Martin Shkreli isn’t a person that many people like, but he is a person who has something that many people would like to have. He is infamously the owner of the one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang Clan album Once Upon A Time In Shaolin, and he also claims to have a copy of the unreleased Lil Wayne record The Carter V, which he says he found in a used car. Now that he’s been sentenced to seven years in prison, he has to forfeit more than $7.3 million in a brokerage account and personal assets, which include those two albums, as well a Picasso painting. This means, as the Associated Press notes, that the government could end up auctioning off the Wu-Tang and Lil Wayne albums.
Per the forfeiture order, Shkreli has until Thursday to declare whether or not he has the albums or any proceeds from the sale of the Wu-Tang record (he may or may not have actually sold the album on eBay). Before then, he “shall not, directly or indirectly, transfer, assign, license, waste, pledge, encumber, hypothecate, distribute, dissipate, dilute or remove” them from the court’s jurisdiction.
Record executive Jeff Gold told the AP that he believes the value of these albums have decreased since Shkreli gained possession of them, and that selling them will be a challenge:
“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. […] 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.”
Gold is right about Shkreli’s public perception, since many people were thrilled when they found out about his sentence.
