Remember When Martin Shkreli Bought That Single-Copy Wu-Tang Clan Album?

After a turbulent journey through controversy, criticism and chaos, the single-copy Wu-Tang Clan album had finally sold to a little known buyer and the project’s success seemed assured. And then, one fateful day, news broke that would transform that ''little known buyer' into the most notorious figure in America.

July passed in a flurry of detail and redlines. We had no contact whatsoever with the buyer during this period; the only time we’d spoken to him had been on that very first call with his lawyers.

We had, of course, done our research, and while it didn’t look like he’d be winning the Nobel Peace Prize anytime soon, there didn’t seem to be too much of concern in his background. Sure, he was being sued, but this was America. If you’re rich in America and someone isn’t trying to sue you, that’s when you smell a rat. And he’d been investigated, but again, that didn’t seem unduly worrisome. He was making all the right noises.

The contract was finally signed on August 26, 2015. 2 + 6 = 8. August is the eighth month. That makes eighty-eight. The deal had been three months in the making. All that was left was for the buyer to wire half the money and we’d start moving toward a close.

With the deposit paid, we set a closing date for early October. The money was in escrow pending a full inspection of the audio and the package. Mindful of the fact that only two people in the world had heard the whole thing, we couldn’t risk the buyer listening to the full two hours, then saying no thanks. So we hammered out a skipping scenario where he could listen to ten seconds in the beginning, middle, and end of each track to make sure the audio was all on there. We asked him if he wanted us to make a digital backup for importation in case the CDs got scratched in transit, but he wasn’t having any of it. That seemed like madness, though—what if they got dropped at customs?—so we agreed on a protected dark net server to place the actual music on until we were safely within the United States. What a delicious irony that this whole project would culminate with a download. Contradictions. Fucking love ’em.

We needed time to get the box polished in New York and import the leather-bound lyric book, the big leather outer case, and the certificates of authenticity. Courtney Ercolino at Paddle8 was all over the logistics—from sourcing the finest silver polishers in New York to assembling the documentation for import. We fixed a date of October 8 to seal the deal and booked our flights to New York.

And then it happened. Wait, that it needs capitalization. And then IT happened.

I was still basking in the glow of success as I perused my Facebook feed one sunny September afternoon, when I stumbled into a nest of furious outrage. Some hedge fund pharmaceutical guy had apparently just jacked up the price of an AIDS drug by 5,000 percent. And everyone I knew was up in arms at the injustice. I felt a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach. Hedge fund. Pharmaceuticals. It couldn’t be.

Why, yes, of course it could. Because our buyer was Martin Shkreli.

I haven’t seen a story take light in quite such a gasoline-drenched way for a long time. I suddenly remembered that Martin and his lawyers had been dragging their feet a couple of months back because he had been financing a company takeover. It certainly all made sense now—this was the company he’d been buying, and he had just skyrocketed the price of Daraprim.

Daraprim wasn’t actually an AIDS drug per se, but AIDS is always a hot-button media issue. A triumph for social attitudes, actually, as in the eighties no one seemed to give too much of a fuck what happened to AIDS victims, and here we were in a position where adding the word AIDS to a story actually made it emote further. Daraprim was an anti-toxoplasmosis drug, and while toxoplasmosis could be a dangerous parasite for an immune system destroyed by HIV, it was just as dangerous for a body weakened by any autoimmune disease.

about the author

About

Cyrus Bozorgmehr was the senior adviser on the Once Upon a Time in Shaolin project and worked alongside Wu-Tang Clan’s RZA and producer Cilvaringz. He lives in Marrakech.

All of which was beside the point. This looked like price gouging on steroids. In the immortal words of The Wire’s Clay Davis, this was some shameless shit. The story had come out via the New York Times, and instead of doing what most corporate profiteers do when an unwelcome light is shone on their business practices, Martin set about digging himself an even deeper hole.

There’s an unwritten rule in crisis management: don’t give the story a face. Instead of giving a comment to the New York Times from a “Turing Pharmaceuticals spokesman,” Martin had signed his name to the quote and then, as the story erupted, he made the fatal mistake of going on every TV show that would have him. He clearly thought he was justified in the price hike, claiming that it wouldn’t affect individual patients and that it would provide money for research, but no one, least of all me, could understand why a 5,000 percent increase was needed if that was indeed the case.

He did not acquit himself well on TV. His explanations were garbled and his body language prompted a chorus of derision. It didn’t do him any favors that there were a couple of unfortunate photos out there and that he had a penchant for quoting rappers. Within hours, the media had its first label for him: Pharma Bro.

Jesus—if he was Pharma Bro now, what the fuck would happen when people found out he bought this fucking album? The mind boggled. And not in a good way.

This wasn’t just calamitous—this was Calamity walking into a bar, sweet-talking Catastrophe, getting really drunk together, smoking some crack, punching Fiasco in the face, then going on a shooting spree while eating orphans and setting fire to kittens.

Predictably, all his media appearances just fueled the fire. Turing Pharmaceuticals wasn’t the story, nope—Martin was the story. Meanwhile, Volkswagen had been caught with their fingers in the emissions jar, perpetrating a massive fraud on the world involving the faked emissions of eleven million cars, but there’s only so far you can hate a logo. Even with the CEO resigning, Volkswagen never gave the story a face, and that amount of passion just wilts on inanimate objects like corporations.

Which is how corporations work in the way that they do. Their very facelessness abrogates the need for morality. Executives who are animal-loving, charity-giving, Little League-coaching, God-fearing family men allow themselves to collude in shocking practices because they have bought into the insidious architecture of amorality. It’s numbers, it’s statistics, it’s my job, it’s not my personal morality. Therefore I’m not a bad guy. Meanwhile, the public is presented with nothing more than a logo to project its fury onto and a bunch of gray suits that can barely be distinguished from one another. The corporation feeds individuals into a system and through that system, manages to divorce personal identity from behavior in the company’s name. There are a lot fewer fundamentally evil people out there than we like to luridly imagine, and self-perpetuating systems geared toward the mechanics of profit need a lot more scrutiny. It’s usually not the player. It’s the game.

Martin had missed this memo and had gone on what looked like a one-man crusade to make sure people hated him rather than the more abstract specter of his company. The really bizarre thing was that he really didn’t feel he’d done anything wrong—as far as he was concerned, people needed educating in the economics of drugs, and then they would understand. But they didn’t, of course. His explanations were confusing, no one wanted to hear about how American health care should be more expensive, and there was no getting past the sheer scale of that price hike.

Everyone I knew was holding Martin up as the poster boy for the evils of capitalism, and there was no way out. We were locked into a contract.

The project looked to be in tatters. Who would buy a single copy of an album for millions? I’ll tell you who—Pharma Bro would. Forget that we had other buyers on the table, that wasn’t even footnote material. No, this would be the ultimate proof of failure for our concept. Or would it?

Maybe this was the ultimate artistic statement. If we don’t support musicians as a society and all contribute to its sustainability, then it will end up in the hands of the most ruthless capitalists out there. There was a certain poetry to it. This had been an experiment in social dynamics, after all, and experiments didn’t have a right answer. Yes. The press would buy that on the day I miraculously became slim and attractive.

It was true, though. Who buys art, anyway? Everyone from arms dealers to hedge fund sharks bankrupting communities to oil executives poisoning the world. Mother Teresa didn’t have a fucking art collection. Just because most of the superwealthy are better versed in keeping a low profile and handle controversy in a silkier fashion doesn’t make them any less guilty than Martin.

Is the art market built on the backs of the disadvantaged, the swindled, and the dying? Well, yes, in many ways it probably is, and look at us making that point by selling our album to the devil himself. This was actually one of the most intriguing outcomes we could have had. A philanthropist giving the album away for free and donating millions to AIDS research to celebrate wasn’t a symbol of how the world works. It would have been the exception that proved the rule.

Try telling that to the fans, though. What did taking an album away from them and putting it in the hands of Dr. Fucking Evil say about us? Highfalutin talk about the art market and the music world wouldn’t overcome this in the eyes of the fans. It would be confirmation that the Wu had gone to the Dark Side.

Cilvaringz and RZA both took it a lot better than I did. Cilvaringz was following the minutiae of Martin’s logic, and while he conceded that the way Martin was making the case had confused the issue, he was prepared to hear him out in person. He wasn’t going to judge through a press filter; he wanted to come to his own conclusions through independent research. Lynch mobs weren’t his thing—this needed a fact-based analysis.

RZA saw it differently again. If you put a product in a shop window and someone buys it, neither the shop nor the creator of the product is tied in any way to the morality of the buyer. And anyway, if Martin had been making some bad decisions and was mired in negativity, then the album would open a portal of positivity and hopefully make him change direction. Maybe the most troubled guy in the world needed the album more than anyone. RZA really is like that—it’s no persona. He genuinely believes in the positive power of Wu-Tang music and always views it through the third eye.

I, on the other hand, was focused on how it would play. Suddenly evil had a face. And we were standing next to it.

Excerpt adapted from ONCE UPON A TIME IN SHAOLIN: The Untold Story of Wu-Tang Clan’s Million-Dollar Secret Album, the Devaluation of Music, and America’s New Public Enemy No. 1. Copyright © 2017 by Cyrus Bozorgmehr. Excerpted by permission of Flatiron Books, a division of Macmillan Publishers. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

Related Video

Culture

RZA is the Man with the Iron Fists

RZA talks his love for Kung Fu movies and directorial debut.