Sitting in his home office, Keefe read the documents and tweeted what he found. In 2018, Maura Healey, the attorney general of Massachusetts, sued Purdue Pharma, and in January 2019, court filings from the lawsuit were released. His first article about the Sacklers and the opioid crisis was published in The New Yorker in 2017. He had heard of the family because the name is displayed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, but he didn’t know much about them. As he learned more about soaring opioid abuse, he stumbled on the Sackler name. In the 2010s, he was reporting on El Chapo, and wrote about the drug lord for The New York Times Magazine in 2012 and The New Yorker in 2014.ĭuring his research, he noticed the uptick in heroin usage in the United States. Like the tales in his books, the saga of how Keefe came to write about the Sacklers is anything but simple. Connolly, said, “Documents being released in Purdue’s bankruptcy now demonstrate that Sackler family members who served on Purdue’s board of directors acted ethically and lawfully.” A representative for members of Mortimer Sackler’s family said, “Our focus is on concluding a resolution that will provide help to people and communities in need, rather than on this book.”

In a statement, a lawyer for Raymond Sackler’s family, Daniel S. “The hope is that a certain kind of reader will be interested in this book, primarily as a story about a great American dynasty, and what I would argue is the corruption of a great American dynasty.”

“I didn’t want to write an opioid crisis book per se,” Keefe said. It’s a byzantine topic, but Keefe focuses on the Sackler family, which owns Purdue Pharma, the maker of Ox圜ontin. Now he’s back with a new book, “ Empire of Pain,” out from Doubleday on Tuesday, that examines the opioid crisis. In his 2019 best-seller, “ Say Nothing,” he dove into the decades-long sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland, particularly the mystery surrounding Jean McConville, a young mother who was kidnapped from her home in 1972. In his 2009 book, “ The Snakehead,” he reported on a human smuggling operation run out of New York’s Chinatown, untangling the web of the enterprise and highlighting its victims and its perpetrators. “I think I have an almost childlike suggestibility where if you tell me you know a secret and you won’t tell, I’m going to do everything I can to figure out what that secret is,” he said in a video interview from his home in Westchester County, N.Y.īut if you’ve ever read something Keefe, 44, has written, you may already sense that he has a passion for unearthing what’s hidden. Patrick Radden Keefe has always been interested in secrets.

Empire of pain sackler