Martin Shkreli, the notorious, most-hated-man-on-the-Internet pharma douchebro who was arrested last week for securities fraud, told the FBI that the only reason they bothered busting him for financial corruption is that he had made a spectacle out of himself with his pharma shenanigans.
His crime wasn't financial fraud, in other words: it was bringing capitalism into disrepute.
That's why the cops tipped off the press to catch his perpwalk, too: as a lesson to the rest of the one percent sociopaths: keep a low profile. Destroy people's lives, yes. But don't gloat about it in public. That's why we have private parties and secret societies.
Shkreli committed his frauds years ago, to little official notice. But once Shkreli started to behave in public as millionaires behave behind closed doors, the authorities started to dig for the excuse to bust him that they knew they'd find, because something like that lurks in every hedge-douche's past.
It's just a less flashy version of the Russian system, in which every oligarch is known to be guilty of crimes, because oligarchy can only be attained through criminal means. So if anyone falls into official disfavor, they can be purged stripped of their fortunes.
"'Trying to find anything we could to stop him,' was the attitude of the government," Shkreli said, according to the Journal story Monday. "Beating the person up and then trying to find the merits to make up for it — I would have hoped the government wouldn't take that kind of approach."
Martin Shkreli: I was arrested for hiking drug prices
[Chris Isidore/CNN Money]
(via Naked Capitalism)
