John Ray III, the firefighter drafted in to quell the FTX crisis

John Ray III built a 40-year career overseeing companies hit by epic blowouts, from Enron to Nortel Networks. But as FTX's new boss, he may face his toughest task yet.

Ray took over the troubled cryptocurrency exchange at 4:30 a.m. on November 11 as founder Sam Bankman-Fried seized control amid a multi-billion dollar bank run.

Since then, he has worked day and night to restore order in the face of a global firestorm that has left the once-celebrated bankman Fried arrested and jailed on fraud charges as more than 1 million customers of a company with an $8 billion balance sheet wonder whether they will ever get their savings back.

“Think of John Ray in the vein of Red Adair,” said James Bromley, FTX attorney at Sullivan & Cromwell, referring to the famed firefighter who circled the globe fighting oil well fires.

Ray, a native of Massachusetts, was trained as a lawyer and rose to become general counsel of the clothing manufacturer Fruit of the Loom in the 1990s. When the company went bankrupt in 1999, he received a crash course in picking up the pieces of a bankrupt company.

He eventually founded his own consulting firm specializing in messy explosions, landing at such high-profile companies as Nortel Networks, Overseas Shipholding Group and Residential Capital. But he made a name for himself at Enron in the mid-2000s as a tactician and racketeer seeking to recover money for plaintiffs in the fraudulent group.

The job at FTX requires not only a deft understanding of finance, accounting, and law, but also the ability to make daily judgments that can bring calm amidst the cacophony. Then the basic tasks of locating and valuing assets that can eventually be allocated and distributed to FTX victims can continue.

The contrast between the 63-year-old Ray in the suit and his predecessor at FTX, known for his T-shirts, board shorts and a bush of curly hair, is stark.

Ray carefully avoided any public judgments against Bankman-Fried and chose his words carefully. And unlike Bankman-Fried, he has communicated his public thoughts primarily in court filings or through FTX lawyers in court.

Still, he was blunt in his descriptions of FTX.

In testimony before the U.S. Congress this week, Ray said that despite a career spent tackling "large and vexing corporate failures involving allegations of criminal activity," he had "never seen such a complete failure of corporate controls at all levels of an organization, from the absence of financial statements to the complete failure of any internal controls or governance."

Among his findings, Ray, who mostly worked out of New York, couldn't even determine how much cash FTX held and also found that a certain amount of FTX cryptocurrency had disappeared.

From the information he was able to gather and review, Ray tried to methodically organize its presentation. Among the 100 FTX subsidiaries that filed for bankruptcy in federal court in Delaware, he told the judge that the sprawling and interconnected operations could be distilled into four separate silos. He told Congress that he had five different goals in his job.

Bromley, who recruited Ray, recalled meeting him years ago at the breakup of Enron, the notorious Texas energy trader. As Enron's emergency chief, Ray had aggressively litigated Enron's opponents, including Bromley's client Lehman Brothers.

Enron creditors believed that major Wall Street banks were the key enablers of the company's byzantine shell companies that facilitated its fraud. There was initially little hope that much could be done to get money back. Ultimately, however, Ray was able to use litigation as a means to win billions of dollars in settlements with companies like Citigroup and Lehman Brothers.

The disputes at FTX were limited but significant. The Company endeavors to keep the names of its account holders, who are its principal creditors, confidential. This has drawn the ire of the Office of the US Trustee, which says the move violates the spirit of transparency in Chapter 11 proceedings.

A jurisdictional dispute has already begun between Ray and the Bahamas, where Bankman-Fried has located the FTX command center. FTX Digital, a subsidiary not included in the US bankruptcy case, has been acquired by a trio of local liquidators who say significant FTX assets remain in the Bahamian entity.

Ray has accused authorities in the Bahamas of withdrawing cryptocurrency from FTX in collaboration with Bankman-Fried in the days surrounding the bankruptcy filing.

Each side has sharply criticized the other's actions. Bahamian authorities have rejected Ray's claims, which they said "appear to have no concern for facts but are only intended to grab headlines and advance questionable agendas."

For his firefighting skills, Ray is paid a flat rate of $1,300 per hour by FTX - even if it means he has to get up before sunrise.