Jeff Sessions now gets to decide what happens to that Martin Shkreli-owned Wu-Tang album

Where will this madness stop?
 By 
Marcus Gilmer
 on 
Jeff Sessions now gets to decide what happens to that Martin Shkreli-owned Wu-Tang album
The smug. It burns. Credit: Getty Images

Jeff Sessions and the Wu-Tang Clan is a combination that goes together like peanut butter and gasoline, but they're been thrown together all the same.

Sessions and the Department of Justice now control the fate of the rap group's Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, the single-copy album purchased for $2 million by convicted Pharma Bro Martin Shkreli.

Shkreli, as you'll recall, was recently sentenced to seven years in prison for a variety of fraud charges and was ordered to forfeit roughly $7.4 million. Among the assets he was ordered to forfeit? That much-sought Wu-Tang album as well as a Picasso and an unreleased album by Lil Wayne.

You can see the court order below, via Pitchfork.

The government has been trying to get its hands on these items for months now, and it looks like they'll finally get their wish. Who knew they were such fans of the Clan?

So what happens next? Well, Forbes reached out yesterday to the Department of Justice about that and the DOJ replied: "The United States hereby gives notice of its intent to dispose of the forfeited property in such manner as the United States Attorney General may direct."

Which, yes, sounds very ominous especially when you consider that the image of Jeff Sessions setting the record on fire like the religious fervor that led to the destruction of many, many Beatles albums in the 1960s is a very plausible thing.

But, really, the government is likely to sell the damn thing, which is interesting because Shkreli was put under some restrictions on what he could do with the album when he bought it. An attorney for the album's producers, Tarik "Cilvaringz" Azzougarh and Robert "RZA" Diggs, told Forbes whoever buys it will be subject to the same terms as Shkreli.

This is, of course, putting aside the controversy of whether or not the album is officially a Wu-Tang project which has swirled since this whole thing went down.

Ultimately, the U.S. Attorney's office for the the Eastern District of New York is handling the whole affair but the thought of Jeff Sessions lording over the auction of Wu-Tang and Lil Wayne albums seized from Martin Shkreli is so 2018 it hurts.

Topics Politics

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Marcus Gilmer

Marcus Gilmer is Mashable's Assistant Real-Times News Editor on the West Coast, reporting on breaking news from his location in San Francisco. An Alabama native, Marcus earned his BA from Birmingham-Southern College and his MFA in Communications from the University of New Orleans. Marcus has previously worked for Chicagoist, The A.V. Club, the Chicago Sun-Times and the San Francisco Chronicle.

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