Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

Radden Keefe is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His most recent critically acclaimed work Say Nothing, an account of a murder during the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland, received a National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. His other awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and an award from the Council on Foreign Relations.

Empire of Pain began as a 2017 feature story on the life of Arthur Sackler and the Sackler family’s history as key context for the opioid use disorder crisis. In retaliation for his investigations, Radden Keefe was followed by private investigators, likely hired by the Sacklers, and had a particularly adversarial relationship with the family attorney hired by Mortimer and Kathe Sackler. He acknowledges that much of his source base for the work relied on anonymous sources, owing to the strong loyalty culture at Purdue. Radden Keefe is clearly dedicated to emphasizing the role of personality and family culture in the history of the opioid epidemic.

Arthur Sackler was born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1913, to Jewish immigrants who had high hopes for their oldest child. Arthur was ambitious and energetic, and “from an early age he evinced a set of qualities that would propel and shape his life—a singular vigor, a roving intelligence, and an inexhaustible ambition” (12).