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In this episode of American Greed.
I love being the tampon.
It's a gift from God.
Don't you agree?
Martin Shkreli, the hedge fund manager, investor, and pharmaceutical CEO, is a
social media mainstay, exhibiting a questionable social conscience.
He raises the price of this drug, which benefits probably the most empathetic
group of people on the planet.
Babies, pregnant women, and AIDS patients.
By jacking the prize of a life -saving drug 5 ,000%, he earns the title of the
most hated man in America.
But a quick look at his posts on social media reveals that's fine by him.
Are you going to change the price?
No. He wants Martin Shkreli to be a household name.
And I'm not sure that he minds that it's infamy, that it's a notorious name.
Despite being indicted on several counts of securities fraud, this Internet
troll doesn't think he has to answer to anybody.
No questions from CNBC. I'm sorry.
Until one Facebook post gets the attention of the Secret Service.
Oh, you done went too far now, you stupid prick.
Can Martin Shkreli learn his lesson?
Or is the pharma bro hooked on his own hype?
New York City.
eight million stories mine's the best
in
the summer of 2015
Legendary hip -hop group the Wu -Tang Clan is in the midst of the
private sale of its album Once Upon a Time in Shaolin.
To hip -hop personality and self -professed Wu -Tang fanatic Charlamagne
God, the sale is a statement.
It was actually to bring the value back to music.
That's what they wanted to do. They wanted to create this singular piece of
This has been called the Nickel Silver.
we decided, hey, there's a world -famous logo of the Wu -Tang Clan within this
beautiful pattern, treated as an art piece, which it is.
The Wu -Tang Clan is protesting the rampant piracy in the music industry.
If the public isn't willing to pay for their music, they won't make it
to them.
The terms of the agreement say that the buyer cannot share the album with
anyone.
Lifelong fans will conceivably never get to hear it.
This won't be an album for the people, but for the elite.
More specifically, one singular member of the elite.
But even given that fact, there's one thing the Wu -Tang Clan couldn't have
anticipated.
The buyer is going to be the most hated man in America.
I don't think Wu -Tang should be looked upon negatively for selling that album
to Martin. Like, they sold him an album. Like, we didn't know he was a douche.
Some people saw signs.
In the early 2000s, Caroline Stewart is a Wall Street stock analyst who
publishes recommendations for biotech stocks.
And one morning, after advising against the stock Shkreli is high on, she says
he ambushes her with an unsolicited and insulting phone call.
There are times when you get nasty phone calls from people who hold the opposite
viewpoint as you on any particular stock.
But he's the only instance I could think of where it was actually meant to
ridicule. And it quickly devolved into sort of a mockery of me where he started
to ask questions that were obviously meant to just make me feel stupid.
But years later, they meet again when Shkreli is running a hedge fund of his
own.
And this time, things are much more cordial.
He offered to take me on as a consultant.
And I was, again, extremely grateful, and I jumped at the chance.
The company is called MSMB Capital, a hedge fund that specializes in
biotech and pharmaceutical investing.
It's a red -hot industry on Wall Street, and one Stewart knows well.
She works for the fund as an analyst.
But beyond researching stocks, she doesn't know much about the inner
the company.
It was very strange because as far as I could tell, there was no audited
performance record.
And I didn't know how much he had in assets under management.
He was very secretive. He was very, very secretive about things.
Well, ostensibly, MSNBCapital was supposed to be a hedge fund, a true
fund. It's supposed to have equal amounts of short and long positions, so
minimizes the risk to investors of a substantial loss.
That's how he pitched it to investors.
Shkreli tells investors that in the bustle of high -powered investment
the heart of the world's biggest financial market, he will work harder
smarter than everyone else.
There were maybe four of us crammed into this little room, and it was intense.
It was by far the most intense work experience I'd ever had.
It seems to be paying off as investors begin to get behind the fund and its
leader. He made connections with people.
He made connections with one person, that person introduced another person,
he cultivated these relationships.
among investors, people that ended up being willing to put capital into his
hedge fund.
People on Wall Street are there for a reason. It's because they want to make
money, and money is very important to them. And so everybody's kind of
by it, and everybody wants to, you know, jump on that coattail.
But one day, that coattail drags them into the mud.
He took a very aggressive short position on a stock called the Rexachin.
And that stock trade failed spectacularly. It blew up, and it lost
all of MS &B's, or effectively all of MS &B Capital's money.
So he was broke.
According to Stewart, Shkreli keeps the destruction of the fund to himself, even
hiding it from employees.
But for days afterwards, Stewart can see Shkreli's roaring fire extinguished.
He seemed very deflated.
And, you know, the lights in the office were off.
He was slumped in his chair. He had his hoodie up.
And I felt bad for him because this is a normally very hyper person, if you
will, and very aggressive, ambitious, who suddenly, you know, was more like a
dog with his tail between its legs.
And it was sometime a little later that he told me that.
The fund had blown up, and then he told me that he owed Bank of America Merrill
Lynch $10 million.
According to the government, Shkreli never reveals that detail to investors.
In fact, he'd been keeping a lot from them.
There's no evidence that at any point he was trading in the manner that he was
describing to the investors. There's no evidence that he had the amount of
assets under management that he claimed to have.
There's no evidence.
that he performed well with their money, there is significant evidence that he
quickly burned through their money that they pledged with him.
But the government asserts that Shkreli continues to tell investors everything
is doing great.
He's smart and he keeps on going.
He turns what's negative news and he puts a really positive spin on it and he
keeps going.
Within a few days, he had...
come up with a survival plan.
He starts this new hedge fund, MSNB Healthcare, and he follows the same
that he did with MSNB Capital.
He lures investors in with the promises of the fund's going to be fully hedged,
it's going to behave in the proper manner, it has this auditor, it has this
firm that keeps an eye on things, and he has this great track record.
And none of that was true.
But MSMB Healthcare is only the beginning.
He brags, boasts, and smooth talks his way into getting investors to put money
into a much more ambitious venture.
A new drug company of his own creation, Retrophin.
Instead of like the classic scenario of a guy in his laboratory slaving away for
years to... create the drug that's going to save people.
Martin is looking for kind of a market opportunity, a financial market
opportunity, in much the same way that he claimed to be looking for market
opportunities in buying pharmaceutical stock.
The difference here, instead of buying a stock in equity, he's buying an actual
asset, a drug.
There are virtual biotech companies, and a lot of companies get formed because
you have an entrepreneur who is able to scour the universe for maybe drugs that
have failed in the past, drugs that were put aside from pharma companies because
they weren't going to be profitable enough.
You can even go to academia, right, where a lot of the work is done and say,
this looks like a promising compound. I'll in -license it from you, and I'll
develop it.
But Shkreli needs money to buy the licenses for these drugs.
And he owes investors and banks millions of dollars.
He has a big hole to fill and knows one way to fill it. So immediately after he
formed the company, of course, he's on a mad dash to collect money.
Shkreli never tells investors that MSMB Capital is broke.
But he suddenly announces that he is closing the hedge fund.
despite its purported success to focus entirely on retrophin.
Which surprised just about every investor. It's like, well, why?
Everything is going great. Why would you close this up?
He said you can either take the money in cash and get it within a month or so,
or you can get the equivalent amount in retrofit stock.
He was hoping, clearly, that people would take the retrofit stock because
delays having to pay these investors to make them whole.
This was akin to, you know, a performer who's got a bunch of plates spinning on
sticks, and he's keeping the plates spinning.
Most investors ask to take the cash from MSNB Capital.
But Scrummy doesn't have the money.
And many investors believe he simply ignores them and does whatever he wants.
Martin, as smart as he is, is completely fiscally irresponsible.
You know, as soon as he raised his money, I think he almost views it as
I think that Martin knew full well that he was misrepresenting what he was doing
with people's money.
And I think that the history shows here, the evidence shows, that instead of
doing kind of the grunt work of managing people's money on a daily basis in a
way that he claims to be managed, that he's looking for a quick hit, a quick
return.
It doesn't appear that the Grandmaster of Wall Street is playing chess.
He seems to be rolling the dice.
But then a funny thing happens.
His number comes up.
When American Greed returns, Martin Shkreli becomes the face of rapacious
drug pricing and has no problem letting everyone know it.
Usually when you have that kind of negative attention, executives tend to
quiet. He did the opposite of that.
After MSMB Capital goes broke in 2011, Martin Shkreli looks to pursue
a different business model.
He's not going to bet on Wall Street.
Wall Street is going to bet on him.
His startup company, Retrophin, begins licensing relatively obscure
And in a move that will later make him infamous, he raises their prices.
It's just the medicine his company needs.
And Retrophin returns enormous profits.
But despite getting his bragging rights back, Things aren't so rosy within
Retrophin, particularly from the perspective of its board of directors.
He was still relatively young, and they saw him as not having the skill set
necessary to be the CEO of a publicly traded company that was looking to grow.
They saw him as more of kind of an innovator, a creator, an idea business
strategy guy.
And Martin did not take that well at all.
Shkreli stands up to the board of directors, and they don't flinch.
He's fired from the company.
But once again, Martin is Martin. The sun will rise another day.
He creates another company in Retrophin's image called Turing
And before long, he becomes famous, but for troubling reasons.
Martin Shkreli bought...
a drug that was decades old. It was used for very rare but serious infections
that affect really vulnerable people, HIV patients, cancer patients, pregnant
women, people with suppressed immune systems. And he raised the price by 5
% overnight.
Dr. Carlos Del Rio is a board member of the HIV Medicine Association.
And he says Daraprim is a drug that treats a disease called toxoplasmosis,
can affect anyone.
But in patients with immune system deficiencies, it can be extremely
even deadly.
They'll get an absence in the brain. That's called a toxoplasmosis
They can get a meningitis. They can get an infection in their heart.
In a pregnant woman, toxoplasmosis can lead to fetal loss and can lead to, if
not a loss, a severely malformed or diseased baby.
Ever since 1953, Daraprim has been an effective treatment for toxoplasmosis.
But when Shkreli raises the price of a single pill from $13 .50 to
$750,
the treatment becomes far less available.
When I would call my hospital and say, I need Daraprim, and they said, well, you
know, we don't have it because in order to stock the medication, it used to cost
us, you know, $3 ,000 to stock the medication. Now it's costing us a
dollars.
What that means to a patient is, you know, somebody comes in with toxic
lesmosis, they're in the ICU, they have a seizure, and it may take the hospital
two to three days to get the medication that you need to give the patient right
away.
The HIV Medicine Association writes an open letter about the price hike.
and it soon gains national attention.
The New York Times has a story about this price hike, and instead of issuing
this kind of like bland statement, you know, that business people often do in
cases like this, Martin gives an interview, and he's unapologetic about
price hike.
And Martin Shkreli joins us now from the NASDAQ. He's the CEO of Turing
Pharmaceuticals. Martin, thank you for joining us. Thanks for having me.
Martin Shkreli embraced his role in the limelight and seemed to do everything he
could to stay there.
At this price, Airprim is still actually on the low end of what orphan drugs
cost, and we're certainly not the first company to raise drug prices.
What's striking about Martin is that when he's in trouble like this, and in a
situation which will lead many people to hunker down and kind of like hope it
all blows over, he sticks his neck out even further and dares people to cut it
off.
On camera, in front of the entire world, Shkreli doesn't apologize for the price
hike. He makes his case for it.
So, in essence, we're taking the revenue from Daraprim and trying to come up
with a better, safer, more effective version of it.
According to Dr. Del Rio and dozens of advocacy groups, Shkreli's case is bad
medicine.
It's an argument that simply holds no water, and there's no need for other
for toxoplasmosis.
In September of 2016, the issue gains the attention of the two people in the
center of the national spotlight.
With this young guy, raise the price to a level that's absolutely ridiculous,
and he looks like a spoiled brat to me. You want to know the truth?
He looks like a spoiled brat.
There's no excuse. Look.
We want companies to get a fair return. That's the way our system works. There's
no excuse from going from $13 .50 to $750 for one pill.
Shkreli argues that his little drug Daraprim was such a tiny part of the
care world that it wouldn't have an impact either on health care costs or
directly on patients because he said that insurance should cover it.
Dr. Del Rio says Shkreli isn't exactly wrong.
But he's not on the right side either.
In the big scheme of things, this is not the cause that our health care is going
broke. But I think it's not the cause, but it's a symptom of what the problems
are.
I would say that nothing that is being done is illegal, but I think it's
immoral.
And yes, I would qualify it as greedy.
The United States Congress sees it the same way.
When American Greed returns, Martin Shkreli seems willing to dish it out as
as he takes it until Capitol Hill gives him a taste of his own medicine.
The way I see it, you can go down in history as the poster boy for greedy
company executives, or you can change the system.
Yeah, you.
He is a brash self -promoter who's called himself the world's most eligible
bachelor, but this morning he was in handcuffs, accused of duping investors
of millions of dollars.
On December 17, 2015, Martin Shkreli is arrested and indicted on eight
criminal counts of securities fraud by the Department of Justice for his time
with MSNB Capital and his subsequent dealings.
Clearly, the charges aren't related to raising the price of Daraprim.
But that doesn't mean he's off the hook for it.
Another branch of government wants answers for that. In February 2016,
the U .S. Congress brings him forward to testify about rapacious drug pricing.
And the outspoken CEO is suddenly silent.
What do you say to that signal?
pregnant woman who might have AIDS, no income, and she needs
Daraprim in order to survive.
What do you say to her when she has to make that choice? What do you say to
On the advice of counsel, I invoke my Fifth Amendment privilege against self
-incrimination and respectfully decline to answer your question.
Do you think you've done anything wrong?
On the advice of counsel, I invoke my Fifth Amendment privilege.
against self -incrimination, and respectfully declined to answer your
He gets dragged before Congress to testify, and he's contemptuous.
He's rolling his eyes at the Congressman. Instead of being
taunting the people that are criticizing him.
You can look away if you like, but I wish you could see the faces of people,
matter what Ms.
Redlap says, who cannot get the drugs.
Did they need him, by the way? And then when he was finally excused because he
kept telling them he wasn't going to answer their question, he immediately
tweeted that the congressmen are imbeciles.
Despite being in the crosshairs of the U .S. government, Shkreli apparently
believes he has more important feuds to rectify.
Well,
talking today for Friday, January 29th, goes to Martin Shkreli. Do you know who
that is? Yes.
Donkey of the Day is a segment that I do on my show, The Breakfast Club. I give
people the credit they deserve for being stupid.
And I mean, I think history has shown that nobody deserves a lot more credit
being stupid than Martin Shkreli.
After buying the single copy of the Wu -Tang's album Once Upon a Time in
for reportedly more than $2 million, a TMZ interview with Wu -Tang's
ghostface killer turns Shkreli from an avid supporter to a bitter enemy.
I gotta ask you guys, man. You guys know that guy bought you guys this $2
million, your CD for $2 million at the auction.
Yeah, that shit. Yeah,
yeah, yeah. You know what I mean?
Martin Shkreli.
Shkreli is really sensitive about any perceived slights.
That wasn't a perceived slight. That was an obvious slight. But, yeah, he seemed
to jump at the opportunity to seem to be threatening.
ghost -faced killer in a video back.
And I think TMZ ran with all of it, which probably thrilled him.
Dennis, I'm going to call you by your government name.
You're not a ghost -faced killer.
I'm sorry. It started with Martin getting online and just talking
know what I'm saying, with some guys. He rented some goons, and he had these
goons standing behind him in a video, and he was just talking real greasy.
You know, at the end of the day, I'm very sorry for you.
You're an old man.
You're an old man that's lost his relevance, and you're trying to reclaim
spotlight from my spotlight.
That's not going to work, Ghost.
Dennis.
Ghost -based killer isn't one to back down.
He comes back with a video posted on his website, dynamitestick .com.
Hey, yo, man.
You hilarious, man.
You must be on Ritalin or something, man.
You know what I mean? Take a shot, man. It's like, yo, you a fake -ass super
villain, man.
Ghostface is just entertaining the people. That's not even really energy
Martin. That's energy for us.
You know what I'm saying? And I appreciate that.
This is the guy right here that planned on challenging me.
The man with the 12 -year -old body.
This is who he be.
His name is Shkreli right there. When y 'all see him, you know what I mean?
Oh, he's having a ball.
Pee -wee Shkreli? And the fact that he looks so much like Pee -wee Herman.
He really does look like Pee -wee Herman in the face. A lot.
You're watching The Breakfast Club.
After Charlemagne the God makes him donkey of the day, Shkreli asks to come
the show for a face -to -face.
The Breakfast Club gladly obliges.
He came in here and tried to shake my hand. I said, nope, I can't shake your
hand. I need to know what you're all about first. So first question, are you
privileged, entitled prick?
No.
Nah, I didn't shake his hand because I knew he was a prick.
I mean, I just knew he was a prick from what I saw, you know, in interviews and,
you know, what I read in the news. And, you know, I just knew he wasn't my type
of person. All right. And Ghostface is going to smack.
We'll see, man. Bring it. I wish he would. All right.
The leader of the douche tank clan.
In the meantime, while awaiting his tryout on eight felony counts,
Shkreli doesn't shy away.
He goes all in on social media, challenging friends and foes alike.
New York City, 8 million stories.
And mine's the best.
Two things I have that you don't. Number one and number two.
If anyone dared slap me, oh Lord, I wish they would.
And there is seemingly no end to who he'll argue
with online.
I
see
your foolish face here.
You need to lose weight.
But even the Internet has lived.
When American Greed returns, the content trolling goes too far. And even
Twitter says, time's up.
I'm having fun here.
Through all his trolling and his reputation from raising the price of a
-saving drug, Martin Shkreli soon becomes known as the Pharma Bro and the
most hated man in America.
If he wants to be a household name, mission accomplished.
And there's also that musical about him.
I probably shouldn't say the name.
It's called Pharma Bro and American Doucheable.
A great American hero of our time.
A moral person, a Samaritan, a fine upstanding citizen.
It's Martin Shrelby. Martin Shrelby.
Martin Shrelby. Who's made the American dream.
He went to one of the shows, and soon afterwards he tweets at one of the
creators of the play, and he said,
Something to the effect, hurt your place sucked, too bad you're a liberal.
So again, it's like classic Martin.
Classic Martin is ever apparent in his constant confrontations with the media,
which he gladly shares with the world.
Dan Mangan himself makes an appearance on Shkreli's Facebook page.
Hi, this is Dan.
This is Jake. Hi, this is Martin Shkreli.
Hi, Martin, how are you? Good.
And he said, I'm ordering you not to call me, contact me or call my lawyer
anymore.
Because I don't want you talking to my attorney.
He was basically gaming me or he was trying to game me because he's saying,
know, I don't want to talk to you. I have no interest in talking to Dan
from CNBC. How dare you call me? I have no interest at all in ordering you. But
at the same time, he's recording this. It's all an ad for a lot of us.
We don't respect you or your organization enough to ever give you our
the story.
The NBC is on our blacklist.
Clearly.
When American Greed requests an interview, he succinctly declines,
It's a common attitude from Shkreli,
but one interaction with the media goes too far.
There was a journalist who had written a piece about Donald Trump gaslighting
America.
She caught Martin Shkreli's attention and he asked her to the inauguration,
apparently.
And I think she responded, I would rather eat my own organ.
And then he started this sort of social media obsession with her, going so
far as to Photoshop his face onto pictures of her and her husband or
And, you know, she felt harassed and notified Twitter. And that led to him
banned from Twitter.
But free reign on Twitter isn't the only freedom Shkreli risks losing.
He faces eight felony counts.
Potential decades in jail.
And the public that hates him.
Can a jury possibly be impartial?
And I'm sitting there and I'm looking at him and I'm saying, he looks familiar
to me, he looks familiar to me.
And I just can't place him.
And then somewhere along the line it just clicked who he was.
When American Greed returns.
Potential jurors let their feelings be known.
Can Martin Shkreli get a fair trial?
They use very strong words. He's evil, he's naked.
They have very negative feelings about that.
After nearly a week of trying to seat a jury from a hostile public,
Twelve impartial citizens and six alternates are finally selected to serve
Martin Shkreli's jury.
The government makes its case.
The government's case really was that Martin Shkreli formed the hedge fund
Capital.
And he sort of, they say, hoodwinked people into investing with him, lost
money, and then founded another hedge fund, MSMB Healthcare.
did basically the same thing there, then founded a biotech company that he
called Retrofin.
And the whole idea was that he was funneling money from Retrofin to his
fund investors because he had lost their money.
The investors in this case were the most damning evidence, I think, because they
said, he told me this, and this is what happened. He told me X, Y, and Z was
going to happen. It was actually A, B, and C.
That was very damning evidence. It was impossible to get over that. And what
Brafman's argued is like, well, they're rich people. They should know better.
And who cares, really? I mean, like, they got their money back.
It's a crucial point for the defense.
Retrophin becomes a wildly successful company.
And investors, despite many not wanting to invest initially, make multiple times
their investments.
So defense attorney Benjamin Brafman argues, where's the harm?
It's more an argument to the jury saying, hey, look, come on.
What's going on here? Why would you bother convicting this guy?
What Braffman wants jurors to believe, what Braffman suggests the public should
believe, is that there's Martin Shkreli, kind of like the comic book figure, the
pro -wrestling villain.
And then there's Martin Shkreli, the brilliant, young, mathematical,
scientific genius, who has nothing but altruistic impulsiveness.
And don't pay attention to this kind of freaky, nasty troll over
here. Pay attention to this really nice guy over here and believe what this guy
says. Don't believe what this guy says. Or if he says anything, he's just
kidding. He's just kidding.
They're one person.
In the meantime, even though he already has the U .S. government shining its
spotlight on him, Shkreli doesn't stop bringing attention to himself.
There were times when it seemed like Shkreli was tweeting from inside the
courthouse.
It was really bizarre.
I don't cover a lot of court cases. I'm a pharmaceutical industry reporter, but
I don't know that that kind of thing happens frequently.
Martin is unusual in a whole bunch of ways, and he's particularly unusual for
the fact that, you know, the one time when you would expect somebody like this
to keep their mouth shut, to keep their head down, and to let their lawyer do
their job, he does the opposite.
He goes into a room, I've never seen anything like this before, where a
defendant comes into a room and does an impromptu press conference with
reporters. He came in there and commented on our coverage of the case,
prosecution's approach. He insulted them and called them the junior varsity.
Afterwards, we asked his attorney what he thought about the fact that Shkreli
did that, and Martin leaned over and said, I can do whatever I want.
How did you feel about Martin coming to talk to reporters today in the middle of
the trial? I do whatever he wants. I was stunned that it happened, and I'm
hoping he doesn't do it ever again.
Nevertheless, the jury has to consider the facts of the case. And in the end,
the case goes to jury deliberation, the verdict is uncertain.
It was really unclear.
You have no idea what's going on in the room.
And this was a really complicated case with a lot of counts, eight counts to
decide on, three interrelated schemes.
So they had a lot to talk about. It was really impossible to tell.
We debated a lot. We talked a lot.
And, yeah, we took it very seriously. We took it seriously.
I've been on several juries before.
This was the most stress.
When American Greed returns, Barton Shkreli's fate rests in 12 people's
But to look at Shkreli's Facebook feed, the verdict is already in.
The jury starts tomorrow.
I give them about 20 minutes before they free the boy.
Free the boy.
In August 2017,
Lois Pounds and 11 other jurors sit in a room to determine Martin Shkreli's
fate.
It's hard. It's hard. But that's what we are there for as jurors.
And I would hope that if I'm in that situation, God forbid, one day, that I'd
have somebody that was, you know, open -minded, you know, and took it
After almost five days of deliberation and almost 40 hours of debate, the jury
finds Skrelik guilty of three of eight counts.
When he and his attorneys came out of the courthouse, they declared victory.
We're, I think, delighted in many ways with this verdict.
Count Devin was the government's...
attempt to theorize that I robbed Peter to pay Paul, and the jury has spoken
conclusively that Bertropin was not defrauded in this case.
My investors made three to five times their money without any aid of any sort.
According to Lois Pound, the charges he is convicted of are straightforward and
basically relate to whether or not Shkreli lied or misled investors to
them to invest.
It was easy to see that if you're supposed to have an auditor and you
an auditor and you present that, that's wrong.
If you're supposed to have a fund administrator and you don't have that,
wrong. If you provide full fund performance to your investors, that's
And that's fraud.
That's fairly easy to see.
But Pounds believes the other charges are less clear -cut.
She believes Shkreli had no intent to take investors' or Retrofin's money.
I think one juror said that his intent for Retrofin was never to cause,
you know, Retrofin to lose money.
And I think the term used by that individual was that was his baby.
He wanted to make Retrofin successful.
If you want a company to be successful, the last thing you're going to do is
cause it to lose money.
This was a witch hunt of epic proportions.
Maybe they found one or two broomsticks, but at the end of the day, we've been
acquitted of the most important charges in the case, and I'm delighted to report
that. Once again, Martin Scarelli seems to believe he's escaped unscathed.
Immediately after he returned home, after declaring victory outside the
courthouse, he was drinking a beer on a live stream and talking about how he
expected he might not get any jail time.
How are you feeling?
You know, pretty good. You know, there was a chance that the government could
have put me in jail for 10 years and fined me $20 million, but right now I'm
looking at zero to six months.
You may have gotten off and not guilty on some charges, but you were convicted
of several fraud charges, which is serious.
And I really believe that there's something emotionally off with him.
Martin is a brilliant young man, but sometimes people's skills don't
translate well. So we will have some good discussions, but at the end of the
day, you know, Martin, I think, has more than held his own in this case.
I don't think I'm scared of the government.
I call them junior varsity.
Free on bail as he awaits sentencing, Shkreli returns to good old -fashioned
trolling. And he targets an old friend, Charlemagne the God.
I
don't
care about having peace with Montesquarelli.
It's like I don't care about having peace with Satan.
I don't care about Montesquarelli.
A spat with a New York radio host is one thing.
Shkreli has legions of supporters online who are willing to fight his fight or
go after those who go after him.
But when Shkreli targets a person who targeted him on the campaign trail,
Hillary Clinton, he finds himself punching above his weight class.
On Facebook.
He posts a message which suggests, you know, the Clinton Foundation was
in murders or covered -up murders, and he suggests that he's willing to pay $5
,000 to any of his readers who get a hair follicle out of her head.
The Department of Justice says they're concerned and bring the issue up to the
court. They want his bail revoked.
When he apologized to the judge, you know, he said, It never occurred to him
that the Secret Service would have to get involved, that anybody would take it
seriously.
And he was embarrassed that anybody really thought he would do anybody harm.
The judge is not amused.
The judge really focused on his making women feel uncomfortable from this
journalist who, you know, he said he just admired and wanted to sort of.
put his face next to in these pictures, whom he made feel very uncomfortable, to
Hillary Clinton.
To the judge, this isn't a humorous prank.
She believes it's a comment that someone could take as a call to action.
Well, the judge made the point that Shkreli doesn't know all of his
social media. It's impossible to predict how somebody will interpret something
like that.
She told him that he was harassing women and making them feel unsafe.
Judge Kiyo Matsumoto revokes Shkreli's bail.
And she sends him to await his time until sentencing in Brooklyn's Central
Detention Center.
Oh, you done went too far now, you stupid prick. You know what I'm saying?
I love the fact that that trolling actually eventually got him locked up.
Because nobody cares when you troll rappers.
Nobody cares when you troll hip -hop radio personalities.
But take that trolling to a former first lady of the United States, a former
senator, and now your dumb ass is in jail. Good riddance.
Sentencing is scheduled for later this year.
Shkreli could be facing up to 20 years.
But with no prior convictions and no tangible loss of money by investors,
likely he'll get much less.
So what's next?
One thing that strikes me is that it's hard to imagine when Martin Shkreli is
going to stop being, you know, Martin Shkreli, when he's going to stop doing
outrageous things.
I don't know how long he's been in prison, but when he comes out, I don't
him to go away.
Anytime soon.
American
Greed,
coming up next.
CNBC, get yours.
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