Keller @ Large: America's Most Hated

BOSTON (CBS) - It's not a title any decent person would aspire to.

But with his ultra-arrogant dismissal of outrage over his price-gouging after purchasing rights to a life-saving drug used by babies and AIDS patients, his tasteless public preening and online trolling, and his alleged operation of a crude Ponzi scheme, Martin Shkreli has emerged as arguably the year's most despicable greedhead.

His arrest Thursday by the feds on a multiple-count fraud indictment was hailed online as "an early Christmas present." Some are calling him "the most hated man in America."

It isn't easy becoming a global poster boy for greed. There's plenty of competition.

So how did Shkreli pull it off?

Obscene profit-taking was one thing. Bragging about it was another.

At a recent Forbes Magazine forum, Shkreli was asked: "If you could rewind the clock a few months, I wonder if you would do anything differently?"

His smirking answer: "I probably would have raised the price higher... I could have raised it higher and made more profits for our shareholders, which is my primary duty."

But today's indictment suggests Shkreli's commitment to his investors was just part of the scam. Instead, the feds claim, he was a common, money-grubbing criminal, like the characters in the recent Martin Scorsese movie "The Wolf of Wall Street," one of whom proclaims: "Name of the game: move the money from your client's pocket into your pocket."

"You know, this is a capitalist society, a capitalist system and capitalist rules," Shkreli lectured his audience at the Forbes forum. "And my investors expect me to maximize profits, not to minimize them or go half."

Turns out Shkreli allegedly bilked his investors instead. Add that to his smug indifference to human suffering, runaway narcissism, and complete amorality, and you have the blueprint for championship-level hatefulness.