The saga of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, the one-of-a-kind Wu-Tang Clan album that Martin “pharma bro” Shkreli bought for approximately $2 million in 2015, continues. The album’s contents have always been a highly guarded secret, and it was seized by the U.S. government in 2018 after Shkreli was convicted of securities fraud. For years, it was reported that the government had sold the album directly to PleaserDAO, a crypto collective that specializes in NFTs. However, Bloomberg now reports that this was not the case.
According to new FOIA documents, the government actually sold the album off to another company before PleaserDAO acquired it in 2021. Bloomberg sued the Justice Department for more information on the heavily redacted case, and the government has finally revealed the buyer’s identity. WTC Endeavours Limited, which was set up for the express purpose of purchasing the album in 2020, was incorporated in Hong Kong. The company was dissolved some two years after the album was purchased by PleaserDAO in 2023.
Bloomberg writes that WTC Endeavors purchased the album from the U.S. government for $2,238,482.30, which was the amount that Shkreli owed the government at the time. PleaserDAO then subsequently procured the album through crypto payments equivalent to $4 million. “The DOJ made it clear to my FOIA attorney that PleasrDAO wasn’t connected in any way to the corporate entity or the individual who purchased the album,” Bloomberg writes.
Not a whole lot of information is available about WTC Endeavors, and Leopold notes that the names of the officers affiliated with the company “don’t appear to be well known.”
Shkreli, formerly the CEO of Turing Pharmaceuticals, is best known for having bought and jacked up the price of Daraprim, an anti-parasitic drug that saves lives, by 5,000 percent. Shkreli subsequently became the face of the pharmaceutical industry’s sociopathic price-gouging and has been notorious ever since. He went to prison for securities fraud in 2018. A thoroughly ridiculous individual, Shkreli subsequently managed to seduce a journalist while in prison, who left her husband for him. Since getting out of prison, Shkreli and the journalist have parted ways, and Shkreli is now thoroughly entrenched in the cryptocurrency community, which is probably where he belonged all along.
Once Upon a Time in Shaolin is a 31-track album that was developed by Wu-Tang over a long period and sold with the legal stipulation that it couldn’t be commercially released until the year 2103. For a majority of us peons, its contents remain a mystery, although if you get invited to the right party, you have a chance at catching some of its tracks.
