For the next four months, the perpetually smirking Martin Shkreli will sit in federal detention in Brooklyn in far grimier conditions than the white collar “Club Fed” experience he was expecting. Dubbed “Pharma Bro” by a media scandalized by his penchant for hiking the price of lifesaving drugs by 4,000 and 5,000 percent when he was a pharmaceutical executive, there isn’t a large reservoir of public sympathy for him. Quite the opposite.
For the next four months, the perpetually smirking Martin Shkreli will sit in federal detention in Brooklyn in far grimier conditions than the white collar “Club Fed” experience he was expecting. Dubbed “Pharma Bro” by a media scandalized by his penchant for hiking the price of lifesaving drugs by 4,000 and 5,000 percent when he was a pharmaceutical executive, there isn’t a large reservoir of public sympathy for him. Quite the opposite.
Shkreli, who was convicted for lying to investors about the performance of two of his hedge funds, violated the conditions of his $5 million bond. The 34-year-old posted a bounty on Facebook in which he promised $5,000 to anyone who could grab hair from Hillary Clinton during her book tour for “What Happened.”
Because this is America where the chances are 100 percent that someone would attempt to take Shkreli up on the offer to assault the former presidential candidate for both the notoriety and the cash, U.S. District Judge Kiyo Matsumoto revoked his bond and ordered him to cool his heels at the Brooklyn Metropolitan Correctional Center until he is formally sentenced in January.
Predictably, Shkreli, who failed to take any of his legal proceedings seriously and defied his lawyers by ignoring gag orders during his trial, claimed the bounty on Clinton’s head was “a joke.” Well, the joke’s on him.
Matsumoto ordered him to report to a prison that lacks any of the amenities that the convicted felon expected. His predictions that he would work on his tennis game and Xbox skills might come true once he’s sentenced in January, but until then, he’ll be locked up in a cell without internet connections, fresh air or sunlight.
Many will say that being sent to a Brooklyn prison that provides the kind of experience one might expect to undergo at a Third World prison represents the kind of rough justice Shkreli deserves. Given his track record as one of the most notorious price-gougers in the corporate world, few elicit the kind of knee-jerk revulsion that Shkreli does.
What isn’t clear is why Shkreli, who surely has an inkling of how unpopular he is, would threaten Clinton and antagonize a judge who would not hesitate to banish him to a dungeon even before his sentencing in January. Perhaps the quirky, arrogant former executive fails to pick up on cues that are obvious to the rest of us. In any event, he’ll be out of sight until January. Then he will be sentenced to prison.
It looks as if the long arc of justice, if not karma, curved correctly in this case.
— Pittsburgh Post-Gazette