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Martin Shkreli Is Finally Going Away (to Prison)

NEW YORK, NY - AUGUST 4: (L to R) Lead defense attorney Benjamin Brafman walks with former pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli after the jury issued a verdict at the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, August 4, 2017 in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. Shkreli was found guilty on three of the eight counts involving securities fraud and conspiracy to commit securities and wire fraud. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Pharma profiteer and insufferable gadfly Martin Shkreli has been sentenced to seven years in prison for defrauding investors in his former hedge funds, the Associated Press reports. Judge Kiyo Matsumoto, who last week ordered Shkreli to forfeit his rare Wu-Tang Clan album and millions in other assets, handed down the sentence in federal court in New York today.

Shkreli was convicted last August on three counts of securities fraud and related conspiracy stemming from his pre-public-notoriety career as a hedge fund manager. Prosecutors also accused him of taking millions from one of his pharmaceutical companies, Retrophin, to pay back hedge fund investors. (It was Shkreli’s next pharmaceutical company, Turing, that raised the price of a drug sometimes used for AIDS patients from $13.50 to $750 per pill.)

Shkreli himself has been in jail since last September, when his bail was revoked after he offered Facebook followers $5,000 for a strand of Hillary Clinton’s hair. At today’s sentencing hearing, Shkreli cried, and his own lawyer acknowledged that he’d sometimes like to punch his client in the face.