The U.S. government on Tuesday said it had sold a unique Wu-Tang Clan album previously owned by former pharmaceutical executive Martin Shkreli, who was convicted of securities fraud in 2017.
The sale of the album, titled “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin,” will cover the balance of the $7.4 million in forfeiture that a judge ordered Mr. Shkreli to pay at a 2018 sentencing where he was also given a seven-year prison term, federal prosecutors said. The sale contract includes a confidentiality provision that protects information about the price and buyer, according to federal prosecutors in Brooklyn, N.Y., where Mr. Shkreli was tried.
Mr. Shkreli has said he paid $2 million for the only existing copy of the album by the New York hip-hop group at an auction in 2015.
Discussions with the government over the sale went on for more than a year, said Peter Scoolidge, a lawyer who said he represented the buyer who wishes to remain anonymous for now.
The album, which came in a hand-carved nickel-silver box with a gold-leafed certificate of authenticity, wasn’t permitted to be released to the public until 2103, according to the website of EZCLZIV/SCLUZAY, which identifies itself as a consortium of private investors that funded and coordinated the creation of the album. Mr. Scoolidge said those original restrictions on the album remain in place.
“Shkreli has been held accountable and paid the price for lying and stealing from investors to enrich himself,” said Jacquelyn Kasulis, acting U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York, the office that brought the criminal case. “With today’s sale of this one-of-a-kind album, his payment of the forfeiture is now complete.”
Ben Brafman, a lawyer for Mr. Shkreli, said he was pleased that his client had satisfied his forfeiture obligation. “We are also pleased that he was able to sell the album for a price that is substantially more than that which he paid for it,” Mr. Brafman added.
As of this past April, the government had collected $5.1 million toward the forfeiture, with an outstanding balance of $2.2 million, according to a filing in a related case.
The government still has two of Mr. Shkreli’s assets in its custody: a Picasso engraving and his interest in Phoenixus AG, his former drug company, prosecutors said in a letter to the judge filed Tuesday. Prosecutors said that the drug company shares, and possibly the Picasso, may be made available to a receiver expected to be appointed in a separate civil-court proceeding involving Mr. Shkreli.
In 2017, a Brooklyn federal jury convicted Mr. Shkreli, who became known as the “Pharma Bro,” of three securities-fraud counts and acquitted him of five other conspiracy charges. Prosecutors said Mr. Shkreli committed a series of interconnected frauds, misleading investors in his hedge funds and looting a publicly traded drug company for cash and stock to cover the losses when those funds foundered. His lawyers had argued that Mr. Shkreli never intended to defraud investors and that he eventually repaid all alleged victims.
Mr. Shkreli is serving his sentence at a low-security federal prison in Pennsylvania, federal records show. His release date is Oct. 11, 2022.
Write to Corinne Ramey at [email protected]
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Appeared in the July 28, 2021, print edition as ‘Unique Album Owned By Shkreli Is Sold.’
