In the middle of Arthur Sackler’s Terramycin campaign, Martí-Ibáñez had stumbled across what he thought was a terrific business opportunity. He had learned that the Washington Institute of Medicine, the publisher of the prestigious Journal of Antibiotics, was near bankruptcy. The FDA’s chief of the Division of Antibiotics, Henry Welch, was the journal’s editor. Because Welch only received a small honorarium, the FDA had given him its permission to act as editor in his spare time. They decided there was no conflict of interest since the amount of money was so small: $3,270 over three years.1
When Martí-Ibáñez called Arthur and told him about the Washington Institute’s money problems, Sackler offered to pay its debts. MD Publications, the company they formed the previous spring, would become the new owner and publisher. It was worth doing, both agreed, only if Welch agreed to stay on as editor.
Martí-Ibáñez spoke to Welch. To entice him to remain, he and Sackler devised a generous offer. Welch would get 7.5 percent of all advertising income for any journal he edited, and 50 percent of net income from any reprints sold to pharmaceutical companies.2
Welch was so enthusiastic with the new terms that he even assigned his rights to a book, Antibiotic Therapy, on which he had been working.3 Martí-Ibáñez and Welch agreed to introduce the first of a series of new journals; the initial one was a quarterly, Antibiotics and Chemotherapy. Sackler advanced $50,000 in start-up funding, enough to pay off the Washington Institute’s debts and for a few operating months ($484,000 in 2019). Welch did not disclose the new financial arrangements with his FDA superiors.4
As with MD Publications, Martí-Ibáñez acted as if he owned the resurrected Washington Institute. Soon after the bailout he executed a contract entitling the Washington Institute to a flat “consulting fee” of $3,500 every time it published an MD Publication–branded journal. In a couple of years there were ten journals, translating into a fixed annual fee of $420,000 ($4.4 million in 2019).
The author uncovered that the Sacklers had a secret controlling stake in MD Publications. As with most businesses connected to the brothers, it was complicated. Arthur had become the editor-in-chief in 1950 of one of four quarterly publications then owned by the Washington Institute, The Journal of Clinical and Experimental Psychopathology. After Sackler’s colleague, Joseph Borkin, became a part owner of the Washington Institute, responsibility for the psychiatric journal transferred to the Ophuijsen Center. That was the name of a research unit at Creedmoor Psychiatric Center, named after Johan van Ophuijsen, the Dutch director of the state hospital’s medical trials.
The address listed for the Ophuijsen Center, however, was not its correct one in Queens, but 15 East 62nd Street, New York. The telephone number was (212) 832-7900. That is where Arthur moved the William Douglas McAdams Agency in 1954; it had the same phone number. The address was also listed in the Manhattan phone book for Mortimer and Raymond.5 The author discovered that in later years 15 East 62nd Street, and that phone number, were used by a series of medical companies and charitable foundations controlled by the Sacklers.
Arthur stocked The Journal of Clinical and Experimental Psychopathology with his most trusted associates. Martí-Ibáñez was its international editor, and Mortimer and Raymond, along with the Washington Institute’s Joseph Borkin, were directors. A series of stock transfers and option assignments resulted in Martí-Ibáñez, Borkin, and his partner Dr. Henry Klaunberg each owning 10 percent. The owner of the remaining 70 percent is not identified in any recorded legal document. However, the accountants for the anonymous buyer were Brooklyn-born brother and sister Louis Goldburt and Mary Siegel. The duo, operating from an office at 1440 Broadway, did tax withholding, payroll forms, and general accounting for other Sackler companies.6 Louis was one of the three listed “owners” in New York State filings for Purdue Frederick. That covert 70 percent share returned a guaranteed minimum of $294,000 a year to the Sacklers, based only on the fixed reprint fees Martí-Ibáñez had created.
When the small Medicine Avenue partners speculated about what might be the next big development in the pharmaceutical industry, all agreed that it was certain to be tied to antibiotics. That market was in its early stages. Natural antibiotics and the first wave of broad-spectrum drugs had upended the industry.7
A problem they identified was that finding effective therapeutic organisms in millions of samples of soil or on decaying fruit was like playing the lottery. There had been, no doubt, major discoveries in some unexpected places. Cephalosporin was extracted from sewage waste, streptomycin located in a throat of a chicken, and fusidic acid, a topical antibiotic, found in Japanese monkey dung.8 A few companies might get lucky and develop a blockbuster antibiotic, but it was unpredictable. That uncertainty might be acceptable for academic and scientific researchers. But it frustrated those responsible for bottom-line profits.
Sackler and Martí-Ibáñez saw those business issues through the prism of their medical backgrounds. The dream solution, both thought, was to find a way to synthesize improved antibiotics. That ran counter to accepted scientific wisdom that natural antibiotics were the best available because they had evolved over thousands of years by surviving countless strains of bacterium. Drug researchers believed it was not possible to create a synthetic drug more potent than what Mother Nature provided. A few efforts at modification had only decreased the drugs’ benefits, producing weaker knock-offs of little value.9
Arthur Sackler knew that Pfizer was trying to change that. CEO John McKeen’s hard-driving attitude had given the lab researchers an opportunity to pursue some long-shot theories.10
Lloyd Conover was a twenty-eight-year-old organic chemist who had been at Pfizer for two years. One of Conover’s “scientific hunches” was that it was possible to modify natural antibiotics to enhance their therapeutic benefits. At Pfizer’s Brooklyn lab, Conover worked with only a single assistant. He did not share any progress with his colleagues. “I didn’t want an audience if we failed.”11
Conover focused on the chemical structure of Pfizer’s Terramycin and Lederle’s Aureomycin. He was intrigued by what would happen if he manipulated two misaligned atoms. His experiments paid off in 1952 when he swapped a chlorine atom with an oxygen one. The result was a drug that was virtually the chemical twin of both Terramycin and Aureomycin but had more stability and potency as well as superior solubility. Pfizer’s chemists named it tetracycline. Conover had invented the world’s first semisynthetic antibiotic (he was ultimately inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame, joining five hundred other iconic American inventors including Henry Ford, Thomas Edison, and the Wright brothers).
Martí-Ibáñez and the Sacklers had predicted that synthetic antibiotics would herald a new age. Now they planned on how to profit. Exploiting the prestige and power of Welch’s FDA position through their growing basket of journals gave them an unmatched advantage over competitors.
The Washington Institute, Welch’s previous publisher, had run into financial difficulties because it refused ads it considered potential conflicts of interest with any of its scholarly content. The appearance of impropriety did not worry Martí-Ibáñez, Arthur Sackler, and Bill Frohlich. Sackler and Frohlich packed The Journal of Antibiotics with pharmaceutical ads.12
Martí-Ibáñez and Welch established an annual antibiotics conference that brought together more than six hundred clinicians and scientists. Welch convinced the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare to permit the FDA to co-sponsor it.13 Pharma companies tried outdoing each other with lavish reception parties. President Eisenhower paid tribute to the event that “honored all those who, through their work in antibiotics, have made profound changes in the practice of medicine.”14 Welch and Martí-Ibáñez meanwhile skewed the papers selected for presentation to be those that favorably reviewed drugs from the biggest pharma firms, resulting in increased reprint sales. Sackler promoted those reprints as ideal for direct mail campaigns to physicians.15 Every year the symposium proceedings were packaged and sold as a book titled Antibiotics Annual. Martí-Ibáñez and Welch established MD Encyclopedia, which became a widely accepted reference source about diseases, drugs, medical tests, and surgical procedures.16
No one at the FDA seemed concerned that the chief of the all-important Division of Antibiotics was so deeply involved in a commercial enterprise about the same drugs he regulated. Welch’s superiors believed he was still only receiving a small honorarium. Martí-Ibáñez had assured him there was no way anyone could find out how much he earned from their private partnership.17
With Welch enmeshed as a partner in their publishing ventures, Sackler turned next to expanding Bill Frohlich’s role. All Sackler’s friends and business colleagues had heard him frequently complain that ad agencies such as his and Frohlich’s were operating in the dark ages. Arthur contended that what was missing was prescribing data from physicians, pharmacies, and hospitals. That would be invaluable for pharma firms to target more accurately their drug ads. Frohlich and Sackler had already taken the first step. In 1950, Frohlich incorporated Intercontinental Medical Information Service in New York.18 Now, based on renewed talks with Sackler, he was the owner on paper for two related companies and changed the name of the original business to International Marketing Services (IMS).19
In its early days, even though Frohlich promised that all patient data would be anonymized, most doctors resisted sharing information about which drugs they prescribed and for what ailments. Sackler suggested doctors and pharmacists might be more cooperative if Frohlich couched the requests under the guise that sharing information would help pharmaceutical companies develop better drugs. That helped. Still, however, IMS had to make small payments, between $25 and $150 monthly, to get the information it wanted.20
Although Frohlich was IMS’s legal founder and owner according to the incorporation filings, the Sacklers had a hidden stake. Sackler wanted distance from IMS so his rivals could not complain that the collected market data gave him an unfair advantage in winning business for his McAdams agency. Arthur talked to Frohlich about the appearance of impropriety and that prompted Frohlich to open a separate office for IMS. At the beginning, it had shared the McAdams office. Although IMS had been Arthur’s brainchild, he suggested it would be better if Mortimer and Raymond represented the Sackler family interest.21
Arthur’s two younger brothers had the free time because in May 1953 they had been dismissed from Creedmoor. The FBI had shared some of its information about Raymond and Beverly Sackler’s Communist Party membership.22 It was during the height of the decade-long Red Scare, in which a series of congressional investigations whipped up a public frenzy over fears of communist influence and infiltration of the government and American businesses. The New York State commissioner of mental hygiene had the authority to fire the brothers since they were salaried employees at a state institution. Arthur, who still consulted there, was indignant and resigned. Psychiatric researcher Donald Klein, who arrived after the Sacklers were gone, recalled Arthur “had been thrown out by the Creedmoor Director on entirely political grounds.”23 An anonymous FBI source inside William Douglas McAdams later gave the FBI background on the Sacklers; Mortimer and Raymond had problems because of their “alleged involvement in subversive activity” reported by the FBI.24
The Creedmoor Psychiatric Institute’s director, Johan van Ophuijsen, did not want it tarnished by news of the Sacklers’ left-wing politics. The story that made its way to print in The New York Times was that while working on a research project for the Atomic Energy Commission on skin reactions to burns, Mortimer and Raymond had refused to sign an Army loyalty oath that would have required them to report any subversive conversations they overheard at work.25 That was the public reason for their dismissal. The Bureau’s McAdams informant said that privately Arthur had defended his brothers by claiming “it was contrary to a tenet of the Jewish faith to inform on anyone.”26
Mortimer and Raymond wanted to devote all their efforts to building up Purdue Frederick. Arthur, however, convinced them there was much more than Purdue that needed their attention. Hiring the right professionals to run Purdue would give them freedom to take on other ventures. It would also allow them to stay in the background, something they all preferred.
Schneider recommended thirty-two-year-old Seymour Lubman, a pharmacist with corporate experience. He joined Purdue as a “sales administration assistant.” It took only eight months for him to become the company’s national sales manager.27 The first key hire was sixty-year-old Benjamin Schneider, a pharmacist and sales manager at Harrower Laboratory, a California-based drug company founded by a pioneering endocrinologist, Henry Harrower.28 Schneider was a Brooklyn native who grew up not far from the Sacklers. And Arthur admired the internal advertising department run by Harrower’s parent, Lambert. The company had made its Listerine mouthwash a blockbuster by marketing it for halitosis, the medical term for bad breath. Lambert was one of the largest buyers of newspaper and magazine space and had elevated Listerine from $115,000 in sales in 1930 to nearly $20 million by the mid-1950s.29 Schneider joined Purdue in June 1953 as an executive vice president, general manager, and board director.30 The Sacklers made Schneider Purdue’s president in under a year.31
The brothers were content to allow Schneider to be the company’s public face. When The New York Times later did a story about four Lower East Side women who had worked at Purdue for nearly sixty years, the paper called Schneider “a master pharmacist” who “three years ago… took over Purdue and Frederick.”32 The double-column article did not mention the Sacklers. When Purdue announced the creation of an award “to encourage the international exchange of medical ideas on a physician-to-physician basis,” Schneider was the only executive quoted in press coverage.33 When the company sold its twenty-six- by ninety-foot parcel of land at 135 Christopher Street a few years later, Schneider was the one listed on the transfer papers.34 I 35
At IMS, Frohlich’s medical data collection company, few knew that Mortimer and Raymond were helping or that Arthur had developed the business concept. A McAdams employee, David Dubow, who had also grown up in the same Brooklyn neighborhood as the Sacklers, left Arthur’s ad agency to become IMS’s president.36 (Some histories of IMS mistakenly list Dubow as its founder.)
Arthur, more than his friends and siblings, relished the complicated business arrangements. For every new idea he created another company. Sometimes he was the owner, other times it was in the name of one of his wives, brothers, friends, or a trust for one of his children. When The New York Times later announced, for instance, that Purdue Frederick had retained Pharmaceutical Advertising Associates for all its brands, it seemed as if the Sackler-owned drug firm had deliberately avoided retaining the McAdams agency.37 That was the simplest way of avoiding any potential conflict of interest between the products Purdue offered and those marketed by McAdams’s powerful clients. But as the author uncovered, Pharmaceutical Advertising Associates was another Sackler-controlled entity they had founded in 1947 (it was separate from a company they created in 1945 with a similar name, Pharmaceutical Research Associates).38
Marietta did not know all the details of Arthur’s corporate shell game, but she later wrote in her memoir that he was “entering into increasing numbers of business ventures that involved increasingly complex working arrangements with staff and associates. He’d come home exhausted from work. The slightest provocation would infuriate him.” She observed that the “non-stop days and late-night meetings” were “more and more time consuming.”39
The “complex working arrangements with staff and associates” that Marietta observed had attracted the attention of the FBI. Declassified documents obtained by the author through a Freedom of Information request reveal the Bureau investigated Sackler’s web of companies. It was concerned Arthur’s firms “may have become a haven for past or present members of the Communist Party.”40 Many left-wing journalists had been fired after they were subpoenaed before the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) and refused to answer questions about their political affiliations by invoking their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination.41 In a national frenzy started by Senator Joe McCarthy’s congressional witch hunt for communists in the government and media, mainstream newspaper and magazine correspondents found little support from their employers. The New York Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, and United Press International were among the media outlets that terminated reporters for refusing to answer whether they were or had been Communist Party members.42 Most of those sacked never again worked in journalism.43 The FBI had zeroed in on Arthur Sackler because he had subsequently hired many of them.
In 1956, FBI agents met at New York’s St. Regis Hotel with an unidentified informant who was a William Douglas McAdams employee. He warned the agents that Sackler himself had “pink sympathies.”44 The informant told them that in far-left political circles the word had spread that Sackler’s companies were a safe place to earn a living while trying to rebuild shattered careers.
There were limits to how many Sackler could help. Walter Bernstein, for instance, was a screenwriter who had been blacklisted in Hollywood in 1950 after he was named as one of 151 actors, writers, and on-air journalists in Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television, a booklet that purported to unmask the “communist domination of the entertainment industry.”45 In September 1952, Bernstein showed up at 11 East 26th Street in New York, the location for four Sackler companies.46 Bernstein met with Leo Davis, a film editor who got a job at Medigraphics after it was disclosed that he had signed the Communist Party petition for putting candidates on the New York ballot.47 Bernstein was low on money and needed a loan and steady work. Davis knew that Bernstein, a talented screenwriter, would be an ideal fit for the promotional and instructional films Medigraphics developed for Sackler’s pharmaceutical clients. The next month, Davis told Bernstein that Medigraphics wanted to hire him. The FBI needed to first clear him.
Bernstein looked startled. “What would they want that for?”
“Medigraphics makes medical films for the U.S. Government.”
Bernstein skipped the job.II
Bernstein was the exception; in most cases Sackler had no problem in hiring blacklisted journalists. The FBI informant told the Bureau that he suspected many of his McAdams coworkers had a Red connection. He pointed to a recent hire, David Gordon, a newspaper reporter. Gordon had been fired from New York’s Daily News the day after he appeared before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee and refused to answer if he had run the communist “shop paper” when he worked at the Brooklyn Eagle.48
The FBI confirmed that Gordon, going then by the name Alex Gordon, was a copywriter at Sackler’s Medical Press.49 The Bureau quickly discovered that many of the activists and writers it listed as communist sympathizers or former party members had gone unnoticed since Sackler gave them non-byline jobs at his newsletters and promotional publications.50
The New York Times had dismissed Jack Shafer, a foreign desk copy editor, after he invoked the Fifth Amendment before Congress when asked if he was a communist. He took a job at Medical Tribune, Sackler’s biweekly free newspaper that went to 168,000 American doctors.51 Medical Tribune was also where Max Gordon, a former city editor of the New York Daily Worker, found a job. The same was true for Melvin Barnet, a Times copy editor who had testified he was not a communist after 1942 but took the Fifth for the period before that. Although Barnet had an English and classics degree from Harvard and his thesis about Shakespeare won honors, his journalism career was finished. After the Times let him go, he ended up picking oranges in Florida and editing vanity books to pay his bills. Then a friend told him that Arthur Sackler at William Douglas McAdams “had hired others who had lost their job during the McCarthy era.”52 III 53
The Bureau’s probe gathered some momentum when it learned Peter Rhodes, who it had investigated for possible espionage, worked as a McAdams copywriter and editor. Rhodes had been a UPI reporter who had covered World War II for the Office of War Information. He lost his job after a special investigating unit of the House Un-American Activities Committee revealed he had signed petitions for the Communist Party for state and local elections in 1940 and had also listed fake addresses on the forms. During the war, an FBI surveillance team had tracked Jacob Golos, a Ukrainian-born Bolshevik revolutionary and Soviet intelligence operative who was a founding member of the American Communist Party, to Rhodes’s Washington Heights apartment on West 173rd Street. Golos was in charge of recruiting foreign agents. Rhodes was never charged with espionage and after the war denied he was a Soviet asset.54 The agents who worked his case thought he was lying.
The FBI learned from their McAdams informant that Rhodes had recently traveled to Europe and not returned; it was believed he was working there for McAdams International, which Sackler had opened to handle the promotion needs of his foreign pharma clients. Moreover, the informant said that Rhodes was responsible for Sackler hiring Jack Ryan, the former executive vice president of the New York local of the American Newspaper Guild. Ryan had resigned after witnesses publicly identified him as a Communist Party member (he never flatly denied it).55 During his testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee, when asked about work, Ryan said he was a self-employed horticulturist. At the time, he was on the payroll of Communications Associates, a McAdams subsidiary.56
The FBI informant warned the Bureau that he had become “increasingly suspicious this summer [1956] when Dr. Arthur Sackler, Fritz Silber, two partners—Dr. De Forrest Ely [sic] and Dr. Felix-Ibanez [sic]—and the company accountant, Louis Goldburt, all visited Europe at the same time, ostensibly for pleasure trips.” That was the first time Martí-Ibáñez’s name came up. The Bureau knew that American leftists respected Martí-Ibáñez because he had fought the fascists in the Spanish Civil War.
Martí-Ibáñez traveled often to Switzerland to visit Dr. Henry Sigerist, a pro-Soviet physician who had left America after the FBI declared him a security risk.57 Arthur Sackler, said the informant, “sees Rhodes while visiting there.”58 Some of Sackler’s recent new hires—Fritz Silber and Heinz Norden—were “close associates of Ryan and Rhodes.” That raised the specter of espionage. The memo sent to FBI headquarters noted: “The files of the NYO [New York Office] reflect that Dr. Arthur Sackler to have been an apparently close business contact of Alfred Kaufman Stern, a suspected Soviet agent.”59
The FBI thought it odd that some of Sackler’s companies shared the same address and telephone numbers.60 The top executives overlapped.61 The agents wondered whether the complexity was designed to hide the real owners and sources of funding.62
Relying on original incorporation, legal, and tax papers, the author cross-matched directors, attorneys, accountants, and shared office addresses and telephone numbers to unmask many of the previously secret Sackler enterprises. With some of their earliest ventures, the brothers were not hiding anything from the FBI but rather believed their odds for getting research grants were better if each company seemed independent when it applied to government and private foundations.
No Sackler was listed on the paperwork for the 1945 incorporation of Pharmaceutical Research Associates.IV63 It was formed to pursue drug research grants. Arthur Sackler did not appear as a director on a corporate filing until 1957, the Laboratories for Therapeutic Research. It also pursued private and public research grants.64
The Sacklers’s strategy worked. Time and again, both Pharmaceutical Research Associates and Laboratories for Therapeutic Research landed private and government funding without anyone realizing the Sacklers controlled both.
Even in instances in which the brothers used their names, they worked an angle. Arthur, for instance, was listed as the “Director of the von [sic] Ophuijsen Center [Creedmoor],” though he had not been formally with that research facility for years. Letterhead for the Ophuijsen Center discovered by the author listed its address as “130 East 50th Street, New York,” the same as the McAdams agency. On another occasion, the electrochemicals department of DuPont de Nemours Company awarded Arthur a generous grant for a clinical trial about amino acids and gastric secretions. For his twenty-one-subject study he was aided by Dr. Lawrence Sophian, listed as the Ophuijsen Center’s “Consultant Pathologist and Director of Research.” There was no such position, although Sophian was real and employed as one of two doctors at the McAdams agency. Dr. Sophian was also one of the directors on the incorporation papers for the Laboratories for Therapeutic Research.65
Landing research grants was only one reason for the corporate maze the brothers created. Another was disseminating pharma-friendly information disguised as unbiased research.66 Their new ventures mimicked the enormous success of Arthur’s Medical Tribune newsletter. Arthur admitted to being the chairman of the board for Medical Press Inc., and president of the Medical Radio and TV Institute and the Physicians News Service (both of which shared with McAdams and other businesses three floors at 130 East 59th Street).67 The author uncovered that Arthur, often with his brothers, had either a significant stake or full ownership in Brooklyn Medical Press (1942), Angiology Research Foundation (1950), Inter America Medical Press (1952), and International Medical Press (1952).68
Purdue Frederick, the patent drug company they bought in 1952, was at the center of most of their grand plans. Yet their Purdue ownership was not transparent, instead initially in the names of two of their lawyers and an accountant.69 The same was true for a 1955 New York corporation, Bard Pharmaceuticals.70 The trio opened their first foreign subsidiaries only three years after buying Purdue.71 Mundipharma Limited (Latin for “world medicine”) and Dagrapharm Limited (Urdu for “people’s drugs”) opened in August 1955 in London.72 Those U.K. companies were followed soon by Mundipharma AG in Basel, Switzerland.73 The author discovered that as was typical of their American operations, the two London companies shared the same address.74 As for the Swiss firm, its address would be the same for fifteen future Sackler-connected Mundipharma-branded companies that opened in Switzerland through 2019 (twelve of which are still active).75
Despite its suspicions, the FBI never got the chance to probe the Sacklers’ businesses. The Bureau was overwhelmed by a deluge of pending investigations about communist domestic infiltration and possible espionage. It had to do constant triage for prioritizing cases. Without any new evidence, the investigation into Arthur Sackler, his companies, and his employees, stalled. The case agents dutifully noted Arthur’s left-wing leanings and his assistance to Communist Party members. The file on him and his brothers remained open.76
I. The first time the Sacklers decided to be the public face of Purdue was in 1960. The brothers had convinced the AMA to join them in launching the “Purdue Frederick–American Medical Association Presidential Award.” It was for “contributions to science and the total welfare of the nation.” The first one went to Dr. Louis Orr, the AMA’s retiring president, and Mortimer Sackler presented it at the annual AMA convention.
II. Director Sidney Lumet helped Bernstein emerge from the blacklist three years later. Lumet hired him to write the screenplay in 1959 for the Sophia Loren film That Kind of Woman. He worked on The Magnificent Seven the following year but did not get credit. Then in 1964 he demonstrated his Red Scare past was truly behind him with the hit screenplay for Fail Safe.
III. The author discovered that when Sackler did not have an opening for one of the blacklisted journalists, he sometimes asked Bill Frohlich for help. William Marx “Bill” Mandel, a reporter who was most famous for his heated exchanges with Senator McCarthy during the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings, got a job at L. W. Frohlich after Sackler made a personal request. The same was true for Carol Greitzer, a feminist activist who later became president of the National Abortion Rights Action League and in 1969 got elected to New York City Council. Once elected, she reduced her work at L. W. Frohlich to three days a week. Mandel’s father, Hyman Robert Mandel, had served on New York’s Citizen’s Housing Council with Sackler’s friend Alfred Stern.
IV. Pharmaceutical Research Associates initially listed its address as the law office of Brooklyn-born brothers Myron and Martin Greene. Martin incorporated the Sacklers’ first charitable foundation in 1947. Both Greenes, and their office secretary, were listed as the sole shareholders for the February 1955 incorporation of Vard Pharmaceuticals (changed a month later to Bard Pharmaceuticals). Vard’s address was also the Greenes’ lower Broadway law office. After it became Bard, the address changed to 259 Broadway, the office of Louis Goldburt, Arthur Sackler’s accountant.