Illustration by Tim Lahan

On a recent evening, Martin Shkreli was drinking beer at Tuttles, a bar in the Murray Hill neighborhood of Manhattan that has sticky wooden tables and sports playing on TV. He was taking a break from two activities that now consume much of his time: writing computer code for a new company he heads and meeting with his lawyers in anticipation of his upcoming criminal fraud trial.

“I think they’ll return a not-guilty verdict in two hours,” he said. “There are going to be jurors who will be fans of mine. I walk down the streets of New York and people shake my hand. They say, ‘I want to be just like you.’ ”

Shkreli achieved infamy as the founder and C.E.O. of Turing Pharmaceuticals, where he applied strategies honed in his career as a hedge-fund manager. Under his direction, Turing acquired a drug called Daraprim, which treats a parasitic infection that can be deadly when it afflicts unborn babies and people with H.I.V. and AIDS, and then raised the price of a single pill from $13.50 to seven hundred and fifty dollars. Although Shkreli’s company wasn’t the first to order such a price increase, his did so in the late summer of 2015, as the Presidential race was warming up. He was also arrogantly unapologetic about it. Hillary Clinton accused him of “price gouging,” and he was described in the press as “the most hated man in America.” That December, just weeks after Donald Trump referred to him as a “spoiled brat,” Shkreli was arrested and charged with securities fraud in a case involving his hedge funds, MSMB Capital Management L.P. and MSMB Healthcare L.P., and another drug company that he had founded, called Retrophin. (He denied the charges.)

Shkreli, now thirty-four, has pale, thin arms and black hair that falls into his eyes. He can be more self-effacing and thoughtful than his public persona would suggest. “Many men are sensitive about their psychiatric well-being,” he said, explaining that he used to have anxiety attacks every day. “I saw a psychiatrist a long time ago. He said, ‘Martin, you have anxiety. Take this pill.’ ” The medication was Effexor. Shkreli went on, “My affinity for pharmaceuticals is partly due to the miracle of that pill.”

He used to be a provocative user of Twitter (he was suspended from the service in January) and now live-streams himself on Facebook, where he has more than seventy thousand followers. He is well versed in many subjects: romantic relationships, drug-pricing models, his entrepreneurial feats, and the hedge-fund manager Steven Cohen. At Tuttles, Shkreli was eager to discuss what he claimed was his underappreciated role in the downfall of Cohen’s fund, S.A.C. Capital.

He said that in 2008, when he was working as a portfolio manager, he invested money in shares of a pharmaceutical company called Elan, which was conducting a clinical trial of a promising Alzheimer’s drug. On the morning that the trial results were set to be announced, Shkreli watched Elan’s stock price excitedly. “The stock was up two bucks, so I’m giddy,” he said. When the price started to move erratically—he remembers it lurching up three dollars and then down two—he became convinced that inside information about the results was leaking to certain traders with sizable stakes in Elan. Shkreli said that he called the New York Stock Exchange to complain, suggesting that it temporarily halt trading in the stock until the results of the trial were released. Later that day, after the results were announced and they failed to meet expectations, Elan’s stock price quickly fell by almost forty-two per cent. “I was devastated,” Shkreli said.

The government ended up investigating Elan, and in 2012 it indicted an S.A.C. portfolio manager named Mathew Martoma on insider-trading charges. Martoma was convicted. (He denied the charges and his case is on appeal.) The Elan case also helped lead the government, in 2013, to bring insider-trading charges against S.A.C. Capital itself. S.A.C. closed after Cohen agreed to pay more than a billion dollars in fines. It is difficult to confirm Shkreli’s story, although its outlines conform to what is known about how the investigation started. Shkreli himself seemed to delight in the idea of being the catalyst for one of the biggest insider-trading cases in U.S. history.

Now Shkreli is facing serious legal troubles of his own. The federal government has accused him of fraud, contending that he misappropriated funds from his three companies in order to conceal losses and mislead investors. As Robert Capers, the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York, described it, “Shkreli essentially ran his companies like a Ponzi scheme.” (In an unrelated twist, S.A.C. Capital disclosed in 2014 that it had bought stock in Retrophin.) Shkreli claims that the government misunderstood what happened and picked on him because he had been so vilified for the drug-price hike. “This case never would have happened if Daraprim hadn’t happened,” he said.

Shkreli hinted that he intended to testify at his trial, which starts in June. In the meantime, he is working on a new biotech-software startup, called Godel Systems, which he won’t describe in detail. “I haven’t told anybody what it is,” he said. “When I do, it will shock and awe the world.”

It was almost 9 p.m. when Shkreli drained his second glass of beer. He suddenly looked alert, remembering that he had received a jury-duty summons. He looked at his phone and said, “Shit, I might have missed it. What day is it?” ♦