Explore the real-world places that appear in Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe. Each location on the map shows what happens there in the novel, the real history of the place, and what's there today. Featured locations include Flatbush, Brooklyn, Arthur Sackler's Medical Advertising Empire — William Douglas McAdams Agency, Purdue Pharma Headquarters, Metropolitan Museum of Art — Sackler Wing, Sackler Gallery — Smithsonian Institution and 9 more.
Flatbush Ave & Cortelyou Rd area — Sackler family origins
The Sackler saga begins in the crowded immigrant streets of Flatbush, Brooklyn, where Isaac and Sophie Sackler raised their three sons — Arthur, Mortimer, and Raymond — during the early twentieth century. The family was not wealthy, and the boys grew up acutely aware of the precariousness of their station. Arthur, the eldest, was brilliant and driven, determined to claw his way out of Brooklyn poverty through sheer ambition and intelligence. Their upbringing in this working-class Jewish neighborhood would shape the family's obsessive pursuit of money and respectability for generations.
Flatbush was a major destination for Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe in the early twentieth century, with families crowding into tenements and row houses. The neighborhood was a launching pad for countless strivers who went on to reshape American professional and cultural life. By the mid-twentieth century, it was one of Brooklyn's most densely populated and diverse communities.
Flatbush remains a vibrant, densely populated Brooklyn neighborhood, today home to large Caribbean and West Indian communities. The streets the Sacklers walked still exist, lined with a mix of older rowhouses and commercial strips. It is one of Brooklyn's most recognizable neighborhoods.
Visit: Flatbush Historic District (historic site)
350 Madison Ave, Midtown Manhattan — Arthur's rise to power
Arthur Sackler's genius and his original sin converged at the William Douglas McAdams advertising agency on Madison Avenue, which he eventually came to control. Arthur pioneered the modern pharmaceutical advertising industry, devising campaigns for Valium that made it the first billion-dollar drug in history. He understood that doctors, not patients, were the true targets of pharmaceutical marketing, and he developed techniques — lavish physician gifts, planted journal articles, aggressive detail men — that Purdue Pharma would later use to devastating effect with OxyContin. Keefe shows how Arthur built a media empire in parallel with his medical career, using each to reinforce the other.
Madison Avenue gave its name to the American advertising industry. By the mid-twentieth century, major pharmaceutical companies were beginning to market prescription drugs directly to physicians, a practice that would transform medicine and public health in America. The corridor between 40th and 60th Streets on Madison became home to some of the most powerful ad firms in the world.
350 Madison Avenue is a commercial office tower in Midtown Manhattan. The pharmaceutical advertising industry Arthur Sackler created has since grown into a multi-billion-dollar sector that continues to operate across Midtown Manhattan offices. Madison Avenue remains synonymous with advertising culture.
One Stamford Forum, Stamford, CT — The OxyContin machine
Purdue Pharma, the Stamford-based company controlled by the Sackler family's second generation — Raymond's sons Richard, Jonathan, and David — became the engine of the opioid crisis. From this headquarters, executives launched the 1996 marketing blitz for OxyContin, training a sales force to tell doctors that the drug's slow-release formula made it less addictive than ordinary opioids. Keefe details how Purdue sales reps were instructed to target prolific prescribers and offer lavish perks, funneling hundreds of thousands of prescriptions into communities that would be devastated by addiction. The building was the nerve center for what federal prosecutors would later call a criminal conspiracy.
Stamford, Connecticut became a major corporate hub in the late twentieth century as companies relocated from New York City to take advantage of lower taxes and suburban amenities. Purdue Pharma was founded in New York in 1892 as the Purdue Frederick Company and moved to Stamford in the 1980s. It remained a privately held, family-controlled company throughout its history.
Purdue Pharma filed for bankruptcy in 2019 under the weight of more than 2,600 lawsuits from states, cities, and counties. The company reached a landmark $6 billion settlement in 2022. Its former Stamford headquarters continues to operate under the Purdue name as it works through bankruptcy proceedings and dissolution.
1000 Fifth Ave, Upper East Side — The Temple of Dendur
The Sackler Wing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, housing the ancient Egyptian Temple of Dendur, was one of Arthur Sackler's most visible monuments to his own philanthropy. Keefe uses the Met's Sackler Wing as a central symbol of the family's strategy of laundering its reputation through cultural giving. The book chronicles how, as the opioid crisis mounted, activist groups like P.A.I.N. led by artist Nan Goldin staged dramatic 'die-ins' inside the Sackler Wing, protesters in white lab coats raining fake prescription bottles into the fountain surrounding the ancient temple. The spectacle drew worldwide media attention and forced the Met to eventually remove the Sackler name from the wing.
The Temple of Dendur, a gift from Egypt to the United States in 1965, was installed in the Metropolitan Museum in 1978. The Sackler Wing was named for Arthur Sackler, who donated $3.5 million toward the gallery's construction. The wing became one of the most visited spaces in the museum, hosting galas and events for New York's cultural elite.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art announced in 2021 that it would remove the Sackler name from the wing. The Temple of Dendur remains on display in the same gallery space, which is now known simply as the Dendur Wing. The Met was one of several major institutions — alongside the Louvre, Oxford, and the Tate — to sever ties with the Sackler name.
Visit: The Metropolitan Museum of Art (museum)
1050 Independence Ave SW, Washington D.C. — Arthur's museum
Arthur Sackler's most grandiose philanthropic achievement was the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery on the National Mall, part of the Smithsonian Institution and dedicated to Asian art — the collection Arthur amassed over decades of obsessive buying. Keefe portrays the gallery as the ultimate expression of Arthur's need for recognition and immortality, his name carved in stone on one of the most prestigious museum strips in the world. The irony Keefe underlines is profound: Arthur himself had no connection to opioids — he died in 1987 before OxyContin — yet his brothers and nephews used the charitable playbook he pioneered to try to salvage the family name even as the opioid deaths mounted.
The Arthur M. Sackler Gallery opened in 1987, just months after Arthur Sackler's death. It was built with a $4 million gift from Arthur and houses over a thousand works of Asian art that he donated from his personal collection. It sits alongside the Freer Gallery on the National Mall and is connected to it by an underground passage.
The Smithsonian's Sackler Gallery is now known as the National Museum of Asian Art, following a rebranding in 2022 that quietly subsumed the Sackler name into a broader institutional identity. The museum remains fully open to the public and houses one of the finest collections of Asian art in the Western hemisphere.
Visit: National Museum of Asian Art (museum)
950 Pennsylvania Ave NW, Washington D.C. — Federal prosecution
The Department of Justice plays a central role in Keefe's narrative as the arena in which the government repeatedly — and, Keefe argues, inadequately — confronted the Sacklers. In 2007, Purdue Pharma pleaded guilty to federal charges of misbranding OxyContin and paid $600 million in fines, but crucially, the individual Sackler family members were not prosecuted. Keefe details how DOJ prosecutors in the Eastern District of Virginia built a strong case against Sackler family members, only to see it result in a deal that let the family walk away. The book's moral core is the argument that the DOJ allowed one of the worst public health catastrophes in American history to go individually unpunished.
The Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building on Pennsylvania Avenue was completed in 1935. It is the headquarters of the United States Department of Justice and houses the offices of the Attorney General. The building is a landmark of New Deal-era federal architecture.
The Department of Justice continues to operate from this Pennsylvania Avenue headquarters. Following the Purdue Pharma bankruptcy proceedings and the Supreme Court's 2023 ruling that blocked a settlement provision shielding Sackler family members from future civil suits, the legal battles over opioid accountability have continued into the mid-2020s.
Visit: Robert F. Kennedy Department of Justice Building (historic site)
485 Broadway, Cambridge, MA — Elite institutional complicity
Harvard's Arthur M. Sackler Museum is one of the most prominent examples of what Keefe calls the Sackler strategy: using enormous donations to elite institutions to cloak the family in respectability. Keefe shows how Arthur cultivated relationships with Harvard and other Ivy League institutions, understanding that association with academic prestige was a form of social laundering. As OxyContin lawsuits mounted, pressure grew on Harvard and other institutions to distance themselves from the Sackler name. The university's response — cautious, legalistic, slow — illustrated for Keefe the way elite institutions protect their donors even in the face of catastrophic harm.
Harvard University's Sackler Museum was named for Arthur Sackler following a major donation and opened in 1985. It houses the university's collection of Asian, ancient, and Islamic art. Harvard is the oldest university in the United States, founded in 1636 in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Harvard renamed the Arthur M. Sackler Museum in 2023, rebranding it as the Harvard Art Museums' Art Study Center. The physical building continues to function as part of the Harvard Art Museums complex, which also includes the Fogg and Busch-Reisinger museums. The renaming was part of a broader wave of institutions severing ties with the Sackler name.
Visit: Harvard Art Museums (museum)
Belle Haven & Back Country, Greenwich — The second generation's wealth
Greenwich, Connecticut is where the second generation of Sacklers — Raymond's sons Richard, Jonathan, and David — lived in extraordinary opulence as OxyContin made them billionaires. Keefe depicts Greenwich as a world of gated estates, private clubs, and total insulation from the communities their drug was destroying. Richard Sackler, the most aggressive champion of OxyContin, oversaw the marketing strategy from his Connecticut perch, urging sales staff to push higher doses and dismissing early reports of addiction as the fault of 'addicts.' Keefe uses Greenwich's bubble of privilege to dramatize the moral chasm between the Sacklers and their victims.
Greenwich, Connecticut has been one of the wealthiest communities in the United States since the late nineteenth century, attracting New York financiers and industrialists who built grand estates in its backcountry hills. It became a center of hedge fund wealth in the late twentieth century. Its Belle Haven peninsula and backcountry estates represent some of the most valuable residential real estate in New England.
Greenwich remains one of the wealthiest towns in the United States, with a median household income among the highest in the country. The Sackler family estates are private residences not open to the public. The town itself is a functioning affluent suburb with a charming downtown and waterfront.
300 W Main St, White Sulphur Springs, WV — OxyContin launch
Keefe describes how Purdue Pharma held lavish sales conferences at upscale resorts, including The Greenbrier, to train and motivate its sales force to push OxyContin aggressively. These events were part of the company's strategy of making sales representatives feel like crusaders for pain relief, given awards and bonuses tied to prescription volume. Sales reps were coached to counter physician skepticism about addiction, armed with Purdue-produced talking points that minimized the drug's risks. The conferences were a microcosm of the company culture: glamorous, competitive, and utterly divorced from the consequences playing out in rural America.
The Greenbrier has been a luxury resort in the Allegheny Mountains of West Virginia since 1778. It served as a congressional bunker during the Cold War and has hosted American presidents and global dignitaries. It became a symbol of American luxury and was a popular destination for corporate events in the late twentieth century.
The Greenbrier remains a full-service luxury resort and spa, open to the public for stays, golf, dining, and spa services. It is a National Historic Landmark and continues to host corporate events and conferences. The Cold War-era bunker beneath the resort is now a publicly accessible museum.
Visit: The Greenbrier (historic site)
Williamson, WV — Mingo County, epicenter of the opioid crisis
While the Sacklers schemed from Greenwich and Manhattan, the consequences of OxyContin played out most catastrophically in Appalachian communities like Williamson, West Virginia. Keefe documents how Purdue's sales force identified rural areas with high concentrations of physically demanding labor — mining, logging, construction — as prime markets, targeting physicians who would prescribe heavily. Communities like Mingo County experienced overdose death rates that were among the highest in the nation. The book traces the arc from Purdue's boardrooms to the hollows of West Virginia, where families were destroyed by the drug the Sacklers marketed as safe.
Mingo County, West Virginia was historically one of the most productive coal mining regions in Appalachia. The decline of coal employment in the late twentieth century left communities economically devastated and workers with high rates of physical injury and chronic pain — the exact conditions that made them vulnerable to OxyContin. The region became a flashpoint for early reporting on the opioid epidemic.
Williamson, West Virginia has been at the center of efforts to hold pharmaceutical companies accountable for the opioid crisis. The city was home to the so-called 'Pill Mill' investigations and was a plaintiff in major opioid litigation. The Williamson Health and Wellness Center has been cited as a model for community-based addiction treatment efforts.
31 Chambers St, Lower Manhattan — Arthur's contested will
After Arthur Sackler's death in 1987, his estate became the subject of bitter legal warfare between his widow Jillian and his brothers Mortimer and Raymond, fought out in New York's Surrogate's Court. Keefe uses the spectacle of the Sacklers suing each other over Arthur's art collection — worth hundreds of millions — as a window into the family's character: litigious, acquisitive, and willing to weaponize the legal system against each other just as readily as against outside adversaries. The dispute over who owned which artworks exposed the baroque complexity of Arthur's financial arrangements and foreshadowed the scorched-earth legal tactics the family would later use to fend off opioid victims.
The New York County Surrogate's Court on Chambers Street, completed in 1907, handles wills, estates, and guardianship matters. Its Beaux-Arts building is considered one of the finest examples of that architectural style in New York City. The court has presided over some of the most consequential estate disputes in American history.
The New York County Surrogate's Court continues to operate from its landmark Chambers Street building in Lower Manhattan. The building is a functioning courthouse and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Its ornate facade and interior are open to view during court hours.
Visit: New York County Surrogate's Court (historic site)
10903 New Hampshire Ave, Silver Spring, MD — Regulatory capture
Keefe's account of Purdue Pharma's manipulation of the FDA is one of the book's most damning sequences. Purdue lobbied the FDA to approve OxyContin's label with language claiming that its slow-release formula reduced addiction potential — a claim that was scientifically dubious and became a cornerstone of the company's marketing. Keefe details how former FDA officials moved into lucrative positions at Purdue and how the company cultivated relationships with key agency personnel. The FDA's 1995 approval of OxyContin, with its favorable labeling, was a critical enabler of the epidemic that followed.
The Food and Drug Administration was established in 1906 and moved to its current Silver Spring, Maryland campus in 2003. The agency is responsible for approving and regulating pharmaceutical drugs sold in the United States. The FDA's drug approval process has been the subject of ongoing controversy over the balance between speed of approval and safety.
The FDA's main campus in White Oak, Silver Spring remains the headquarters of the agency. The FDA has faced sustained criticism for its role in the opioid crisis and has since tightened approval standards and labeling requirements for opioid medications. The campus is not open to general public visitors.
Rue de Rivoli, Paris, France — International philanthropy
The Sackler name reached as far as Paris's Louvre, where the family's philanthropic ambitions extended to one of the world's most visited museums. Keefe uses the Sackler presence at institutions like the Louvre to illustrate the truly global scale of the family's reputation-laundering strategy. As activist Nan Goldin's P.A.I.N. campaign spread internationally, pressure mounted on European institutions as well as American ones to reckon with where the Sackler fortune originated. The Louvre's eventual decision to remove Sackler naming rights was part of a worldwide reckoning chronicled in the book's final sections.
The Louvre is the world's largest art museum, housed in a former royal palace on the Right Bank of the Seine. It has been a public museum since 1793. Major donors to the Louvre have historically received naming recognition within the museum's galleries, a practice common to leading cultural institutions worldwide.
The Louvre announced in 2019 that it would remove the Sackler name from its galleries, becoming one of the first major international institutions to do so. The museum remains open to the public as one of the world's most visited cultural destinations, with over nine million visitors annually in pre-pandemic years.
Visit: Musée du Louvre (museum)
401 Courthouse Square, Alexandria, VA — Criminal prosecution of Purdue
The Eastern District of Virginia, known as the 'rocket docket' for its fast-moving cases, was where federal prosecutors built the most serious criminal case against Purdue Pharma and the Sackler family. Keefe details how investigators in this district accumulated evidence of a knowing conspiracy to defraud — evidence that pointed toward individual Sackler family members, not just the corporation. The 2007 guilty plea by Purdue subsidiaries and the subsequent 2020 guilty plea by Purdue Pharma itself were both handled through this court. Keefe's account of the prosecutorial decisions made here — and the deals that let the Sacklers personally escape criminal charges — is one of the book's most indicting passages.
The United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia in Alexandria has been nicknamed the 'rocket docket' since the 1970s for its exceptionally fast case processing times. It is one of the busiest federal courts in the country and has handled numerous high-profile national security and corporate cases.
The Albert V. Bryan United States Courthouse in Alexandria continues to be the seat of the Eastern District of Virginia. It remains one of the most active federal trial courts in the country. The Purdue Pharma cases resolved through this court set precedents that reverberated through subsequent opioid litigation nationwide.
Visit: Albert V. Bryan United States Courthouse (historic site)
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