Federal prosecutors have been trying to get their hands on convicted felon and categorically terrible person Martin Shkreli’s assets since December, a few months after he was convicted of three counts of securities fraud and one count of conspiracy to commit securities fraud. Now it looks they’ll be getting one of his more famous holdings: a one-a-kind of Wu-Tang Clan’s Once Upon a Time in Shaolin.
The poster child for the excesses of our new Gilded Age—who rose to infamy after raising the price of a drug used by cancer and AIDS patients by 5,000% in a transparently villainous bid to make a quick buck—purchased Wu-Tang Clan’s comically rare album for $2 million in 2015. The record’s sale itself was something of a social experiment, as only a single copy of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin was ever produced (the album was recorded in secret between 2008 and 2013).
Fans of Wu-Tang Clan weren’t the only folks who were upset about the fact that one of hip-hop’s rarest items ended up in the hands of an anthropomorphic ball of slime. Back in 2016, Wu-Tang’s own Ghostface Killah did an interview with TMZ video in which he called Shkreli a “shithead.”
Ghostface Killah on Martin Shkreli
In any event, Shkreli is currently wasting away in a Brooklyn jail cell awaiting his sentence (which could be as high as 27 years), and a federal judge just ordered him to forfeit $7,360,450 in assets. One Upon a Time in Shaolin will reportedly be among them, and he may also have to fork over other valuables like a Picasso painting and a copy of Lil Wayne’s unreleased album The Carter V. I think we all agree with Indiana Jones that stuff like this “belongs in a museum” or, at the very least, an easy-to-access online music streaming service.
[H/T – Consequence of Sound]