Martin Shkreli’s arrest shows how U.S. laws encourage ripping off sick people

He has become the poster boy for schadenfreude.

As the CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, Martin Shkreli was all over television as a self-proclaimed hero of free-market health care, when he legally bought the rights to a life-saving drug which had been on the market for 53 years.

He then immediately raised the price from $13.50 a pill to $750 a pill.

“Well, you know, we needed to turn a profit on the drug,” Shkreli explained. “The companies before us were almost were just giving it away almost. The price they were pricing it at was … price to save your life was only $1,000.”

Which he thought was ridiculously cheap for a drug that can save your life. Even though the cost to make the pill is about a $1.

Related: Ted Cruz is killing it with ‘The Princess Bride’ quotes

Now it turns out, according to the federal indictment, that by some weird coincidence, Martin Shkreli along with an accomplice and two people known only as Corrupt Employee 1, and Corrupt Employee 2, recently lost a pile of money in a Ponzi scheme. They would trick rich investors into thinking they’d made big money in a health care hedge fund, when in fact they’d lost it all.
The indictment quotes an email from his accountant, which reads in part, and I quote, “WT….F.”

The indictment also says that if he is convicted, the United States of America plans to confiscate everything he bought with the money he took, and if any of that stuff goes missing, they can take every last thing he owns.

That would include the a one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang Clan album he recently bought for $2 million. Shkreli has admitted being a huge fan of the Wu-Tang Clan.

Notice that by another weird coincidence, his favorite rap is about a gang that sells drugs and makes a lot of money but winds up in jail.

But here’s the part you’ll want to tell your friends about. The thing that could send Shkreli to jail has nothing to do with drugs, as the U.S. attorney’s office made clear. It’s about the hedge fund Ponzi scheme. It’s wildly illegal to rip off rich investors. Ripping off sick people, on the other hand – completely legal. In fact, our laws encourage it.