>>4803687 lb
>https://www.dailycaller.com/2019/01/17/sackler-family-met-museum/
>Metropolitan Museum of Art is reviewing its gift acceptance policies after new information that members of a prominent donor family behind sales of the prescription opioid OxyContin covered up the drug’s dangers
Only 50 years too late for that. Nice scam they had going. Build a shrine to their cult and take a tax deduction for their drug profits.
According to a memoir written by Thomas Hoving, the Met director from 1967 to 1977, when Arthur established the Sackler Gallery at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to house Chinese antiquities, in 1963, he required the museum to collaborate on a byzantine tax-avoidance maneuver. In accordance with the scheme, the museum first sold Arthur a large quantity of ancient artifacts at the deflated 1920s prices for which they had originally been acquired. Arthur then donated back the artifacts at 1960s prices, in the process taking a tax deduction so hefty that it likely exceeded the value of his initial donation.
Three years later, in connection with another donation, Arthur negotiated an even more unusual arrangement. This time, the Met opened a secret chamber above the museum’s auditorium to provide Arthur with free storage for some five thousand objects from his private collection, relieving him of the substantial burden of fire protection and other insurance costs. (In an email exchange, Jillian Sackler, Arthur’s third wife, called Hoving’s tax-deduction story “fake news.” She also noted that New York’s attorney general conducted an investigation into Arthur’s dealings with the Met and cleared him of wrongdoing.)
In 1974, when Arthur and his brothers made a large gift to the Met—$3.5 million, to erect the Temple of Dendur—they stipulated that all museum signage, catalog entries, and bulletins referring to objects in the newly opened Sackler Wing had to include the names of all three brothers, each followed by “M.D.” (One museum official quipped, “All that was missing was a note of their office hours.”)
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a12775932/sackler-family-oxycontin/
http://khentiamentiu.blogspot.com/2018/01/the-top-10-secrets-of-temple-of-dendur.html