'Pharma Bro' Martin Shkreli Ordered To Surrender All Copies Of Unreleased Wu-Tang Clan Album

Infamous "Pharma Bro" Martin Shkreli has until Friday to give his lawyers over any copies he made of an unreleased Wu-Tang Clan album before it was sold for $4.75 million.

A federal judge in Brooklyn also gave Shkreli until Sept. 30 to reveal the names of anyone with whom he shared "Once Upon a Time in Shaolin" and any proceeds he received, the Associated Press reported Monday.

U.S. District Judge Pamela Chen's order came in response to a June lawsuit filed by the cryptocurrency collective PleasrDAO, which bought the one-of-a-kind double album in 2021.

It accused Shkreli — who earned his nickname by boosting the price of the life-saving drug Daraprim — of violating the terms of its purchase by distributing duplicates to his social media followers, AP said.

PleasrDAO lawyer Steven Cooper called Chen's ruling "an important victory for our client" and said she "recognized that immediate relief was necessary to thwart the continuing bad acts of Mr. Shkreli."

A Shkreli lawyer, Edward Paltzik, said the order maintained "the perceived status quo" of the pending case against him and had "no bearing whatsoever on the final outcome."

Paltzik also noted that Chen didn't issue a finding on the likelihood that PleasrDAO would succeed on the merits or on the truthfulness of its allegations.

Shkreli paid $2 million for "Once Upon a Time in Shaolin" in 2015 but was forced to surrender it to the federal government after he was convicted of securities fraud and sentenced to seven years in prison in 2018.

The two-CD album — which was packaged in an engraved, silver-and-nickel box, with 174 pages of liner notes printed on gilded parchment and bound in leather — was sold to help pay back investors who Shkreli cheated out of millions of dollars while running two failed hedge funds.

He was released from prison in 2022.

The Wu-Tang Clan spent six years secretly creating the 31 tracks for "Once Upon a Time in Shaolin," which was touted as a "unique work of art" available "to one single collector, with no physical or digital duplicate in existence."

When the rappers learned about Shkreli's "business practices," they "decided to give a significant portion of the proceeds to charity," Wu-Tang Clan member RZA told Bloomberg in 2015.