21 ms·

Martin Shkreli has been sentenced to seven years in prison

355 points by tchalla 9y ago

gfosco 9y ago
Harsh sentence for a case where all the money was paid back.
- sincerely 9y ago
  illegal is illegal
  - ryanlol 9y ago
    'illegal is illegal' is not at all how sentencing works. Edit: Not sure if you guys are aware of this, but sentencing is actually completely separate from the part of the trial where they decide whether you're guilty or not.
    - giarc 9y ago
      Unfortunately it's how he got into the mess. Without illegal actions there are no sentencing procedures.
      - daxorid 9y ago
        It's not quite that easy, unfortunately. The vast majority of us, just by sheer ignorance of the contents of the enormous Federal Register, unknowingly commit at least a few federal felonies per year. If the Feds want you in prison, they'll find a way.
        Clubber 9y ago
        This is absolutely correct. There are shelves and shelves of laws that no one really knows. If someone wants to go after you, it won't take much research.
        DanBC 9y ago
        He didn't accidentally defraud people. He knew exactly what he was doing.
        Clubber 9y ago
        Yes, but that's not the point. The point is the US government has many ways of throwing people in jail it doesn't like, including me or you. That's doesn't equate with a free society.
        DanBC 9y ago
        It doesn't seem relevant to the thread, where he knowingly and willingly engaged in a massive theft-related offence against large numbers of people. That's not "the government is out to get you", that's "the government punishes crooks".
        s73v3r_ 9y ago
        Neither does being perfectly free to defraud investors.
        ryanlol 9y ago
        Did anyone actually suggest that anywhere here?
        dragonwriter 9y ago
        > The vast majority of us, just by sheer ignorance of the contents of the enormous Federal Register, unknowingly commit at least a few federal felonies per year. Federal felonies (and federal crimes more generally) are defined by the US Code, and almost entirely Title 18 of that Code, not the Federal Register. The Federal Register is the regular publication of regulatory process documents, most of which is notices and procedural background information; the operational material from the Federal Register is codified in, for the most part, the Code of Federal Regulations (which is much smaller than the Federal Register; while not a perfect analogy, you could think of the Federal Register as the Git repository for the Code of Federal Regulations, with commit messages that usually far exceed the size of code changes.) The CFR itself is occasionally relevant to defining the parameters of crimes (not all of which are felonies), in that in certain cases Congress has made violation of certain regulatory orders criminal. But it's only a very small share of the CFR (itself much smaller than the Federal Register) that is relevant to that.
      - ryanlol 9y ago
        With all due respect, I fail to see how this is at all relevant. Could you help me out here? It feels like you and others here are suggesting that we should not discuss sentencing policies in general because Shkreli was guilty, that seems insane to me.
  - gfosco 9y ago
    of course, but 7 years is a very long time. It could have been shorter, considering the lack of actual damages.
    - justinjlynn 9y ago
      lesson one: don't play games with other people's money, unless they won't have any left when you're done. The second part is secret /s
    - cowsandmilk 9y ago
      Why do you believe there were no actual damages? Because investors eventually got their money back after years of fraud? (I would also argue the investors in Retrophin lost millions in returns due to Shkreli's paying off MSMB Capital investors, but that is not what he was convicted of)
      - gfosco 9y ago
        They actually had their money tripled. Tripled. Tripled.
        dragonwriter 9y ago
        Were this a civil case for damages, that would be more relevant. The criminality of getting other people to give up their property with false representations is not eliminated by paying them back plus extra later, however. Civil damages mostly addresses the harm caused, criminal punishment is less about the harm caused by a particular act and more about the risk to society of normalizing the behavior.
        s73v3r_ 9y ago
        Yeah, they got lucky. Can you guarantee that the next set of investors he pulls this fraud with will be as lucky?
      - oh_sigh 9y ago
        How much longer than normal were investor funds locked up for?
  - topbanana 9y ago
    The judicial system doesn't work like that sadly
- ModernMech 9y ago
  "Your honor, I must protest this sentence! After all, my clients paid back all the money they stole from the bank!"
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - gfosco 9y ago
    Not really a good analogy. They invested with him, he lost it but found another way to make that money back. There wasn't any theft.
    - jartelt 9y ago
      If I give you money to invest in Alphabet stock and you instead invest it in lottery tickets, that seems like theft to me regardless of whether the lottery tickets pay off or not.
      - jonnycomputer 9y ago
        it surely does sound like people are looking for excuses for the guy. it was fraud, and he has only himself to blame.
        s73v3r_ 9y ago
        I think it's just that so many people don't want to have to think about their intentions when they do things.
    - danso 9y ago
      He wasn't prosecuted for theft (or embezzlement). He was prosecuted for fraud.
    - meowface 9y ago
      He not only lost it, he lied and said he did not lose it and that their money was safe and sound. Big difference. When you fabricate numbers and lie to people who have given you money, you're committing fraud, regardless of your ultimate intentions or if you manage to recover the money through other means.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  Especially given that the funnelling other money to cover the losses happened after some investors and the SEC were already on to the fraud.
bhouston 9y ago
He was so obnoxious that I guess it is easy to be happy about that, but he was so small time in the grand scheme of things. But nearly no bankers responsible for the 2008 financial crisis ever went to jail: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/how-wall-streets-bankers-stayed-out-of-jail/399368/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/how-wal...
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  One banker did. For 30 months. I think Shkreli was obnoxious and crude; the sentencing should've aligned with the crime. But America, so vengeance porn. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/magazine/only-one-top-banker-jail-financial-crisis.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/magazine/only-one-top-ban...
  - danso 9y ago
    He was also obnoxious and crude in a manner that made it near impossible for the judge to be generous in mitigating his sentence with regards to acceptance of responsibility. He couldn't even wait for an hour after being convicted before going on YouTube and bragging about how he thought he wouldn't face any prison time: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/martin-shkrelis-lawyers-fail-to-corral-bragging-pharma-bro-ahead-of-sentencing-2017-08-05 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/martin-shkrelis-lawyers-fa...
    - ImSkeptical 9y ago
      How dare he post on YouTube! 7 years in jail! This is clearly giving an unpopular person an unnecessarily harsh penalty. This is a corruption of justice.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
- birken 9y ago
  Like it or hate it, this is what the SEC does. You think Martha Stewart deserved jail time for making 50k in an insider trading scheme she didn't really care about? The SEC finds very public cases and then brings the hammer down in order to act a deterrent. Martin Shkreli broke the law, something he didn't have to do. It isn't like it was mob justice and some hugely biased jury convicted him of all the crimes he was committed of without thought. The jury by all accounts fairly deliberated his actions and convicted him of crimes that he did, while letting him off for crimes he didn't do. Then all Shkreli had to do was show some remorese and kiss the ring a little bit, but he continued to be a troll and mock the justice system. He downplayed his crimes literally minutes after being convicted of them, which showed a lack of remorse (and maybe honestly so, but the justice system doesn't like that). He continued to be a troll, including the whole Hillary Clinton incident, many of these statements used against him in sentencing. This isn't a case of the tall blades of grass getting cut first. It's a case where we have a subjective justice system that doesn't want to be mocked while it is doing it's job. Shkreli went out of his way to mock it, he went out of his way to mock the SEC, all the while he actually did commit a crime. Yes, it is a witch hunt in that the SEC will throw the book at some people while letting other people who committed worse crimes off the hook (Phil Mickelson vs Martha Stewart), but that how any limited investigative body works. If you don't want to be a target of a witch hunt, don't break the law. And if you do, kiss the ring. I'm not convinced it is a huge indictment of our society that people who break the law all the while trolling everybody get unfairly harsh punishments, though I admit it is unfair in the sense that life as a whole is unfair.
yodsanklai 9y ago
I used to watch some of his investment tutorials on youtube as well as other videos. For someone called the "most hated man in America", he actually seemed like a nice person. I also enjoyed his trollish sense of humor.
- hb3b 9y ago
  His video series on investing and chemistry are like an adult version of Khan Academy. Martin literally sat on-air for weeks on end with a Chemistry textbook and went chapter-by-chapter explaining each topic in pretty good detail. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8gjB1PSXv_oAUSAQ16S0fA/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8gjB1PSXv_oAUSAQ16S0fA/vid...
  - AdmiralAsshat 9y ago
    This gives me an idea to create a hand-curated list, "Useful Knowledge From Terrible People".
- ergothus 9y ago
  > I also enjoyed his trollish sense of humor. I think that makes the title that much easier to understand. I'm an old-fuddy-duddy (for example, I say things like 'fuddy-duddy'), but to me there are two forms of trolling. One where you're doing it to get their reaction and entertainment when they get it. I find this usually fun - the person doing it has fun, any audience has fun, and the person has that anguish-relief-joy cycle. When you do this to someone, you aren't gaining joy from the first emption your stoking, you get joy when it's found out and that emotion changes. The trolling itself is building anticipation. An example: My wife bought me a PalmPilot (back when those were a thing) but secretly took it out of the package to charge it, then gifted the surprisingly-not-much-lighter box to me. After my moment of feeling like I'd have to wait longer for my new toy (to try and return it) she revealed it fully-charged, and we had a laugh. The second way is subtly different. The trolls are still poking at a person's emotions. They can SAY the target should get it and enjoy it ("relax, it's just a joke"), but really the goal is to entertain the troll and any audience. The targets of this trolling don't get a laugh. They get anxiety/hate/fear/dread/panic/anger or whatever, and the troll gains satisfaction from that, not from when that ends. Example: Posting political/moral thoughts that you don't have, but that are deliberately chosen to invoke outrage within the forum you are posting to, then moving on to the next once that's gotten enough reaction. I'm obviously biased, but while I can appreciate the first kind, the second kind just seems to be increasing the misery in the world for a laugh. Laughs aren't so hard to get in other ways. Misery is miserable, by definition. So if someone is described as a "troll" I tend to be leery rather than eager. When I encounter someone, it's very easy to find EITHER kind of trolling annoying. Perhaps because your brain is trying to fit people into a context/schema and trolling disrupts that. Brains don't tend to react well to that sort of thing. Known friends and family don't cause that reaction. I don't know anything about Shkreli other than what I've read, but if you say "most hated man in America" and "trollish sense of humor", my instinct is to nod knowingly.
hb3b 9y ago
Cruel and unusual given the crime. Half the sentence of Jeffrey Skilling who destroyed thousands of families. No question in my mind that the judge had it out for him from the get-go.
- se30b 9y ago
  He really screwed himself over while he was on bail. He probably could have gotten off with what his attorneys wanted (around a year) if he just shut up until after the sentencing was over. But he kept trolling on livestream and twitter and acting like it was a given that he would get off easy. Obviously he was joking around with the Clinton "threat" but he should not have given prosecutors anything to use against him. I like the guy overall, his educational streams were pretty good, but trolling very powerful people while you are facing potential 20 years in prison is insane.
  - thewizardofaus 9y ago
    Shkreli taught me lots. If it wasn't for shkreli's advice and guidance my stock portfolio would be a mere fraction of what it is today.
    - jonathanjaeger 9y ago
      Wow, it really is a treasure trove. I'm interested in biotech and could definitely use this kind of primer. Are you investing in biotech or are you just speaking in general?
      - thewizardofaus 9y ago
        I do minor investing in biotech. The skills I learnt generally helped me to focus on sectors that applied to my knowledge base more.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- danso 9y ago
se30b 9y ago
Can someone explain specifically what lies he told his investors to defraud them?
- tedunangst 9y ago
  He claimed the fund was worth millions when it was really worth zero.
  - spaceflunky 9y ago
    But then he tripled their money...
    - techman9 9y ago
      That doesn't make his claims any less fraudulent.
      - hokumguru 9y ago
        While definitely immoral and risky I might abide by "no harm no foul" - no one was harmed in this, end sum is positive
        techman9 9y ago
        That's not the way federal law works. Beneficial ends don't justify illegal means in the eyes of federal prosecutors.
        s73v3r_ 9y ago
        This time. Because he paid those investors with proceeds from his other company. But letting him off here means he'll likely do it again, and those investors might not be so lucky.
    - 4gotmypass 9y ago
      He tripled their money using money that he earned from his pharma company not from his investments with their money, which doesn't sound like a crime, but it's basically a Ponzi scheme and is illegal. (If I remember correctly)
synaesthesisx 9y ago
For every Shkreli that gets locked up there are hundreds of others that walk free. They wanted to make an example of him - it doesn't help that his character is almost a cartoon-villain of sorts.
Clubber 9y ago
Here's what we just witnessed. 1. Companies were cornering certain drugs, then hiking their prices up significantly. Shkrelli did the same thing (but stated he was willing to give it free for anyone who asked). Note, that this is not illegal in any way, but news was all over it and citizens were pissed. 2. Shkrelli, being outspoken, became the focus of this issue. He dug a hole for himself, but concerning drug prices, he did nothing illegal. 3. Prosecutors, needing to do something got him on fraud charges where he misstated information on an investment but still tripled their money. 4. Shkrelli goes to jail, news and citizenry quelled. Companies still free to continue cornering the market and jacking up prices with impunity. That's how you get away with this stuff. News made money with the story. Companies made money with their drug hikes, politicians and prosecutors look good because they took action, Shkrelli investors made money. Shkrelli lost, patients lost, taxpayers lost. Rinse, repeat. Systemic corruption.
- swanson 9y ago
  Don't forget 3b) had to go through hundreds of jurors while the news/twitter laughed about people saying they could not be impartial because he "had a punchable face" and "disrespected the Wu Tang Clan". Better hope you don't say anything too mean on Twitter and ever end up in court :(
  - thrillgore 9y ago
    In the defense of the potential juror, you cannot disrespect the Wu-Tang Clan. They'll banish you to the 36 chambers.
  - s73v3r_ 9y ago
    It's more, "don't be an asshole". Which I feel is quite good advice for anyone. People are less willing to help people who are assholes to others.
- monochromatic 9y ago
  Except this investigation was already in progress when the drug price thing happened.
jcoffland 9y ago
The good news is that the Wu Tang album Shkreli bought is forfeit and can now presumably be released to the public. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/03/05/590980850/martin-shkreli-now-in-jail-may-have-to-forfeit-that-wu-tang-album-after-all https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/03/05/590980850...
- sigstoat 9y ago
  that's not how intellectual property, property in general, or being forced to pay fines works, as is pretty clear if you read to the end of that article. if he still owned the album, and it is seized by the government, it would go up for auction, at which point whoever pays for it gets it. and they'd be under no more obligation to release/sell it than shrekli was.
  - s73v3r_ 9y ago
    We could start a GoFundMe to purchase the album and release it.
    - sigstoat 9y ago
      i don't know that any of the crowd funding things are structured appropriately for sending a representative to an auction to try and win something for a crowd. that would be an interesting feature for them to add. regardless, best of luck with that plan.
pmarreck 9y ago
Possibly the only man that has caused me to feel bad for a troll. I don't think he deserved this. And it will pretty much only legitimize him as "gangsta"
jimjimjim 9y ago
Role models. He was a rock star at being an asshole. This encourages others who were maybe unsure of their assholeness to feel free to be more assholish. The world need more good role models and less bad ones.
- jimjimjim 9y ago
  I'm doubling down on my comment. There is a growing trend in not caring if you are hated, and reveling in the attention. That only works while you are powerful. If you fall you need friends and goodwill. The world needs to stop rewarding purposefully angering people just for attention.
roymurdock 9y ago
Really recommend watching Shkreli's interview with The Breakfast Club where he's attacked for all the things he's become infamous for in the public sphere (drug price hikes, wu-tang album, etc.) The guy gets it, and played the game the way it was presented to him. He actually comes across as a very smart, thoughtful, and respectful guy that can roll with the punches and dish back when needed. Sure he's a bit of a troll, but can you blame him when some of the most public figures/role models currently in the US are paid and rewarded for extreme trolling? Feel he's been very misunderstood, and it's a shame he got the book thrown at him https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTNOWSKMS10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTNOWSKMS10
- paxy 9y ago
  Well he wasn't sentenced for any of those things. His real "play" was securities fraud.
  - roymurdock 9y ago
    Sure, he had the spotlight on him after the "pharma bro" stories came out and everyone started to hate him unequivocally without considering how perverse incentives within the pharma/insurance system have allowed countless other drug manufacturers to take advantage of the same loopholes and price gouging techniques. Unfortunately for him he has a hateable face, fit into the "young rich person flying too close to sun" story arc, and was dumb enough to continue his trolling activities instead of fading from the limelight and allowing the mob to pass on to the next social media pariah. Think about it...his crime was that he lied to a few rich people who gave him money, then ended up making these rich people even more money in the end, ending positively for them. Then ask yourself why prosecutors have failed to go after any of the bankers responsible for the great financial crisis, which affected hundreds of millions of people and their families, causing many people to lose their homes, jobs, etc. Is that really a fair system? Or are people just gloating about this guy going to jail as some type of proxy for justice being served somewhere, in some fashion for white collar financial crime that many have been indirectly victimized by, but have never received due compensation/justice. Really, nobody on HN should care that he's going to prison, drug price gouging will still continue on unabated, and 20 more snake oil ICOs will pop up tomorrow to steal investors money. This conviction is hardly a sign that the system is working as intended. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/08/why-arent-any-bankers-in-prison-for-causing-the-financial-crisis/496232/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/08/why-are...
irunbackwards 9y ago
Wu-Tang ain't nothin' to fuck wit.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
otalp 9y ago
It does say something depressing about our laws that he got sent to prison for the thing where he lied to rich people while still making them money rather than the thing where he extorted sick poor people...which is still fully legal even if the majority of society thinks it shouldn't.
- paulgb 9y ago
  Another way to look at this is that he got a harsher sentence than he should have on the "stealing from the rich" part which is a crime, because he was so unpopular on the extorting the poor part which (sadly) isn't. Whether that's how we would like the system to function is, of course, up for debate.
- throwaway84742 9y ago
  He didn’t “extort sick poor people”, he extorted insurance companies. If you couldn’t afford his drugs, he was offering them for free.
  - s73v3r_ 9y ago
    And schools, and other places which, by law, were required to have Epi-pens on hand.
    - saas_sam 9y ago
      You should read things before posting.
    - matte_black 9y ago
      Schools waste disgusting amounts of taxpayer money overpaying for things all the time. What’s a couple more dollars to the books?
    - throwahey 9y ago
      I think you are confused, Shkreli's company owned retrophin, the toxoplasmosis drug, not epi-pen's. And as the parent commenter said, he was charging insurance companies alone, and claimed the drug was only used by a few hundred people.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
swedish_mafia 9y ago
This is a travesty. He is sentenced not for drug prices but for this: he started a hedge fund which lost money, used some of the funds to start a pharma co, the pharma co did well went public and he returned the investors their money at a huge profit for them. Who sufffered? No one. But he misrepresented his funds performance and did not inform them of the pharma co investment. This man is an entrepreneur.
- hidenotslide 9y ago
  His new investors made $10 million less than they would have if he had not stolen from them. Embezzlement is still a crime even if you are the CEO and the company is profitable. And there was a bunch of lying in securities disclosures of course, which is a crime by itself.
- rpearl 9y ago
  So he lied in order to start the company in the first place and managed to exploit the lie into a profit. This is still fraud. The fact that it paid off isn't relevant to the fact that it's fraud.
- s73v3r_ 9y ago
  This man is not an entrepreneur, and to try and say so is to insult and demean actual entrepreneurs everywhere. His investors got lucky that he had the funds to repay them due to his other company. Had he gotten away with this, he likely would have done it again, and those investors might not have been so lucky.
  - swedish_mafia 9y ago
    You can talk after you take a biotech company public.
    - rpearl 9y ago
      no, we can talk about the fact that using fraud to fund legitimate activity isn't entrepreneurship, now.
dayaz36 9y ago
This is insane. Sentencing guidelines for his crime was 0-12 months. He didn't even lose his investors any money.
- DanBC 9y ago
  Can you link to the US sentencing guidelines please? Elsehwere in the thread I've linked to the UK version, and it seems he'd have got a similar sentence over here. Although we do have parole, so he'd be out a lot sooner.
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > Can you link to the US sentencing guidelines please? https://www.ussc.gov/guidelines https://www.ussc.gov/guidelines
- danso 9y ago
  Shkreli's lawyers sought a 12+ month sentence. Sentencing guidelines allowed for a max of 25+ years https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-crime-shkreli/pharma-bro-shkreli-seeks-12-to-18-month-sentence-below-guidelines-idUSKCN1GC258 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-crime-shkreli/pharma-...
- maskedinvader 9y ago
  not according to the Judge who cited Federal Law to determine he did incur 10.4 million in losses for the investors [1], it's complicated even though he did pay the investors back after they became suspicious. My understanding is this, say you leave your ferrari at the valet and the valet driver took it on a joy ride and returns it undamaged, you didn't lose anything, but the valet driver did break the law. 1. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-crime-shkreli/pharma-bro-shkreli-to-be-held-responsible-for-10-4-million-in-losses-u-s-judge-idUSKCN1GA2DB https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-crime-shkreli/pharma-...
  - cypherpunks01 9y ago
    What law is the valet breaking in that case?
seorphates 9y ago
This is what jail is for, bad people that do bad things to others. Excepting maybe bankers or traders, of course. You know, as opposed to jailing good people that do "bad" things to themselves.
rajacombinator 9y ago
Jail time for JPM, Goldman, Bear Stearns, Lehman execs? Oh I see ... Shkreli’s real crime was not donating to the appropriate PACs. (Friend of Schumer, etc...)
thrillgore 9y ago
Okay, so who wants to create an ICO to buy his Wu-Tang album when it goes up for auction, and then publish it to the Internet Archive?
seltzered_ 9y ago
I realize the actual charges are for different things, but I find myself comparing Shkreli's actions of hiking up daraprim prices to John Kapoor's fraud charges to sell opioids ( https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/10/doj-billionaire-pharma-owner-fueled-the-opioid-epidemic-with-bribery-scheme/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/10/doj-billionaire-... ). So far one of the doctors involved in the latter case got four years ( https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-09/ivy-league-doctor-gets-4-years-prison-for-insys-opioid-kickbacks https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-09/ivy-leagu... ). More light needs to be shined on Kapoor's case (and the practices in Big Pharma in general) if it's impacting more lives. I don't like Shkreli's obnoxiousness, yet tried listening to his reasoning in why he raised the daraprim price versus other drugs. His talk last year at Harvard ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3bpXHMP4ww https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3bpXHMP4ww ) dives a bit into the thought process.
odammit 9y ago
Is he getting a comfy white collar prison sentence? Also, not to be that guy, but I hope he gets beat daily by other inmates. Edit: jk, totally being that guy.
- no_one_ever 9y ago
  dude...
  - odammit 9y ago
    Chill, even his lawyer wants to punch him in the face. http://time.com/5193461/martin-shkreli-lawyer-punch-face/ http://time.com/5193461/martin-shkreli-lawyer-punch-face/
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Also, not to be that guy, You know, if you feel the need to write this, it's a good sign that you should not write whatever it would come with. Because it's guaranteed that if you do, you will, in fact, be that guy.
  - odammit 9y ago
    Corrected.
tpush 9y ago
The majority of comments here being sad about Shkreli kinda reaffirms my views about HN, I have to say. Shkreli always seemed like a personified 4chan teenager "memelord" with money. Good to see that playing out your delusions of grandeur and arrogance toward the justice system is met with consequences. Maybe in prison he will mature a bit.
- rainieri 9y ago
  He already is quite mature. The media brought him to the stage and he gave a little show. You should see one of his videos shutting down people like you who read 3 or 4 articles and formed an opinion based on that.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- hartator 9y ago
  > delusions of grandeur and arrogance I don't think delusions qualify as crimes. However, bending laws to judge someone on actions outside of the scope of a trial is a crime.
- BenSahar 9y ago
  I think his fan club is hilarious. That they picked such a whiney troll to follow speaks volumes about their character.
  - rainieri 9y ago
    Nobody is actually following him as you describe. Most of people that side with him do so because they are amazed at the unfounded witch hunt that he received and at the amount of people who demonize him 95% because of the Daraprim drama and 5% for his actual conviction. And of that 5% - 0.5% might have an idea of what they are talking about. See his videos. You wouldn't stand a chance debating him unless you were a lawyer or pharmaceutical exec. You are coming from emotions rather than facts. Really. His troll persona is only a small portion of his character. https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2018/03/09/you-hate-martin-shkreli-thats-sort-of-the-problem/#3adfbfa86238 https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2018/03/09/you-ha...
dayaz36 9y ago
To give some background on how his sentencing increased so dramatically, initially he was convicted but since no one lost any money his sentencing guidelines were 0-12 months(most likely no jail time since it was his first offence). As a general rule of thumb in federal fraud cases sentencing is primarily determined by the what's called the "loss amount" of the crime in question. But a couple weeks ago the judge decided to come up with a HYPOTHETICAL loss and base the sentencing on that! And that hypothetical loss was set at $10.4M! Meaning he just went from no jail time 7 years overnight. This seems beyond absurd and as far as I know has no precedence.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- danso 9y ago
  Where are your sources that he was only facing 0-12 months when he was initially convicited? There are stories from the time of his conviction (in 2017) that say he could potentially face decades in prison: https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2017/08/05/lack-of-remorse-could-bite-martin-shkreli-when-it-comes-time-for-sentencing-experts-say.html https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2017/08/05/lack-of-remors...
- meritt 9y ago
  > the judge decided to come up with a HYPOTHETICAL loss The judge issued a 96-page opinion [1] that details his crimes and the sentencing guidelines. It was not an off-the-cuff decision as you're suggesting. > This seems beyond absurd and as far as I know has no precedence. Your lack of knowledge on a subject does not make it absurd. [1] https://martinshkrelilacksjudgment.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/shkreli-judge-opin-loss-02-25-2018.pdf https://martinshkrelilacksjudgment.files.wordpress.com/2018/...
  - dayaz36 9y ago
    I never suggested the judges decision was off the cuff, you just made that up. I simply stated that he is doing 7 years for a $10.4M hypothetical loss that never happened.
exabrial 9y ago
The guy is certainly crass and I wouldn't trust him further than I can toss him, but the way our legal system has treated him worries me if I'm ever accused of a made up crime.
mabbo 9y ago
Looking at the photos of this guy, I'm starting to wonder if that sick little smile he has is actually his stress response. Maybe that's how he looks when he's sweating bullets and feels guilty, and we all interpret that as him being an asshole who is glad he got away with the things he's done. I've certainly known people with weirder ticks. Or maybe he's literally a horrendous human being who is rightfully hated for the horrible things he's done.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
c3534l 9y ago
This whole thing seems like the justice system struggling to punish someone for doing something that wasn't illegal, finding something else to pin him with (and he was guilty of it, sure), then basing sentencing on that other crime, but using this new charge as a smokescreen. This whole thing reeks of corruption, but the kind of corruption where the people abusing their authority think they're the good guys.
- CobrastanJorji 9y ago
  Usually I withhold accusations like "reeks of corruption" for people who did not definitely commit a serious felony and then antagonize the system about to sentence me. Did the fact that he was universally hated by the whole country make his sentence for his crimes worse? It's entirely possible. Does that mean the judge was corrupt? No, that's not what that word means. What should you learn? If you're ever convicted of a serious crime, apologize profusely, then shut up, and maybe don't offer a bounty of a presidential candidate's hair.
- enraged_camel 9y ago
  It’s definitely not corruption. Al Capone did lots of awful shit, but in the end was convicted and sent to prison for tax evasion.
swamy_g 9y ago
Glad to see many comments here denouncing this harsh sentencing. Good to know HN also has folks who do their own individual research and not just abide by the mainstream narrative.
marnett 9y ago
Now the public can rest easy knowing that the only person in pharmaceuticals whose business model for increased profits was spending less on R&D and raising the prices of drugs. Growth all around! /s The public (including many people, unfortunately, in this thread) will now be convinced that there is no more price gouging in pharmaceuticals, which is patently false. It is still legal, it is still one of the primary business models, and still no justice is served to the sick and uninsured. Shkreli is going to jail because he almost (whether intentionally or not is to be determined) brought regulation to an entire industry that thrives off of raising prices on drugs needed to treat chronic conditions.
- techman9 9y ago
  No. Shkreli is going to jail because he committed fraud.
edangjeli 9y ago
uow. Ore Martin!!Chfare bere?!
hackermailman 9y ago
Didn't see in the article if he did a plea or actually went through a trial because in finance cases you're supposed to just plea using a hired 'prison consultant' as part of the deal so you get the white glove Madoff treatment where he's teaching economics to cons at a min security camp.
tomcam 9y ago
It will be awful if his fellow inmates do to him what he did to patients.
- inteleng 9y ago
  Offer free prescription fills to uninsured people who ask him for help? Your comment seems to imply he'll be abused in prison, which is less than acceptable.
petrikapu 9y ago
Justice has served. My fate on America as modern democracy increased +10 exp.
DoreenMichele 9y ago
So he cried and pleaded for leniency after being openly a jackass the entire time. I have a child who is not innately good at the social thing. When he was 8, he spent weeks torturing me for giggles because he knew I was not an abusive parent, so he felt like he could get away with it. That stopped when I told him "The point at which you are going to care about my feelings is when you want something from me and my answer is Fuck You." Apparently, Martin's mom should have had a similar conversation with him at some point. Cuz now it hurts and he thinks we supposed to care about his feefees when he never cared about anyone but him. Turn about's fair play. Think on that while rotting in your cell.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
joshsyn 9y ago
He was arrogant, but a damn, no-nonsense honest guy
supergirl 9y ago
convicted by the media for clicks
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
onecooldev24 9y ago
The end of freedom of speech.
dbuder 9y ago
Meanwhile big pharma who do the same thing all the time are at home with their wives and children. This judge probably thinks they did a great thing for society but they further debased the legal system and society.
PeterMikhailov 9y ago
Great commentary by Jeb Lund 31 minutes in: ttps://soundcloud.com/user-695156563/043-cocaine-nights

355 points by tchalla 9y ago

gfosco 9y ago

Harsh sentence for a case where all the money was paid back.

sincerely 9y ago
illegal is illegal
- ryanlol 9y ago
  'illegal is illegal' is not at all how sentencing works. Edit: Not sure if you guys are aware of this, but sentencing is actually completely separate from the part of the trial where they decide whether you're guilty or not.
  - giarc 9y ago
    Unfortunately it's how he got into the mess. Without illegal actions there are no sentencing procedures.
    - daxorid 9y ago
      It's not quite that easy, unfortunately. The vast majority of us, just by sheer ignorance of the contents of the enormous Federal Register, unknowingly commit at least a few federal felonies per year. If the Feds want you in prison, they'll find a way.
      - Clubber 9y ago
        This is absolutely correct. There are shelves and shelves of laws that no one really knows. If someone wants to go after you, it won't take much research.
        DanBC 9y ago
        He didn't accidentally defraud people. He knew exactly what he was doing.
        Clubber 9y ago
        Yes, but that's not the point. The point is the US government has many ways of throwing people in jail it doesn't like, including me or you. That's doesn't equate with a free society.
        DanBC 9y ago
        It doesn't seem relevant to the thread, where he knowingly and willingly engaged in a massive theft-related offence against large numbers of people. That's not "the government is out to get you", that's "the government punishes crooks".
        s73v3r_ 9y ago
        Neither does being perfectly free to defraud investors.
        ryanlol 9y ago
        Did anyone actually suggest that anywhere here?
      - dragonwriter 9y ago
        > The vast majority of us, just by sheer ignorance of the contents of the enormous Federal Register, unknowingly commit at least a few federal felonies per year. Federal felonies (and federal crimes more generally) are defined by the US Code, and almost entirely Title 18 of that Code, not the Federal Register. The Federal Register is the regular publication of regulatory process documents, most of which is notices and procedural background information; the operational material from the Federal Register is codified in, for the most part, the Code of Federal Regulations (which is much smaller than the Federal Register; while not a perfect analogy, you could think of the Federal Register as the Git repository for the Code of Federal Regulations, with commit messages that usually far exceed the size of code changes.) The CFR itself is occasionally relevant to defining the parameters of crimes (not all of which are felonies), in that in certain cases Congress has made violation of certain regulatory orders criminal. But it's only a very small share of the CFR (itself much smaller than the Federal Register) that is relevant to that.
    - ryanlol 9y ago
      With all due respect, I fail to see how this is at all relevant. Could you help me out here? It feels like you and others here are suggesting that we should not discuss sentencing policies in general because Shkreli was guilty, that seems insane to me.
- gfosco 9y ago
  of course, but 7 years is a very long time. It could have been shorter, considering the lack of actual damages.
  - justinjlynn 9y ago
    lesson one: don't play games with other people's money, unless they won't have any left when you're done. The second part is secret /s
  - cowsandmilk 9y ago
    Why do you believe there were no actual damages? Because investors eventually got their money back after years of fraud? (I would also argue the investors in Retrophin lost millions in returns due to Shkreli's paying off MSMB Capital investors, but that is not what he was convicted of)
    - gfosco 9y ago
      They actually had their money tripled. Tripled. Tripled.
      - dragonwriter 9y ago
        Were this a civil case for damages, that would be more relevant. The criminality of getting other people to give up their property with false representations is not eliminated by paying them back plus extra later, however. Civil damages mostly addresses the harm caused, criminal punishment is less about the harm caused by a particular act and more about the risk to society of normalizing the behavior.
      - s73v3r_ 9y ago
        Yeah, they got lucky. Can you guarantee that the next set of investors he pulls this fraud with will be as lucky?
    - oh_sigh 9y ago
      How much longer than normal were investor funds locked up for?
- topbanana 9y ago
  The judicial system doesn't work like that sadly
ModernMech 9y ago
"Your honor, I must protest this sentence! After all, my clients paid back all the money they stole from the bank!"
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- gfosco 9y ago
  Not really a good analogy. They invested with him, he lost it but found another way to make that money back. There wasn't any theft.
  - jartelt 9y ago
    If I give you money to invest in Alphabet stock and you instead invest it in lottery tickets, that seems like theft to me regardless of whether the lottery tickets pay off or not.
    - jonnycomputer 9y ago
      it surely does sound like people are looking for excuses for the guy. it was fraud, and he has only himself to blame.
      - s73v3r_ 9y ago
        I think it's just that so many people don't want to have to think about their intentions when they do things.
  - danso 9y ago
    He wasn't prosecuted for theft (or embezzlement). He was prosecuted for fraud.
  - meowface 9y ago
    He not only lost it, he lied and said he did not lose it and that their money was safe and sound. Big difference. When you fabricate numbers and lie to people who have given you money, you're committing fraud, regardless of your ultimate intentions or if you manage to recover the money through other means.
dragonwriter 9y ago
Especially given that the funnelling other money to cover the losses happened after some investors and the SEC were already on to the fraud.

bhouston 9y ago

He was so obnoxious that I guess it is easy to be happy about that, but he was so small time in the grand scheme of things. But nearly no bankers responsible for the 2008 financial crisis ever went to jail: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/how-wall-streets-bankers-stayed-out-of-jail/399368/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/how-wal...

toomuchtodo 9y ago
One banker did. For 30 months. I think Shkreli was obnoxious and crude; the sentencing should've aligned with the crime. But America, so vengeance porn. https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/magazine/only-one-top-banker-jail-financial-crisis.html https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/04/magazine/only-one-top-ban...
- danso 9y ago
  He was also obnoxious and crude in a manner that made it near impossible for the judge to be generous in mitigating his sentence with regards to acceptance of responsibility. He couldn't even wait for an hour after being convicted before going on YouTube and bragging about how he thought he wouldn't face any prison time: https://www.marketwatch.com/story/martin-shkrelis-lawyers-fail-to-corral-bragging-pharma-bro-ahead-of-sentencing-2017-08-05 https://www.marketwatch.com/story/martin-shkrelis-lawyers-fa...
  - ImSkeptical 9y ago
    How dare he post on YouTube! 7 years in jail! This is clearly giving an unpopular person an unnecessarily harsh penalty. This is a corruption of justice.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
birken 9y ago
Like it or hate it, this is what the SEC does. You think Martha Stewart deserved jail time for making 50k in an insider trading scheme she didn't really care about? The SEC finds very public cases and then brings the hammer down in order to act a deterrent. Martin Shkreli broke the law, something he didn't have to do. It isn't like it was mob justice and some hugely biased jury convicted him of all the crimes he was committed of without thought. The jury by all accounts fairly deliberated his actions and convicted him of crimes that he did, while letting him off for crimes he didn't do. Then all Shkreli had to do was show some remorese and kiss the ring a little bit, but he continued to be a troll and mock the justice system. He downplayed his crimes literally minutes after being convicted of them, which showed a lack of remorse (and maybe honestly so, but the justice system doesn't like that). He continued to be a troll, including the whole Hillary Clinton incident, many of these statements used against him in sentencing. This isn't a case of the tall blades of grass getting cut first. It's a case where we have a subjective justice system that doesn't want to be mocked while it is doing it's job. Shkreli went out of his way to mock it, he went out of his way to mock the SEC, all the while he actually did commit a crime. Yes, it is a witch hunt in that the SEC will throw the book at some people while letting other people who committed worse crimes off the hook (Phil Mickelson vs Martha Stewart), but that how any limited investigative body works. If you don't want to be a target of a witch hunt, don't break the law. And if you do, kiss the ring. I'm not convinced it is a huge indictment of our society that people who break the law all the while trolling everybody get unfairly harsh punishments, though I admit it is unfair in the sense that life as a whole is unfair.

yodsanklai 9y ago

I used to watch some of his investment tutorials on youtube as well as other videos. For someone called the "most hated man in America", he actually seemed like a nice person. I also enjoyed his trollish sense of humor.

hb3b 9y ago
His video series on investing and chemistry are like an adult version of Khan Academy. Martin literally sat on-air for weeks on end with a Chemistry textbook and went chapter-by-chapter explaining each topic in pretty good detail. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8gjB1PSXv_oAUSAQ16S0fA/videos https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8gjB1PSXv_oAUSAQ16S0fA/vid...
- AdmiralAsshat 9y ago
  This gives me an idea to create a hand-curated list, "Useful Knowledge From Terrible People".
ergothus 9y ago
> I also enjoyed his trollish sense of humor. I think that makes the title that much easier to understand. I'm an old-fuddy-duddy (for example, I say things like 'fuddy-duddy'), but to me there are two forms of trolling. One where you're doing it to get their reaction and entertainment when they get it. I find this usually fun - the person doing it has fun, any audience has fun, and the person has that anguish-relief-joy cycle. When you do this to someone, you aren't gaining joy from the first emption your stoking, you get joy when it's found out and that emotion changes. The trolling itself is building anticipation. An example: My wife bought me a PalmPilot (back when those were a thing) but secretly took it out of the package to charge it, then gifted the surprisingly-not-much-lighter box to me. After my moment of feeling like I'd have to wait longer for my new toy (to try and return it) she revealed it fully-charged, and we had a laugh. The second way is subtly different. The trolls are still poking at a person's emotions. They can SAY the target should get it and enjoy it ("relax, it's just a joke"), but really the goal is to entertain the troll and any audience. The targets of this trolling don't get a laugh. They get anxiety/hate/fear/dread/panic/anger or whatever, and the troll gains satisfaction from that, not from when that ends. Example: Posting political/moral thoughts that you don't have, but that are deliberately chosen to invoke outrage within the forum you are posting to, then moving on to the next once that's gotten enough reaction. I'm obviously biased, but while I can appreciate the first kind, the second kind just seems to be increasing the misery in the world for a laugh. Laughs aren't so hard to get in other ways. Misery is miserable, by definition. So if someone is described as a "troll" I tend to be leery rather than eager. When I encounter someone, it's very easy to find EITHER kind of trolling annoying. Perhaps because your brain is trying to fit people into a context/schema and trolling disrupts that. Brains don't tend to react well to that sort of thing. Known friends and family don't cause that reaction. I don't know anything about Shkreli other than what I've read, but if you say "most hated man in America" and "trollish sense of humor", my instinct is to nod knowingly.

hb3b 9y ago

Cruel and unusual given the crime. Half the sentence of Jeffrey Skilling who destroyed thousands of families. No question in my mind that the judge had it out for him from the get-go.

se30b 9y ago
He really screwed himself over while he was on bail. He probably could have gotten off with what his attorneys wanted (around a year) if he just shut up until after the sentencing was over. But he kept trolling on livestream and twitter and acting like it was a given that he would get off easy. Obviously he was joking around with the Clinton "threat" but he should not have given prosecutors anything to use against him. I like the guy overall, his educational streams were pretty good, but trolling very powerful people while you are facing potential 20 years in prison is insane.
- thewizardofaus 9y ago
  Shkreli taught me lots. If it wasn't for shkreli's advice and guidance my stock portfolio would be a mere fraction of what it is today.
  - jonathanjaeger 9y ago
    Wow, it really is a treasure trove. I'm interested in biotech and could definitely use this kind of primer. Are you investing in biotech or are you just speaking in general?
    - thewizardofaus 9y ago
      I do minor investing in biotech. The skills I learnt generally helped me to focus on sectors that applied to my knowledge base more.
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
danso 9y ago

se30b 9y ago

Can someone explain specifically what lies he told his investors to defraud them?

tedunangst 9y ago
He claimed the fund was worth millions when it was really worth zero.
- spaceflunky 9y ago
  But then he tripled their money...
  - techman9 9y ago
    That doesn't make his claims any less fraudulent.
    - hokumguru 9y ago
      While definitely immoral and risky I might abide by "no harm no foul" - no one was harmed in this, end sum is positive
      - techman9 9y ago
        That's not the way federal law works. Beneficial ends don't justify illegal means in the eyes of federal prosecutors.
      - s73v3r_ 9y ago
        This time. Because he paid those investors with proceeds from his other company. But letting him off here means he'll likely do it again, and those investors might not be so lucky.
  - 4gotmypass 9y ago
    He tripled their money using money that he earned from his pharma company not from his investments with their money, which doesn't sound like a crime, but it's basically a Ponzi scheme and is illegal. (If I remember correctly)

synaesthesisx 9y ago

For every Shkreli that gets locked up there are hundreds of others that walk free. They wanted to make an example of him - it doesn't help that his character is almost a cartoon-villain of sorts.

Clubber 9y ago

Here's what we just witnessed. 1. Companies were cornering certain drugs, then hiking their prices up significantly. Shkrelli did the same thing (but stated he was willing to give it free for anyone who asked). Note, that this is not illegal in any way, but news was all over it and citizens were pissed. 2. Shkrelli, being outspoken, became the focus of this issue. He dug a hole for himself, but concerning drug prices, he did nothing illegal. 3. Prosecutors, needing to do something got him on fraud charges where he misstated information on an investment but still tripled their money. 4. Shkrelli goes to jail, news and citizenry quelled. Companies still free to continue cornering the market and jacking up prices with impunity. That's how you get away with this stuff. News made money with the story. Companies made money with their drug hikes, politicians and prosecutors look good because they took action, Shkrelli investors made money. Shkrelli lost, patients lost, taxpayers lost. Rinse, repeat. Systemic corruption.

swanson 9y ago
Don't forget 3b) had to go through hundreds of jurors while the news/twitter laughed about people saying they could not be impartial because he "had a punchable face" and "disrespected the Wu Tang Clan". Better hope you don't say anything too mean on Twitter and ever end up in court :(
- thrillgore 9y ago
  In the defense of the potential juror, you cannot disrespect the Wu-Tang Clan. They'll banish you to the 36 chambers.
- s73v3r_ 9y ago
  It's more, "don't be an asshole". Which I feel is quite good advice for anyone. People are less willing to help people who are assholes to others.
monochromatic 9y ago
Except this investigation was already in progress when the drug price thing happened.

jcoffland 9y ago

The good news is that the Wu Tang album Shkreli bought is forfeit and can now presumably be released to the public. https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/03/05/590980850/martin-shkreli-now-in-jail-may-have-to-forfeit-that-wu-tang-album-after-all https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/03/05/590980850...

sigstoat 9y ago
that's not how intellectual property, property in general, or being forced to pay fines works, as is pretty clear if you read to the end of that article. if he still owned the album, and it is seized by the government, it would go up for auction, at which point whoever pays for it gets it. and they'd be under no more obligation to release/sell it than shrekli was.
- s73v3r_ 9y ago
  We could start a GoFundMe to purchase the album and release it.
  - sigstoat 9y ago
    i don't know that any of the crowd funding things are structured appropriately for sending a representative to an auction to try and win something for a crowd. that would be an interesting feature for them to add. regardless, best of luck with that plan.

pmarreck 9y ago

Possibly the only man that has caused me to feel bad for a troll. I don't think he deserved this. And it will pretty much only legitimize him as "gangsta"

jimjimjim 9y ago

Role models. He was a rock star at being an asshole. This encourages others who were maybe unsure of their assholeness to feel free to be more assholish. The world need more good role models and less bad ones.

jimjimjim 9y ago
I'm doubling down on my comment. There is a growing trend in not caring if you are hated, and reveling in the attention. That only works while you are powerful. If you fall you need friends and goodwill. The world needs to stop rewarding purposefully angering people just for attention.

roymurdock 9y ago

Really recommend watching Shkreli's interview with The Breakfast Club where he's attacked for all the things he's become infamous for in the public sphere (drug price hikes, wu-tang album, etc.) The guy gets it, and played the game the way it was presented to him. He actually comes across as a very smart, thoughtful, and respectful guy that can roll with the punches and dish back when needed. Sure he's a bit of a troll, but can you blame him when some of the most public figures/role models currently in the US are paid and rewarded for extreme trolling? Feel he's been very misunderstood, and it's a shame he got the book thrown at him https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTNOWSKMS10 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTNOWSKMS10

paxy 9y ago
Well he wasn't sentenced for any of those things. His real "play" was securities fraud.
- roymurdock 9y ago
  Sure, he had the spotlight on him after the "pharma bro" stories came out and everyone started to hate him unequivocally without considering how perverse incentives within the pharma/insurance system have allowed countless other drug manufacturers to take advantage of the same loopholes and price gouging techniques. Unfortunately for him he has a hateable face, fit into the "young rich person flying too close to sun" story arc, and was dumb enough to continue his trolling activities instead of fading from the limelight and allowing the mob to pass on to the next social media pariah. Think about it...his crime was that he lied to a few rich people who gave him money, then ended up making these rich people even more money in the end, ending positively for them. Then ask yourself why prosecutors have failed to go after any of the bankers responsible for the great financial crisis, which affected hundreds of millions of people and their families, causing many people to lose their homes, jobs, etc. Is that really a fair system? Or are people just gloating about this guy going to jail as some type of proxy for justice being served somewhere, in some fashion for white collar financial crime that many have been indirectly victimized by, but have never received due compensation/justice. Really, nobody on HN should care that he's going to prison, drug price gouging will still continue on unabated, and 20 more snake oil ICOs will pop up tomorrow to steal investors money. This conviction is hardly a sign that the system is working as intended. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/08/why-arent-any-bankers-in-prison-for-causing-the-financial-crisis/496232/ https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/08/why-are...

irunbackwards 9y ago

Wu-Tang ain't nothin' to fuck wit.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

otalp 9y ago

It does say something depressing about our laws that he got sent to prison for the thing where he lied to rich people while still making them money rather than the thing where he extorted sick poor people...which is still fully legal even if the majority of society thinks it shouldn't.

paulgb 9y ago
Another way to look at this is that he got a harsher sentence than he should have on the "stealing from the rich" part which is a crime, because he was so unpopular on the extorting the poor part which (sadly) isn't. Whether that's how we would like the system to function is, of course, up for debate.
throwaway84742 9y ago
He didn’t “extort sick poor people”, he extorted insurance companies. If you couldn’t afford his drugs, he was offering them for free.
- s73v3r_ 9y ago
  And schools, and other places which, by law, were required to have Epi-pens on hand.
  - saas_sam 9y ago
    You should read things before posting.
  - matte_black 9y ago
    Schools waste disgusting amounts of taxpayer money overpaying for things all the time. What’s a couple more dollars to the books?
  - throwahey 9y ago
    I think you are confused, Shkreli's company owned retrophin, the toxoplasmosis drug, not epi-pen's. And as the parent commenter said, he was charging insurance companies alone, and claimed the drug was only used by a few hundred people.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

swedish_mafia 9y ago

This is a travesty. He is sentenced not for drug prices but for this: he started a hedge fund which lost money, used some of the funds to start a pharma co, the pharma co did well went public and he returned the investors their money at a huge profit for them. Who sufffered? No one. But he misrepresented his funds performance and did not inform them of the pharma co investment. This man is an entrepreneur.

hidenotslide 9y ago
His new investors made $10 million less than they would have if he had not stolen from them. Embezzlement is still a crime even if you are the CEO and the company is profitable. And there was a bunch of lying in securities disclosures of course, which is a crime by itself.
rpearl 9y ago
So he lied in order to start the company in the first place and managed to exploit the lie into a profit. This is still fraud. The fact that it paid off isn't relevant to the fact that it's fraud.
s73v3r_ 9y ago
This man is not an entrepreneur, and to try and say so is to insult and demean actual entrepreneurs everywhere. His investors got lucky that he had the funds to repay them due to his other company. Had he gotten away with this, he likely would have done it again, and those investors might not have been so lucky.
- swedish_mafia 9y ago
  You can talk after you take a biotech company public.
  - rpearl 9y ago
    no, we can talk about the fact that using fraud to fund legitimate activity isn't entrepreneurship, now.

dayaz36 9y ago

This is insane. Sentencing guidelines for his crime was 0-12 months. He didn't even lose his investors any money.

DanBC 9y ago
Can you link to the US sentencing guidelines please? Elsehwere in the thread I've linked to the UK version, and it seems he'd have got a similar sentence over here. Although we do have parole, so he'd be out a lot sooner.
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Can you link to the US sentencing guidelines please? https://www.ussc.gov/guidelines https://www.ussc.gov/guidelines
danso 9y ago
Shkreli's lawyers sought a 12+ month sentence. Sentencing guidelines allowed for a max of 25+ years https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-crime-shkreli/pharma-bro-shkreli-seeks-12-to-18-month-sentence-below-guidelines-idUSKCN1GC258 https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-crime-shkreli/pharma-...
maskedinvader 9y ago
not according to the Judge who cited Federal Law to determine he did incur 10.4 million in losses for the investors [1], it's complicated even though he did pay the investors back after they became suspicious. My understanding is this, say you leave your ferrari at the valet and the valet driver took it on a joy ride and returns it undamaged, you didn't lose anything, but the valet driver did break the law. 1. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-crime-shkreli/pharma-bro-shkreli-to-be-held-responsible-for-10-4-million-in-losses-u-s-judge-idUSKCN1GA2DB https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-crime-shkreli/pharma-...
- cypherpunks01 9y ago
  What law is the valet breaking in that case?

seorphates 9y ago

This is what jail is for, bad people that do bad things to others. Excepting maybe bankers or traders, of course. You know, as opposed to jailing good people that do "bad" things to themselves.

rajacombinator 9y ago

Jail time for JPM, Goldman, Bear Stearns, Lehman execs? Oh I see ... Shkreli’s real crime was not donating to the appropriate PACs. (Friend of Schumer, etc...)

thrillgore 9y ago

Okay, so who wants to create an ICO to buy his Wu-Tang album when it goes up for auction, and then publish it to the Internet Archive?

seltzered_ 9y ago

I realize the actual charges are for different things, but I find myself comparing Shkreli's actions of hiking up daraprim prices to John Kapoor's fraud charges to sell opioids ( https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/10/doj-billionaire-pharma-owner-fueled-the-opioid-epidemic-with-bribery-scheme/ https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/10/doj-billionaire-... ). So far one of the doctors involved in the latter case got four years ( https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-09/ivy-league-doctor-gets-4-years-prison-for-insys-opioid-kickbacks https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-03-09/ivy-leagu... ). More light needs to be shined on Kapoor's case (and the practices in Big Pharma in general) if it's impacting more lives. I don't like Shkreli's obnoxiousness, yet tried listening to his reasoning in why he raised the daraprim price versus other drugs. His talk last year at Harvard ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3bpXHMP4ww https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n3bpXHMP4ww ) dives a bit into the thought process.

odammit 9y ago

Is he getting a comfy white collar prison sentence? Also, not to be that guy, but I hope he gets beat daily by other inmates. Edit: jk, totally being that guy.

no_one_ever 9y ago
dude...
- odammit 9y ago
  Chill, even his lawyer wants to punch him in the face. http://time.com/5193461/martin-shkreli-lawyer-punch-face/ http://time.com/5193461/martin-shkreli-lawyer-punch-face/
dragonwriter 9y ago
> Also, not to be that guy, You know, if you feel the need to write this, it's a good sign that you should not write whatever it would come with. Because it's guaranteed that if you do, you will, in fact, be that guy.
- odammit 9y ago
  Corrected.

tpush 9y ago

The majority of comments here being sad about Shkreli kinda reaffirms my views about HN, I have to say. Shkreli always seemed like a personified 4chan teenager "memelord" with money. Good to see that playing out your delusions of grandeur and arrogance toward the justice system is met with consequences. Maybe in prison he will mature a bit.

rainieri 9y ago
He already is quite mature. The media brought him to the stage and he gave a little show. You should see one of his videos shutting down people like you who read 3 or 4 articles and formed an opinion based on that.
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hartator 9y ago
> delusions of grandeur and arrogance I don't think delusions qualify as crimes. However, bending laws to judge someone on actions outside of the scope of a trial is a crime.
BenSahar 9y ago
I think his fan club is hilarious. That they picked such a whiney troll to follow speaks volumes about their character.
- rainieri 9y ago
  Nobody is actually following him as you describe. Most of people that side with him do so because they are amazed at the unfounded witch hunt that he received and at the amount of people who demonize him 95% because of the Daraprim drama and 5% for his actual conviction. And of that 5% - 0.5% might have an idea of what they are talking about. See his videos. You wouldn't stand a chance debating him unless you were a lawyer or pharmaceutical exec. You are coming from emotions rather than facts. Really. His troll persona is only a small portion of his character. https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2018/03/09/you-hate-martin-shkreli-thats-sort-of-the-problem/#3adfbfa86238 https://www.forbes.com/sites/matthewherper/2018/03/09/you-ha...

dayaz36 9y ago

To give some background on how his sentencing increased so dramatically, initially he was convicted but since no one lost any money his sentencing guidelines were 0-12 months(most likely no jail time since it was his first offence). As a general rule of thumb in federal fraud cases sentencing is primarily determined by the what's called the "loss amount" of the crime in question. But a couple weeks ago the judge decided to come up with a HYPOTHETICAL loss and base the sentencing on that! And that hypothetical loss was set at $10.4M! Meaning he just went from no jail time 7 years overnight. This seems beyond absurd and as far as I know has no precedence.

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danso 9y ago
Where are your sources that he was only facing 0-12 months when he was initially convicited? There are stories from the time of his conviction (in 2017) that say he could potentially face decades in prison: https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2017/08/05/lack-of-remorse-could-bite-martin-shkreli-when-it-comes-time-for-sentencing-experts-say.html https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2017/08/05/lack-of-remors...
meritt 9y ago
> the judge decided to come up with a HYPOTHETICAL loss The judge issued a 96-page opinion [1] that details his crimes and the sentencing guidelines. It was not an off-the-cuff decision as you're suggesting. > This seems beyond absurd and as far as I know has no precedence. Your lack of knowledge on a subject does not make it absurd. [1] https://martinshkrelilacksjudgment.files.wordpress.com/2018/02/shkreli-judge-opin-loss-02-25-2018.pdf https://martinshkrelilacksjudgment.files.wordpress.com/2018/...
- dayaz36 9y ago
  I never suggested the judges decision was off the cuff, you just made that up. I simply stated that he is doing 7 years for a $10.4M hypothetical loss that never happened.

exabrial 9y ago

The guy is certainly crass and I wouldn't trust him further than I can toss him, but the way our legal system has treated him worries me if I'm ever accused of a made up crime.

mabbo 9y ago

Looking at the photos of this guy, I'm starting to wonder if that sick little smile he has is actually his stress response. Maybe that's how he looks when he's sweating bullets and feels guilty, and we all interpret that as him being an asshole who is glad he got away with the things he's done. I've certainly known people with weirder ticks. Or maybe he's literally a horrendous human being who is rightfully hated for the horrible things he's done.

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c3534l 9y ago

This whole thing seems like the justice system struggling to punish someone for doing something that wasn't illegal, finding something else to pin him with (and he was guilty of it, sure), then basing sentencing on that other crime, but using this new charge as a smokescreen. This whole thing reeks of corruption, but the kind of corruption where the people abusing their authority think they're the good guys.

CobrastanJorji 9y ago
Usually I withhold accusations like "reeks of corruption" for people who did not definitely commit a serious felony and then antagonize the system about to sentence me. Did the fact that he was universally hated by the whole country make his sentence for his crimes worse? It's entirely possible. Does that mean the judge was corrupt? No, that's not what that word means. What should you learn? If you're ever convicted of a serious crime, apologize profusely, then shut up, and maybe don't offer a bounty of a presidential candidate's hair.
enraged_camel 9y ago
It’s definitely not corruption. Al Capone did lots of awful shit, but in the end was convicted and sent to prison for tax evasion.

swamy_g 9y ago

Glad to see many comments here denouncing this harsh sentencing. Good to know HN also has folks who do their own individual research and not just abide by the mainstream narrative.

marnett 9y ago

Now the public can rest easy knowing that the only person in pharmaceuticals whose business model for increased profits was spending less on R&D and raising the prices of drugs. Growth all around! /s The public (including many people, unfortunately, in this thread) will now be convinced that there is no more price gouging in pharmaceuticals, which is patently false. It is still legal, it is still one of the primary business models, and still no justice is served to the sick and uninsured. Shkreli is going to jail because he almost (whether intentionally or not is to be determined) brought regulation to an entire industry that thrives off of raising prices on drugs needed to treat chronic conditions.

techman9 9y ago
No. Shkreli is going to jail because he committed fraud.

edangjeli 9y ago

uow. Ore Martin!!Chfare bere?!

hackermailman 9y ago

Didn't see in the article if he did a plea or actually went through a trial because in finance cases you're supposed to just plea using a hired 'prison consultant' as part of the deal so you get the white glove Madoff treatment where he's teaching economics to cons at a min security camp.

tomcam 9y ago

It will be awful if his fellow inmates do to him what he did to patients.

inteleng 9y ago
Offer free prescription fills to uninsured people who ask him for help? Your comment seems to imply he'll be abused in prison, which is less than acceptable.

petrikapu 9y ago

Justice has served. My fate on America as modern democracy increased +10 exp.

DoreenMichele 9y ago

So he cried and pleaded for leniency after being openly a jackass the entire time. I have a child who is not innately good at the social thing. When he was 8, he spent weeks torturing me for giggles because he knew I was not an abusive parent, so he felt like he could get away with it. That stopped when I told him "The point at which you are going to care about my feelings is when you want something from me and my answer is Fuck You." Apparently, Martin's mom should have had a similar conversation with him at some point. Cuz now it hurts and he thinks we supposed to care about his feefees when he never cared about anyone but him. Turn about's fair play. Think on that while rotting in your cell.

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joshsyn 9y ago

He was arrogant, but a damn, no-nonsense honest guy

supergirl 9y ago

convicted by the media for clicks

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onecooldev24 9y ago

The end of freedom of speech.

dbuder 9y ago

Meanwhile big pharma who do the same thing all the time are at home with their wives and children. This judge probably thinks they did a great thing for society but they further debased the legal system and society.

PeterMikhailov 9y ago

Great commentary by Jeb Lund 31 minutes in: ttps://soundcloud.com/user-695156563/043-cocaine-nights