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Comment by totalZero | Hacker News Reader

Shkreli got hard time even though investors didn't lose money due to his fraud.

There isn't a performance threshold beyond which fraud ceases to be criminal.

Shkreli is a good example of how well oiled justice runs if the defendant is politically indefensible. In the same vein the treatment that SBF got so far (eg getting invited as speaker on a NYT event that featured people such as Selenskyy) makes me fear it will be a much softer prosecution.

A couple of days ago there was a consensus group of Republican commentators confidently asserting SBF’s Democratic donations and connections meant there would no investigation/prosecution at all. Perhaps now this have pivoted to saying they’ll go easy on him?

It seems to me, all these assertions say nothing about the process of justice for SBF, and instead only illustrate that the people making them can’t conceive that there is a section of the political class who believe the law should apply equally to rich people as well as poor people.

Didn't he and his close associates donate to the Republican party members as well?

SBF said so but there is no public evidence of it, so far as I can tell. The federal government brought a charge against SBF due to his campaign contributions, so it can perhaps be expected that we will learn more about those contributions as this saga plays out.

> But Ryan Salame, another executive, gave almost $24 million to Republican and conservative causes, somewhat counterbalancing the giving to the left. Overall, according to Open Secrets, FTX donations to candidates were very slightly GOP-leaning, although contributions to individual politicians were only a small slice of the $70 million.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2022/12/sam-bankma...

As Jon Stewart pointed out, they went with the classic formula of having “a guy for each camp.”

Here is where semantics get tricky and people are twisting facts. Fox who reported on this positioned it as SBF donated 40 million to democrats and barely anything to republicans. Fox has in several articles used Open Secrets and the number the report match open secrets. But they left out a big part of the story. Most of the 40 million didn't go to "Democrats," they went to democrat aligned super pacs. Open secrets also shows that FTX/SBF put 20-25 million into republican aligned super pacts. I believe one of board members of FTX, Ryan Salame, also donated about 15 million or 20 million to "Republican causes?" For me, I will just say we should probably lump all of these donations under a single entity.

The reality is. These guys were funneling tons of money into anyone who would take it. What is hard to extrapolate is, were democrats easier to buy on mass and that is why there is a higher amount? Or were republican votes cheaper?

[1] https://www.opensecrets.org/orgs/ftx-us/summary?id=D00007369... [2] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/12/09/crypto-sca...

NYT is not the government. It's a private business that looks at profit first, politics second, and impartial justice last if at all. The financial lure of a panel with SBF post-scandal must have been too much to resist. It's not even clear the panel (did it happen in the end? I'm not sure) would do SBF any good, given his tendency to self-incriminate. On the other hand I'm sure it was incredible for NYT ratings.

I don't think we'll ever see another defendant in these kinds of cases as universally hated by the public as Martin Shkreli. The transcripts from his jury selection made the news[0]. Some highlights:

"he disrespected the Wu-Tang Clan" (big problem in NYC, of course)

"he kind of looks like a dick"

"I would honestly, like, seriously like to go over there -"

[0] - https://www.spin.com/2017/08/martin-shkreli-jury-selection-t...

Elizabeth Holmes?

Shkreli did not get “hard time”, he got a basic, well-deserved prison sentence.

I find it distressing that folks keep pointing out that the investors did not lose money. Are they deliberately ignoring the fact that Shkreli had no right to take criminal risks with investor money?

I don't think GP is implying that it is OK to take risks with investor money. However it sounds right that you should get a longer prison term if you gamble and lose $8B than if you gamble and make some money on it.

Was that trial a bit politicized yu think? serious question

Not particularly. He had gained notoriety due to other behavior (raising drug prices to fund other drug research, his attitude during his Congressional testimony and media appearances, etc.), but it sounds like his fraud [or whatever he was specifically found guilty of] was very cut-and-dry against SEC and other relevant rules.

"On December 17, 2015, Shkreli was arrested by the FBI after a federal indictment in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York was filed, charging him with securities fraud. The charges were filed after an investigation into his tenure at MSMB Capital Management and Retrophin. U.S. Attorney Robert Capers said, "Shkreli essentially ran his company like a Ponzi scheme where he used each subsequent company to pay off defrauded investors from the prior company."

I think that is a misleading quote. He made actual profits, albeit by unscrupulous (but legal and very common) methods. There was nothing like a ponzi scheme, the prosecution just wanted to say a crime that was well known at the time. Along the way he made false statements to investors, and he was so gross and unpopular they were able to get a conviction the "victims" were not even interested in, but only on two securities technicalities and only because the jury wanted to get him on something. He was acquitted of 5 other more serious charges.

This is a great example of a public show trial, where they basically make an example of someone while allowing companies to engage in the same disgusting behavior without any attempt to discourage it.

Justice Department press releases are incredibly biased. His hedge fund failed (legal), he lied to his investors and said everything was fine (this is the fraud part), then he started a drug company called Retrophin (now NASDAQ: TVTX) which ended up being worth a billion dollars and he was able to repay investors in shares of Retrophin or proceeds from selling shares in Retrophin.

He certainly committed fraud, but it’s certainly unusual that he was prosecuted for it when nobody lost money. In fact, investors did well.

It’s hard not to feel like this is not a thing that would have been investigated had he not been a totally raging asshole.

It’s not true that nobody lost money in spite of the fact that he made this claim in court and it is repeated frequently. The court found he reduced the gains from group A to pay off losses from group B. People in group A lost money that was rightfully theirs as a result of his actions.

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