JACK SHAFER: The Confession of Sam Bankman-Fried.

“Please, shut up.” This is what lawyers tell clients who have been charged with crimes — or are in danger of being charged — because anything they say will only be dredged up by the prosecution to prove their guilt. Sam Bankman-Fried, the wunderkind behind the FTX and Alameda crypto trading scandal in which upwards of $8 billion has gone AWOL, rejected this foundational advice on Wednesday afternoon to give New York Times reporter Andrew Ross Sorkin a lengthy, live tele-interview.

Bankman-Fried didn’t just give prosecutors a few leads as he rambled. He essentially confessed in serial fashion to his many potential offenses.

“I didn’t ever try to commit fraud on anyone,” Bankman-Fried said near the top of the interview, as he began to shovel himself into the trench he has been digging since the scandal broke in early November. “Clearly, I made a lot of mistakes or things I would give anything to be able to do over again,” he said, adding vinyl wood paneling to his new underground home. “I was responsible ultimately for doing the right things and I mean, we didn’t. Like, we messed up big,” he said, installing a wet bar in his space. And then came the rug that pulled it all together. “There absolutely were management failures, huge management failures. I bear responsibility for that. There were oversight failures, transparency failures, reporting, like, so many things we should have had in place. I think that a lot of it was on the risk management side,” Bankman-Fried said. “Look, I screwed up.”

While SBF keeps digging, why hasn’t he been arrested yet?

I certainly understand why people would bristle at all of these sources of potential delay, but this sort of investigative slog is much more common in a white-collar case than a quick arrest. For instance, it took almost a year for the U.S. Attorney’s office in Manhattan (which is reportedly handling the FTX investigation) to charge the founder of the electric-truck start-up Nikola with fraud even though the short-selling firm Hindenburg Research seemingly did all of the work when it published a lengthy report that precipitated the investigation in the first place. And it took nearly two years for the department to charge Holmes even after the Journal’s John Carreyrou publicly exposed the central problems at Theranos.

Prosecutors at the Justice Department cannot — and do not — simply indict people based on what they read in the press, no matter how damning it may seem. Even if they desperately want to charge someone, prosecutors have to conduct their own investigation to develop robust, admissible evidence of criminal misconduct, which requires gathering and reviewing documents and data, speaking with witnesses, and — perhaps above all — time.

Rudy Giuliani made his bones in 1987 by ordering financial executives with insider trading charges escorted out of their offices in handcuffs; lots of investors presumably believe SBF deserves a similar fate.