After Shkreli conviction, whither the Wu’s album?

NEW YORK — Two unreleased, collectible rap albums may go up for auction following the criminal conviction of the albums’ owner, pharmaceutical company investor Martin Shkreli.

Shkreli was sentenced to seven years in prison for securities fraud recently. He owns an unreleased WuTang Clan album and claims to own an unreleased Lil Wayne album.

Both could be auctioned by the government since Shkreli has to forfeit more than $7.3 million in a brokerage account and personal assets.

The 34-year-old entrepreneur dubbed “Pharma Bro” boasted that he paid $2 million in 2015 for “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin,” the 31-track double album the Wu-Tang Clan years creating.

Shkreli won an auction for the sole copy of the album in 2015.

Group member RZA said he wanted the album — which was packaged in a hand-crafted silver and nickel case and includes a 174-page book wrapped in leather — to be viewed as a piece of contemporary art

Prosecutors said the forfeiture order requires Shkreli to say if he’s still in possession of the album — or has proceeds from a sale of it — by Thursday.

Until then, he “shall not, directly or indirectly, transfer, assign, license, waste, pledge, encumber, hypothecate, distribute, dissipate, dilute or remove” it from the court’s jurisdiction, reads the order, still subject to appeal.

Along with the Wu-Tang Clan album, the government spent six has listed a Picasso painting and Lil Wayne’s “Tha Carter V” as substitute assets for Shkreli.

In September 2017, Shkreli put the Wu-Tang Clan album up for sale on eBay. It’s unknown if he sold it. Jeff Gold, a longtime record executive and owner of Recordmecca, a music collectibles and memorabilia store, said the value of the albums have decreased since being in Shkreli’s hands.

“Martin is not viewed by the general public in a necessarily positive way, so his association with [the albums] I don’t think is a positive,” he said.

Gold called the rollout of Wu-Tang’s album “brilliant” and said “there’s never been anything like this.”

But he added, “These [albums] are problematic to sell.”