Martin Shkreli, the pharmaceuticals C.E.O. who sledgehammered his way into public consciousness when he raised the price of a life-saving drug by 5,000 percent overnight earlier this fall, and then swung again last week when news broke that he was the mysterious buyer who spent an estimated $2 million on a Wu-Tang Clan album at auction, has struck a third time. 
 
 The self-proclaimed hip-hop aficionado and aspiring mixtape dropper now wants to be the one to bail out jailed Brooklyn rapper Bobby Shmurda, according to an interview with the rap Web site Hip Hop DX published Wednesday. 
 
 “We’re actually in discussion to try to bail out Bobby Shmurda. Forget whether you think he’s guilty or not, the guy should not be sitting in jail right now,” he said in the interview. “He deserves a fair trial. He deserves good lawyers. He doesn’t have good lawyers. His label is hanging him out to dry and so I have a conference call tomorrow morning with them (December 15). I’ll show up with $2 million bail money no fucking problem.” 
 
 Shmurda, whose real name is Ackquille Pollard, was arrested on gun charges and gang conspiracy in December of 2014. His bail was set at $2 million, a fee his record label, Epic, a subsidiary of Sony, has not paid, though it signed Pollard to a seven-figure multi-album deal just months before his arrest. 
 
 Reached by V.F. on Wednesday, Shkreli would not confirm whether the conference call took place or, if it did, whether anything came out of it. He did tell V.F.com, “I stand ready to support Ackquille Pollard at his request.” 
 
 Though he is a professed fan, Shkreli’s support wouldn't come without strings. 
 
 “The guy’s going to have to record for me if he comes out. I’ll just come out and say it,” he told Hip Hop DX. “If I’m gonna post his bail, pay for his trial, get him a ‘Not Guilty’ verdict. . . . With the right lawyer it’s just a matter of money. I see opportunity. 
 
 “The guy’s going to be more popular when he’s out. The guy probably didn’t do shit. . . . He’s New York’s best chance for rap since 50 Cent. It’s not a lot of money for me. Spend a couple million on his defense, a couple million on bail and I’ll get the bail money back real quick. So a million or two for his defense, which is probably $4 million in total, I’m willing to put towards his defense.” 
 
 Shkreli sees a lot of himself in Bobby Shmurda. They’re both from Brooklyn for starters. Plus, Shkreli said, “The guy’s totally irreverent. He doesn’t give a damn what people think. Totally irreverent. Totally I don’t give a fuck.” 
 
 Shmurda wasn’t the only thing on Shkreli’s mind. He used the wide-ranging Hip Hop DX interview to escalate a spat with Robert “RZA” Diggs, the Wu-Tang mastermind and producer that began last week after Bloomberg revealed Shkreli to be the mysterious buyer of the sole copy of the group's album Once upon a Time in Shaolin. Shkreli told the business news outlet that after the meeting, he found that he and Diggs had little in common. In his own statement to Bloomberg, RZA said that the sale of the album to Shkreli was agreed to long before the group learned of his business practices. As a result, he said Wu-Tang “decided to give a significant portion of the proceeds to charity.” 
 
 Shkreli, who referred to himself as “the most successful Albanian to ever walk the face of this Earth,” did not take kindly to that perceived slight, and referred to the situation as an “emerging war” between the two of them as part of an expletive-laden challenge: “I bought the most expensive album in the history of mankind and fucking RZA is talking shit behind my back and online in plain sight. That’s not the way I do business. If I hand you $2 million, fucking show me some respect." 
 
 As for sharing the Wu-Tang album, he has thought about it, but again, nothing comes without strings for Shkreli. 
 
 DX: Have you thought about sharing the album? 
 
 Martin Shkreli: I’m not going to play it for no reason. If Taylor Swift wants to come over and suck my dick, I’ll play it for her. [Laughs] 
 
 And so, having cemented his reputation as a stock-market heavy, it seems as though Shkreli is seeking to earn a similar rep in the hip-hop industry, a world that knows from voluntary bad guys. He said he’s reached out to a few producers and a few artists to “test the waters,” but he wouldn’t put anything less than golden out for fear of embarrassing himself. He’s willing to pay up to avoid such shame. 
 
 “The budget for the album can be fucking $5 million,” he said. “I’ll pay fucking Drake. I’ll pay fucking Lil Wayne. I’ll pay Timbaland to make a beat. I don’t care.” 
 
 Also, he said, he’s talking with DJ Khaled to see if he can help him expand his restaurant. 
 
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 Shkreli, Drug Price Gouger, Denies Fraud and Posts Bail Arrested Thursday, accused of Ponzi-like scheme 
 
 Martin Shkreli, center, and attorney Evan Greebel exit the federal building in Manhattan where the FBI is located on Dec. 17, 2015. Photographer: John Taggart/Bloomberg 
 
 Martin Shkreli, a boastful pharmaceutical executive who came under withering criticism for price gouging vital drugs, denied securities fraud charges on Thursday following an early morning arrest, and was freed on a $5 million bond. 
 
 While the 32-year-old has earned a rare level of infamy for his brazenness in business and his personal life, what he was charged with had nothing to do with skyrocketing drug prices. He is accused of repeatedly losing money for investors and lying to them about it, illegally taking assets from one of his companies to pay off debtors in another. 
 
 “Shkreli essentially ran his company like a Ponzi scheme where he used each subsequent company to pay off defrauded investors from the prior company,” Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Robert Capers said at a press conference. 
 
 Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Shkreli at his Midtown Manhattan apartment at about 6:30 a.m. and forced him to walk through a gaggle of photographers outside FBI headquarters. 
 
 Evan Greebel, a New York lawyer, who is alleged in the federal indictment to have helped Shkreli in his schemes, was also arrested and charged. Like Shkreli, he pleaded not guilty, and he was freed on a $1 million bond. Both men and their lawyers declined to comment after their court appearance. 
 
 A spokeswoman for Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP where Greebel worked during the time in question, declined comment. A spokeswoman for Kaye Scholer where he works now, said the firm has launched an internal investigation. 
 
 Read the full text of the indictment here 
 
 In the federal indictment and a complaint by the Securities and Exchange Commission, authorities say Shkreli began losing money and lying to investors from the time he began managing money. In his mid-20s, he got nine investors to place $3 million with him and at one point he had only $331. 
 
 Securities fraud is hardly unheard of on Wall Street and the amounts involved here are nowhere near on the scale of Bernie Madoff. But Shkreli’s case has drawn such attention because of his defiant price-gouging and his own up-by-the-bootstraps history. 
 
 The son of immigrants from Albania and Croatia who did janitorial work and raised him and his brothers in working-class Brooklyn, Shkreli seemed at first to embody the American dream and then to mock it. After dropping out of an elite Manhattan high school, he worked as an intern for Jim Cramer’s hedge fund as a 17-year-old and quickly impressed with his ability to call stocks. He created hedge funds, taught himself biology and, after earning a BA at Baruch College in New York City, began hedge funds investing in biotech. 
 
 AIDS activists pour cat litter on an image of Shkreli in a makeshift cat litter pan during a protest highlighting pharmaceutical drug pricing, in front of the building that houses Turing's offices, in New York. Photographer: Craig Ruttle/AP Photo 
 
 He became famous within a certain world but entered public consciousness after he raised the price more than 55-fold for Daraprim in September from $13.50 per pill to $750. It is the preferred treatment for a parasitic condition known as toxoplasmosis, which can be deadly for unborn babies and patients with compromised immune systems including those with HIV or cancer. His company, Turing Pharmaceuticals AG, bought the drug, moved it to a closed distribution system and instantly drove the price into the stratosphere. 
 
 He drew shocked rebukes from Congress, doctors and presidential candidates, and brought public attention to the rising prices of older drugs. Donald Trump called Shkreli a “spoiled brat,” and the BBC dubbed him the “most hated man in America.” Bernie Sanders, the Democratic presidential candidate, rejected a $2,700 campaign donation from him, directing it to an HIV clinic. A spokesman said the campaign would not keep money “from this poster boy for drug company greed.” 
 
 All the criticism seemed at first to have some impact and Shkreli said he would lower the price. Then he reneged. When Hillary Clinton tried one more time last month to get him to cut the cost, he dismissed her with the tweet “lol.” At a Forbes summit in New York this month, wearing a hooded sweatshirt, he said if he could have done it over, “I probably would have raised the price higher,” adding, “My investors expect me to maximize profits.” 
 
 “The $65 million Retrophin wants from me would not dent me. I feel great. I’m licking my chops over the suits I’m going to file against them” 
 
 Shkreli did further damage to his public image with other acts and boasts. He spent millions on the only copy of a Wu-Tang Clan album that music fans are desperate to hear and then told Bloomberg Businessweek that he had no immediate plans to listen to it. He takes often to Twitter and message boards, bragging about his business strategies, musical tastes and politics; he live-streams from his office for long stretches. 
 
 The SEC complaint and federal indictment lay out a series of schemes and cover-ups carried out by Shkreli. Capers said authorities began investigating him as early as 2014. 
 
 Barely 23, he was managing hedge fund Elea Capital in New York and lost it all in 2007. Around then, a trade with Lehman Brothers ended with a $2.3 million judgment against him, prosecutors said. In 2010, he lost his clients’ $3 million investment in his new fund, MSMB Capital. 
 
 In 2011, he bet that shares of Orexigen Therapeutics Inc. would fall and wound up owing $7 million to his broker, Merrill Lynch, authorities said. He couldn’t pay, and he, an unnamed accomplice and MSMB Capital eventually extinguished the debt with a $1.35 million settlement, they said. 
 
 Part of that money came from his next firm, authorities said. After the collapse of MSMB Capital, Shkreli launched MSMB Healthcare with about $5 million from 13 investors. He paid himself “far in excess” of the agreed-upon 1 percent management fee and 20 percent profit incentive, according to the SEC. 
 
 From Wall Street Wunderkind to “Most Hated Man in America" About 2000: Age 17, Shkreli interns for Jim Cramer, of “Mad Money," and correctly predicts biotech decline. Early 2000s: Sets up hedge funds, trash-talking companies he is shorting. About 2009: Founds MSMB Capital Management, which later suffers losses on a bad trade with Merrill Lynch. February 2011: Starts Retrophin, a biotech company. September 2014: Voted out as Retrophin's CEO, Shkreli tweets that the directors are “inane." February 2015: Launches new company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, which acquires an old drug and jacks up their prices. August 2015: Retrophin sues Shkreli for $65 million, saying he used company assets to pay off hedge fund investors. September 2015: Storm erupts over Turing's price increase—from $13.50 to $750 a pill—for anti-parasitic drug Daraprim. Sept. 21, 2015: Hillary Clinton tweets “Price gouging like this in the specialty drug market is outrageous. Tomorrow, I'll lay out a plan to take it on." October 2015: New York attorney general investigates the pricing and distribution of Daraprim. November 2015: A Shkreli-led group buys majority of KaloBios, presaging price increase in drug for Chagas disease. Nov. 5, 2015: To critics of his drug-pricing strategy, Shkreli tweets “lol." December 2015: News emerges that Shkreli bought the only copy of the Wu-Tang Clan's latest album. Shkreli tweets: “Within 10 years, more than half of all rap/hip-hop music will be made exclusively for me. Don't worry—I will share some of it." 
 
 Shkreli then used cash from MSMB Healthcare to invest in Retrophin, the pharmaceutical company he founded in 2011, even though it “had no products or assets,” prosecutors said. Later, he used the assets of Retrophin to repay angry investors in his hedge funds, prosecutors said. 
 
 Shkreli is confident that he will be cleared of the charges, according to a statement on his behalf. 
 
 Shkreli is particularly disappointed that his litigation with Retrophin has become a government enforcement matter, according to the statement. He also denied the charges regarding the MSMB entities, which he said involve complex accounting matters that prosecutors and the SEC fail to understand, according to the statement. 
 
 “It is no coincidence that these charges, the result of investigations which have been languishing for considerable time, have been filed at the same time of Shkreli’s high-profile, controversial and yet unrelated activities,” according to the statement. “The government suggested that Mr. Shkreli was involved in a Ponzi scheme. Ponzi victims do not make money, yet Mr. Shkreli’s investors enjoyed strong results.” 
 
 As Shkreli’s losses mounted, so did his lies. He fabricated portfolio statements and, with his lawyer’s help, deceived the SEC and outside accountants. He backdated records, manufactured a phony loan agreement between Retrophin and a hedge fund, and created sham consulting agreements with Retrophin as a way to route the company’s cash to his earlier investors. 
 
 Greebel, the arrested lawyer, made sure Retrophin’s outside accountants were unaware of Shkreli’s financial maneuvers and helped him concoct the consulting agreements used to repay the hedge fund investors, the U.S. said. 
 
 The cases mirror a lawsuit brought by Retrophin. Shkreli blithely dismissed his old company’s claims, saying, “The $65 million Retrophin wants from me would not dent me. I feel great. I’m licking my chops over the suits I’m going to file against them.” 
 
 Earlier, he had denied wrongdoing in a post on InvestorsHub after Retrophin disclosed it had received a subpoena from federal prosecutors and the preliminary findings from its own investigation of Shkreli. He called the company’s allegations “completely false, untrue at best and defamatory at worst.” 
 
 “Every transaction I’ve ever made at Retrophin was done with outside counsel’s blessing,” he said on the investment blog in February, without identifying the lawyers. 
 
 When Shkreli was working for Cramer’s firm, he was still a teenager. After recommending successful trades, Shkreli eventually set up his own hedge fund, quickly developing a reputation for trashing biotechnology stocks in online chatrooms and shorting them, to enormous profit. 
 
 Widely admired for his intellect and sharp eye, he set up Retrophin to develop drugs and acquire older pharmaceuticals that could be sold for higher profits. 
 
 Turing, which is less than a year old and has raised $90 million in financing, has followed a similar strategy with the purchase of drugs, including Daraprim. 
 
 Shkreli recently bought a majority stake in KaloBios Pharmaceuticals Inc. after Turing received a warning from the New York attorney general that the distribution network for Daraprim may violate antitrust laws. State officials made their concerns known to Turing and Shkreli in an Oct. 12 letter obtained by Bloomberg. 
 
 KaloBios recently acquired the license for benznidazole, a standard treatment for Chagas, a deadly parasitic infection most common in South and Central America. The firm announced plans to increase the cost from a couple hundred dollars for two months to a pricing structure like that for hepatitis-C drugs, which can run to nearly $100,000 for 12 weeks. 
 
 “Some of these companies seem to act more like hedge funds than traditional pharmaceutical companies” 
 
 With the federal charges and regulatory actions, Shkreli could be banned from running a public company, which could put the future of KaloBios into question. Trading in KaloBios shares was halted after the stock fell 53 percent. It’s less clear what the impact could be on Turing, which is closely held. 
 
 Federal authorities will have to ask a judge to impose an asset freeze if they want to guarantee Shkreli doesn’t dispose of ill-gotten gains. 
 
 The charges suggest that a small group of health-care firms—ones that acquire the rights to drugs and significantly increase their prices—is drawing the scrutiny of regulators and prosecutors, with a possible chilling effect on aggressive drug-pricing strategies. 
 
 Legislators are already paying attention. A hearing of the Senate Special Committee on Aging on Dec. 9 scrutinized such tactics. 
 
 Before Shkreli started Turing, Retrophin raised the price of Thiola, used to treat a rare condition causing debilitating recurrences of kidney stones, from $1.50 a pill to $30. 
 
 “Some of these companies seem to act more like hedge funds than traditional pharmaceutical companies,” said Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican who ran the recent hearing. 
 
 George Scangos, CEO of biotechnology giant Biogen Inc., went further, saying in an interview, “Turing is to a research-based company like a loan shark is to a legitimate bank.” 
 
 (Updated with Shkreli statement.) 

 Companies & Industries 
 
 Not long ago we profiled a controversial young biotech short-seller who flipped and took the ultimate long position—starting his own publicly traded company and becoming its chief executive. The question about Martin Shkreli, 31, was whether after making a name for himself betting on biotech stocks to fall, he had undergone a conversion or was using his knowledge to game the biotech field. 
 
 After a rocky few months marked by erratic public statements from Shkreli, his board of directors at Retrophin (RTRX), an orphan-disease drug maker, apparently got antsy. On Tuesday, the board abruptly fired him. 
 
 The shakeup wouldn’t have shocked readers of Bloomberg Businessweek’s profile last April of the brilliant, self-trained biologist with a penchant for grandiosity and immature behavior. Subordinates referred to Shkreli as “the boy genius.” From an investor’s perspective, though, things looked different: 
 
 “He’s ‘a high-risk, high-reward play,’ says Alan Geller, a retired oil trader and investor in Retrophin. Geller, who invested with Shkreli back in his hedge fund days, says this is what makes Retrophin so compelling. … ‘He’s definitely a genius,’ Geller says. He’s also “’a little flaky. I’m betting he’s going to make a billion dollars rather than blow up.’” 
 
 Geller may now be rethinking his wager. 
 
 In a boilerplate announcement, the Retrophin board said it had appointed Chief Operating Officer Stephen Aselage as interim chief executive “effective immediately” to replace Shkreli. “The Retrophin board is grateful to Martin for his creativity, energy, and vision over the past three years. In a remarkably short time, he built a world-class management team and created a thriving biopharmaceutical company that has improved the lives of patients with rare diseases,” said Steve Richardson, chairman of the Retrophin board. When contacted by e-mail and asked for elaboration, an outside company spokesman said Retrophin had no additional comment. 
 
 An avid user of Twitter (TWTR), Shkreli used the site to declare: “Rather upset at my inane BOD [board of directors] who was overly focused on irrelevant innuendo but also can now pursue a NewCo.” The latter reference apparently alludes to Shkreli’s plan to start a new company, which might prove challenging given the nature of his departure from Retrophin. Shkreli did not return a message seeking comment. 
 
 Reuters provided this background: 
 
 “Retrophin, which currently markets hypertension drug Vecamyl and metabolism treatment Chenodal among others, is developing drugs for a number of rare diseases including rage disorders, schizophrenia and infantile spasms. The company in May acquired the U.S. marketing rights to a potentially lucrative drug for treating a rare kidney disease, and raised its full-year forecast. Shkreli said on a conference call after the deal that the drug, Thiola, then sold for $4,000 a year per patient, would be priced closer to rival drug penicillamine, which costs $80,000 to $140,000. “The company said earlier this month that Chief Financial Officer Marc Panoff and board member Jeffrey Paley had stepped down. Shkreli, 31, owns about 11 percent stake in the company and is the second biggest shareholder as of Sept. 22.” 
 
 Retrophin, which trades on Nasdaq, was down 7.5 percent, to $8.34 a share, during afternoon trading.
– Martin Shkreli may have to dump some of his recent musical acquisitions to pay his own legal fees: The 32-year-old pharmaceutical pariah who unapologetically jacked the price of a life-saving drug was arrested by the FBI Thursday on charges of federal securities fraud, Reuters reports. Shkreli is accused of pilfering stock from his former company, Retrophin, and using it to take care of other business debts, per Bloomberg. Prosecutors say when Shkreli's MSMB Capital hedge fund went bust, losing millions, he started playing what Bloomberg calls a "complicated shell game" that involved "secret payoffs" and "sham consulting arrangements." The SEC, which has been looking into Shkreli's dealings for the past three years, is also expected to file a civil suit against him, sources tell Bloomberg. In August, Retrophin actually sued its former CEO, who was kicked out of the company in October 2014. The biotech firm alleged, among other things, that Shkreli had set up multiple transactions between the company and MSMB investors, bankrupted MSMB, paid off as many as 10 MSMB investors through phony contracts or by dipping into company stock and cash without permission, and then tried to cover it all up via what Bloomberg frames as "complex financial maneuvers." Shkreli's reaction at the time: "The $65 million Retrophin wants from me would not dent me. I feel great. I'm licking my chops over the suits I'm going to file against them." (This means a jailed Brooklyn rapper will have to wait a little longer to make bail.)