Reporter falls into Martin Shkreli’s rabbit hole

The following is an excerpt from a memoir and should be viewed as opinion.Martin Shkreli was always eager to talk, even when it wasn’t in his best interest. That was clear from the very first conversation I had with him. It was January 2015. He was still a virtual unknown outside of hedge fund, trader and biotech circles. It was still many months before his company Turing Pharmaceuticals would hike the price of a toxoplasmosis treatment, Daraprim, by 5,000% — turning him overnight into a global symbol of a greed, the “Pharma Bro,” and the “most hated man in America,” even though he pledged to guarantee access to the treatment and use the profits to research new cures.I was a legal reporter for Bloomberg at the time, and I had gotten a tip that the feds were looking into him for fraud. Before publishing a story about the investigation, I did what was ethically required and reached out to him for comment. I hadn’t anticipated that he, and not a lawyer or some crisis PR representative, would call me back. “Hi, this is Martin Shkreli,” he announced when I answered my cell phone. He paused for effect. He was sorry to tell me that I had “no story.” Yes, there was trouble at his first pharmaceutical company, Retrophin, but that was old news. He had already moved on — after being ousted as CEO by the Retrophin board — and had started a new drug company, Turing. He asked me who told me about the criminal probe; I refused to answer. “Oh,” he hissed. “I bet I know.” He had many enemies, and I would be a fool to trust any of them, he assured me. I told him politely but firmly that I was sure the information was correct, and I would be running the story. I wrote down his infuriated reaction, and added it to my piece. He tweeted later that I had “confused a situation that was no longer relevant.” I didn’t hear from him again until almost exactly a year later, after his arrest. Getting to the bottom of the story What I didn’t realize then was that he did take my reporting seriously…eventually. Days after I published that piece, he did something wildly unwise for anyone who might possibly be the target of a criminal probe: He trekked down to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn with copies of my story in hand and demanded to “get to the bottom of it.” For multiple hours and without a lawyer to protect him from himself, he talked to two assistant U.S. attorneys, two FBI agents and a paralegal. FBI records reflect that he attempted to convey his side of the story — or really his side of every possible story. He didn’t seem to know which of his many messy or controversial business moves might be considered a crime, so he rambled on about them all. He also touched on his disagreements with Retrophin’s board and being ousted from the company in September 2014: The board “wanted Shkreli to stop tweeting online and he refused,” was the explanation Martin offered to the FBI. While the FBI notes of the conversation indicate Martin was full of chest-thumping confidence, Martin later confessed to me that he left that day feeling uneasy. The prosecutors and the agents did not give an impression that they were actually weighing what he said with an idea that he might be innocent. He said it was more like they had already made up their minds, and the information he provided only served to flesh out their case. He trekked down to the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Brooklyn with copies of my story in hand and demanded to “get to the bottom of it.” A month after I broke the story of Martin’s arrest in December 2015, unleashing a giant wave of schadenfreude throughout the internet, he called me again. I was away from my desk and he left a voicemail. When I called back, I braced myself, assuming I was about to endure a confrontation — which is typical when journalists speak to the subjects of negative media articles. But when he answered, his tone was warm. He assured me he wasn’t mad about anything. “It’s been about a year since we last talked, hasn’t it?” he sai

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