The man many call “the most hated man in America” has been arrested for securities fraud.  Martin Shkreli, the 32-year-old chief executive of Turing Pharmaceuticals, “has been called a ‘morally bankrupt sociopath,’ a ‘scumbag,’ a ‘garbage monster,’ and ‘everything that is wrong with capitalism,’” and those are some of the more tamer comments.

Martin Shkreli came under a wave of criticism for price gouging vital drugs,   His company, Retrophin,  acquired old, neglected drugs often used for rare diseases and substantially raised their prices.  Retrophin, for example, raised the price of Thiola, used to treat a disease that causes kidney stones, to $30 a pill from $1.50. In 2012, Shkreli took Retrophin public through a merger with a publicly traded shell company.

Shkreli has been criticized, jointly, by the Infectious Diseases Society of America and the HIV Medicine Association as well as by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.  Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton tweeted about his “outrageous” form of “price-gouging,” while Donald Trump called Shkreli a “disgrace” and his actions “disgusting.”

In what many are calling “karma” or “just desserts” Shkreli was arrested Thursday morning by the federal authorities.  The investigation, in which Mr. Shkreli has been charged with securities fraud, is related to his time as a hedge fund manager and running Retrophin. According to The New York Times report, “He was arrested in his Midtown Manhattan apartment, according to a law enforcement source, who declined to be identified because the indictment had not been unsealed. Federal prosecutors in Brooklyn were expected to hold a news conference on the charges later Thursday.”  The Times also reports that: “Evan L. Greebel, a corporate lawyer at Kaye Scholer who has worked with Mr. Shkreli, was also arrested on Thursday morning.”

He became famous within a certain world but entered public consciousness after he raised the price more than 55-fold for Daraprim in September from $13.50 per pill to $750. It is the preferred treatment for a parasitic condition known as toxoplasmosis, which can be deadly for unborn babies and patients with compromised immune systems including those with HIV or cancer. His company, Turing Pharmaceuticals AG, bought the drug, moved it to a closed distribution system and instantly drove the price into the stratosphere.

When Shkreli, who denied securities fraud charges on Thursday and was freed on a $5 million bond,  was confronted about his price raising his attitude was: What do you care? You’re not paying for it. Your insurance company is.

The federal charges are believed to parallel a civil lawsuit filed against Mr. Shkreli in August by Retrophin, whose board ousted Mr. Shkreli as chief executive in September 2014. In its lawsuit, Retrophin accused Mr. Shkreli of having used the company as a kind of personal piggy bank to help pay off upset investors who lost money at the hedge fund MSMB. Among the ways he did this, the lawsuit says, was by hiring some of these investors as sham consultants to Retrophin.

While the 32-year-old has earned a rare level of infamy for his brazenness in business and his personal life, what he was charged with had nothing to do with skyrocketing drug prices. He is accused of repeatedly losing money for investors and lying to them about it, illegally taking assets from one of his companies to pay off debtors in another.  “Shkreli essentially ran his company like a Ponzi scheme where he used each subsequent company to pay off defrauded investors from the prior company,” Brooklyn U.S. Attorney Robert Capers said at a press conference.

Agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation arrested Shkreli at his Midtown Manhattan apartment at about 6:30 a.m. and forced him to walk through a gaggle of photographers outside FBI headquarters.  Evan Greebel, a New York lawyer, who is alleged in the federal indictment to have helped Shkreli in his schemes, was also arrested and charged. Like Shkreli, he pleaded not guilty, and he was freed on a $1 million bond. Both men and their lawyers declined to comment after their court appearance.

In the federal indictment and a complaint by the Securities and Exchange Commission, authorities say Shkreli began losing money and lying to investors from the time he began managing money. In his mid-20s, he got nine investors to place $3 million with him and at one point he had only $331.

A spokeswoman for Katten Muchin Rosenman LLP where Greebel worked during the time in question, declined comment. A spokeswoman for Kaye Scholer where he works now, said the firm has launched an internal investigation.

The son of immigrants from Albania and Croatia who did janitorial work and raised him and his brothers in working-class Brooklyn, Shkreli seemed at first to embody the American dream and then to mock it. After dropping out of an elite Manhattan high school, he worked as an intern for Jim Cramer’s hedge fund as a 17-year-old and quickly impressed with his ability to call stocks. He created hedge funds, taught himself biology and, after earning a BA at Baruch College in New York City, began hedge funds investing in biotech.