https://www.takimag.com/article/a-tale-of-extravagant-greed/
Nice vignette on the disgusting Mortimer Sackler, purveyor of OxyContin.
Sackler was always friendly, but like a typical New Yorker was too familiar and handed out advice like paper hankies during a flu epidemic. I was particularly appalled when I ran into him and his older brother once in front of the Metropolitan Museum in New York, and heard them call Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn a psychopath. Sackler was very left-wing when it came to politics, but I assume less so when it came to company profits.
“Sackler was very left-wing when it came to politics, but I assume less so when it came to company profits.”
His family is now in deep poo-poo. They’ve been reportedly discovered shifting hundreds of millions of dollars from the business, Purdue Pharma, to themselves through offshore entities, and the state of New York has sued them. The state wants to claw back funds that it alleges were transferred from Purdue to private or offshore accounts in anticipation of lawsuits. This I find very fair, and it’s the same as the RICO law, which forces gangsters who have been convicted to give back their ill-gotten gains.
Monsieur Balzac wrote rather hyperbolically that behind every great fortune lies a great crime. He sure is right in the Sackler case. In order to profit from the plague they knew would be unleashed, the Sacklers must have deliberately betrayed their duties under state drug laws. And by 2014, fearing that Purdue could face catastrophic fines, the family likely directed Purdue to pay family members hundreds of millions through offshore companies they controlled.
Worse is the hypocrisy. These bums thought nothing of enslaving people with their drugs, as long as they kept up appearances by throwing a few million to museums and having their names engraved on their walls. The Met has a Sackler wall. This is a tale of extravagant greed with an even more shocking lack of morality. I don’t know the generation after Mortimer, but I think that a son-in-law in Gstaad once rudely asked me in a loud voice at a party who I was. “Look me up in the Almanach de Gotha, asshole,” I answered just as rudely. I should have cooled the arrogant bastard.
The on-dit around smart circles is that they should go to jail. I think it’s even more important that they have their dirty money taken away—like drug dealers—and then get locked up. The problem is, the Sacklers have expert advice where hiding assets is concerned, as well as using the law to protect themselves. The state does not.