AP Sam Waksal, former CEO of ImClone Systems

I get distracted. I mean, there's a lot to keep track of when you're juggling pharma, biotech and some of the medical device industry. So, thanks to CNBC's bird-dogging assignment desk dude, Jim Forkin, who remembered the significance of February 9th.

I will always remember that date because it's the day I was awakened as a 9-year-old in suburban L.A. by what I thought was our house falling into the Pacific Ocean. My brother thought the moon had landed on top of us. It was approximately 6 a.m. when the so-called Sylmar earthquake hit back in 1971. (You can do the math now.) I'd never felt a temblor before. This was a big one. And we lived less than 10 miles from the epicenter. The brick walls surrounding our house collapsed, all sorts of stuff inside tipped over, the cupboards opened and my goldfish died in a pool of scotch on the floor. No one in my family was hurt, but it was a fatal quake.

But that's obviously not why Forkin reminded me late yesterday that February 9th, 2009 had come and gone. You see, two days ago Sam Waksal officially became a free man. When you search for him now under his inmate number 53803-054 at the Federal Bureau of Prisons website it now says under "Location," in all caps, "RELEASED."

The feds let him out of a Michigan prison last year. Waksal then went to a halfway house in the Bronx, New York before being allowed to live in his apartment on the Upper East Side as long as he regularly checked in with authorities. But now he's done paying his debt.

Waksal went to prison for his role in the trading scandal at his biotech company, ImClone Systems. His friend Martha Stewart

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[MSO  Loading...      ()   ] also went to the pokey for lying to the feds about selling her stock after Sam told her to dump it. They were trying to get out before it went public that the FDA had a problem with the application for approval of ImClone's cancer drug Erbitux. One of the many ironies—or some might call it poetic justice—is that the drug and the company's drug development pipeline turned out to be so good and promising that Eli Lilly

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[LLY  Loading...      ()   ] recently paid several billion dollars to buy ImClone.

Mr. Waksal, if you're reading this, please consider my invitation to do an interview, especially now that you're free and clear as of February 9th—an unforgettable day for both of us.

• Hey, Genentech: Now It's Your Turn

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