Investors: ‘Pharma Bro’ Shkreli was shady — and profitable

The jury at the securities fraud trial of “Pharma Bro” Martin Shkreli has heard investors accuse the quirky former biotech CEO of repeatedly giving them the runaround when they tried to pull their money out of his failing health care hedge fund.

But the government witnesses have made a concession that the defense hopes plays in its favor: In the end, they made a killing.

Whether jurors at the trial that began June 26 in federal court in Brooklyn will see Shkreli’s clients as victims of a crime is central to a case that’s featured odd subplots, including a self-serving rant by the defendant to reporters and email evidence by a mentor about wanting to touch his “soft skin.”

Testimony resumed Thursday with the government still in the middle of its case.

The lack of clear-cut financial harm separates the alleged fraud from others like Bernard Madoff’s notorious Ponzi scheme, which wiped out the nest eggs of ordinary investors. Prosecutors have argued it doesn’t matter because Shkreli still broke the law by blowing investors’ funds with bad stock picks and then lying to them for months — or even years — while he cooked up a way to get out of it.

“I don’t think it mattered to him — it was just what he thought he could get away with,” said Richard Kocher, a New Jersey construction company owner who invested $200,000 in with Shkreli in 2012. “It was insulting.”

Darren Blanton, a Dallas-based investment firm founder, testified Shkreli stalled for three years when he tried to redeem his $1.3 million investment.

Over time, “I was worried Martin might be lying to me and not credible,” Blanton, who notified the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Shkreli, 34, was arrested in 2015 after he already had gained notoriety by using his Turing Pharmaceuticals company to raise the price of a life-saving medication by 5,000 percent and for his nonstop posturing and trolling on social media, a compulsion that spawned the “Pharma Bro” nickname.