SDNY Prosecutors Invoke Bitcoin Fog Appeal Victory to Uphold Storm Trial Venue

Tornado Cash “in Manhattan”

Federal prosecutors have told Judge Katherine Polk Failla, who is overseeing Roman Storm’s Tornado Cash trial, that a recent appeals court decision upholding the conviction of Bitcoin Fog founder Roman Sterlingov bolsters their position that Storm should be tried in New York.

The motion, filed Monday with Judge Failla in the Southern District of New York, cites the D.C. Circuit’s September 25 ruling, which affirmed Sterlingov’s conviction and 150-month sentence. It argues that a Tornado Cash user’s transactions conducted from his Manhattan apartment were sufficient to establish venue on two counts.

Storm’s motion for acquittal, which challenges venue among other grounds, was argued in April and remains undecided. A Manhattan jury convicted Storm in August 2025 of conspiring to operate an unlicensed money transmitting business, though the jury deadlocked on money laundering and sanctions charges.

The Constitution requires that a crime be tried where at least part of it took place. In Sterlingov’s case, the D.C. Circuit found venue proper in Washington largely based on a sting in which a special agent deposited about $250 worth of Bitcoin into Bitcoin Fog from the District and withdrew almost all of it the next day.

Tornado Cash and Bitcoin Fog are coin mixers, software that pools users’ crypto to break the on-chain link between where funds come from and where they go. Prosecutors argue the same reasoning applies to Shakeeb Ahmed, a Tornado Cash user who testified he accessed the service “in [his] apartment in Manhattan.”

Storm’s lawyers had argued that Ahmed’s funds sat in the pools too briefly to further any conspiracy. The letter counters that his deposit remained for “a couple days,” comparable to the agent’s activity in the Bitcoin Fog case.

At the April hearing, Storm’s lawyer Brian Klein argued that Ahmed used Tornado Cash before committing his crime and “didn’t actually use Tornado Cash for his hack.” On the money transmitting count, the letter says the appeals court found venue proper solely because Bitcoin Fog had “served customers in the District,” and that Ahmed’s testimony shows Tornado Cash did the same in Manhattan.

Storm posted the filing on X on Tuesday, writing: “The DOJ is still coming after me with everything it has. They really want to see me convicted.”

October 5, 2026
A new letter was filed today by SDNY:

The DOJ is still coming after me with everything it has. They really want to see me convicted.

It has been 1,139 days since my nightmare began.
They arrested me when my daughter was just 3 years old,…

— Roman Storm (@rstormsf) October 6, 2026

Storm also pointed to a Treasury notice filed Monday, the same day as the letter, in which FinCEN withdrew a 2023 proposal that would have required financial institutions to report transactions involving international crypto mixing. FinCEN said the decision was informed by commenters’ concerns that its broad definition of mixing “could have a chilling effect on legitimate activity.” The notice also states that illicit actors continue to use mixers and that FinCEN will keep monitoring them.

Storm contrasted that with an argument made by prosecutor Ben Arad at the April hearing, which posited that once Tornado Cash was largely serving criminals, “even the legitimate transactions that went through Tornado Cash became illegitimate.” Failla pressed him on the point, saying “I’m concerned if that’s your theory.”

Storm’s retrial on the two deadlocked counts is scheduled for April 26, 2027, after prosecutors had sought a start this month. Alexey Pertsev, who worked on Tornado Cash alongside Storm, was convicted of money laundering in the Netherlands in 2024 and released to electronic monitoring pending appeal.

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