Daily Kickoff: Patrick Radden Keefe on his new book on the Sackler dynasty + The Israeli startup seeking to monetize Clubhouse

Daily Kickoff: Patrick Radden Keefe on his new book on the Sackler dynasty + The Israeli startup seeking to monetize Clubhouse

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Patrick Radden Keefe’s account of the family behind the opioid epidemic

Patrick Radden Keefe

By his own admission, the intrepid reporter Patrick Radden Keefe, a staff writer for The New Yorker, has never taken OxyContin, the addictive painkiller introduced by the drug manufacturer Purdue Pharma in 1996. “I’ve taken milder opioids after procedures,” he told Jewish Insider’s Matthew Kassel in a recent interview. “But no, not OxyContin, ever.” But Keefe is more intimately acquainted with the narcotic than most. His new book, Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, lays out with damning specificity how the Sacklers, the family behind Purdue Pharma, built a pharmaceutical juggernaut while fueling the opioid epidemic.

Shocking revelation: The 44-year-old author and journalist admits he was “shocked” to discover that the Sacklers, until recently better known for their cultural philanthropy, were responsible for the powerful narcotic relentlessly marketed by Purdue Pharma despite clear evidence of OxyContin’s widespread abuse. Some family members are now in legal peril as they fend off a barrage of lawsuits. “There was a kind of initial revelation,” Keefe said, “which was, there’s this name that I see when I go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and actually, this fortune is associated with this drug that has created a lot of carnage.”

Background: Keefe, whose previous books include Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland and The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream, was reporting on the Mexican drug trade years ago when he noticed an uptick in heroin coming into the U.S. and began looking into opioids. “It doesn’t take long when you start reading about the opioid crisis to come upon OxyContin and Purdue Pharma,” he said. “I’ve always been interested in the ways in which illegal drug organizations resemble legal businesses, and I became very interested in some specific ways in which legal Big Pharma practices sometimes resemble those of drug cartels — for instance, offering free samples to an addictive product.”

Strong-arm tactics: No one from the Sackler family cooperated with Keefe for the book, and he suspects he was surveilled. He was also subject to a slew of legal threats. “I’ve written about very wealthy people before who have tried to manhandle my reporting and the way the piece would be written,” he said. “I’ve written about some fairly scary figures from the criminal underworld. This was a different kind of experience.” The reason the Sacklers have managed to keep their name separate from OxyContin for so long, Keefe argues, is “this apparatus of lawyers and PR hatchet men who, any time journalists start writing about this stuff, they just come down on them like a ton of bricks.”

Fun fact: During the pandemic, Keefe hunkered down and got to work on the book, most of which he wrote from his bed. “My wife and I share a home office, and she has a job that normally takes her into the city every day, but she wasn’t doing that,” he recalled. “So I got the bed. It worked out strangely fine, in the sense that because there were so many documents, I found that the bed was a useful place to lay everything out. Everything was right there within easy reach, and I still have a little bit of a mild back pain to show for it. But that’s the worst of it.”

Read the full interview here.

E’ morto Gianni Firpo, storico ristoratore dell’osteria Beccassa in Val Trebbia

Genova – È morto Gianni Firpo, il ristoratore della Beccassa, osteria della Val Trebbia che è un punto di riferimento del mondo della caccia, dei raccoglitori di funghi, dei tifosi genoani e anche della politica ligure, per la presenza quasi fissa ai suoi tavoli dell’ex presidente della regione Claudio Burlando.

Così lo ricorda la deputata Raffaella Paita sul suo profilo Facebook: “Ieri nella sua casa di ponte Trebbia, sopra la sua adorata Osteria Beccassa, se ne è andato un grande amico: Gianni. Gianni era un uomo dai mille interessi, il calcio ( il suo Genoa), la caccia, la politica, la sua famiglia, il suo territorio. La Beccassa non è un luogo come tanti ma un punto di riferimento accogliente, libero, ospitale per l’intera comunità della Val Trebbia e della provincia di Genova. Entrare alla Beccassa e’ come sentirti a casa. Ecco questo era Gianni, un uomo generoso in tutte le cose che faceva. E voglio salutarlo così ricordandolo con quel grande cuore che ha messo a disposizione di tutti. Il mio abbraccio giunga alla moglie, all’adorato figlio e a tutta la sua famiglia. E insieme a loro a tutti quelli che come me hanno avuto l’onore di essergli amici. Ciao Gianni.”

Jeweler-to-the-stars claims sibling femme fatales swindled him

A Manhattan jeweler-to-the-stars, whose clients include rapper Cardi B and Mets shortstop Amed Rosario, was swindled by a pair of sibling femme fatales posing as customers, according to a new lawsuit.

Vladislav Aminov, owner of Vladdys Diamonds on Canal Street, says in the suit that he picked up California sisters Sage and Isabella Firpo at JFK International Airport on Oct. 17, 2017, thinking they were visiting to purchase jewelry. Sage Firpo was a past customer.

Instead “they were on a deceitful mission of theft,” Aminov fumes in court papers.

Once they arrived, they asked Aminov to book them a room at the Dream Hotel on West 55th Street. They “purportedly decided to freshen-up” for dinner, so Aminov left the room for a workout.

Before hitting the gym, he put his $150,000 rose gold Patek Philippe watch in the safe.

“Assuming that defendants were not spying on him at the time, he set the combination on the safe by following the instructions written on the safe, and made the combination 1-5-1-1,” the suit says.

But when he returned, the women were gone — along with his luxury timepiece, a 5711 IR-001 model set with diamonds.

The jeweler believes the Firpos “devised a scheme and artifice to either physically observe, electronically record or had a device to gain access into the safe after [he] had exited the hotel-room.”

The sisters’ father, John Firpo, promised Aminov he would “take care of it,” but never did, according to court papers.

The jeweler is suing for $150,000.

The NYPD has no record of a criminal complaint for the incident. Aminov’s attorney did not return a message seeking comment.

Publicly listed phone numbers for the Firpos were out of service.