NEW YORK — Jury selection got underway Monday in the federal securities fraud trial of a former pharmaceutical CEO who was criticized after raising the cost of a life-saving drug 5,000 percent.
"I'm excited," Martin Shkreli said of the trial in a brief phone call last week to The Associated Press. "I can't wait."
Opening statements could occur as early as Tuesday.
Since his high-profile arrest in late 2015 when he was led into court in a gray hoodie, Shkreli has been free on bail and free to speak his mind. He went on Twitter to label members of Congress "imbeciles" for demanding to know why his company, Turing Pharmaceuticals, raised the price of Daraprim, a drug used to treat toxoplasmosis and HIV, from $13.50 to $750 per pill.
He took to YouTube for a series of lessons on chemistry and stock market analysis. His Twitter account was shut down after his posts mocking a freelance journalist, including one showing a fake photo of him canoodling with her. And on Facebook, he mused about the possibility of being "unjustly imprisoned."
The 34-year-old Shkreli "travels to the beat of a very unique drummer," defense attorney Benjamin Brafman said at a pretrial hearing this month.
Though Shkreli's notoriety came from Daraprim, the federal securities fraud case is unrelated. Prosecutors say that after Shkreli lost millions of dollars through bad trades through his side business hedge fund, he looted a second pharmaceutical company for $11 million to pay them back. The defense has argued that he had good intentions.
"Everybody got paid back in this case," his lawyer said. "Whatever else he did wrong, he ultimately made them whole."
The defense has floated the possibility that it would put Shkreli on the witness stand to try to highlight how he grew up in a working-class Albanian family in Brooklyn, taught himself chemistry, interned at a financial firm founded by CNBC's Jim Cramer and struck out on his own to become a rising star in biotechnology startups. He wanted to develop new life-saving drugs after seeing "several classmates and other children he knew struck down by debilitating disease," court papers say.
Prosecutors call it a ploy to portray Shkreli as "a Horatio Alger-like figure who, through hard work and intelligence, is in a position to do great things if only the jury would ignore the evidence and base its verdict on sympathy." The real Shkreli was a con man often undone by his own mouth, they say.
The government has cited claims by one of Shkreli's former employees that Shkreli harassed his family in a dispute over shares of stock.
"I hope to see you and your four children homeless and will do whatever I can to assure this," Shkreli wrote the employee's wife, according to court filings.
Read Tuesday's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for full details.