After Shkreli conviction, whither the Wu’s album?
Wu-Tang Clan, Lil Wayne recordings may go on auction
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 Wu-Tang 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 spent six 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 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 in an interview with The Associated Press.
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.”
“If there are cars or boats or brokerage accounts, all of that stuff is going to be a lot simpler to quantify. There are a lot of questions around these albums and what you can and can’t do with them,” he said.
Shkreli grew up in Brooklyn and said rock music was his preference as a kid, not rap.
“I told RZA to his face, ‘I’m not your biggest fan,’ ” he told the popular New York radio show “The Breakfast Club” in 2016.