocurrency giant employer were informed that they were about to be charged with tax evasion. The two men appear to have been caught in the middle of a bureaucratic conflict between an unaccountable foreign government and the most controversial player in the cryptocurrency economy. Now, not only are they being held against their will with no end in sight, they are also being accused of being criminals.
Gambaryan spoke on the phone for more than two hours as the courtyard began to scorch under the rising sun. When he finally hung up and returned to the house, he still hadn’t seen any sign of Anjarwalla. Anjarwalla had gone to the local mosque to pray before dawn that morning, and the caretaker who accompanied him kept a close watch on him. When Anjarwalla returned to the house, he told Gambaryan that he was going back upstairs to sleep.
Several hours had passed since then, so Gambaryan went up to the second-floor bedroom to check on his colleague. He pushed open the door and found Anjarwalla, who appeared to be asleep, his feet sticking out from under the sheets. Gambaryan called to him at the door but got no response. For a moment, he worried that Anjarwalla might be having another panic attack—the young British-Kenyan Binance executive had been sleeping in Gambaryans bed for several days and was too anxious to spend the night alone.
Gambaryan walked through the darkened room—he had heard that the government caretaker of the house was behind on electricity bills and the generators were short of diesel, so all-day blackouts were common—and placed his hand on the blanket. Strangely, the blanket sank, as if there was no actual human body beneath it.
Gambaryan pulled back the covers. He found a T-shirt underneath with a pillow stuffed inside. He looked down at the foot sticking out from under the blanket and now saw that it was actually a sock with a water bottle inside.
Gambaryan didn’t call Anjarwalla again, nor did he search the house. He already knew that his Binance colleague and cellmate had escaped. He also immediately realized that his situation was about to get worse. He didn’t know yet how much worse it would be — that he would be in a Nigerian prison, charged with money laundering, which carries a 20-year sentence, without access to medical care even as his health deteriorated to the point of near-death, all while being used as a pawn in a multi-billion-dollar cryptocurrency extortion scheme.
At that moment, he just sat in silence on his bed, in the dark, 6,000 miles from home, contemplating the fact that he was now completely alone.
TIGRAN GAMBARYAN Nigeria’s deepening nightmare stems at least in part from a conflict that has been going on for fifteen years. Ever since the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto revealed Bitcoin to the world in 2009, cryptocurrency has promised a kind of libertarian holy grail: a digital currency that is not controlled by any government, is not subject to inflation, and can flow across national borders with impunity as if it existed in an entirely different dimension. Today, however, the reality is that cryptocurrency has become a multi-trillion dollar industry, largely run by companies with fancy offices and highly paid executives — and that the laws and law enforcement agencies of these countries are able to exert pressure on cryptocurrency companies and their employees just as they would on any other real-world industry.
Before becoming one of the world’s most high-profile victims of the clash between disorderly fintech and global law enforcement, Gambaryan embodied that conflict in another way: as one of the world’s most effective and innovative crypto-focused law enforcers. For a decade before joining Binance in 2021, Gambaryan served as a special agent with the Internal Revenue Service-Criminal Investigation (IRS-CI), responsible for implementing the tax agency’s enforcement efforts. While at IRS-CI, Gambaryan pioneered the technology to track cryptocurrencies and identify suspects by parsing the Bitcoin blockchain. With this “follow the money” tactic, he destroyed one cybercrime conspiracy after another and completely overturned the myth of Bitcoin’s anonymity.
It was Gambaryan who tracked Bitcoin after the FBI shut down the Silk Road dark web drug market, beginning in 2014, exposing two corrupt federal agents who stole more than $1 million while investigating the market—the first time blockchain evidence was included in a criminal indictment. In the following years, Gambaryan helped track $500 million worth of Bitcoin stolen from Mt. Gox, the first cryptocurrency exchange, ultimately identifying a group of Russian hackers as behind the theft.
In 2017, Gambaryan worked with blockchain analytics startup Chainalysis to create a secret Bitcoin tracking method that successfully found and helped the FBI seize the server hosting AlphaBay, a dark web criminal market estimated to be 10 times larger than Silk Road. A few months later, Gambaryan played a key role in the takedown of the cryptocurrency-funded child sexual abuse video network Welcome to Video, the largest such market to date. The operation led to the arrest of 337 users worldwide and the rescue of 23 children.
Finally, in 2020, Gambaryan and another IRS-CI agent tracked down and seized nearly 70,000 bitcoins that had been stolen from Silk Road years earlier by a hacker. At today’s prices, those bitcoins are worth $7 billion, making it the largest criminal forfeiture of any currency in history to the U.S. Treasury.
“He was involved in almost all of the biggest cryptocurrency cases at the time,” said Will Frentzen, a former U.S. prosecutor who worked closely with Gambaryan and prosecuted the crimes he uncovered. “He was very innovative in his investigations, in ways that many people hadn’t thought of, and very selfless in how he took credit.” In the fight against cryptocurrency crime, Frentzen said, “I don’t think anyone has had a bigger impact on this space than he has.”
After that storied career, Gambaryan turned to the private sector, making a decision that shocked many of his former colleagues in government. He became the head of the investigations team at Binance, a massive cryptocurrency exchange that handles tens of billions of dollars in daily transactions and is known for its indifference to whether its users break the law.
When Gambaryan joined Binance in the fall of 2021, the company was already the subject of an investigation by the U.S. Department of Justice. Ultimately, the investigation revealed that Binance processed billions of dollars in transactions that violated anti-money laundering laws and circumvented international sanctions against Iran, Cuba, Syria, and the Russian-occupied region of Ukraine. The Justice Department also pointed out that the company directly processed more than $100 million in cryptocurrency transactions from the Russian dark web criminal market Hydra, and in some cases, the sources of funds included the sale of child sexual abuse material and the funding of designated terrorist organizations.
Some of Gambaryan’s old colleagues privately expressed dissatisfaction with his career change, and even thought he was “selling out to the enemy.” However, Gambaryan firmly believed that he was actually taking on the most important role of his career. As part of Binance’s efforts to clean up its image after years of rapid expansion, Gambaryan formed a new investigative team within the company. He recruited many top agents from the IRS-CI and other law enforcement agencies around the world, and helped Binance launch unprecedented cooperation with law enforcement agencies.
Gambaryan said that by analyzing data with a trading volume that exceeds the combined volume of the New York, London, and Tokyo Stock Exchanges, his team has successfully helped solve cases of child sexual abuse, terrorism, and organized crime around the world. We have assisted in thousands of cases around the world. My influence at Binance is probably greater than when I was in law enforcement, Gambaryan once told me. I am very proud of the work we do, and I am always willing to debate if anyone questions my decision to join Binance.
Although Gambaryan helped Binance create a more law-abiding image, the shift does not erase the companys history as a lawless exchange or insulate it from the consequences of past criminal behavior. In November 2023, U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland announced at a press conference that Binance had agreed to pay $4.3 billion in fines and forfeitures, one of the largest corporate penalties in U.S. criminal justice history. Company founder and CEO Changpeng Zhao was personally fined $150 million and sentenced to four months in prison.
The United States is not the only country that has complaints about Binance. By early 2024, Nigeria also began to blame the company, not only for the compliance violations it admitted to in the US plea agreement, but also because Binance was accused of exacerbating the depreciation of the Nigerian currency, the naira. Between the end of 2023 and the beginning of 2024, the naira depreciated by nearly 70%, and Nigerians rushed to exchange their national currency for cryptocurrencies, especially stablecoins pegged to the US dollar.
Amaka Anku, head of Africa at Eurasia Group, said the real reason for the nairas depreciation was that the government of Nigerias new President Bola Tinubu relaxed the exchange rate between the naira and the dollar, and the Nigerian Central Banks foreign exchange reserves were unexpectedly low. However, when the naira began to depreciate, cryptocurrencies, as an unregulated way to sell the naira, further exacerbated the depreciation pressure. You cant say that Binance or any crypto exchange directly caused this depreciation, Anku said, but they did exacerbate the process.
For years, cryptocurrency proponents have envisioned that Satoshi’s invention would provide a safe haven for citizens of countries facing inflation crises. That moment has finally arrived, and the government of Africa’s largest economy is furious. In December 2023, a committee of Nigeria’s Congress asked Binance’s top brass to appear at a hearing in the capital, Abuja, to explain how they were correcting their alleged wrongs. In response, Binance convened a Nigerian delegation, and as a symbol of the company’s commitment to working with law enforcement agencies and governments around the world, Tigran Gambaryan, a former federal agent and star investigator, naturally became a member of the delegation.
However, before resorting to extreme measures such as coercion and hostage-taking, the demand for a bribe was first made.
In January 2023, Gambaryan had just arrived in Abuja for a few days and his trip was going smoothly. As a show of goodwill, he met with investigators from Nigeria’s Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). The EFCC is basically Gambaryan’s counterpart to the IRS, responsible for combating fraud, investigating government corruption, and other tasks, and discussed the possibility of providing cryptocurrency investigation training to the agency’s employees. He then participated in a roundtable meeting with Binance executives and members of the Nigerian House of Representatives, where everyone promised to resolve their differences together in an amicable atmosphere.
When Gambaryan arrived in Nigeria, he was met at the airport by EFCC detective Olalekan Ogunjobi. Ogunjobi had read about Gambaryan’s career and expressed his admiration for his legendary achievements as a federal agent. Throughout the trip, Ogunjobi had dinner with Gambaryan almost every night at the hotel, the Transcorp Hilton Hotel in Abuja. Gambaryan shared with Ogunjobi his experience in crypto crime investigations, how to handle cases, how to form a task force, etc. They exchanged a lot of investigative experiences. When Gambaryan presented Ogunjobi with his book Tracers in the Dark and signed it, Ogunjobi asked him to sign the book.
One evening, while Gambaryan and Ogunjobi were dining at a table with a group of Binance colleagues, a Binance employee received a call from the company’s lawyer. After exchanging pleasantries, the lawyer told Gambaryan that the meeting with Nigerian officials was not as friendly as it seemed. The officials were now demanding $150 million to resolve Binance’s problems in Nigeria—and asked that the payment be made in cryptocurrency, transferred directly to the officials’ crypto wallets. Even more shocking, the officials implied that the Binance team could not leave Nigeria until the payment was in place.
Gambaryan was so shocked that he didnt even have time to explain or say goodbye to Ogunjobi. He hurriedly packed up the Binance employees, hurried out of the restaurant, and returned to the conference room of the Transcorp Hilton Hotel to discuss the next response plan. Paying this obvious bribe would violate the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. If they refused, they could be detained indefinitely. In the end, the team decided to take the third option: leave Nigeria immediately. They spent the whole night in the conference room urgently planning how to get all Binance employees on the plane as soon as possible, change flights, and move up the departure time to the next morning.
The next morning, the Binance team gathered on the second floor of the hotel, their luggage packed, and they tried to avoid the lobby in case Nigerian officials might be waiting for them and prevent them from leaving. They took a taxi to the airport, nervously passed through security, and boarded the flight back home smoothly without any problems. Everyone felt as if they had avoided a disaster.
Shortly after returning to the suburbs of Atlanta, Gambaryan received a call from Ogunjobi. Gambaryan said that Ogunjobi was very disappointed with the bribery request for the Binance team and was shocked by the behavior of his fellow Nigerians. Ogunjobi suggested that Gambaryan report the bribery to the Nigerian authorities and ask them to launch an anti-corruption investigation.
Eventually, Ogunjobi arranged a call between Gambaryan and EFCC official Ahmad Saad Abubakar. Abubakar was introduced as the right-hand man of Nigerias National Security Advisor Nuhu Ribadu. Ogunjobi told Gambaryan that Ribadu was an anti-corruption fighter and had even given a TEDx talk. Now, Ribadu invited Gambaryan to meet with him in person to resolve Binances problems in Nigeria and get to the bottom of the bribery incident.
Gambaryan told his Binance colleagues about the call, and it sounded like an opportunity to resolve the companys woes in Nigeria. So Binance executives and Gambaryan began to consider whether he could use the invitation to return to Nigeria and untangle the companys increasingly complicated relationship with the Nigerian government. Although the idea sounded risky—after all, they had hurriedly fled the country just a few weeks ago—Gambaryan believed he had received a friendly invitation from a powerful official and a personal guarantee from his friend Ogunjobi. Local Binance staff also told Gambaryan that they had verified and believed the solution was reliable.
Gambaryan told his wife Yuki about the bribery and the invitation to return to Nigeria. For her, the offer was obviously very dangerous. She repeatedly asked Gambaryan not to go.
Gambaryan now admits that perhaps he still had the mindset of a U.S. federal agent—the sense of responsibility and security that came with that. “I think that’s what was left over: when duty calls, you do it,” he said. “I was asked to go.”
So, in what he now considers to be one of the most unwise decisions of his life, Gambaryan packed his bags, kissed Yuki and the two children, and left in the early morning of February 25 to catch a flight to Abuja.
The second trip began with an airport pickup from Ogunjobi, who reassured him during the drive to the Transcorp Hilton and over dinner. This time, Gambaryan was accompanied only by Binance East Africa country manager Nadeem Anjarwalla, a British-Kenyan who had just graduated from Stanford and had a baby at home in Nairobi.
However, when Gambaryan and Anjarwalla walked into a meeting with Nigerian officials the next day, they were surprised to find that Abubakar was in attendance with staff from the EFCC and the Central Bank of Nigeria. Soon, the focus of the meeting became clear: this meeting was not about corruption in Nigeria. At the beginning of the meeting, Abubakar asked about Binance’s cooperation with Nigerian law enforcement agencies, and then turned the topic to the EFCC’s request for transaction data of Binance Nigerian users. Abubakar said that Binance only provided data for the past year, not all the data he requested. Gambaryan felt that he had been raided, and he explained that this was an oversight caused by the temporary request and promised to provide all the required data as soon as possible. Although Abubakar seemed a little dissatisfied, the meeting continued and ended with a friendly exchange of business cards.
Gambaryan and Anjarwalla were left in the hallway, awaiting their next appointment. After a while, Anjarwalla went to the bathroom. When he returned, he said he heard angry voices from some of the officials he had just met in a nearby conference room, Gambaryan recalled.
After waiting for nearly two hours, Ogunjobi came back and took them into another meeting room. Gambaryan remembered that the officials in this meeting room looked solemn and the atmosphere was extremely serious. Everyone sat silently, as if waiting for someone to come - Gambaryan didnt know who that person was. He noticed that Ogunjobi had a shocked expression on his face and didnt dare to look him in the eye. What happened? he thought to himself.
At that moment, a middle-aged man named Hamma Adama Bello walked into the room. He was an EFCC official, dressed in a gray suit, unshaven, and looked to be in his 40s. Without saying hello or asking questions, he placed a folder on the table and immediately began to lecture Gambaryan, who remembers him saying that Binance was “destroying our economy” and funding terrorism.
He then told Gambaryan and Anjarwalla what would happen: They would be taken back to their hotel to pack their bags and then moved to another location, where more EFCC officials and some central bank personnel would be present until Binance handed over all transaction data involving every Nigerian who had ever used the platform.
Gambaryan felt his heart beat faster, and he immediately said that he did not have the authority and could not provide such a large amount of data - the purpose of his trip was actually to report the bribery to Bellos agency.
Bello seemed surprised to hear about the bribe, as if he was hearing about it for the first time, but quickly put it aside. The meeting ended. Gambaryan quickly sent a text message to Noah Perlman, Binance’s chief compliance officer, telling him that they might be detained. Then the officials took their phones.
The two were led outside to a black Land Cruiser with dark window film on the windows. The SUV took them back to the Transcorp Hilton Hotel, where they were taken to their rooms — Anjarwalla with Bello and another official, and Gambaryan with Ogunjobi. They were told to pack their bags. “You know how bad this is?” Gambaryan remembers saying to Ogunjobi.
Ogunjobi, barely able to look him in the eye as he spoke, responded, “I know, I know.”
The Rand Cruiser then delivered them to a large two-story house in a walled compound with marble floors and bedrooms large enough for two Binance employees and several EFCC officials, as well as a private chef. Gambaryan later learned that the house was the government-designated residence of National Security Advisor Ribadu, but Ribadu chose to live in his own home, leaving the place for official use—in this case, as a temporary place to hold them.
That night, Bello made no further requests. Gambaryan and Anjarwalla ate a Nigerian stew prepared by the house cook and were told to rest. Gambaryan lay in bed, anxious and almost in a state of panic because he had no phone to communicate with the outside world, even to tell his family where he was.
He finally fell asleep at 2 a.m., and woke up hours later to the sound of the early morning muezzin prayers. Too anxious to stay in bed, he went out to the courtyard of his house, smoked a cigarette and thought about his predicament: He was a hostage to the financial crime he had dedicated his life to fighting.
But even more than the irony, what was even more overwhelming was the feeling of complete uncertainty. What will happen to me? What will Yuki go through? he thought of his wife, his heart filled with anxiety. How long will we stay here?
Gambaryan stood in the yard smoking until the sun rose.
Then came the interrogation.
Breakfast was prepared by the cook, but Gambaryan was too stressed to eat. Bello sat them down and told them that to release them, Binance would have to hand over all data on Nigerian users and ban Nigerian users from peer-to-peer trading. Peer-to-peer trading is a feature on the Binance platform that allows traders to post cryptocurrency sales ads based on exchange rates they partially control, which Nigerian officials believe has contributed to the naira’s depreciation.
In addition to these demands, there was another unspoken demand in the room: Binance needed to pay a huge sum of money. When Gambaryan and Anjarwalla were detained, Nigerians communicated with Binance executives through secret channels, and the company learned that they were demanding billions of dollars. According to people involved in the negotiations, government officials even publicly told the BBC that the fine would be at least $10 billion, more than double the highest settlement amount Binance has ever paid to the United States. (Binance did propose a deposit plan based on estimates of the companys tax liabilities in Nigeria, but those proposals were never accepted, according to several people familiar with the matter. Meanwhile, the day after Gambaryan and Anjarwalla were detained, the U.S. Embassy received a strange letter from the EFCC, which stated that Gambaryan was detained solely for constructive dialogue and voluntarily participated in these strategic dialogues.
Gambaryan repeatedly explained to Bello that he had no real power in Binances business decisions and could not meet his demands. Bello did not change his tone after hearing this, and continued to accuse Binance of the damage it had caused to Nigeria and claimed that Nigeria should be compensated. Gambaryan recalled that Bello sometimes showed off the guns he carried and showed photos of himself training with the FBI in Quantico, Virginia, as if to show his authority and connection with the United States.
Ogunjobi also participated in the questioning. Gambaryan said he was quieter and more respectful than Bello, but no longer the respectful student. When Gambaryan mentioned that he had provided a lot of help to Nigerian law enforcement, Ogunjobi responded that he had seen comments on LinkedIn saying that Binance hired him just to create a false sense of legitimacy, which shocked Gambaryan, especially after their long conversation.
Furious and unable to meet Nigerias demands, Gambaryan demanded to see a lawyer, contact the U.S. Embassy and have his phone returned, but all requests were denied, although he was allowed to make a call to his wife in the presence of guards.
In a standoff with EFCC officials, Gambaryan told them he would not eat unless he was allowed to see a lawyer and contact the embassy. He began a hunger strike, trapped in the house, guarded by government agents and guards, sitting on the sofa all day watching Nigerian TV. After five days of hunger strike, the officials finally gave in.
He and Anjarwalla had their phones returned but were told not to contact the media and their passports were seized. They were then allowed to meet with a local lawyer hired by Binance. After a week in detention, Gambaryan was taken to a Nigerian government building to meet with local diplomats. The diplomats said they would monitor Gambaryans situation, but so far, there was no way to free him.
Then they settled into a Groundhog Day routine, as Gambaryan later told his wife, moving around. The house was large and clean, but run-down, with a leaky roof and many days without electricity. Gambaryan befriended the cook and some of the caretakers, with whom he watched pirated episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender. Anjarwalla began doing yoga every day and drinking smoothies that the cook made for him.
Anjarwalla seemed to be suffering more from the anxiety of their captivity than Gambaryan, and he was depressed about missing his son’s first birthday. Nigeria had seized his British passport, but they didn’t realize that Anjarwalla also held his Kenyan passport. He and Gambaryan joked about escaping, but Gambaryan said he never seriously considered it. He told himself that Yuki had told him “not to do anything stupid,” and he wasn’t going to take any chances.
One day, Anjarwalla was lying on the couch, telling Gambaryan that he felt sick and cold. Gambaryan covered him with blankets, but he was still shaking. Eventually, the Nigerians took Anjarwalla and Gambaryan to the hospital, in another black Land Cruiser, and tested Anjarwalla for malaria. The test came back negative, and the doctor told Anjarwalla that he was just having a panic attack. Every night since then, Gambaryan said, Anjarwalla would sleep next to him because he was too scared to sleep alone.
In the second week of Gambaryan and Anjarwalla’s captivity, Binance agreed to the request, shut down its peer-to-peer trading function in Nigeria, and reversed all naira transactions. EFCC officials told Gambaryan and Anjarwalla to pack their bags and prepare for their release. The two took the good news seriously, and Gambaryan even took a video of the house with his mobile phone as a souvenir of this strange life.
However, before they were released, government guards took them to the EFCC office. The agency’s chairman demanded confirmation that Binance had handed over all data on Nigerian users. When he learned that Binance had not, he immediately rescinded the release decision and sent the two back to the hotel.
At this time, it was first reported by cryptocurrency website DLNews that two Binance executives were detained in Nigeria, although they were not named. A few days later, The Wall Street Journal and Wired also confirmed that it was Anjarwalla and Gambaryan who were detained.
Bello was furious about the leak, Gambaryan recalled, and he put the blame on him and Anjarwalla. Bello told them that if they handed over the data the government was seeking, they would be free. Gambaryan lost his patience and asked Bello, “Do you want me to take it out of my right pocket or my left pocket?” He recalled standing up and dramatically pulling something out of one pocket and then out of the other. “There was no way I could provide this data.”
Weeks passed with no progress in the negotiations. Ramadan began, and Gambaryan rose with Anjarwalla every morning to pray and fasted with him during the day as a gesture of friendly solidarity.
However, after nearly a month of hardship, things suddenly changed. One morning, Gambaryan woke up and saw that Anjarwalla had returned from the mosque. When he went to look for his companion, he found only a shirt stuffed in his pillow and a water bottle in his socks on the bed - Anjarwalla had escaped.
Later, Gambaryan learned that Anjarwalla had managed to flee Nigeria on a flight. He speculated that Anjarwalla might have somehow jumped over the compound wall, evaded the guards—who often slept in the mornings—and paid for a taxi to the airport, where he boarded the plane using his second passport.
Gambaryan realized that his situation in Nigeria was about to change dramatically. He walked out to the yard and recorded a selfie video to send to his wife Yuki and his colleagues at Binance, talking to the camera as he walked.
I have been detained by the Nigerian government for a month, and I dont know what will happen after today, he said calmly and in control. I have done nothing wrong. I have been a police officer all my life. I am only asking the Nigerian government to let me go, and I am asking the American government for help. I need your help, everyone. I dont know if I can get out without your help. Please help me.
When the Nigerian side learned that Anjarwalla had escaped, the guards and watchmen took away Gambaryans mobile phone and began a frantic search of the house. Soon, they disappeared and were replaced by new people.
Sensing that something more serious might be about to happen, Gambaryan managed to convince a Nigerian to quietly lend him his phone, then went to the bathroom to call his wife, and reached Yuki late at night. Gambaryan said it was the first time in their 17-year relationship that he had told her he was scared. Yuki cried, and she went into the closet to talk to him to avoid waking the children. Then, abruptly, Gambaryan hung up the phone—someone was coming.
A military official told Gambaryan to pack his bags, saying he would be released. He knew that couldnt be true, but packed his things anyway and walked outside to his car, where he saw Ogunjobi sitting. When Gambaryan asked Ogunjobi where they were going, Ogunjobi vaguely replied that maybe he was going home, but not today — and then silently looked at his phone.
The car eventually entered the EFCC compound and instead of stopping near the headquarters, it drove straight to the detention facility. Gambaryan angrily scolded the guards, no longer caring about offending them.
When he was taken to the EFCC detention building, he saw a group of people who had been guarding him in the safe house, now also in the cell, being investigated for possibly allowing Anjarwalla to escape and even suspected of colluding with him. Gambaryan was then put in solitary confinement in his cell.
The cell, as Gambaryan describes it, was like a windowless “box,” with a cold shower on a timer and an ill-fitting Posturepedic mattress. The room was crawling with as many as half a dozen cockroaches, large and small. Despite the stifling heat in Abuja, the cell had no air conditioning or ventilation, only what Gambaryan remembers as “the loudest fan in the world” running day and night. “I can still hear that damn fan,” he said.
Locked in solitary confinement in that cell, Gambaryan said he began to lose touch with his body, his surroundings and the hell he was in. On the first night, he didnt even think about his family, his mind was blank, and he didnt notice the cockroaches in his room.
By the next morning, Gambaryan hadn’t eaten in more than 24 hours. Another detainee gave him some biscuits. He soon realized that his survival depended on Ogunjobi, who came every few days to bring him food and sometimes let him use his phone during brief releases from solitary confinement. Soon, Gambaryan’s former guards began sharing meals sent by their families, and Ogunjobi came less and less often, sometimes refusing to let him use his phone. The young man who had picked him up at the airport, who admired Gambaryan’s work, seemed to have changed completely. “You could almost say he enjoyed the power he had over me,” Gambaryan said.
The Nigerian who was his guard just a few days ago is now Gambaryans only friend. He teaches chess to a young EFCC operative and they play chess together during the short break before being locked up in the cell.
A few days into his detention, Gambaryan’s lawyer visited him and told him that, in addition to the original tax evasion charges, he was now charged with money laundering. These new charges meant he could face up to 20 years in prison.
During his second week at the detention center, Gambaryan’s son turned 5. On his birthday, Gambaryan was allowed to use the EFCC’s phone to call his family and smoke a few cigarettes, but not on other days. He spoke on the phone for 20 minutes with his wife — who he said was “breaking down” with anxiety — and then talked to his children. His son still didn’t understand why he was away. Yuki told Gambaryan that her son began crying for him at random times and would often come to their home office and sit in his chair. Gambaryan explained to his daughter that he was still working out legal issues with the Nigerian government. He later learned that his daughter had looked up his name and watched the news two weeks after he was detained and knew more than she had let him know.
Apart from occasional meetings with his fellow inmates, Gambaryan had two books to occupy his time – a Dan Brown novel given to him by EFCC staff and a Percy Jackson teen novel brought by his lawyer. He had little else to keep himself busy. His mind cycled between angry curses, self-blame and emptiness.
“It was torture,” Gambaryan said. “I knew if I stayed there I would go crazy.”
Although Gambaryan felt extremely alone, he was not forgotten. While he was in the EFCC’s cell, a loose group of friends and supporters had begun to respond to his cries for help in the video. However, he soon realized that real help for his freedom would not come from the Biden administration.
Inside Binance, Gambaryan’s first text about his detention immediately set off endless crisis response meetings, hiring lawyers and consultants, and reaching out to any government officials who might have influence in Nigeria. Will Frentzen, a former U.S. prosecutor from the Bay Area who had handled many of Gambaryan’s big cases, took over Gambaryan’s case as his personal defense attorney after moving to the private firm Morrison Foerster. Gambaryan’s former colleague Patrick Hillman had worked on crisis response with former Florida Congressman Connie Mack and knew Mack’s experience handling hostage situations. Mack agreed to lobby for Gambaryan’s contacts in the legislative community. Gambaryan’s old colleagues at the FBI also immediately began to pressure the FBI to push for Gambaryan’s release.
At the top of the U.S. government, however, some of Gambaryan’s supporters say their calls for help have been met with a cautious response. “From the first day of Gambaryan’s detention, State Department staff have worked to ensure his safety, well-being, provide legal assistance, and facilitate his release once he has been criminally charged,” a senior State Department official told WIRED, speaking on the condition of anonymity in accordance with department policy. Yet, according to several people involved in the matter, the Biden administration initially seemed to have an ambivalent attitude toward Gambaryan. After all, Binance had just agreed to pay a huge fine to the Justice Department, the government’s attitude toward the cryptocurrency industry as a whole was not friendly, and Binance had a poor reputation and was “toxic” — as one of Gambaryan’s supporters described it.
“They thought maybe there was a case in Nigeria,” Frentzen said. “They weren’t sure what Tigran was doing there. So they all backed off.”
Gambaryan finds himself in Nigeria’s lurch at an extremely dangerous geopolitical moment. The U.S. ambassador to Nigeria retires in 2023, and a new one won’t officially take office until May 2024. At the same time, Niger and Chad have asked the United States to withdraw its troops from both countries as they strengthen ties with Russia, a key U.S. military ally in the region. That makes negotiations to free Gambaryan more complicated than with other countries that have wrongfully detained American citizens, such as Russia or Iran. “Nigeria is the only option left, and they know it,” Frentzen says. “So, the timing is really bad. Tigran is really one of the unluckiest people in the world.”
While Gambaryan was held in a guest room, it might have been clearer on a diplomatic level that he was a hostage, said Mack, a former congressman who lobbied for Gambaryan’s release. However, the criminal charges against him complicated the situation. “The U.S. government went along with this narrative,” Mack said. “They wanted to let the legal process play out.”
Frentzen and his senior colleague at Morrison Foerster, former DNI general counsel Robert Litt, said they began approaching the White House to explain how weak the criminal case against Gambaryan was. Of the more than 300 pages of “evidence” submitted by Nigerian prosecutors, only two mentioned Gambaryan himself: one was an email showing he worked at Binance; the other was a scan of his business card.
Still, in the months that followed, the U.S. government did not intervene in Gambaryan’s criminal prosecution. To Frentzen, it was a stunning situation: a former IRS agent who had worked for the federal government for many years, handling many of the greatest cryptocurrency criminal cases and asset forfeiture cases in history, was supported by the government’s mere silence in what appeared to be a cryptocurrency extortion case.
“This guy had recovered billions of dollars for the United States,” Frentzen recalled thinking, “and we couldn’t get him out of trouble in Nigeria?”
In early April, Gambaryan was brought to court for his arraignment. Dressed in a black T-shirt and dark green pants, he was paraded around as a symbol of the evil forces that were destroying Nigerias economy. As he sat on a red sofa chair to hear the charges, local and international media swarmed around him, cameras sometimes just feet from his face, and he could barely hide his anger and humiliation. I felt like a circus animal, he said.
In this hearing, the next, and subsequent court documents, prosecutors argued that if Gambaryan were allowed bail, he would likely flee, citing Anjarwalla’s escape as an example. They bizarrely stressed that Gambaryan was born in Armenia, even though his family left the country when he was 9. Even more absurdly, they claimed that Gambaryan and other inmates at the EFCC detention facility had hatched a plot to use a body double to escape, something Gambaryan said was a complete lie.
At one point, prosecutors made it clear that Gambaryan’s detention was vital to the Nigerian government as a lever they could use to pressure Binance. “The first defendant, Binance, was a virtual operation,” the prosecutor told the judge. “The only one we can catch is this defendant.”
The judge refused to grant bail to Gambaryan and decided to keep him in custody. After two weeks in solitary confinement, he was transferred to a real prison, Kuje Prison.
The guards — including the usual Ogunjobi — took Gambaryan into a van. Ogunjobi handed him his cigarette, which he smoked throughout the hour-long drive from downtown Abuja through what looked like a slum on the outskirts of the city. During the trip, Gambaryan was allowed to call Yuki and a number of Binance executives, some of whom hadn’t heard from him in weeks.
During the drive to Kuje prison, which passed through a facility known for its poor conditions and its past as a place for Boko Haram suspects, Gambaryan said he felt numb, disconnected from the outside world and had given up all control over his fate. I was living hour by hour, minute by minute, he said.
As they arrived and walked through the prison gates, Gambaryan got his first glimpse of the prison’s low-slung buildings, painted pale yellow, many still damaged by an ISIS attack that had allowed more than 800 inmates to escape almost two years earlier. Gambaryan’s EFCC guards took him inside the prison and to the office of the warden, who he later learned was keeping him under close surveillance on the instructions of National Security Adviser Ribadu.
Gambaryan was then taken to the “isolation zone,” a unit reserved for high-risk inmates and VIP prisoners willing to pay extra for special treatment. The 6-by-10-foot room contained a toilet, a metal bed frame with what Gambaryan called a “simple blanket” as a mattress, and a window with metal bars. Compared to the EFCC dungeon, the room was an upgrade: He had sunlight and fresh air—albeit polluted by the garbage fire a few hundred meters away—and a view of trees that were swarmed with bats at night.
On Gambaryan’s first night in jail, it rained and a cool breeze blew in through the windows. “Although the conditions were bad,” Gambaryan said, “I felt like I was in heaven.”
Soon after, Gambaryan met his neighbors. One of them was the cousin of the Nigerian vice president, another was a suspect in fraud and awaiting extradition to the United States, involving a sum of up to $100 million; the third was Abba Kyari, a former deputy police chief in Nigeria, who was prosecuted by the United States for alleged bribery, although Nigeria rejected the US extradition request. Gambaryan believed that Kyaris case was more because he offended some corrupt Nigerian officials.
Gambaryan said Kyari had a lot of influence in the prison, and other prisoners basically worked for him. Kyaris wife would bring home-cooked meals to everyone, even the guards. Gambaryan especially liked some kind of dumplings from northern Nigeria that Kyaris wife made, and she would make extra for him. He would share with Kyari the takeout that the lawyer brought from the fast food restaurant Kilimanjaro, and Kyari especially liked their Scotch eggs.
Gambaryan’s neighbors taught him the unspoken rules of prison life: how to get a cellphone, how to avoid conflicts with prison staff and how to avoid violence from other inmates. Gambaryan insists he never paid a bribe to the guards — even though they sometimes demanded astronomical sums in the tens of thousands of dollars — but that he still received protection because of his close relationship with Kyari. “He’s like my Red,” Gambaryan said, comparing Kyari to Morgan Freeman’s character in “The Shawshank Redemption.” “He was the key to my survival.”
Over the next few weeks, Gambaryan’s case continued, and he was regularly sent back to Abuja for hearings where the judge seemed to side with the prosecutors. On May 17 — his 40th birthday — he attended another hearing, where his request for bail was ultimately denied. That evening, lawyers brought a large cake paid for by Binance to Kuje prison, which he shared with his neighbors and guards.
Every night, Gambaryan was locked in his cell early, often starting at 7 p.m., hours before the other prisoners, under the watchful eye of a guard who recorded his every move in a notebook, all on the orders of the national security adviser. He found that he could exercise by doing pull-ups on the windowsill at the entrance to the quarantine courtyard. Despite the presence of giant cockroaches, geckos, and even scorpions in his cell—he learned to shake the beige scorpions out of his shoes before putting them on—he slowly adapted to prison life.
Sometimes he would wake up from dreams in which he was still outside, suddenly realizing he was in the small, dirty cell, and he would then rise from his bed and pace anxiously around the small space until the guards would let him out around 6 a.m. Eventually, though, Gambaryan said his dreams became filled with prison imagery, too.
One afternoon in May, Gambaryan began to feel ill during a meeting with his lawyer. He returned to his cell, lay down, and spent the rest of the night vomiting. He thought he might have food poisoning, but guards ran a blood test that showed he had malaria. The guards demanded cash, which they used to buy an IV drip that they hung on a nail on the cell wall and gave him an anti-malarial shot.
The next morning, Gambaryan had a court hearing. He told guards he was too weak to even walk, but they removed his IV and forced him into a car, saying they were following an official order. When he arrived at the courthouse, he struggled to climb the long steps, but once he entered the courtroom, his vision began to blur and the room began to spin. Next, he fell to his knees. Guards helped him to his feet, and he slumped in his chair as his lawyers asked the court to order him to be taken to a hospital.
The judge issued a hospitalization order, but rather than being taken directly to a medical facility, Gambaryan was sent back to Kuje prison while the court, his lawyers, the prison, the Office of the National Security Advisor, and the U.S. State Department discussed whether to temporarily release him because they feared he was an escape risk. For the next 10 days, Gambaryan lay in his cell, unable to eat or stand up. He was eventually taken to Nizamiye Hospital in Abuja, where he had a chest X-ray, was given antibiotics after a brief examination, and was told he was fine before being sent back to Kuje prison without explanation.
In fact, Gambaryan’s condition was worse than before. His friend, Turkish-Canadian Chagri Poyraz, eventually had to fly to Ankara to check Gambaryan’s hospital records with the Turkish government, only to learn that his X-rays showed that he had multiple serious bacterial lung infections. Months later, the judge in the case also asked Abraham Ehizojie, the medical director of Kuje Prison, to appear in court to explain why the hospitalization order was not followed. Prosecutors produced Gambaryan’s medical records, saying that he refused treatment and asked to be sent back to prison, but Gambaryan strongly denied this.
Back in his cell at Kuje Prison, Gambaryan had a fever for days, reaching 104 degrees Fahrenheit. During his brief hospital stay, guards searched his cell and found his hidden cell phone, so he was isolated from the outside world until his neighbor got him a new phone. He became weaker and weaker, his breathing became labored, and his temperature did not drop. Gambaryan gradually felt that he might not survive. At one point, he called Will Frentzen to tell him that he might be in critical condition. However, Kuje officials still refused to send him back to the hospital.
Still, Gambaryan didnt die. But he spent nearly a month in bed, until he was finally able to stand up and eat again. He weighed nearly 30 pounds less than when he was in prison.
One day, as he was recovering in his cell, the guards told him he had visitors. Although he still felt weak, he slowly made his way to the office at the front of the prison. Once inside, he saw two members of the U.S. Congress, French Hill and Chrissy Houlahan, one from each party. Gambaryan could hardly believe they were real—they were the first Americans he had seen in months, aside from the occasional low-level State Department official who visited him.
For the next 25 minutes, they listened as Gambaryan described the dire conditions in prison and his close calls with malaria and later pneumonia. Hill recalled that Gambaryan spoke so quietly that the two lawmakers had to lean forward to hear him, especially over the noise of the fans.
At times, Gambaryans eyes filled with tears as the pain of loneliness and fear of dying finally overwhelmed him. He looked like a sick, weak, emotionally broken person who really needed a hug, Hill said. The two lawmakers each gave him a hug and said they would work for his release.
He was then taken back to his cell.
The next day, June 20, Hill and Houlahan recorded a video on the tarmac at Abuja Airport. “We have asked our embassy to facilitate Tigran’s humanitarian release, given the poor prison conditions, his innocence, and his health,” Hill told the camera. “We want him to come home, and we’ll leave the rest to Binance and the Nigerians.”
Connie Macks conversation with his old friend had an effect: During a subcommittee hearing on U.S. citizens detained by foreign governments, Gambaryans Georgia counterpart, Rich McCormick, suggested that Gambaryans case should be treated as a hostage case held by a foreign government. He cited the Levinson Act, which requires the U.S. government to assist citizens who have been wrongfully detained. Was U.S. diplomatic intervention necessary to secure the release of the detainee? Absolutely, absolutely, McCormick said at the hearing. This guy deserves better.
Meanwhile, 16 Republican lawmakers signed a letter asking the White House to treat Gambaryan’s case as a hostage case. A few weeks later, McCormick introduced the request as a congressional resolution. More than a hundred former federal agents and prosecutors also signed another letter asking the State Department to step up its efforts to help resolve the issue.
According to multiple sources, FBI Director Christopher Wray raised Gambaryan’s case during a meeting with President Tinubu during a visit to Nigeria in June. Nigeria’s tax authority, FIRS, has since dropped the tax evasion charges against Gambaryan. However, the more serious money laundering charges filed by the EFCC remain and still threaten him with decades of imprisonment.
For months, Gambaryan’s supporters had hoped that Nigeria would finally reach a deal with Binance to end its prosecution of him. By then, however, they seemed unable to offer terms that would interest Nigeria, which no longer even hinted at accepting any payments, Binance representatives said. Every time they felt they were getting close to a deal, the demands would change, the officials would disappear, and the deal would fall apart. “It was like Lucy and the football,” said Deborah Curtis, an attorney at Arnold Porter and a former deputy general counsel for the CIA, who was representing Binance at the time.
As the summer wore on, Gambaryan’s supporters began to believe that negotiations between Nigeria and Binance had hit a dead end, and that the criminal case had not advanced far enough that Binance alone could not free Gambaryan. “It started to become clear,” Frentzen said, “that this could only be resolved through the U.S. government—otherwise there was no hope.”
Meanwhile, Gambaryan’s health was deteriorating again. Spending long hours on a metal bed frame aggravated an old back injury he had sustained while training at IRS-CI more than a decade earlier, which was later diagnosed as a herniated disk — a breakdown of the outer layer of soft tissue between the vertebrae, causing the inner cushion to bulge out, compressing nerves and causing severe, persistent pain.
By August, Gambaryan told me via text message, he was “almost paralyzed.” He hadn’t left his bed in weeks, and because of his lack of exercise, he was taking blood thinners to prevent blood clots in his legs. Each night, he wrote, the pain was too severe to sleep, and he usually didn’t drift off until 5 or 6 in the morning, even when he couldn’t read. Occasionally, he would call his family and chat with his daughter while she played a Japanese role-playing game called Omori on a computer he had installed for her until she went to sleep in Atlanta. Then, a few hours later, he would drift off.
Despite visits from members of Congress and growing calls for his release, Gambaryan seemed almost desperate and at his lowest point in prison.
“I’m trying to be strong in front of Yuki and the kids, but it’s really bad,” he wrote me. “I’m in a really dark place right now.”
A few days later, a video appeared on Platform X showing Gambaryan limping into the courtroom on crutches, dragging one foot. In the video, he asked a guard in the hallway for help, but the guard even rejected his request. Gambaryan later told me that court staff had been instructed not to provide any assistance or allow him to use a wheelchair, fearing that this would arouse public sympathy.
“This is so f*cking bad! Why can’t I use a wheelchair?” Gambaryan angrily yells in the video. “I’m an innocent person!”
“I’m a fucking human!” Gambaryan continued, his voice almost choking. He took a few steps with his cane, shook his head in disbelief, and leaned against the wall to rest. “I can’t do it.”
If the directive was intended to stop Gambaryan from eliciting sympathy when he entered the courtroom, it backfired. The video went viral and has been viewed millions of times.
By the fall of 2024, there seemed to be a consensus in the U.S. government that it was time for Gambaryan to come home. In September, the House Foreign Affairs Committee passed a bipartisan resolution approving McCormick’s proposal to prioritize Gambaryan’s case. “I urge the State Department, I urge President Biden: Put more pressure on the Nigerian government,” Congressman Hill said at the hearing. “It has to be recognized that the fact that an American citizen was kidnapped and held by a friendly country had nothing to do with him.”
Some of Gambaryan’s supporters revealed that they heard that the new ambassador to Nigeria had also started frequently raising Gambaryan’s situation with Nigerian officials and even President Tinubu, to the point that at least one minister blocked the ambassador on WhatsApp.
During the UN General Assembly in late September, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations raised Gambaryan’s case during a meeting with Nigeria’s foreign minister and stressed the need for his immediate release, the minutes of the meeting said. Meanwhile, Binance hired a truck with a digital billboard to drive around the UN and midtown Manhattan showing Gambaryan’s face and calling on Nigeria to stop illegally imprisoning him.
Meanwhile, White House National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan spoke by phone with Nigeria’s National Security Advisor Nuhu Ribadu, essentially demanding Gambaryan’s release, multiple sources involved in the push for his release said.One of the most impactful revelations was that U.S. officials made it clear that Gambaryan’s case would be an obstacle to talks between President Biden and Nigerian President Tinubu at the United Nations General Assembly or elsewhere, a revelation that deeply troubled the Nigerian side, several advocates said.
Despite all the pressure, the decision to release Gambaryan remains in the hands of the Nigerian government. “There was a time when the Nigerians realized that this was a very bad decision,” said a Gambaryan supporter who requested anonymity because of the sensitivity of the negotiations. “Then it became a question of whether they caved in or held on because of their pride or because there was no going back.”
On a long drive from Kuje to the court in Abuja one day in October—by then, Gambaryan had lost count of how many court hearings he had been through—the driver received a phone call. He spoke for a while, then turned the car around and took Gambaryan back to the prison. Once there, he was taken to the front desk and told that he could not go to court because he was not feeling well. It was a statement, not a question.
Back in his cell, Gambaryan called Will Frentzen, who told him that this might mean they were finally ready to send him home. Having experienced so many dashed hopes over the past eight months, Gambaryan didnt take the news lightly.
A few days later, a court hearing was held, but Gambaryan did not attend. The prosecutors told the judge that they had decided to drop all charges against him because of his health. After spending a day processing documents, officials at Kuje Prison took him out of his cell, brought him the suitcase he had brought with him to Abuja, and drove him to the Abuja Continental Hotel. Binance booked a room for him, arranged for private security guards, and brought in a doctor to examine him and make sure he was healthy enough to fly. For Gambaryan, it all came so suddenly, and after so many months of hopeless waiting, it was almost unbelievable.
The next day, on the runway at Abuja airport, Nigerian officials handed him his passport back — after a dispute over a $2,000 fine he’d been charged for overstaying his visa. State Department agents helped him out of his wheelchair and onto a private plane equipped with medical equipment. Unbeknownst to Gambaryan, Binance staff had been planning the flight for weeks — Nigerian officials had told them he’d be released, then backtracked — and even arranged a route for him to fly over Niger, whose officials signed a consent form less than an hour before takeoff.
On the plane, Gambaryan ate a few bites of salad, fell asleep on the sofa, and woke up in Rome.
Binance arranged for a driver and private security to pick him up at the Italian airport and take him to the airport hotel for the night before flying back to Atlanta the next day. At the hotel, he called Yuki and then called Ogunjobi, his former friend in Nigeria and the person who had persuaded him to return to Abuja a few months ago.
Gambaryan said he wanted to hear how Ogunjobi explained herself. When he called, Ogunjobi started crying, apologizing and thanking God that Gambaryan was finally released.
It was all too much for Gambaryan, who listened quietly but didn’t accept the apology. As Ogunjobi was talking, he noticed a call from an American friend, a Secret Service agent he had worked with. Gambaryan didn’t know it at the time, but the agent was in Rome for a conference, along with his former boss, Jarod Koopman, the head of the IRS-CI cybercrime unit, and they were going to bring him beer and pizza.
Gambaryan told Ogunjobi he had to hang up and ended the call.
On a cold, windy December day, former federal agents, prosecutors, State Department officials and congressional aides gathered in a plush room in the Rayburn House office building for a chat. One by one, members of Congress walked in and shook hands with Tigran Gambaryan, who was wearing a dark blue suit and tie, with a trimmed beard and shaved head. Although he walked with a slight limp from emergency spinal surgery he had in Georgia a month ago, his gait was firm.
Gambaryan took pictures with each legislator, aide, and State Department official, and spoke with them, thanking them for their efforts in getting him home. When French MP Hill said it was nice to see him again, Gambaryan quipped that he hoped he would smell better this time than in Kuje.
The reception was just one of a series of VIP welcomes that Gambaryan received upon his return home. At the Georgia airport, Congressman McCormick came to greet him and presented him with an American flag that had flown over the Capitol the day before. The White House also released a statement saying that President Biden had called the Nigerian President to thank President Tinubu for facilitating Gambaryans release on humanitarian grounds.
I later learned that the statement of thanks was part of an agreement between the U.S. government and Nigeria, which also included assisting Nigeria in its investigation of Binance—an investigation that is still ongoing. Nigeria continues to prosecute Binance and Anjarwalla in absentia. In a statement, a Binance spokesperson said the company was relieved and grateful that Gambaryan had returned home and thanked everyone who worked for his release. We are eager to put this incident behind us and move forward with our efforts to build a better future for the blockchain industry in Nigeria and around the world, the statement read. We will continue to defend ourselves against these unfounded allegations. Nigerian government officials did not respond to multiple requests for comment from WIRED about Gambaryans case.
As Gambaryan and I left in a cab after the reception, I asked him what he planned to do next. He said he might return to government work if the new administration was willing to accept him—depending, of course, on whether Yuki was willing to accept moving back to Washington again. Cryptocurrency news site Coindesk reported last month that he had been recommended by some crypto industry figures with ties to President Trump for a top job at the SEC or in the FBI’s cyber division. Before considering these, he said vaguely, “I might need some time to sort out my thoughts.”
I asked him how his experience in Nigeria had changed him. He responded with an odd sense of lightness: “It did make me angrier, I guess?” He seemed to be thinking about the question for the first time. “It made me want revenge on the people who did this to me.”
For Gambaryan, revenge may be more than just a fantasy. He is pursuing a human rights case against the Nigerian government that began when he was detained, hoping to investigate the Nigerian officials he believes held him hostage for the better part of six months. He said that at times he even texted the officials he believes were responsible, telling them, You will see me again. He said that what they did disgraced the badge, and that he could forgive them for what they did to him, but not for what they did to his family.
“Was it a stupid thing for me to do? Maybe,” he told me in the taxi. “I was lying on the floor with a terrible pain in my back, and I was so bored.”
As we stepped out of the car and walked to his hotel in Arlington, Gambaryan lit a cigarette and I told him that, though he said he was angrier than before prison, he seemed to me calmer and happier than he had been in years — I remembered reporting on his successive takedowns of corrupt federal agents, cryptocurrency launderers, and child abusers, and he always struck me as someone angry, driven, and relentless in his pursuit of his investigative targets.
Gambaryan responded that if he seemed more relaxed now, it was only because he was finally home—that he was grateful to see his family and friends, to walk again, to be free from conflicts between forces larger than himself that had nothing to do with him, to be able to walk out of prison alive instead of dying there.
As for the anger drive of the past, Gambaryan disagrees.
“I’m not sure it was anger,” he said. “It was justice. I wanted justice, and I still do.”
