Past Shkreli winners: Where are they now?

Since 2017, the Lown Institute has held our annual Shkreli Awards, a spirited, interactive awards show where we shine a light on some of the year’s most egregious examples of profiteering and dysfunction in healthcare. Ahead of this year’s Shkreli’s on Thursday, December 11, we’re revisiting several past winners who reappeared in headlines this year—a Shkreli “class reunion” of sorts—to see what our most disreputable alums have been up to.

Last year, our #1 Shkreli Award went to Steward Health Care CEO Dr. Ralph de la Torre, whose “leadership” left hospitals gutted, employees laid off, and communities underserved, while he pocketed more than $250 million. Now, it seems that the proverbial chickens have finally come home to roost for de la Torre. According to Becker’s Hospital Review, Steward has filed a lawsuit against their former CEO, claiming that de la Torre and his co-conspirators engaged in insider dealings that stripped the company of assets and helped trigger its financial collapse. Steward intends to pursue more than $3 billion in claims against former creditors, insurers, and insiders who were paid as the system approached bankruptcy.

Oncologist Dr. Thomas C. Weiner, our #4 Shkreli award in 2024, was back in the news this year. In 2020, he was fired from St. Peter’s Hospital in Helena, MT after a pattern of patient harm and death was brought to light. Nonetheless, the Montana Board of Medical Examiners renewed his license in 2021 and then again 2023. ProPublica, which broke the initial story about Weiner in 2024, reported this February that the board renewed his license for another two years despite the fact that at least 10 questionable deaths were tied to his practice. Criminal investigators with the Montana Department of Justice have since opened a formal investigation into the matter.

In 2023, our #1 Shkreli award went to OB-GYN Robert Hadden who, for decades, had sexually assaulted hundreds of patients at some of New York City’s most prestigious hospitals with little intervention by hospital administrators. Hadden was ultimately convicted and sentenced to 20 years in federal prison in 2023. This year the AP reported that Columbia University and New York-Presbyterian Hospital have agreed to settle sexual abuse claims by Hadden’s patients to the tune of a $750 million. This brings total civil settlements involving the former doctor to more than $1 billion total.

In a ghoulish but true story that earned a 2023 Shkreli dishonorable mention, the former manager of the morgue at Harvard Medical School was accused in a federal indictment of stealing body parts taken from donated cadavers and then selling them on the black market. This year, Reuters reported that the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court ruled that, despite Harvard’s claim of immunity from liability under Massachusetts’ Uniform Anatomical Gift Act, the university can be sued by families of those whose bodies were donated to the school and then sold. In its decision, the court wrote that Harvard was negligent in its oversight of the morgue and allowed the manager’s “horrific and undignified treatment (to) continue for years.”

As revealed in our #5 2022 Shkreli award, Johnson & Johnson marketed and sold its talc baby powder products despite knowing for decades that cancer-causing asbestos could be contaminating the supply. Facing lawsuits from 40,000 cancer patients, J&J created a subsidiary company with all of the baby powder-related liabilities and then declared this shell company bankrupt. However, this attempt to force a global settlement was thrown out of bankruptcy court. Since then, there has been a 17% rise in new lawsuits against J&J, including a $966 million award to a California family of a deceased woman who blamed her cancer on life-long use of baby powder. Despite claiming repeatedly that talc doesn’t cause cancer, J&J took the product off the market in 2023, replacing it with a cornstarch substitute.