Feds picked up Shrem, the CEO of BitInstant, at JFK
A month ago, I spent the evening drinking and hanging out with Charlie Shrem, the Bitcoin millionaire, at his nightclub in New York City.
Later in the the night, we went up to his apartment, where I spotted a couple of bongs. At some point, Shrem told me “I won’t hire you unless I drink with you or smoke weed with you—that’s a 100 percent fact.” As a reporter, it’s always great to get quotes like these—you don’t hear too many CEOs talk about their love of weed. I stuck it in my story.
After my profile was published, which included a few mentions of the pot smoking, Shrem sent me a barrage of text messages, begging me to take down any mention of weed smoking. He claimed he no longer smoked weed, and that he was not a proud stoner. He told me it would end his career.
We refused his request, mostly because we just didn’t think smoking weed was that big of a deal. Plus, it was all true—he had mentioned pot smoking several times in our interview, all of them unprompted.
Now his paranoia makes a little more sense.
Today, he was arrested by a coalition of U.S. prosecutors from the Drug Enforcement Agency, the Internal Revenue Service and the U.S. Attorney General’s office. They allege that Shrem, along with a co-conspirator Robert Faiella, “schemed to sell over $1 million in Bitcoins to criminals bent on trafficking narcotics on the dark web drug site Silk Road.”
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Originally Posted by ClydeCoulter
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