Martin!

Let's walk down Memory Lane and remember the good old days when Martin Shkreli was smugly smirking his way onto the list of America's Top Jerks.

He's 37 now and dwells in a federal ironbar hotel in Allenwood, PA.  He founded some hedge funds and now he has a job trimming hedges in prison! For real, he made a ton of moolah as co-founder of Elea Capital, MSMB Capital Management, and MSMB Healthcare. He was also co-founder and CEO of a biotechnology firm called Retrophin, and founder and former CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals.

Lotta money, and he was in with those guys who make a billion dollars a day trading money for money.  But the ship hit the sand for him in 2015, when he bought the license to manufacture a drug called Daraprim, which is used to treat pneumonia in HIV/AIDS cases. It's an important lifesaving drug.

Knowing this, Shkreli raised the price per pill from $13.50 to $750.  That's called raising the price by a factor of 56.  For this act of benevolence, Shkreli came to be known as "Pharma Bro" and "The most hated man in America."

For his part, he said, "Everybody's doing it. In capitalism, you try to get the highest price you can for a product."

Here's the secret to this sort of operation: if someone brings your villainy to light, quickly have pictures taken where you're delivering hams to the needy or paying to have old bicycles fixed up to give to children. Don't sit there and brag about bleeding others for every nickel you can squeeze out of them.

But by being a flagrant reprobate, he became the target of federal prosecution. He was charged and convicted on two counts of securities fraud and one count of conspiring to commit securities fraud.  The Feds SAID it had nothing to do with the whole Daraprim thing, but you know...

SO off he goes to Club Fed for 7 years, and will pay $7.4 million in fines.

AND SO this past weekend, a judge looked over his request to leave prison. He applied for early dismissal, claiming that he wanted to research a treatment for the novel coronavirus.

Officials said this was the sort of “delusional self-aggrandizing behavior” that got him sent up in the first place.

Smirking at a Congressional hearing.

Shkreli posted a request to get out, because the pharma industry's attempts to create Rona-No-More pills or vaccines are "inadequate.” He points out, with no support, that he is “one of the few executives experienced in ALL aspects of drug development.”

After all, Martin says the cure “so far eluded the best medical and scientific minds in the world working around the clock.”

U.S. District Judge Kiyo Matsumoto said, don't start packing, Sunny Jim. After all, she said, that Shkreli was “healthy,” with no “recent history of preexisting medical conditions that place him at higher risk” and there was no report of any cases at the virus at Allenwood.

But the judge noted that the “Defendant requests to be released into, among other places, an apartment in New York City, the epicenter of the covid-19 pandemic.”

Shkreli’s attorney, Ben Brafman, says he and Shkreli were “disappointed” by the decision but that it was “not unexpected."

I expect that Martin's going to do every minute of his term. I hope I'm right!