Bankruptcy and elite impunity

The Sacklers offer billions of reasons to overthrow the system.

I’ve been writing about the Sackler crime-family for years, as a new generation turned the family’s benzo empire into a opioid powerhouse, exceeding the Rockefeller family fortune by pushing Oxycontin and jumpstarting an epidemic that has claimed 800,000 American lives.

The Sacklers are canny: for years, they laundered their reputation through elite philanthropy, using blood money to paint their names on the world’s great cultural institutions and spending comparable sums to threaten journalists and critics into silence about their crimes.

But no one can run across a river on the backs of alligators forever — eventually, even the fleetest grifter will lose a leg. The Sacklers eventually came into the crosshairs of district attorneys, federal enforcers, bereaved families and recovering addicts.

Outwardly, the family continued to maintain their innocence and assure us that they would prevail in court. Privately, they laundered billions into offshore financial secrecy havens.

Every big con needs a blow-off, a final trick that lets the crook wriggle out of the gator’s jaws. For the Sacklers, that was a breathtaking capture of the bankruptcy system, in the person of Judge Robert Drain of the…