A guy stole 712 BITCOIN out of FBI evidence and only got caught because someone took a picture of him in a bathtub full of cash

In February 2020 the FBI arrested Larry Dean Harmon, the guy who built Helix, a Bitcoin mixer on the dark web that processed over 354,000 BTC, worth $311 million at the time and over $32 billion today
Helix charged 2.5% per transaction and partnered with AlphaBay, Dream Market and every other major drug market on the dark web
When agents seized Larry's Trezor hardware wallets, they couldn't open it because they didn't have the seed phrase or the PIN
Larry's brother Gary attended two of his bail hearings, where the government openly admitted in court that they had the wallets but couldn't crack them
So Gary went home, used the seed phrase he already had as Larry's brother and recreated the wallets on his own device
Then he made 8 separate transfers totaling 712 Bitcoin out of federal evidence and into his own accounts
While all of this was happening, the Harmon family was running a public GoFundMe to cover Larry's legal expenses
Gary even went on the record with CoinDesk talking about how the family was struggling financially
He was using stolen Bitcoin to take out a $1.2 million BlockFi loan and buy himself a luxury condo in Cleveland at the same time
The rest of the money went to strip clubs and private jets, according to the DOJ
When federal agents finally raided his Ohio residence in July 2021, they found wallets with only about $6,000 left in Bitcoin
The rest was already spent or laundered through ChipMixer and Wasabi Wallet but Chainalysis still managed to trace 519 of the 712 stolen coins
Among the evidence from his phone was a photo of Gary sitting in a bathtub full of cash at a nightclub, which the DOJ used at trial
When prosecutors first suspected Larry of stealing his own seized Bitcoin, Larry even told them it was Gary
Gary's own lawyer argued in court that this wasn't sophisticated theft, his exact words were "no more sophisticated than obtaining a key to a safe deposit box and taking the contents of that box" but the judge gave him 51 months in prison anyway
Gary lost 647 Bitcoin, 2 Ethereum and 17.4 million Dogecoin, worth over $20 million by the time of sentencing in April 2023, and the luxury condo was later auctioned off by the US Treasury
Larry got 36 months for running the original mixer that started it all, partly because he cooperated with the feds in another case
The man who built one of the biggest dark web money laundering operations in history got a lighter sentence than the brother who stole from him