Samourai Wallet co-founder faces new transfer after 30-day ordeal

Keonne Rodriguez, a Samourai Wallet co-founder serving a five-year federal sentence, said Wednesday that he and about 70 other inmates will be transferred after the drug treatment program at FCI McKean was deactivated. Rodriguez had entered the program because completing it could reduce his sentence by up to a year. Rodriguez recounted the journey he previously made from FPC Morgantown to McKean as an ordeal in a letter published by The Rage, calling it the worst 30 days of his life. He said his request to make the roughly four-hour trip himself was denied; instead, inmates were shackled and bused to an airport, flown to the Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma City, and held for extended periods. While at the transfer facility, Rodriguez wrote that prisoners from different security levels were housed together and that he spent much of the time confined to a cell. He said he was at one point assigned to share a cell with an inmate serving a murder sentence and received only part of a foam mattress, leaving part of his body on a metal bunk overnight. Rodriguez is serving a five-year sentence after pleading guilty to conspiring to operate an unlicensed money-transmitting business. The Justice Department said Rodriguez and fellow Samourai co-founder William Lonergan Hill transmitted more than $237 million in criminal proceeds through the service. The case has unfolded alongside congressional debate over protections for developers who do not control users’ assets; a Senate draft of the CLARITY Act had retained provisions from the Blockchain Regulatory Certainty Act, but the broader CLARITY Act failed to advance after a Sept. 15 procedural vote fell short of the 60 votes needed to proceed.