In a letter to the court, U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York Robert Capers wrote that the 32-year-old has a history of threatening and intimidating people in his way, a concern for witnesses who could be asked to take part in the criminal case against him.

Capers pointed to a letter Shkreli allegedly penned to the wife of a former employee after the two disagreed about shares of a drug company he once helmed. According to the filing, the letter read: “Your husband had stolen $1.6 million from me and I will get it back. I will go to any length necessary to get it back. . . . Your pathetic excuse of a husband needs to get a real job that does not depend on fraud to succeed. . . . I hope to see you and your four children homeless and will do whatever I can to assure this.”

Shkreli’s attorney, Ben Brafman, said in a statement that “any claim that Martin Shkreli intimidates witnesses is preposterous. While his keen ‘intellect’ can at times be intimidating to mere mortals, nothing else about Martin Shkreli is intimidating at all.”

A day before his arrest in December, however, Shkreli made the same claims about his own behavior. He openly bragged about threatening his former employee and his family in an interview with hip-hop Web site HipHopDX's editor in chief, Justine Hunte, asking if he had seen that Shkreli had “threatened that dude and his fucking kids.”

“He had to call the police, that guy. . . . This is not a fucking act. I threatened that fucking guy and his fucking kids because he fucking took $3 million from me and he ended up paying me back,” he said. “I had two guys parked outside of his house for six months watching his every fucking move. I can get down.”

Part of this is Shkreli’s signature schtick—the same one that led him to start a one-sided feud with one rap legend, release a video with his masked “goon” squad requesting an apology from another, and before his own brush with the law, proclaim he wanted to bail out rapper Bobby Shmurda from jail. “I’ve had guns pointed at me. I’ve had tons of that shit happen. I know that world,” he strained to HipHopDX. “Not knee deep, but know it enough to know what it is. I’m definitely the real fucking deal.”

Allegedly threatening to put someone’s family and children out on the street does not make someone the real deal; it makes them really quite cruel. The villainous reputation Shkreli now brushes off as a misunderstanding seems more like a spot-on representation of who he is, deep down, when the cameras, the live-streams, and the media spotlight are not shining.