The Untold Story of a Crypto Crimefighter’s Descent Into Nigerian Prison

At 8 am on March 23 of 2024, Tigran Gambaryan woke up on a couch in Abuja, Nigeria, where he’d been dozing since the predawn call to prayer. The house around him, which often buzzed with the nearby sound of generators, was eerily quiet. In that silence, the harsh reality of Gambaryan’s situation flooded back into his mind the way it had every morning for nearly a month: That he and his colleague at the cryptocurrency firm Binance, Nadeem Anjarwalla, were being held hostage in a Nigerian government-owned compound—detained without access to their own passports under military guard in a building circled by barbed-wire walls.

Gambaryan got up from the couch. The 39-year-old Armenian-American wore a white T-shirt over his compact, muscular build, his right arm covered with an Eastern Orthodox tattoo. His usually shaved head and trimmed black beard were now stubbled and scraggly from a month of growth. Gambaryan found the compound’s cook, and asked if she would buy him some cigarettes. Then he walked out into the house’s internal courtyard, and began to restlessly pace and make phone calls to his lawyers and other contacts at Binance—the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange—restarting his daily efforts to “unfuck the situation,” as he put it.

Just the day before, the pair of Binance staffers and their crypto giant employer were told they were about to be charged with tax evasion. The two men seemed to be wedged into the middle of a bureaucratic conflict between an unaccountable foreign government and one of the most controversial players in the crypto economy. Now they were not only being confined against their will, with no end in sight, but also charged as criminals.

Gambaryan spoke on the phone for more than two hours as the sun rose in the sky and began to bake the courtyard. When he finally hung up and went back inside, he still couldn’t see any sign of Anjarwalla. Before dawn that morning, Anjarwalla had gone to the local mosque to pray, accompanied by minders who kept him under close watch. When Anjarwalla returned to the house, he had told Gambaryan he was going back upstairs to sleep.

Several hours had passed since then, so Gambaryan went up to their second-floor bedroom to check on his colleague. He nudged the door open to find Anjarwalla seemingly asleep, his foot sticking out from under the sheets. Gambaryan called out to him from the doorway but got no response. For a moment, he worried that Anjarwalla might be having another panic attack—the young British-Kenyan Binance exec had been sleeping in Gambaryan’s bed for days, too anxious to spend nights alone.

Gambaryan walked across the dark room—he had heard the house’s government caretakers were behind on the electricity bills and short on diesel for the generators, so all-day blackouts were common—and put his hand on the blanket. It sank, strangely, as if there was no actual body beneath it.

Gambaryan pulled the sheets away. He found, underneath, a T-shirt stuffed with a pillow. He looked down to the foot that had been protruding from the blanket and now saw that it was, in fact, a sock with a water bottle inside it.

Gambaryan didn’t call out for Anjarwalla again or search the house. He knew already that his Binance colleague and fellow prisoner had escaped. He was immediately aware, too, that his own situation was about to become far worse. He didn’t yet know just how much worse—that he would be thrown in a Nigerian jail, charged with money laundering crimes that carried a 20 year prison sentence, and denied medical care even as his health deteriorated to the point of near death, all while being used as a pawn in a multibillion-dollar crypto extortion scheme.

For that moment, he just sat on the bed in silence, in the dark, 6,000 miles from home, and considered the fact that he was now utterly alone.

Tigran Gambaryan’s spiraling Nigerian nightmare stemmed, at least in part, from a clash that’s been a decade and a half in the making. Since the mysterious Satoshi Nakamoto revealed Bitcoin to the world in 2009, cryptocurrency has promised a kind of libertarian holy grail: digital money that can’t be controlled by any government, defying inflation and crossing borders with impunity, as if it exists in an entirely different dimension. Yet the reality today is that crypto has become a multitrillion-dollar industry, run to a large degree by companies with flashy offices and well-paid executives—assets and people that exist very much in this dimension, in countries with laws and law enforcement agencies capable of applying pressure to crypto companies and their staff just as they can with any other real-world industry.

Before Gambaryan became one of the world’s most prominent victims of that collision between anarchic financial technology and global law enforcement, he embodied it in a very different sense: as one of world’s most effective and innovative crypto-focused cops. For a decade prior to going to work for Binance in 2021, Gambaryan served as a special agent for IRS Criminal Investigation, the law enforcement division of the US tax authority. At IRS-CI, Gambaryan pioneered the technique of deciphering Bitcoin’s blockchain to trace cryptocurrency and identify suspects. He’d used that follow-the-money playbook to take down one cybercriminal conspiracy after another and entirely flip the myth of Bitcoin’s anonymity on its head.

Starting in 2014, following the FBI seizure of the Silk Road dark-web drug market, it was Gambaryan who traced the bitcoins that identified two corrupt federal agents who had taken over $1 million from the drug market as they investigated it—the first time blockchain evidence was ever included in a criminal complaint. Over the next several years, Gambaryan helped track down half a billion dollars’ worth of bitcoins stolen from the first crypto exchange, Mt. Gox, eventually ID-ing a group of Russian hackers behind the heist.

In 2017, Gambaryan worked with the blockchain analysis startup Chainalysis to create a secret Bitcoin tracing method that located—and allowed the FBI to seize—the server that hosted AlphaBay, a dark-web crime market that was estimated to be 10 times the size of the Silk Road. Just months later, Gambaryan played a key role in the takedown of the crypto-funded child sexual abuse video network, Welcome to Video, the biggest-ever market of its kind, along with the arrest of 337 of the site’s users worldwide and the rescue of 23 children.

Finally, in 2020, Gambaryan and another IRS-CI agent traced and seized nearly 70,000 bitcoins that had been stolen from the Silk Road years earlier by a hacker. That sum today is worth $7 billion, making it the biggest criminal seizure of currency of any kind to flow into the US Treasury.

“The cases he was involved in are a who’s who of the biggest crypto cases of that time,” says Will Frentzen, a former US prosecutor who at times worked closely with Gambaryan and prosecuted the crimes Gambaryan uncovered. “He was innovative in investigating things in ways that very few people in the country had figured out, and incredibly selfless in terms of who got credit.” In the fight against cryptocurrency-powered crime, Frentzen says, “I don’t think anyone had a bigger impact.”

After that epic run, Gambaryan took a private sector job that shocked many of his former government colleagues. He became head of the investigations team at Binance, a behemoth that oversaw the daily trade of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of crypto assets—and had a reputation for doing so with remarkably little concern for when its users were breaking the law.

When Gambaryan joined Binance in the fall of 2021, the company was already under investigation by the US Justice Department—a probe that would eventually determine that it had enabled billions of dollars’ worth of transactions that violated anti-money-laundering laws and evaded international sanctions on Iran, Cuba, Syria, and Russian-occupied areas of Ukraine. The company had directly processed more than $100 million in crypto from the Russian dark-web crime market Hydra, too, and had even in some cases cashed out funds from the sale of child sexual abuse materials and the financing of designated terrorist groups, the DOJ would later allege.

Some of Gambaryan’s old law enforcement peers quietly grumbled about him selling out—or worse, joining the enemy. But Gambaryan insists he was actually taking on the most important role of his career. As part of Binance’s efforts to belatedly clean up its act after years of quick and dirty growth, Gambaryan built a new team of investigators within the company—recruiting many of the best agents he’d worked with at IRS-CI and other agencies around the world—and helped open up Binance’s cooperation with law enforcement like never before.

By digging through data from a volume of transactions bigger than that of the New York Stock Exchange, the London Stock Exchange, and the Tokyo Stock Exchange combined, Gambaryan says his team enabled busts of child sexual abusers, terrorists, and organized crime members on an immense, global scale. “There were literally tens of thousands of cases around the world that we assisted with. I probably had a bigger impact at Binance than I did in law enforcement,” Gambaryan told me at one point. “I’m completely proud of the work we did, and I’ll debate anyone on the merits of me joining Binance any day.”

Still, that new, more law-abiding Binance that Gambaryan was helping to create couldn’t erase the company’s past as a rogue exchange—or spare it from the consequences of those crimes. In November 2023, US 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 biggest corporate penalties in the history of US criminal justice. The company’s founder and CEO, Changpeng Zhao, was personally fined $150 million and later sentenced to four months in prison.

The US wasn’t the only country with Binance grievances. By early 2024, Nigeria, too, was casting blame on the company, not only for the past compliance violations it had confessed to in its US plea agreement, but also for allegedly contributing to the devaluation of Nigeria’s currency, the naira. Over late 2023 and early 2024, as the naira lost close to 70 percent of its value, Nigerians had rushed to trade their local currency for crypto, in particular blockchain-based “stablecoins” pegged to the US dollar.

The real cause of that disastrous sell-off was the decision by the administration of the new Nigerian president, Bola Tinubu, to relax restrictions on the exchange rate between the naira and the dollar, combined with the revelation that the Central Bank of Nigeria held a surprisingly small reserve of foreign currency, says Amaka Anku, an analyst and Africa head at business advisory Eurasia Group. Once the naira began to tumble, though, cryptocurrency’s role as an unregulated means to sell off naira created more downward pressure, she says. “You can’t say Binance or any crypto exchange caused this devaluation,” says Anku. “But they did exacerbate it.”

For years, cryptocurrency’s advocates had imagined a day when Satoshi’s invention would offer a safe haven for citizens of a country experiencing an inflation crisis. Now that day had come, and the government of the nation with the biggest economy on the African continent was furious. In December 2023, a committee in Nigeria’s National Assembly called upon Binance executives to attend a hearing in its capital, Abuja, to explain how it would right its alleged wrongs. And when Binance assembled its Nigerian delegation, it naturally tapped its star investigator and former federal agent, the symbol of its commitment to partnership with law enforcement and governments around the world: Tigran Gambaryan.

Before the coercion and the hostage-taking, there was the demand for a bribe.

Gambaryan was a few days into his trip to Abuja in January of last year, and it had been going well. As a kind of olive branch, he’d met with investigators at the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, or EFCC—essentially the Nigerian counterpart to Gambaryan’s old shop at the IRS, responsible for everything from hunting scammers to investigating government corruption—and discussed training its staff in cryptocurrency investigations. Then he joined a larger meeting with Binance execs and members of the Nigerian House of Representatives, a roundtable discussion of business people and government officials in suits assuring one another in friendly tones that they would work out their differences.

When Gambaryan first arrived in Nigeria, he’d been picked up at the airport by Olalekan Ogunjobi, a detective at the EFCC who had read about Gambaryan’s career and professed his admiration for Gambaryan’s legendary record as a federal agent. Almost every evening of the trip, Ogunjobi had met up with him for dinner at his hotel, the palm-tree-lined Transcorp Hilton Abuja. Gambaryan shared advice with Ogunjobi about investigative work in the world of crypto crime, how to run a case, how to set up a task force. They swapped war stories, and when Gambaryan gave Ogunjobi a copy of Tracers in the Dark—a book I wrote about cryptocurrency tracing that featured Gambaryan as one of its central subjects—Ogunjobi asked him to sign it.

Then, one evening when Gambaryan was at dinner with Ogunjobi and a group of Binance colleagues, a Binance staffer at the table got a phone call from one of the company’s lawyers. Beneath the pleasantries, the lawyers told Gambaryan, the meeting with the Nigerian officials hadn’t been as friendly as it seemed. The officials now were asking for a payment of $150 million to make Binance’s issues in the country go away—to be paid in cryptocurrency, directly into officials’ crypto wallets—and suggesting that they wouldn’t let the group leave the country until the money was received.

Gambaryan was so disturbed, he says, that he didn’t even offer an explanation to Ogunjobi or say goodbye as he gathered up Binance’s staffers and hurried out of the restaurant to reassemble in a Transcorp Hilton conference room to discuss their dilemma. Cough up what appeared to be a straightforward bribe, and they’d be violating a US law known as the US Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. Refuse, and they might be detained indefinitely. The team decided on a third option: Get the hell out of Nigeria immediately. They spent that night in the conference room strategizing and planning how to get all the Binance staffers on planes as soon as possible, changing their flights to early the following morning.

The Binance team gathered that morning on the second floor of the hotel with their suitcases packed, avoiding the lobby for fear that Nigerian officials might be staking them out to prevent them from leaving. They took Ubers to the airport, rushed nervously through security, and boarded flights home—all without incident, feeling collectively like they’d dodged a bullet.

Not long after he’d gotten home to the suburbs of Atlanta, Gambaryan received a call from Ogunjobi. Gambaryan says the Nigerian expressed his dismay that the Binance team had been pressured for a bribe, and said he was scandalized by his countrymen’s behavior. He suggested that Gambaryan report the demand to Nigerian authorities so they could pursue an anti-corruption investigation.

Eventually Ogunjobi set up a call between Gambaryan and Ahmad Sa’ad Abubakar, an official at the EFCC who was described to Gambaryan as the right-hand man of Nigeria’s national security adviser, Nuhu Ribadu. Ogunjobi had told Gambaryan that Ribadu had made his name as a corruption fighter—he’d even given a TEDx talk about it. Now Ribadu was inviting Gambaryan to come meet with him to resolve Binance’s problems in Nigeria and get to the bottom of the bribery attempt. In person.

Gambaryan told his Binance colleagues about the call, which sounded like it might offer a way out of the company’s Nigerian conflict. Perhaps, Binance’s executives and Gambaryan began to think, Gambaryan could use this invitation to go back to Nigeria and untangle the company’s increasingly problematic relationship with the country’s government. As fraught as the idea sounded—they had only just fled the same country weeks earlier—Gambaryan believed he’d been offered a friendly meeting with a powerful official, and given the personal assurance of his friend Ogunjobi. Binance’s staff in the region told Gambaryan that they’d done their own checks and heard that the offer of finding a resolution seemed legitimate.

Gambaryan had told his wife, Yuki, about the bribe attempt and the invitation to return to Nigeria. To her, the idea sounded glaringly dangerous. She repeatedly asked Gambaryan not to go.

Gambaryan admits now that he was perhaps still operating with an image of himself as a federal agent of the US government—with both the protections and sense of responsibility that carried. “I guess it was part of what was left over from before: When duty calls, you do it,” he says. “I was asked to go.”

So, in what he now considers one of the most ill-advised decisions of his life, Gambaryan packed his suitcase, kissed Yuki and their two small children goodbye, and left in the early morning hours of February 25 to catch a flight back to Abuja.

The second trip began with another airport pickup from Ogunjobi, who repeated all of his reassurances on their drive to the Transcorp Hilton and at dinner at the hotel that evening. This time, rather than a full coterie of Binance staff, Gambaryan was accompanied only by Nadeem Anjarwalla, the company’s regional manager for East Africa, a fresh-faced British-Kenyan Stanford grad with a baby son back in Nairobi.

When Gambaryan and Anjarwalla walked into their meeting with Nigerian officials the next day, however, they were surprised to see that Abubakar was accompanied by a full table of staff from the EFCC and Nigeria’s Central Bank. Very quickly, it became clear that the meeting was not about Nigerian corruption. After a few innocuous questions about Binance’s cooperation with Nigerian law enforcement, Abubakar quickly turned the conversation to the EFCC’s request for certain trading data about Binance’s Nigerian users. Binance had responded with only the data for the last year, Abubakar said—not what he’d asked for. Gambaryan, feeling ambushed, said it must have been an oversight due to a last-minute request, and he’d get him everything he requested. Abubakar looked visibly rankled, but the meeting went ahead with the usual promises of cooperation and ended with friendly swapping of business cards.

Gambaryan and Anjarwalla were left in a hallway to await their next appointment. After a while, Anjarwalla got up to use the bathroom. When he returned, he said he’d overheard some of the officials they’d just met in a nearby conference room sounding angry, as Gambaryan remembers it.

After close to two hours of waiting, Ogunjobi returned to lead them into a different conference room. The officials inside this one had a noticeably somber air, Gambaryan remembers, as everyone sat silently waiting for someone—Gambaryan didn’t know whom—to arrive. He noticed that Ogunjobi had a look of blank shock on his face and wouldn’t meet Gambaryan’s eye. “What the fuck is going on?” he thought to himself.

Then a man named Hamma Adama Bello, a bearded EFCC official in a gray suit who looked to be in his mid-forties, walked into the room. Rather than offer any greeting or ask questions, he put a folder down on the table and immediately launched into a diatribe, as Gambaryan remembers it, about how Binance was “destroying our economy” and financing terrorism.

Then he explained what was going to happen: Gambaryan and Anjarwalla would be taken to their hotels to pack their things and moved to a different location, where they would stay until Binance handed over all the data it had on every Nigerian who had ever used the exchange.

Gambaryan felt his adrenaline spike. He protested that he didn’t have the authority or even the ability to give the Nigerians so much data—that he had, in fact, come to Nigeria to report a bribery allegation to Bello’s agency.

Bello seemed surprised, as if it were his first time hearing about any such bribe, then immediately disregarded it. The meeting was over. Gambaryan managed to quickly type out a text message on his phone to his boss, Binance’s chief compliance officer Noah Perlman, telling him they were about to be detained. Then the officials took Gambaryan’s and Anjarwalla’s phones.

The two men were led outside to a black Land Cruiser with tinted windows. The SUV took them to the Transcorp Hilton, where they were led back to their rooms—Anjarwalla by Bello and another official, Gambaryan by Ogunjobi. They were told to pack their belongings.

“You know this is fucked up, right?” Gambaryan remembers saying to Ogunjobi, who he says could barely meet his gaze.

“I know. I know,” Ogunjobi replied, according to Gambaryan.

Then the Land Cruiser drove them to a large, two-story house in its own walled compound, with marble floors, enough bedrooms for the two Binance staffers and several EFCC officials, and a private cook. Gambaryan would later learn that it was officially the government-designated house for Ribadu, the national security adviser, but that he had chosen to live in his own home and leave this property for official use—in this case, as a holding pen for Gambaryan and Anjarwalla.

That night, there were no more demands from Bello. Gambaryan and Anjarwalla were served a meal of Nigerian stew made by the house’s cook and told to go to bed. Gambaryan lay awake, his mind racing, near panic from the feeling of being incommunicado without his phone, unable even to tell his family where he was.

Finally at 2 am, he fell asleep, then woke up a few hours later just before the muezzin’s call to prayer. Too anxious to stay in bed, he walked out into the internal courtyard of the house and chain-smoked cigarettes as he considered the clusterfuck that he now found himself in: He was being held hostage and implicated in the same financial crimes he’d spent his career fighting.

But even more than that irony, he was overwhelmed with the feeling of total uncertainty. “What the fuck is going to happen to me? What is Yuki going to go through?” he asked himself, thinking of his wife, frantic thoughts cycling. “How long are we going to be here?”

Gambaryan stood in the courtyard, thinking and smoking, until the sun came up.

Then came the interrogation.

After the cook served breakfast—which Gambaryan was too stressed to eat—Bello sat down with the detainees and told them what he’d need for their release: that Binance turn over all data on Nigerians and that it disable peer-to-peer trading for Nigerian users, a feature of Binance’s platform that allowed traders to advertise crypto for sale at an exchange rate the traders partially controlled, which the Nigerian officials felt was contributing to the naira’s freefall.

A third demand went unspoken in the room: that Binance pay a massive sum. As the Nigerians held Gambaryan and Anjarwalla, their contacts were also back-channeling with Binance executives, and the company was hearing requests that it pay billions of dollars, according to people familiar with those conversations. At one point, government officials even publicly told the BBC the fine would be at least $10 billion, more than twice the record settlement Binance had paid the US. (According to several people involved in those negotiations, Binance at some points did offer a “down payment” based on what it agreed was an estimate of its tax liability in Nigeria. But the offers were never accepted. Meanwhile, a day after Gambaryan and Anjarwalla were detained, the US embassy received a bizarre letter from the EFCC, stating that Gambaryan was being held “purely for the purpose of constructive dialogue” and was “participating willingly in the aforementioned strategic talks.”)

Gambaryan repeated to Bello that he had no real role in Binance’s business decisions and couldn’t help him with any of his demands. Bello, he says, responded with long, loud speeches about the harm Binance had allegedly done and what Nigeria was owed. At times, Gambaryan says, Bello showed off the gun he carried and photos of himself training with the FBI in Quantico, Virginia, an apparent display of his authority and US connections.

Ogunjobi, too, participated in the questioning. He was quieter and more respectful than Bello, Gambaryan says—but no longer the deferential mentee. When Gambaryan at one point referred to all the help he’d given Nigerian law enforcement, Ogunjobi responded that he’d seen comments on LinkedIn that Binance had hired him only to give the impression of legitimacy, a jab that shocked Gambaryan after all their previous conversations.

Incensed and unable to give the Nigerians what they wanted, Gambaryan demanded an attorney, access to the US embassy, and his phone back. All his requests were refused, though he was allowed to call his terrified wife with a guard present.

Stuck in a stalemate with the EFCC officials, Gambaryan told the Nigerians he wouldn’t eat until he was given access to an attorney and contact with the embassy. It took five days of that hunger strike, stuck in the house surrounded by government minders and guards, dazedly watching Nigerian TV on the couch, before the officials relented.

He and Anjarwalla were given back their phones, but told not to speak to any media, and officials took their passports away. They were allowed to meet with local Nigerian attorneys that Binance had hired to represent them. And at the end of a week of detention, Gambaryan was driven to a Nigerian government building to meet with State Department officials there, who said they would monitor Gambaryan’s situation but that, for now, there was nothing they could do to get him free.

They settled into a “Groundhog Day” routine, as Gambaryan later described it to his wife, puttering around their new home. The house was spacious and clean but run-down, with a leaky roof and no electricity on many days. Gambaryan befriended the cook and some of his minders, and watched hours of pirated episodes of Avatar: The Last Airbender with them. Anjarwalla got into a routine of doing yoga and drinking smoothies the cook made for him every morning.

Anjarwalla seemed to be taking the anxiety of their captivity harder than Gambaryan, and was upset that he would likely miss his son’s first birthday. The Nigerians had taken his British passport, but they hadn’t realized that Anjarwalla still had his Kenyan one. He and Gambaryan joked about escaping. Yet Gambaryan says he never seriously considered it. Yuki had told him “not to do anything stupid,” he says, and he didn’t intend to.

Then one day, lying on the couch, Anjarwalla told Gambaryan he was feeling ill and freezing cold. Gambaryan piled blankets on him, but he kept shivering. Eventually the Nigerians took Anjarwalla and Gambaryan to the hospital in another Land Cruiser and tested Anjarwalla for malaria. Gambaryan says the tests came back negative, and doctors told Anjarwalla that he had instead suffered a panic attack. Every night from then on, Gambaryan says, Anjarwalla would sleep in his bed next to him, too afraid to sleep alone.

By the middle of Gambaryan and Anjarwalla’s second week of captivity, Binance had agreed to the demand that it shut down its Nigerian peer-to-peer trading feature and even removed all naira trading on the exchange. The EFCC officials told Gambaryan and Anjarwalla to pack their things in preparation to finally be released. The two men took the good news seriously enough that Gambaryan used his phone to shoot a video tour of the house as a kind of souvenir of the strange weeks he’d spent there.

But before they could be freed, a government minder drove them in the Land Cruiser to the EFCC office. The agency’s chairman there demanded to know if Binance had turned over all of its data on Nigerians. When he learned it hadn’t, he immediately rescinded their release and sent the two men back to the guest house.

Around that time, the crypto site DLNews was the first outlet to publicly reveal that two Binance executives were being detained in Nigeria, without naming them. The Wall Street Journal and WIRED reported days later that the two detainees were Anjarwalla and Gambaryan.

Bello was furious about the news leaking, Gambaryan says, blaming him and Anjarwalla. If they would just hand over the information the government requested, they could go free, he told them. Gambaryan, losing his temper, asked Bello how he expected him to produce that data. “Do you want me to take it out of my right pocket? Or my left one?” he remembers asking Bello, standing up and theatrically emptying one pocket and then the other. “I don’t have any control over this.”

Weeks went by, and the negotiations were still at an impasse. Ramadan had begun, and Gambaryan would get up before dawn every morning with Anjarwalla for his prayers and then fast with him throughout the day in a show of friendly solidarity.

Then, one morning after nearly a month in the guesthouse, that routine came to an abrupt end. Gambaryan woke up on the couch after Anjarwalla returned from the mosque, went looking for his colleague, and discovered the shirt with the pillow stuffed in it. The water bottle in a sock. The empty bed. Anjarwalla had escaped.

Gambaryan would later learn that Anjarwalla had managed to get a flight out of the country. He figures that his colleague must have somehow jumped the compound’s wall, gotten past the guards—who were often asleep early in the morning—paid for a ride to the airport, then used his second passport to board a plane.

Gambaryan knew already that everything about his time in Nigeria was about to change. He went out into the courtyard and recorded a selfie video to send to Yuki and his colleagues at Binance, speaking into the camera as he paced.

“I’ve been detained by the Nigerian government for a month. I don’t know what’s going to happen to me after today,” he said in a quiet, controlled voice. “I’ve done nothing wrong. I’ve been a cop my whole life. I just ask the Nigerian government to let me go, and I ask the United States government to assist me. I need your help, guys. I don’t know if I’ll be able to get out of this without your help. Please help.”

When the Nigerians learned Anjarwalla was gone, the guards and minders took away Gambaryan’s phone and frantically searched the house. Then they all suddenly disappeared, replaced by new faces.

As Gambaryan waited for the crackdown he knew was coming, he persuaded one of the Nigerians to let him discreetly borrow their phone and went into the bathroom to call his wife, reaching Yuki in the middle of the night. For the first time in their 17-year relationship, she says, Gambaryan told her he was scared. Beginning to cry, she went into the closet to speak to him without waking up their children. Then Gambaryan abruptly said goodbye—someone was coming.

A military official told Gambaryan to pack his things, that he was being released. He knew better than to believe it. He packed nonetheless and got into the car outside, with Ogunjobi waiting in the vehicle. When Gambaryan asked Ogunjobi where they were going, Gambaryan says, he answered vaguely that maybe he was going home, but not today—then stared silently at his phone.

The car eventually arrived at the EFCC compound. But instead of parking near its headquarters, it pulled up to the agency’s detention facility. Gambaryan began to swear at his captors in outrage, too angry to care any longer about offending them.

As he was being led into the EFCC’s detention building, he saw a group of his former minders from the safehouse, now jailed together in one of the cells, under investigation for allowing Anjarwalla’s escape or even suspected of collaborating with him. Then he was put into his own cell, in solitary.

It was, as Gambaryan describes it, a box with no windows. Just a shower that produced cold water with a timed button and, incongruously, a Posturepedic mattress on the floor. The room’s walls crawled with as many as a half dozen cockroaches of all sizes. Despite the sweltering Abuja heat, the cell had no air-conditioning or even ventilation, only what Gambaryan remembers as “the world’s loudest fan” humming day and night. “I can still hear that goddamn fan,” he says.

Left alone in that cell, Gambaryan says he disassociated from his body, his surroundings, his hellish situation. He didn’t think about the roaches. For the first night, he didn’t even think about his family, he says. His mind was simply blank.

By the next morning, Gambaryan hadn’t eaten in more than 24 hours. Another detainee gave him some crackers. He soon realized that his survival depended on Ogunjobi, who would come by his cell every few days to give him food and sometimes let him use his phone when he was briefly let out of solitary confinement. Soon, Gambaryan’s old minders began to share with him the meals brought by their families, and Ogunjobi started coming less frequently—and sometimes, Gambaryan said, refused to let him use his phone when he did. There was no trace left of the wide-eyed fan of his work who had picked him up at the airport. “It was almost like he enjoyed having the power over me,” Gambaryan says.

The Nigerians who had been his guards just days before now became Gambaryan’s only friends. He taught one young EFCC staffer the rules of chess, and they’d play during the short hours before they were locked back into their cells.

A couple of days after he was put in lockup, Gambaryan’s attorneys visited him and told him he was now being charged with money laundering on top of the tax evasion charges he already faced. The new charges carried 20 years in prison.

During his second week at the detention center, Gambaryan’s son turned 5. On his birthday, Gambaryan was allowed to call his family from an EFCC phone and smoke a few cigarettes, which were otherwise denied to him. He spoke for 20 minutes with his wife—whom he describes as “crushed” with anxiety—and his kids. His son still didn’t know why he was gone. Yuki told Gambaryan that he’d started crying for his father at random times and going into their home office to sit in his chair. He explained to their daughter that he was still busy working out a legal issue with the Nigerian government. Gambaryan would later discover that she had googled his name two weeks into his detention, read the news, and knew far more than she let on.

Aside from his brief visits with his fellow inmates and two books—a Dan Brown novel given to him by an EFCC staffer and a Percy Jackson young adult storybook randomly brought by his lawyers—he had nothing to occupy his mind. He alternated between cyclically racing through angry curses and accusations against those who had wronged him, self-recriminations for the decisions that had led him to this point, and a kind of comatose emptiness.

“It was just torture,” Gambaryan says. “I knew that if I stayed there, I was going to lose my mind.”

As alone as Gambaryan felt, he hadn’t been forgotten. By the time he was in the EFCC cell, a loose-knit collection of friends and supporters had mobilized to answer the call for help in his video plea. Yet for the most part, it soon became clear the real help he needed to get free wasn’t about to come from the Biden administration.

Within Binance, Gambaryan’s very first text message warning that he was being detained had set off an immediate, unending whirlwind of daily war-room meetings, hiring of lawyers and consultants, and phone calls to anyone in government who might have any influence in Nigeria. Will Frentzen, the Bay Area–based former US attorney who’d prosecuted many of Gambaryan’s biggest cases before taking a private-sector job at the law firm Morrison Foerster, took on Gambaryan’s case as his personal defense attorney. One of Gambaryan’s ex-Binance colleagues, Patrick Hillman, knew the former Florida congressman Connie Mack from work they’d done together on crisis response, and knew of Mack’s experience resolving hostage situations. Mack agreed to lobby his legislator contacts on Gambaryan’s behalf. Gambaryan’s old colleagues in the FBI, too, immediately began pressing the bureau to demand Gambaryan’s release.

At higher levels of the executive branch, however, some of Gambaryan’s supporters say their entreaties for help were met with cautious responses. “State Department staff, from the first days of Gambaryan’s detention, worked to make sure he was safe, healthy, and had legal representation, and pushed for his release soon after he was criminally prosecuted,” according to one senior State official who spoke to WIRED on condition of anonymity according to the department’s policy. But at the same time, the Biden administration initially seemed ambivalent about Gambaryan, according to half a dozen people involved in the efforts to get him free. Binance, after all, had just agreed to a massive criminal penalty to the Justice Department. The administration seemed to have little love for the crypto industry as a whole, and Binance’s reputation was “toxic,” as one of Gambaryan’s supporters put it.

“They thought maybe the Nigerians have a case,” says Frentzen. “They weren’t sure what Tigran had done there. So they all took a step back.”

Gambaryan had also fallen into his Nigerian trap at a particularly dangerous moment in geopolitics. The US ambassador to Nigeria had retired in 2023, and the new ambassador wouldn’t officially take up the post until May of 2024. Meanwhile, Niger and Chad had asked the US to withdraw its troops from both countries as they tightened their relationship with Russia, leaving Nigeria as a key US military ally in the region. This made the negotiations to free Gambaryan far more complex than they might have been with the usual adversaries who wrongfully detain Americans, like Russia or Iran. “Nigeria was the only game left in town, and they knew it,” says Frentzen. “So this was bad. In terms of timing, Tigran happened to have been one of the unluckiest sons of bitches on the face of the earth.”

When Gambaryan was being held in the guesthouse, the diplomatic case might have been clearer that he was a hostage, says Mack, the former congressman lobbying for his release. But the criminal charges against him complicated the picture. “The US government fell in line with that narrative,” Mack says. “They wanted to let the legal process play out.”

Frentzen and his more senior colleague at Morrison Foerster, former general counsel to the office of the director of national intelligence, Robert Litt, says they began to approach people in the White House to explain to them how flimsy the criminal case against Gambaryan actually was. In the Nigerian prosecutors’ 300-plus pages of “evidence” against Gambaryan, only two pages even mentioned Gambaryan himself: One was an email showing that he worked at Binance. Another was a scan of his business card.

Still, for months to come, the US government wouldn’t intervene in Gambaryan’s criminal prosecution. The result, for Frentzen, was an appalling situation: After a career in the federal service, the former IRS agent responsible for many of the biggest cryptocurrency criminal busts and seizures in history was left with only hands-off government support in the midst of what appeared to be, itself, a crypto shakedown.

“This guy recovered billions of dollars for the US,” Frentzen remembers thinking, “and we can’t get him out of a hole in Nigeria?”

In early April, Gambaryan was taken to court for an arraignment hearing. Wearing a black T-shirt and a pair of dark green pants, he was put on public display, a personification of the villainous forces destroying the Nigerian economy. As he sat down in a red-upholstered chair to hear the charges against him, local and foreign media swarmed, with cameras at times just a few feet from Gambaryan’s face as he barely concealed his anger and humiliation. “I just felt like a circus animal,” he says.

In that hearing, a second one a week later, and in an accompanying filing to the court, prosecutors argued that Gambaryan would jump bail if he were let out of custody, pointing to Anjarwalla’s escape. They emphasized, strangely, that Gambaryan had been born in Armenia, though his family had left that country when he was 9 years old. They claimed, even more bizarrely, that Gambaryan had hatched a plot with fellow prisoners at the EFCC facility to replace himself with some sort of body double and escape, which Gambaryan says was an absurd lie.

Prosecutors at one point made explicit that holding Gambaryan was crucial in the Nigerian government’s leverage against Binance. “The first defendant, Binance, is operating virtually,” the prosecutor told the judge. “The only thing we have to hold on to is this defendant.”

The judge declined to rule on Gambaryan’s bail, leaving him in detention. After two weeks in solitary in the EFCC cell, he was transferred to a real jail: Kuje Prison.

The guards—and as usual, Ogunjobi—put Gambaryan in a van. Ogunjobi gave him back his cigarettes, and he smoked for most of the hour-long drive out of central Abuja, into what looked like a semirural slum on the outskirts of the city. During the trip, Gambaryan was allowed to call Yuki and Binance executives, some of whom hadn’t heard from him in weeks.

During that drive to Kuje, a prison known for its abysmal conditions and fellow inmates that included accused Boko Haram terrorists, Gambaryan says he felt numb, “disconnected,” resigned to a total lack of control of his fate. “I was just living one hour, one minute at a time,” he says.

As they arrived and drove through the prison’s gates, Gambaryan got the first glimpse of its low-slung buildings, painted a pale yellow, many still cratered and broken from an ISIS attack that had allowed more than 800 inmates to escape almost two years earlier. Gambaryan’s EFCC minders walked him into the prison and brought him to the office of the controller, who Gambaryan would later learn had specific instructions from Ribadu, the national security adviser, to keep him under close surveillance.

Then he was taken to his cell in a “segregation” wing, set aside for high-risk prisoners and VIP inmates willing to pay for special treatment. The 6- by 10-foot room had a toilet, a metal bed frame with what Gambaryan describes as a “glorified blanket” for a mattress, and a single window with metal bars. Aside from the bed, this was actually an upgrade from the EFCC dungeon: He had sunlight and outside air—albeit polluted by a trash fire a couple hundred yards away—and a view of trees that swarmed with bats every evening.

His first night in the prison, it rained, and a cool breeze came through the window. “As bad as it was,” Gambaryan says, “I thought I was in heaven.”

Gambaryan soon got to know his neighbors. One was a cousin of Nigeria’s vice president. Another was an alleged fraudster awaiting extradition to the US for a $100 million scam. A third was the former Nigerian deputy commissioner of police, Abba Kyari, under indictment in the US and accused of allegedly receiving a bribe—though the Nigerians had denied US extradition. Gambaryan came to believe Kyari’s Nigerian prosecution might have more to do with angering certain other corrupt officials.

Kyari, Gambaryan says, turned out to have enormous sway in the prison. Other inmates essentially worked for him. And his wife brought in home-cooked food for everyone, even the guards. Gambaryan especially liked a certain Northern Nigerian dumpling Kyari’s wife made, and she would cook extra for him. He in turn would share the take-out food his lawyers brought him from a fast food restaurant called Kilimanjaro; Kyari liked its Scotch eggs.

Gambaryan’s neighbors helped him learn the unwritten rules of prison life: how to get a phone, how to avoid trouble from prison staff and violence from other inmates. Gambaryan insists he never paid a bribe to the guards—they sometimes demanded absurd amounts in the tens of thousands of dollars—but his closeness to Kyari protected him nonetheless. “He was my Red,” Gambaryan says, comparing Kyari to Morgan Freeman’s character in The Shawshank Redemption. “He was instrumental to my survival.”

Over the weeks that followed, Gambaryan’s court case continued, and he’d be periodically driven back to Abuja for hearings in which the judge seemed to side with prosecutors on every point. He spent his 40th birthday, May 17, in yet another hearing where his bail was finally denied. That evening, his lawyers delivered a giant cake, paid for by Binance, to Kuje Prison, which he shared with his neighbors and the guards.

Every night, Gambaryan would be locked in his cell as early as 7 pm, sometimes hours earlier than the other inmates, and a guard constantly watched him and made notes in a notebook about his every move, all on the national security adviser’s orders. He found that he could do pull-ups on the ledge of an entryway to the segregation wing’s courtyard to get some exercise. Despite the huge cockroaches, geckos and even scorpions that crawled around his cell—small beige ones he learned to shake out of his shoes before putting them on—he began to settle into prison life.

Sometimes he’d still wake up from a dream about being on the outside, remember again that he was in a tiny, squalid cell, and rise from his bed to anxiously pace the cramped space until the guards let him out around 6 am. But eventually, Gambaryan says, his dreams, too, were in prison.

One afternoon in May, Gambaryan began to feel ill during a meeting with his lawyers. He went back to his cell, lay down, and then vomited repeatedly for the rest of the evening. Gambaryan guessed he had food poisoning. A blood test administered by the guards showed it was malaria. They asked him for cash, which they used to buy a bag of IV fluids—hung from a nail on the wall of his cell—and antimalarial injections.

The next morning, Gambaryan had a court hearing. He told the guards he was too weak to travel, or even to walk. They nonetheless took out his IV and put him in a car, telling him they were acting on official orders. When Gambaryan arrived at the court in central Abuja, he managed to slowly climb the long steps to the courthouse’s door. But as he entered the courtroom, his vision blurred and the room began to spin. The next thing he knew, he was on one knee. Guards helped Gambaryan up, and he slumped in his chair as his attorneys requested a court order for him to be sent to a hospital.

The judge issued the order. But instead of heading straight to a medical facility, Gambaryan was sent back to Kuje while the court, his attorneys, the prison, the national security adviser’s office, and the US State Department debated whether his temporary release represented an escape risk. For 10 days, Gambaryan lay in his cell, unable to eat or stand. Finally, he was taken to the Turkish-run Nizamiye hospital in Abuja, where he was given a chest x-ray, briefly examined, prescribed antibiotics, told he would be fine, and then inexplicably sent back to Kuje.

Gambaryan’s illness was, in reality, worse than ever. One of his friends, Turkish-Canadian Binance staffer Chagri Poyraz, eventually had to fly to Ankara to inquire about Gambaryan’s Nizamiye medical records with the Turkish government before he learned that Gambaryan’s scan had shown multiple serious bacterial lung infections. Even the judge in the case would demand—months later—that Kuje’s medical director, Abraham Ehizojie, appear before the court to explain why he hadn’t obeyed the hospitalization order. Prosecutors pointed to Gambaryan’s medical records, which stated that he had refused care and asked to be returned to prison, which Gambaryan vehemently denies.

For days after his return to his Kuje cell, Gambaryan had a 104-degree fever. During his brief hospital stay, the guards had searched his cell and found his secret phone, so he remained cut off from all contact for much of that time until one of his neighbors could get him another. He grew weaker, had trouble breathing, and his temperature refused to drop. Gambaryan became convinced he was going to die. At one point, he called Will Frentzen and told him that he might be on his deathbed. Kuje officials still refused to take him back to a hospital.

Gambaryan didn’t die. But he spent close to a month in bed before he was able to stand and eat again. He had lost nearly 30 pounds from when he had first entered the prison.

One day while he was lying in his cell recovering, the guards told Gambaryan that he had visitors. Still feeling weak, he walked slowly to an office in the front of the prison. Inside sat French Hill and Chrissy Houlahan, two US members of Congress, one from each party. Gambaryan could hardly believe that they were not a mirage—the first Americans he’d seen in months other than the relatively low-level State Department officials who would periodically visit him.

For the next 25 minutes, they listened to Gambaryan describe the conditions of the prison and his close call with malaria and then a chest infection that developed into pneumonia. Hill remembers that he spoke so softly that the two legislators had to lean forward to hear him over the noise of a fan in the room.

At times, Gambaryan found his eyes filling with tears as the intensity of his loneliness and the fear of his near-death experience caught up with him. “He looked like a sick, frail, emotionally distraught human who needed a hug,” Hill says. The two lawmakers each gave him one, and they told him they would work for his release.

Then he was led back to his cell.

The next day, June 20, Hill and Houlahan recorded a video on the tarmac of the Abuja airport. “We’ve asked for our embassy to advocate for a humanitarian release of Tigran, because of the horrible conditions in the prison, his innocence, and his health,” Hill told the camera. “We want him home, and we can let Binance deal with the Nigerians.”

Connie Mack’s conversations with his old congressional colleagues had taken root: In a subcommittee hearing on Americans detained abroad, Gambaryan’s Georgia representative, Rich McCormick, had argued that Gambaryan’s case should be elevated to that of a hostage held by a foreign government. He had cited the Levinson Act, a law that requires the US to help wrongfully imprisoned citizens. “Is United States diplomatic engagement likely necessary to secure the release of the detained individual? Absolutely. Abso-frickin-lutely,” McCormick told the hearing. “This guy deserves better.”

Around the same time, 16 Republican legislators signed a letter demanding the White House treat Gambaryan’s case as a hostage situation. A few weeks later, McCormick introduced that same demand as a House resolution. More than a hundred former agents and prosecutors had already signed another letter asking for the State Department to step up its efforts.

In June, FBI director Christopher Wray brought up Gambaryan’s case during a visit to the country to meet with President Tinubu, according to several sources. Shortly after, Nigeria’s FIRS, its tax authority, dropped the tax evasion charges against Gambaryan. But the more serious charge of money laundering, brought by the EFCC, stayed in place, along with the decades of prison time it threatened.

For months, many of Gambaryan’s supporters had hoped that Nigeria would eventually reach a deal with Binance to end the country’s prosecution. But Binance’s representatives say that by that point, they couldn’t seem to make an offer that interested the Nigerians, who now no longer even hinted at a payment. Every time it felt like they were getting close to an agreement, the requirements would change, the official would disappear, the deal would fall apart. “It was like Lucy and the football,” says Deborah Curtis, an attorney for Arnold & Porter and a former CIA deputy general counsel who was representing Binance.

As the summer wore on, Gambaryan’s supporters began to believe the negotiations between Nigeria and Binance were at a dead end, that the criminal case had progressed far enough that Binance alone would never get Gambaryan free. “It started to become clear,” says Frentzen. “This was going to be a US government solution—or nothing.”

Meanwhile, Gambaryan’s health had taken yet another turn for the worse. All of that time laid out on a metal frame had aggravated an old back injury from Gambaryan’s time in IRS-CI training more than a decade earlier, leading to what would later be revealed to be a herniated disc—a rupture in the outer layer of the tissue between spinal vertebrae, causing the internal part of that cushion to bulge out, trapping nerves and causing immense, constant pain.

Within a few weeks of recovering from his pneumonia, Gambaryan had almost no feeling in one of his legs. By July, he was attending his court hearings in a wheelchair. His trial adjourned for the summer, and Gambaryan spent the next months partially paralyzed, in unending torment, too depressed and stricken to even leave his cell in Kuje.

Prison officials finally followed through on the court order to release Gambaryan from Kuje so he could receive proper care, but instead of bringing him to a hospital, they transferred him to a National Intelligence Agency medical facility. He was under constant guard, his feet cuffed, given only painkillers as a treatment, and—perhaps most disturbing for him—had no access to his contraband phone, leaving him more isolated than ever. This time, after three days, he did ask to be returned to Kuje.

By August, Gambaryan was “essentially crippled,” he wrote to me in a text message. He hadn’t gotten out of bed in weeks, and was taking blood thinners to prevent clots in his legs from the lack of movement. Every night, he wrote, he would lie awake until 5 or 6 in the morning, too distracted by pain to even read a book. Sometimes he would call his family and talk to his daughter as she played a Japanese role-playing game called Omori on a PC he had built for her until it was her bedtime in Atlanta. Then, hours later, he’d finally black out.

Even despite the visit from members of Congress and the growing groundswell to get him released, he seemed to be nearly hopeless, at the nadir of his entire time in prison.

“I try to put on a face for Yuki and the kids, but it’s bad,” he wrote to me. “I am in a dark place.”

Days after that text message, a video emerged on X of Gambaryan limping into court on a borrowed crutch, dragging one foot behind him. In the clip, he begs for help from a guard in the hallway, who refuses to even give him a hand. Gambaryan would later tell me that the court staff had been instructed not to give him any support or let him use a wheelchair, for fear that he’d garner sympathy.

“This is fucked up! Why can’t I use a goddamn wheelchair?” Gambaryan yells in the video, outraged. “I’m an innocent person.”

“I’m a fucking human,” Gambaryan goes on, his voice almost breaking. He takes a few labored steps with the crutch, shaking his head in disbelief before leaning against a wall to recover. “I’m not fucking OK.”

If that order not to help Gambaryan as he hobbled into court was meant to prevent him from gaining public sympathy, it massively backfired. The video of the courthouse incident went viral and was watched millions of times.

By the fall of 2024, the US government, too, seemed to have finally reached a consensus that it was time to get Gambaryan home. In September, a bipartisan markup session in the House Foreign Affairs committee approved the resolution McCormick had introduced to prioritize his case. “I urge the State Department and I urge President Biden: Turn up the heat on the government of Nigeria,” congressman Hill said in that hearing. “Honor the fact that an American citizen has been snatched by a friendly government and put in prison over something he had no responsibility for.” Some of Gambaryan’s supporters say they heard that the new ambassador to Nigeria, too, had begun bringing up Gambaryan’s situation with Nigerian officials, including President Tinubu, so often that at least one minister blocked the ambassador on WhatsApp.

At the United Nations General assembly in New York in late September, the US ambassador to the UN raised Gambaryan’s case in a meeting with the Nigerian foreign minister, “stressing the need for his immediate release,” according to a readout of their meeting. At that same time, Binance hired a truck with a digital billboard to drive around the UN and midtown Manhattan displaying Gambaryan’s face and messages calling out Nigeria for illegally jailing him.

Around the same time, White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan had a phone call with his Nigerian counterpart, Nuhu Ribadu, in which he essentially asked that Gambaryan be freed, according to multiple sources involved in pushing for Gambaryan’s release. Perhaps most impactful of all, several supporters say, they learned that US officials had made clear that Gambaryan’s case was going to present an obstacle to any meeting between President Biden and Nigeria’s President Tinubu at the UN General Assembly or elsewhere, a notion that deeply troubled the Nigerians.

Even as all of those levers of power began to apply pressure, the decision of whether to free Gambaryan still rested with Nigeria alone. “There was a point in time where the Nigerians realized this was a really bad idea,” says one of Gambaryan’s supporters who asked not to be named due to the sensitivities of the negotiations. “Then it became a matter of whether they would capitulate, or whether they would stick it out because of their pride—or because they were beyond the point of no return.”

One day in October during the long drive from Kuje to the Abuja court for yet another hearing—by that time, Gambaryan had lost count of how many it had been—the car’s driver got a call. He spoke into the phone for a minute, then turned the car around. Gambaryan was driven back to the prison, taken to the front office, and told that he was not feeling well enough to go to court. This was a statement, not a question.

Back in his cell, Gambaryan called Will Frentzen, who told him this could be it: that the Nigerians might finally be preparing to send him home. After so many false hopes of release over the past eight months, Gambaryan didn’t allow himself to believe it.

Several days later, the court held a hearing without him, and the prosecution told the judge they were dropping all charges against Gambaryan due to his health. Officials at Kuje spent a day processing the paperwork, then took him out of his cell, handed him the suitcase he’d brought on his two-day trip to Abuja, and drove him to the Abuja Continental Hotel, where Binance had booked him a room guarded by private security, as well as a physician to make a house call and ensure he was healthy enough to fly. For Gambaryan, it was all so sudden, after so many months of excruciating stasis, that it was almost too surreal to comprehend.

A day later, on the Abuja airport tarmac, Nigerian officials handed over Gambaryan’s passport—after briefly quibbling over a $2,000 fine he was told he owed for overstaying his visa. With State Department staffers helping him, Gambaryan stepped out of his wheelchair and climbed into a private jet stocked with medevac equipment. Unbeknownst to Gambaryan, Binance staff had spent weeks working to charter the flight—Nigerian officials had already once before told them Gambaryan would be released and then reneged—and even negotiated for him to fly out of the country over neighboring Niger’s airspace, which the country’s officials signed off on less than an hour before takeoff.

Aboard the jet, Gambaryan ate a few bites of the salad in his in-flight meal, fell asleep sprawled on a couch, and woke up in Rome.

Binance had arranged for a driver and private security to meet him at the airport in Italy and take him to the airport hotel to spend the night there before his flight home to Atlanta the next day. While he was in the room, he called Yuki and then Ogunjobi, his Nigerian erstwhile friend, the one who had persuaded him to come back to Abuja so many months earlier.

Gambaryan says he wanted to hear Ogunjobi explain himself. On the phone, Gambaryan remembers, the EFCC official began crying, apologizing repeatedly, thanking God that Gambaryan had been released.

For Gambaryan it was too much to process. He listened quietly without accepting the apology. In the midst of Ogunjobi’s outpouring, he noticed that an American friend was calling, a Secret Service agent he’d worked with in the past. Gambaryan didn’t know it yet, but the agent happened to be in Rome for a conference with Gambaryan’s old boss, the head of the IRS-CI cybercrime division, Jarod Koopman, both of whom wanted to bring him beer and pizza at his hotel.

Gambaryan told Ogunjobi he had to go, and he ended the call.

On a cold and windy December day on Capitol Hill, former federal agents and prosecutors, State Department officials, and congressional aides mingle in a plush room in the Rayburn House Office Building. One by one, members of Congress come in and shake hands with Tigran Gambaryan, who’s wearing a dark blue suit and tie, his beard close-trimmed again and head cleanly shaved, limping only slightly from the emergency surgery on his spine that he underwent a month earlier in Georgia.

Gambaryan poses for photos and chats with each legislator, aide, and State Department official long enough to thank them for their role in getting him home. When French Hill says that it’s good to see him again, Gambaryan quips that he hopes he smells better than he did during their meeting in Kuje.

The reception is one in a series of VIP welcomes that Gambaryan has received on his return. At the airport in Georgia, Representative McCormick had come to greet him, and gave him an American flag that had flown above the Capitol building the previous day. The White House released a statement noting that President Biden had called the Nigerian president and “underscored his appreciation for President Tinubu’s leadership in securing the release on humanitarian grounds of American citizen and former U.S. law enforcement official Tigran Gambaryan.”

The statement of thanks, I later learned, was part of the deal the US government struck with Nigeria, which also included aiding in its investigation of Binance—which is still ongoing. Nigeria continues to prosecute both Binance and Anjarwalla in absentia. A Binance spokesperson wrote in a statement that the company is “relieved and grateful” that Gambaryan is home and expressed thanks to all who worked to secure his release. “We are eager to put this episode behind us and continue working toward a brighter future for the blockchain industry in Nigeria and around the world,” the statement adds. “We will continue to defend ourselves against spurious claims.” Nigerian government officials did not respond to WIRED’s repeated requests for comment on Gambaryan’s case.

After the reception, Gambaryan and I get in a cab outside, and I ask him what’s next for him. He says that he may be getting back into government, if the new administration will have him—and if Yuki will put up with another move back to DC. (Crypto news site Coindesk reported last month that he’s been recommended by cryptocurrency industry insiders with connections to President Trump for roles as senior as head of crypto assets at the SEC or a high-level position in the FBI’s cyber division.) Before he considers anything like that, he says vaguely, “I probably need time to get my head straight.”

I ask him how he feels the experience in Nigeria has changed him. “I guess it did make me angrier?” he responds in a strangely light tone, as if thinking about the question himself for the first time. “It made me want to get vengeance against those that did this.”

Revenge for Gambaryan may be more than a fantasy. He’s pursuing a human rights lawsuit against the Nigerian government that began during his detention, and hopes there will be an investigation into the Nigerians who he argues held him hostage for the better part of a year of his life. At times, he says, he’s even sent messages to individual officials he holds responsible, telling them, “You’ll see me again,” that what they did “brought shame on the badge,” that he can forgive what they did to him, but not what they did to his family.

“Was it stupid for me to do that? Probably,” he tells me in the cab. “I was on the floor with back pain and just bored.”

As we step out of the car at his hotel in Arlington and Gambaryan lights a cigarette, I tell him that despite his description of himself as angrier than before his time in prison, he actually seems calmer and happier to me than in years past—that when I was covering his serial takedowns of corrupt federal agents, crypto money launderers, and child abusers, he had always struck me as angry, driven, relentless in chasing the targets of his investigations.

Gambaryan responds that, if he seems more relaxed now, it’s only because he’s happy to be home—grateful to see his family and his friends, to be able to walk again, to not be caught between forces so much larger than himself waging a conflict that had so little to do with him. To have not died in prison.

As for being driven by anger in the past, Gambaryan disagrees.

“I’m not sure that was anger. That was justice,” he says. “I wanted justice. And I still do.”