Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty

by Patrick Radden Keefe

Friedman, Goldenheim, and Udell “took responsibility on themselves and pleaded guilty,” Kathe Sackler would later say. In doing so, they were ensuring that the family would not be implicated. “Those three guys basically took the hit for the family, because the family was going to take care of them,” Gary Ritchie, who spent eleven years at Purdue as a chemist, recalled. “ ‘Keep yourself out of prison; we’ll take care of you off the books.’ That’s just how they did business,” he said. Not long after the guilty plea, the Sacklers voted to pay Michael Friedman $3 million. Howard Udell got $5 million. The dynamics in play resembled nothing so much as a Mafia film. As one friend of Goldenheim’s put it, the three men had been designated to “take the fall.”