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Wondery Plus subscribers can listen to scam fluencers early and ad-free right now. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or Apple Podcasts. Sarah, between Sam Bankman-Fried and Donald Trump, there are a lot of big fraud trials in the news right now. Have you been following any of them? Vaguely. They're very hard to follow. There's too much happening and too much information all the time.
I know. Well, as you know, we cover a lot of fraud trials on this show, but there's one that I still think about all the time, unfortunately, for my mental health. It happened in a federal courthouse in Brooklyn back in 2017, and it was chaotic from the moment it got started. The defendant alienated jurors, harassed journalists, and made fun of the prosecutors. He talked so much smack that he was actually banned from speaking outside the courthouse publicly.
Like I said, it was chaotic. Do you remember who I'm talking about? I mean, of course I do. Mr. Bi's Wu-Tang album.
Yes, exactly. Martin Shkreli. And this week, we're rerunning our two-part series from last year, all about the farmer bro everybody loves to hate. We'll be back in two weeks with a fresh batch of new episodes for you, including our deep dive into Congressman George Santos, highly anticipated. It drops November 27th on Wondery Plus and December 4th on the public feed. Stay tuned.
Hey, baby. Okay, so who do you think is someone that everyone everywhere, no matter what their political affiliation or moral alignment, can agree sucks? I don't know. This is a very random answer, but I feel like everyone hates Omarosa. She was on The Apprentice, like a very early season of Donald Trump's old show. I didn't come here to make friends. I said that from day one. And if you all stop being so freaking sensitive, you know,
Life's too short to be a bitch. She was so ruthless. And then she kind of joined him when he started his political career. And then everyone hated her even more. Yeah. And then she bailed on him, too. Yeah. And he hates her. And yeah. All
All right. That's a pretty good answer. I will say I was half expecting you to say me or even us based on our Apple podcast reviews, some of which are very rude. Yeah. I mean, I do think a lot of people can unite over disliking us. Don't forget to leave us a review. Okay. Well, anyway.
I want to talk to you about one super rich, cartoonishly evil entrepreneur who is so notoriously and unilaterally loathed that I'm pretty sure he's actually the great equalizer across the globe. Yeah, that is a very powerful position to be in when everyone hates you. Everyone loves a supervillain until they don't. It's a clear and unusually warm morning in New York City on December 17th, 2015.
It's early, like 6.30 a.m., and Martin Shkreli is likely fast asleep in his Murray Hill apartment. For non-New Yorkers, Murray Hill is a Manhattan neighborhood full of finance bros and PR girls. I personally cannot afford to live there, not on some podcaster's salary. Martin is 32 years old with sharp facial features and dark, swoopy hair. And I imagine that he's jolted awake when he hears a loud banging at the front door.
He's groggy and disoriented. He throws on a gray hoodie and opens the door to a group of FBI agents with handcuffs. Martin is under arrest, and he's charged with securities fraud. The feds say he misled investors, lied to brokers, and misappropriated hundreds of thousands of dollars from hedge funds. Martin is thrown into the back of a squad car and taken to the Jacob K. Javits Federal Building in Lower Manhattan.
The building is a 41-story glass and concrete monolith. And instead of sneaking him through the back, the FBI decides to march Martin through a crowd of reporters and photographers who are waiting out front. It's a complete media frenzy. I actually have a picture of it. Sarah, can you describe it?
Oh, yeah. I can describe it without even looking at it. I know this photo very well. It's Martin Shkreli. He, you know, is totally stone-faced. He's wearing the gray hoodie we all know and kind of love. I mean, it's a very evocative photo because he looks so normal. Like, you wouldn't look at this guy and think, oh, he's done all these things. No, total normie.
I feel like he looks like a poorly behaved teen being trotted out for like a Dr. Phil segment where he gets sent to the ranch, you know? Yeah. Well, facing the cameras and the flashing lights, Martin's facial expression is completely blank. A lifetime of putting up walls and hiding his emotions has prepared him very well for this moment. But now he's finally facing consequences and he could serve up to 20 years in prison. Martin Shkreli is a rags to riches and then back to rags story.
Adopting American capitalism as his religion, he traded morality for money. And in the end, he became public enemy number one. From Wondery, I'm Saatchi Cole. And I'm Sarah Hagee. And this is Scamfluencers.
Sarah, I have frankly been completely obsessed with the story. It's a little bit about financial fraud, a little bit about how love can truly blind us. And it hits on a little hobby horse of mine about how incredibly fucked up the American health care system is. There's something for us all. This is There's Something About Martin, Part One. Legend.
Before he becomes a symbol for American capitalism, Martin Shkreli is just a shy, awkward kid struggling to fit in. He grows up in a very working-class family in Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn, near Coney Island. He's one of four kids in a close-knit Albanian-Croatian family. The neighborhood is dense with Eastern European immigrants like his parents. They both work odd jobs, mostly as janitors. For a while, his dad works as a doorman.
Martin later says that he grows up with a lot of financial and medical anxieties and that his family has a history of mental health issues. He's skeletally thin and he skipped the first grade, so he's younger than his classmates. He often shows up to school without enough money for lunch, never mind cool sneakers and nice clothes. He seems like a lonely outcast, desperate to be liked. And it doesn't help that his hobbies are pretty dorky. He's into chess, video games, and computer programming.
Martin has zero social status, so he seems to fixate on how to gain power by getting rich as hell. When he's just 13 years old, he reportedly asks his parents for the book Alchemy of Finance for Christmas. Around this time, his father says he gives him $2,000 to play the stock market in his name.
Here's what he later tells a Vice reporter. I got interested in stocks as a kid, and my friends made fun of me all the time for that. And I told them that it someday would matter. Okay, well, by someday it would matter, you mean for your entire existence? Forever. Forever, like for hundreds of years. But also, I do think that there's something about guys like this. They always have a story where they're like,
When I was a kid, no one liked me, but I was studying the blade. You know what I mean? I feel like a lot of the stories we do around men are just like Joker origin stories because they all kind of feel the same way. It's like somebody didn't like you. I was special since I was a kid because people didn't like me and I had some truly lame interest. And that's why I'm a genius.
Well, Martin voraciously reads newspapers, absorbing everything he can about trading and Wall Street. And by the time he's in high school in the mid-90s, he's already pretty good at playing the stock market. One day, he's hanging at his crush's house in her bedroom when her dad knocks on the door and asks to speak with Martin in the other room. So Martin is preparing himself for the whole if you touch my daughter, I'll kill you talk situation.
But the dad looks at him with this serious expression on his face and he asks Martin for investment advice. Oh, God, what a loser dad. That would be a boner killer for me, I think. Also, I thought no one liked you, Martin. Suddenly you're in a girl's room. Yeah, I didn't go into a boy's room until my 20s.
Well, Martin is consumed by this obsession with getting rich to prove himself. And it seems like he thinks he's always the smartest person in the room, even in a room full of adults. So he starts questioning authority, especially the kind of authority that stands between him and serious money. When he finally gets unleashed on Wall Street a few years later, the rules won't apply.
As a 17-year-old freshman at Baruch College, Martin scores an internship at a Wall Street hedge fund. It's called Kramer Berkowitz. And Jim Kramer, the host of CNBC's Mad Money with Jim Kramer, is a partner there. I picture Martin standing outside their offices wearing a starched button-down shirt and dorky slacks. His eyes are all big as he stares up at a skyscraper. It's probably a huge deal for a working-class kid like him. It's the first day of the rest of his life.
At first, Martin's job is mostly menial tasks. File this, staple that.
But Martin's dreams are too big for the admin work he's been given. So he learns all he can about the stock market. And he spends hours in chat rooms after work, speculating about stocks. And it turns out, Sarah, he's pretty good at it. One day, he suggests that his employer short a biotech stock. Basically, that means taking a huge bet that the price of the stock would plummet.
So Kramer Berkowitz takes a chance on Martin's hunch and it pays off big time. The share price of the stock takes a nosedive and the firm makes a huge profit. I mean, it is very remarkable that Martin is so young and able to do this. Yeah, it's such a good play, in fact, that the Securities and Exchange Commission calls Kramer Berkowitz to make sure that they didn't have any insider knowledge.
But they don't find anything. Just a gangly teenager with good instincts. Martin knows that a lot of biotech firms are out there raising tons of money, promising investors that their drug is going to cure diseases and also make them very rich.
But most don't even get their drugs approved by the FDA. And without approval, the value of their shares plummet. It's a lot of bluffing, and Martin knows how to sniff it out. So he becomes a golden boy at the firm. According to Vanity Fair, he becomes Kramer Berkowitz's mole, spying on hedge funds and then sharing the information with the team. After graduating from Baruch College at just 20 years old, Martin is hired by Kramer Berkowitz as an analyst. But he doesn't stay put for long.
He takes jobs at a few other firms over the next few years, using his reputation for being a finance prodigy to climb the ladder on Wall Street. When he decides to start his own firm, Alia Capital Management, in 2006, he easily convinces multiple investors to raise roughly $5 million to help him get it off the ground.
But Martin's boldness is a double-edged sword. He loves making big bets, but sometimes he's wrong. And being wrong on Wall Street is very expensive. A year after founding Aaliyah Capital Management, Martin makes a big gamble. He bets more than $2 million that the market will drop.
And when it doesn't, he doesn't have the money to pay back the investment bank Lehman Brothers. So Lehman Brothers takes Martin to court and wins a $2.3 million judgment against him. But Martin has impeccable timing as ever because something big happens on Wall Street in 2008. Sarah, do you have any guesses? You know, I watched a bit of this movie once while on my phone called The Big Short. Does it have anything to do with that?
I think so. I also watched that movie. I barely understood it. I was like, money, bad. Money, bad, me, stupid. That's what I took from that movie. But yes, you're right. In 2008, the stock market collapses and the world is thrown into a financial crisis. It's a financial crisis.
It's the millennial original sin, basically. And also, Lehman Brothers completely folds. They file for bankruptcy, and guess who doesn't have to pay them back anymore? Our boy Marty? Our boy Marty. So Martin might be off the hook, but his new company has been destroyed. So he moves back home to Sheepshead Bay. It's probably a little depressing to go from being a swanky Wall Street player to sleeping in your childhood bedroom.
But Martin refuses to stay down. And this time, he's determined to do whatever it takes to succeed, legal or otherwise. After a while, Martin remembers the thing that made him a superstar when he was still just an intern, shorting biotech stocks. So he decides to start a new hedge fund that focuses on doing just that.
He calls it MSMB Capital, and its tactics are savage. He goes online and spreads rumors that certain stocks will go down, influencing people to sell them. And it works. Technically, this kind of market manipulation is illegal, but it's really hard to prove.
So it seems like there are a lot of things that are illegal. Wink, wink, you know? Yes. Or it's like, I don't know, is it legal? Wink. Yeah, there's a lot of sort of internal winking happening in this industry that you and I will never understand. But Martin is back, baby.
He's out of his parents' house with a new company. From the outside, things seem to be going great. Martin calls and emails current investors and prospective investors to tell them that MSMB is killing it. But he's hiding a big secret from them. He owes millions to the investors for his first failed company, and he doesn't have it. The truth is, MSMB is barely surviving.
How do you function knowing you owe millions of dollars? I don't know. I get nervous when I get a Venmo request that I don't immediately fulfill.
But Martin still manages to court investors. One of them is 21-year-old Sarah Hassan. She's got long brown hair and dimples. Her dad is an uber-wealthy pharmaceuticals executive, and she appears to be following in his footsteps. She just graduated with an MBA in finance and pharmaceutical management. And after she hears that Martin is a rising star in the hedge fund world, she decides she needs to meet him.
Martin and Sarah meet at a restaurant in Manhattan in January 2011. And Martin reportedly tells Sarah that MSMB is managing between $40 and $50 million, which is a lie. Really, they have less than $700, which is mostly a result of Martin's reckless trading. How the hell is this guy walking around?
Saying he's managing between 40 to 50 million dollars when you have less than 700 bucks. That's not even rent for a room these days. It's nothing. It's not even rent for one of four bedrooms you would have to share in like Fort Greene. I am shaken by this lie. I know. Martin. I know. Martin. Martin.
Well, despite all of this lying, the dinner goes well. And Sarah decides to invest $300,000 into MSMB Capital. Martin starts sending Sarah email updates boasting about the company's success. But within a month, the emails have stopped. Martin doesn't have much good news to report anyway. It turns out he shorted another pharma stock and reportedly lost some $7 million.
That is insane. He had $700. Yeah. Now he's losing $7 million? This story does make me start to feel that money is not real. What's real? What is real on this earth? It's making me feel crazy. Yeah, I don't know. But in the fall of 2012, Sarah gets an email from Martin telling her that he's closing his firm. All the money is gone.
And I can only imagine that Sarah is pissed. The loss makes her look really bad. But Martin tells her not to worry. He's starting a new pharma company called Retrophin, focused on creating medicine for rare diseases. And she can take her payout in either cash or shares of the company. Sarah chooses cash, obviously, but receives shares of a shell company instead.
After a six-month legal dispute, Martin finally agrees to wire her $300,000, the money she initially invested in the company. Plus, she gets to keep the stocks. By this point, Retrophin has taken off, and Martin's recently been featured in a Forbes 30 Under 30 finance list. It's a glowing profile with the headline, Hedge Fund Gadfly Turns Biotech Entrepreneur.
It paints him as a wunderkind who's dedicated to funding new medicines to help people with rare diseases. Sarah, take a look.
Yeah, I mean, this is a real Forbes article. It's not like one of those paid partnership things that you see at the top. Yeah, no, it's real. And, you know, just skimming through it, it's really framing this as a guy who wants to just do right by the world. There's a quote saying, I'd like to focus on my life on creating new medicines for people who are suffering from rare diseases.
And I guess if you just read something like that, you think like, oh yeah, this guy's using finance for good. Yeah. Well, at this point, Martin must feel amazing with all of this attention. Retrophin has raised millions and his investors are heavy hitters, like the CEO of the maker of Botox. And before long, Martin will make a name for himself even outside of Wall Street and Big Pharma as the most hated man in America.
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In 2014, three years after Martin starts retrophin, he buys the rights to a drug called Theola, which helps prevent a rare form of kidney stone. And he immediately jacks the price up exponentially from $1.50 a pill to $30 a pill.
Oh my God. Yeah, this is when we get into supervillain territory. There aren't a ton of people who need Theola, but those who do have to take several pills a day. So the price increase results in big profits for Martin and big losses for everyone who actually needs this drug. Retrophin stocks skyrockets. And then on May 29th, 2014, Screlly tweets two things. Sarah, could you read this tweet first?
He says, everyone having a nice day. Isn't there just something bone chilling about someone who writes tweets like this? Like it's just so pleasant, but isn't it spooky? And then just two minutes later, Martin fires off another tweet. And this one says, quote, this is one of the best days of my life. Sarah, can you guess why Martin might be tweeting all of this?
Does it have anything to do with him making a ton of money? Well, Retrophin closes a deal that same day, buying a new drug from a private Texas-based company. And Martin is using his Twitter account to hint that Retrophin is doing really well, which basically amounts to manipulating the stock market by trying to encourage people to buy shares of his company.
Martin takes a lot of heat for this. And the members of Retrophin's board are furious. They tell him to stop tweeting and to get his act together. Well, yeah, I feel like he's doing a big faux pas in this kind of finance world that's full of old people who don't use the internet, which is, shut up. Other people can't know what we're really like. Well, the other thing is that you can't tame Martin Shkreli.
The day after he sends those tweets, he pulls another stunt. Now that the price of Retrophin has soared, he sells nearly $4.5 million worth of his own shares of it. Martin offloading all of those shares makes him a ton of money, but it also makes his investors think something bad is going down at the company.
and everyone sells, tanking the stock. So he really just doesn't care at all if he burns his own company down as long as he makes money? Yeah. And at this point, Martin's obsession shifts from making money to keeping it, even if it means breaking rules, further trashing his reputation, and alienating everyone around him, including the people at his own company.
In September 2014, the chairman of Retrophin's board calls Martin for a meeting on the 22nd floor of his office in Midtown East. Looking out at the city from this phallic glass tower, Martin must feel like the master of the universe. But the chairman tries to bring him back to Earth. He reportedly tells Martin that the board has had it with him. They want him out as CEO. He can stay on as a senior advisor, but he can't be the face of the company anymore.
About a year and a half later, he reflects on this time in an interview with a podcast called Schmucks. My board fired me over Twitter. There's things that as a CEO you probably shouldn't do on Twitter and that's fine. But my addiction to social media was so strong. I mean, that's probably one of the more honest things he said. I guess. Because it's 100% true. Well, at the time, Martin is too deep in his Twitter addiction to even understand what a blow this really is.
Instead, he basically laughs in the chairman of the board's face. He refuses to accept the demotion and he brags that he doesn't even need retrophin.
In fact, that same weekend, he decides to start a new company, Turing. What's up with these guys invoking like old scientist names for their companies? Like it doesn't make you seem like you have more experience, you know? Yeah, I mean, they're just trying to recapture lightning in a bottle. It's aspirational. Yeah, it is. It'd be like if I'm like, I'm starting a company called Rihanna. Oh God, wouldn't that be fun? Yeah.
Well, being kicked out of Retrophin seems to strip Martin of any accountability. Now he feels free to flaunt his money and status. But his next big attempt to impress people completely backfires. About six months later, on a cold spring night in March 2015, Martin shows up to the Museum of Modern Art's PS1 location in Queens. There's a huge stage with a massive screen and towering speakers on either side.
The stage has just three chairs, one for 45-year-old Wu-Tang Clan rapper RZA, his co-producer Silva Chains, and a music critic from The New Yorker. They're here to host a private listening party for a very unique album called Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, which features all surviving members of the Wu-Tang Clan. The album is wild. It features a guest appearance from Cher and comes in a hand-carved box with 174 pages of liner notes.
And it's been stored in a vault in a hotel in Morocco, watched over by security guards since RZA and Silva Chains finished it. Oh, I know this album. It is very infamous. Yeah. And has been the subject for a lot of controversy. Yes.
Well, RZA is auctioning off the only existing copy of the album slash art piece to the highest bidder. Tonight, he's playing just 12 minutes of this precious music to a Trey exclusive crowd of roughly three dozen fans, potential buyers and members of the press.
Soon after the listening party, RZA gets a call. The auction house he's working with has found a buyer. Here's what he later recalls in an interview with Bloomberg. They said, we have another guy. He just came on board. He's interesting. He's young. He's a Wu-Tang fan. He loves hip-hop. Would you like to meet him?
And that's how RZA finds himself sitting across from Martin Skrulli. They connect on their humble backgrounds and their love of hip-hop. And by the end of their meeting, RZA feels comfortable selling the album to him. Martin doesn't tell anyone that he's the secret buyer of Shaolin, making him the only person on earth who can listen to the album. But when his little secret eventually gets out, it'll come at the worst possible time, bringing Martin to unimaginable new lows.
Martin Shkreli is feeling like a baller in Turing's high-rise office in Murray Hill. After the roller coaster of working on Wall Street, dealing with all the risks and losses, Martin shifts his focus to more of a sure thing. He notices big pharma buying orphan drugs, drugs that treat diseases so rare that they often have no competition, and jacking up the price.
So in August of 2015, Martin buys an orphan drug called Daraprim, which is used to treat toxoplasmosis. It's an infection that mostly affects people with HIV and AIDS and pregnant people. And the drug to treat it can be life-saving. At the time that he buys it, there's no generic form of it. So Martin immediately raises the price of Daraprim by more than 5,000%.
And overnight, a single pill goes from $13.50 to $750. This was another big moment where if you hadn't heard about him by now, this is when you're going to hear about him. And I just remember all the headlines of like this scumbag, like he took this rare drug. Yeah.
It was so nakedly monstrous. Everyone was like, there has to be something else here. Like, this can't just be what he did. And I just remember everyone going so crazy. Yeah, it's kind of a fun story where, like, the person being terrible is, that's it. There's no, like, secret reason for any of it. Within 24 hours, Martin goes from being just another finance bro to being a supervillain in the eyes of the public.
He actually earns a pretty lasting nickname, the most hated man in America. The thing is, Martin and Turing are not the only ones pulling this kind of stunt. Drug makers raise the price of life-saving drugs all the time. The difference is Martin doesn't shy away from the spotlight.
Here's what he says about it on CBS this morning. Why was it necessary to raise the price of Daraprim so drastically? Well, it depends on how you define so drastically, because the drug was unprofitable at the former price. And at this price, it's a reasonable profit, not excessive at all. I mean, you have to sort of accept his terms that health care is about a profit to even wrap your head around the logic. Well, here's the thing. Like, OK, he did something terrible. There's no question. But.
But effectively, this is how healthcare works. Right. It is about turning a profit in most cases, especially in the U.S.,
And there's a reason why people ration insulin. Yeah. And it's not because there's one villain who's making insulin so expensive that people die from something they shouldn't be dying from. No, there's several villains. It's because that's how it works. Yeah. You know, like, I guess in a way, when I think about it, like this could have been this moment of reckoning almost, right?
of people being like, wait, someone can just do this. These companies can just do this and they do it all the time. And it just happens to be an extremely online troll who's doing it this time. Yeah. But instead, I feel like it kind of became all about Martin Shkreli when it could have been about much more. You know what I mean? Yeah. Well, in the interview with CBS, Martin also says that the price hike won't actually impact patients.
He says the additional cost will only impact insurance companies and hospitals. But that has created its own set of problems that impacts patients. The chief of infectious diseases at Mount Sinai told Vanity Fair that when her hospital tried to buy more Daraprim, they were told that their credit limit just wasn't high enough. And an Emory University professor of medicine told NPR that one of her patients with toxoplasmosis has been ready to leave the hospital for months.
but no rehab facility will take her because they can't afford the Daraprim that she needs. All the while, Martin is riling up his haters even more by bragging about how rich he is on Twitter. He tweets out a photo of a bottle of 1979 wine and claims that it costs $9,000. And more than once, he tweets photos of the views from a helicopter flying high over New York City.
Sarah, take a look. This is so deeply embarrassing for Martin. There's no signifier of not belonging more than posting photos like this. No person whose life is actually like this would ever post this on Twitter because it's tacky. Yeah. He tweets like a middle-aged housewife visiting New York for the first time. It's like he won a contest. Yeah.
Well, Martin quickly becomes the poster boy for pharmaceutical greed. And it's not like he's quietly raking in the dough. He's flaunting his wealth in the most obnoxious way possible. And the more he runs his mouth on Twitter, the more his enemies want to take him down, including some of the most powerful people in the country. ♪
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Martin doesn't take his new spot as America's most wanted capitalist lightly. On Twitter and Reddit, he calls the price hike a great thing for society. He quotes Eminem and calls at least one reporter a moron before briefly making his Twitter private. Oh, and all of this is happening during the lead up to a presidential election. So Martin becomes a talking point on the campaign trail.
That's price gouging, pure and simple. He looks like a spoiled brat to me. In an email to supporters, Sanders called Shkreli a prescription drug price gouger. Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, and Donald Trump all agreed. Martin Shkreli sucks.
It is cool that everyone can get along to call him a little bitch, you know? It's really encouraging. But then something else happens that keeps Martin at the center of the internet storm. Bloomberg Business revealed on Wednesday that the buyer was pharmaceutical CEO Martin Shkreli. Wu-Tang Clan ain't nothing to f*** with. And, you know, here comes Martin Shkreli and what does he do? He f***ed with the Wu-Tang Clan.
Neither Wu-Tang nor Martin have ever revealed how much he paid for the record. But a friend of Martin's tells Bloomberg it was around $2 million. In a statement to that publication, RZA says, About a month later, RZA's bandmate, Ghostface Killa, takes things a step further...
When asked by TMZ how he felt about the guy who bought Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, Ghostface says, Ghost calls on Martin to release the album to the public. And in response, Martin makes a video.
The video, Sarah, it is truly wild. There's three randos wearing skeleton outfits and hoods standing around him like they're his posse. He sips his wine and calls Ghostface Killa an old man. He asks for a formal written apology and then he like kind of threatens him. Why is that? Why are your goons not as hard as mine? Ghost, stop pretending, stop acting, stop lying. Be
Be real, as your video once said. And don't ever f***ing mention my name again. Evermore. Or it'll be... There'll be more of a price to pay than just this video.
Just when you think Martin can't do something more humiliating. He's so embarrassing. He takes it to another level. This video, he's also wearing like slightly unbuttoned dress shirt with, you know, a blazer on top. And it's like, what cartoon did you watch where you thought this was cool? Yeah. Some people are just born embarrassing, Sarah. Like you could just just stop. Well, obviously, Ghostface can't just sit back and take it.
So, of course, he makes a video in response. Hey, yo, man, you hilarious, man. You must be on Ritalin or something, man. You know what I mean? Check this out, man. It's like, yo, you a fake-ass supervillain, man. And then Ghost brings out his goons, meaning his sister and his mom. Look, Martin, if you was my son, I'd whip your ass. I'd give you an ass-whipping because what you're doing is so, so foul. You trying to disgrace my brother, Ghostface Killah?
There's nothing that scares me more than being yelled at by somebody else's mom or sister. Truly. Yeah. Also, it's kind of like, be better, ghost. Like, I don't know. I kind of like it. You don't need to involve yourself in this any further. Like, he's
He's not a worthy opponent. Yeah, I guess so. But I'm glad he did it for the content. Well, Martin's galactic level of cringe definitely gets some attention. But unfortunately for him, his internet haters are not the only ones scrutinizing everything he says and does. The FBI is onto his case too. And they are about to pounce. A few months later, in December 2015, a reporter named Christy Smythe gets a scoop.
Farma's bad boy has been arrested by the FBI in his Murray Hill apartment. She's been tracking Martin for a year, and she's been waiting for this moment. And her patience pays off. She breaks the story for Bloomberg. The headline of Christie's article is matter-of-fact. Shkreli, drug price gouger, denies fraud and posts bail.
Christie's in her early 30s with pale skin and honey blonde hair. She covers the federal court in Brooklyn, and nearly every day she writes about different people or companies suing each other. Her career is going well, but she's waiting for that big breakout story. And she probably thinks that Martin Shkreli might just be the story she's waiting for.
Okay, Sachi, you know what? I'm going to have to say, even if our listeners don't know where this is going, I know where this is going. And I'm going to tell you right now, I don't like it. I don't like it one bit. I know. Well, a handful of months after Christie's article comes out, she heads to Congress to watch Martin testify about skyrocketing drug prices. He wears a black blazer and a striped button down, and he's got a perma-smirk plastered on his face. Martin is not here to make friends. No.
On the stand, Christie takes notes as Martin refuses to answer a single question, invoking the Fifth Amendment every time. A frustrated Congressman Trey Gowdy tries to get Martin to spill the tea. You are welcome to answer questions, and not all of your answers are going to subject you to incrimination. You understand that, don't you? I intend to follow the advice of my counsel, not yours. Congressman Elijah Cummings, ranking member of the subcommittee, tries to get through to Martin and, well...
He's not exactly successful. I want to ask you to, no, I want to plead with you to use any remaining influence you have over your former company to press them to lower the price of these drugs. You can look away if you like, but I wish you could see the faces of people who cannot get the drugs that they need.
After the hearing, Martin tweets out, hard to accept that these imbeciles represent the people in our government. While most people would conclude that, yeah, Martin sucks, it does seem like Christie sees something else. A slight, nerdy man covering his insecurity with bravado. Yeah, get in line. That's all men. Like...
Oh no, he's so special because he's a nerd who's insecure. Oh my God. Stop the presses. Yeah. Well, Christy decides to email Martin to get his side of the story. But he's hard to nail down. She wonders, who is the person behind the persona? This question will soon become an obsession, leading her down a dangerous path of no return. ♪
A few months after the trial, Christy Smythe sits across from Martin at a bar near his apartment. He probably agrees to chat with her because, well, he's been charged with securities fraud. And let's face it, he needs an ally in the media. According to Christy, Martin says that he wants someone to write the truth about him. That, sure, he's a jerk, but he's innocent. But he hasn't agreed to an on-the-record interview just yet. This is just a warm-up.
Over wine and snacks, Martin shares about his childhood, how he skipped the first grade because he was so smart, only to feel lonely and out of step with his peers. Christy later says that as a kid, Martin got anxiety attacks that were so bad, his family took him to the hospital because he thought he was dying. Christy also says that she grew up with anxiety and feelings of not belonging. And she leaves the interview confused by her own feelings. Has Martin Shkreli charmed her?
This is a plague that has been cast upon women all over the world, where talking to a man and finding anything he says remotely relatable translates into a deeper connection.
And it's very unfortunate for Christy that this man happens to be Martin Shkreli. Yeah, I mean, Sarah, I don't want to spoil too much because there's another episode about this next week and it's even juicier. But what I will say is that the meeting goes well and Martin agrees to meet Christy again, this time at the Turing office.
He continues to dangle the possibility of giving her a real interview. But Christie's frustrated. She can't write about anything he says if this is all off the record.
After the meeting, they keep in touch via phone and email. And Martin keeps playing cat and mouse. Christy is hooked. It seems like Martin Shkreli represents so much to her. The scoop of a lifetime, a story she can really own. Maybe she can even turn it into a book, which would probably open a lot of other doors for her.
Unfortunately, what she thinks is her meal ticket is actually her downfall. Christy's about to get pulled in by Martin's powerful personality, and she'll lose her journalistic credibility and so, so much more.
This is There's Something About Martin, Part One. I'm Saatchi Cole. And I'm Sarah Hagee. We use many sources in our research. A few that were particularly helpful were Bethany McLean's article for Vanity Fair, Everything You Know About Martin Shkreli is Wrong, or Is It? Ali Conti's article for Vice, Wine, Wu-Tang, and Pharmaceuticals Inside Martin Shkreli's World, and Paul Barrett's article for Bloomberg, Once a Notorious Short Seller, Martin Shkreli Now Sees a Future in Biotech.
And our senior story editor is Rachel B. Doyle.
Sound design is by James Morgan. Fact-checking by Sonia Maynard. Additional audio assistance provided by Adrian Tapia. Our music supervisor is Scott Velasquez for Freeze On Sync. Our executive producers are Janine Cornelow, Stephanie Jens, and Marshall Louis for Wondery. Wondery.
If you like Scamfluencers, you can listen to every episode early and ad-free right now by joining Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts. Prime members can listen ad-free on Amazon Music. Before you go, tell us about yourself by filling out a short survey at wondery.com slash survey.