- Martin Shkreli described his time in prison like something out of the mob movie "Goodfellas."
- Shkreli told Tucker Carlson in an interview that he was pals with a mob boss while locked up.
Infamous "Pharma Bro" Martin Shkreli described his time locked up in a federal prison like something straight out of Martin Scorsese's 1990 classic mobster movie "Goodfellas."
Shkreli, who served more than four years at a low-security Pennsylvania prison after he was convicted of securities fraud in 2017, said in a newly published episode of Tucker Carlson's show on X (the social media site formerly known as Twitter) that early on during his slammer stint he was roommates with an 80-year-old mob boss.
"Did you make spaghetti sauce together?" Carlson, the ousted Fox News host, asked Shkreli, who was freed from prison last year, during the hour-long interview.
Ep. 36 What happens when you give Hillary Clinton the finger? Ask Martin Shkreli. He did four and a half years in prison. That may be why Sam Bankman-Fried just asked his advice on doing time. pic.twitter.com/vMGiqDk4tR
— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) November 6, 2023
The notorious fraudster replied, "Believe it or not, yes," before he detailed how he and his unidentified mafia pal had a special system to get spaghetti and sauce smuggled into the lock-up.
"One of the like finest things you could get is like we would somehow pay a guy to pay a guy to get spaghetti in. And then we'd pay a guy to pay a guy to get the sauce in," Shkreli recounted.
He added, "And we kind of like had a lookout to make sure that the police, you know, the guards didn't see what we were doing. Now, some of the guards saw, but they kind of liked the mob guys, so they're like, 'You guys are all right.' Because they felt like they were in, you know, a movie or something like that."
"It was fun," Shkreli said.
The claim sounded surprisingly close to a scene from "Goodfellas," in which a group of jailed mobsters cook pasta and tomato sauce while in prison.
During the interview, Shkreli also boasted about his incarceration, saying that he made a lot of friends, got to experience "four fascinating years of life," and read hundreds of books.
"It's actually awesome," Shkreli said, explaining, "There are bad parts of prison. You know, it's not fun being there. But if you just sort of zoom in on that there's a real big silver lining there."
Shkreli also said that disgraced FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried asked him for advice on serving time behind bars, though Bankman-Fried's representative told Insider he couldn't confirm if a conversation like that actually happened.