On the way to meet me for lunch, Martin Shkreli is detained by two strangers who want to have their photo taken with “the drug guy”. That is one name for him — although some have called him far worse. “Nobody stopped me to punch me, as you can see,” he says.
Shkreli’s ability to stroll down a Manhattan sidewalk without provoking an act of violence would be unremarkable but for his status as the personification of US corporate greed, acquired after he bought a life-saving medicine last year before swiftly raising the price from $13.50 to $750 per pill. His decision to inflate the price of Daraprim, a decades-old medicine for Aids and cancer patients, drew a sharp rebuke from Hillary Clinton, who described the 5,000 per cent increase as “outrageous”.
