Infamous “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli was released early from prison Wednesday, with the disgraced exec and one-time “most hated man in America” serving just over four years of his seven-year sentence on fraud charges.
Soon after his release from a Pennsylvania prison, Shkreli announced his semi-freedom with a selfie/troll post on Facebook, “Getting out of real prison is easier than getting out of Twitter prison,” a reference to him getting booted from Twitter five years earlier for harassing a female journalist.
CNBC confirmed Shkreli’s prison release, though the former owner of Wu-Tang Clan’s one-copy-only Once Upon a Time in Shaolin will have to spend his summer in a Bureau of Prisons-sanctioned halfway house in New York to finish out his sentence.
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“I am pleased to report that Martin Shkreli has been released from Allenwood prison and transferred to a BOP halfway house after completing all programs that allowed his prison sentence to be shortened,” Shkreli’s lawyer Benjamin Brafman said in a statement.
Shkreli was found guilty of misleading investors about the stock performance of his hedge funds MSMB Capital and MSMB Healthcare, while he also used money from his pharmaceutical company Retrophin to pay off investors and personal debts. In total, Shkreli reportedly cheated investors out of more than $11 million between 2009 and 2014, and was subsequently banned for life from ever reentering the pharmaceutical business.
Prior to his conviction in 2017, Shkreli gained notoriety for raising the price of Daraprim — a medication used by AIDS and cancer patients — from $13.50 to $750 overnight, as well as his toxic online behavior that included putting a bounty on Hillary Clinton’s hair as well as promising to share (and then reneging) his $2 million Once Upon a Time in Shaolin.
(Shkreli was forced to sell the Wu-Tang album as part of the $7.4 million forfeiture of assets following his conviction; the Pharma Bro’s copy has since been purchased by Crypto Bros.)
A Bureau of Prisons spokesperson said in a statement Wednesday, “Community confinement means the inmate is in either home confinement or a Residential Reentry Center (RRC, or halfway house). Mr. Shkreli’s projected release date from the custody of the BOP is September 14, 2022. For safety and security reasons, we do not discuss any individual inmate’s conditions of confinement to include transfers or release plans.”