![“Mr. Shkreli's strategy in this case has been to shift focus and prolong”: Controversial owner of rare Wu-Tang Clan album sues RZA, claiming he retains 50% ownership.]](https://backingtracksfullcollection.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/Mr-Shkrelis-strategy-in-this-case-has-been-to-shift-758x426.jpg "“Mr. Shkreli's strategy in this case has been to shift focus and prolong”: Controversial owner of rare Wu-Tang Clan album sues RZA, claiming he retains 50% ownership.] 1")
After a quiet couple of years, the long and torturous story of Wu Tang Clan’s unique single-copy album Once Upon A Time In Shaolin has kicked into gear again. Inevitably, in the courts.
The one-time owner of the album, the disgraced pharma executive Martin Shkreli has filed a lawsuit against RZA claiming that he is still the rightful owner of half of the album’s copyrights. This is despite the fact that federal officials seized the album and sold it in 2021 as part of an auction to pay the victims of Shkreli’s securities fraud conviction.
Shkreli went to jail for five years, but having emerged, he’s now alleging that the complicated deal he came to with RZA and the Wu Tang producer Cilvaringz to purchase the album in 2015 was “bifurcated” into tangible and intangible assets. The tangible ones are the actual physical album and intangibles being his immediate grant of 50% of the album’s copyrights, with the other half coming after 88 years, in 2103 (if human civilisation exists that long, of course).
You may recall that the group that purchased the album in 2021, the cryptocurrency group PleasrDAO, filed a civil action against Shkreli, accusing him of retaining illegal copies of the album (something he has actually boasted about in the past on social media). Last month, a federal judge allowed PleasrDAO’s case to move to trial, ruling that the album could qualify as a trade secret illegally retained by Shkreli. It’s this, it seems, that has provoked Shkreli’s countermove.
In a statement sent to Rolling Stone, the lawyers for PleasrDAO said: “Mr. Shkreli’s approach throughout this case has been to distract and delay, with actions that the court has consistently and strongly rejected. These counterclaims will meet the same fate. They are untimely, non-cognisable, and oddly, claim that Mr. Shkreli retained rights to the album when he was under a court order to forfeit all of his rights in his criminal prosecution.”
RZA has talked in the past about regretting selling the album in 2015 and admitted in a 2018 Rolling Stone interview that he’d considered buying it back: “It was hard for me to sell that album because I wanted it to be on my living room table. When it was finally completed, I was like, ‘This would be great in the Wu mansion.’
“Whoever comes by here can see this piece of art sitting in my living room. I argued with the people that invested money to get the project on its way, but they wanted [their investment] back. So, it would’ve cost me more than the selling price in reality, because of the deficit that was already incurred.”
And so a project which started out with pure intentions – to remind us of the value of recorded music – has, like cursed objects from literature like the picture of Dorian Grey, ended up only exposing the venality and greed of modern life. The only winners in the saga of Once Upon A Time In Shaolin have been – and continue to be – the lawyers.
