The Sackler story begins with three striving brothers, Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond, born to a Jewish immigrant grocer and his wife in early 20 th century Brooklyn. Keefe calls this “a graphic measure of the Sacklers’ vanity, and of their pathological denial, that the family was prepared to debase itself by trying to force its name back onto a university where the student body had said, quite explicitly, that they found it morally repugnant.” It’s also an illustration of how much the very rich, when crossed, operate like the Mafia, though they reinforce their power with shell companies and lawyers rather than omertà and violence. The family threatened to sue, claiming that the university was violating an agreement it had made when it received donations from one of its members. Among the final scenes in Empire of Pain is a student activist happily watching the Sackler name being chipped off the facade of a building at Tufts University. The Sacklers went from an esteemed clan known primarily for their philanthropy on behalf of cultural, educational, and scientific institutions-including, most famously, the spectacular Sackler wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which houses the Temple of Dendur-to public disgrace and repudiation. Like Purdue, it is all about the Sackler family: how it transformed American medicine, the key role it played in the opioid crisis that now costs tens of thousands of Americans their lives every year, and the family’s belated and incomplete downfall.
Thanks for signing up! You can manage your newsletter subscriptions at any time.Įmpire of Pain, Keefe explains in his afterword, is a dynastic saga. The company’s foremost priority, Baker went on to remind all present, was “to protect the family at all costs.” The unnamed (and now former) Purdue employee who witnessed this little speech told Keefe, “I remember going home and saying, ‘Where the fuck am I working?’ ” “Those people had to take the fall to protect the family,” Baker said, as quoted in Empire of Pain, Patrick Radden Keefe’s masterfully damning new book about that family, the billionaire Sacklers, who owned Purdue. Those three men had pleaded guilty in 2007 to making fraudulent claims about the harmlessness of Purdue’s cash cow product, Ox圜ontin, and had been forced to resign. At a meeting, the company’s lawyer, Stuart Baker, had been praising three former members of the leadership team, including his own predecessor.
In the late 2000s, an employee of Purdue Pharma was stunned by the words of the corporation’s in-house counsel.
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