Howard Udell

Howard Udell, Purdue Pharma’s general counsel, stood at the intersection of the company’s legal defense and the federal case over its marketing of OxyContin. In the book, he is presented through sharply different accounts: a senior lawyer whom the company described as principled and whose family later emphasized his integrity, and an executive who pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor arising from Purdue’s fraudulent marketing. The contrast persists after the courtroom proceedings, as Udell’s community service became a lasting form of veterans’ advocacy while his son continued to regard the conviction as unjust.

Identity and Role

Udell was the company’s general counsel during a period of mounting lawsuits, investigations, and public scrutiny. Purdue publicly insisted that it had not settled any of the civil claims brought by people who attributed addiction to OxyContin, even as its legal costs reportedly reached $3 million a month and 285 suits remained pending. One case involved former sales representative Karen White, who said she had been fired for refusing to sell to physicians she believed were illegally overprescribing the drug; Purdue cited performance and paperwork issues as the reasons for her dismissal. The competing accounts made the company’s treatment of internal dissent part of its broader legal and reputational crisis.

Purdue also faced scrutiny over security at its manufacturing plants after the 2001 arrest of two employees accused of trying to steal thousands of pills. Rudy Giuliani and his consulting firm were hired to improve the company’s standing with public officials. Giuliani negotiated behind the scenes over a fine involving the Purdue affiliate that operated the New Jersey factory; the settlement included a $2 million civil penalty without an admission of wrongdoing, although the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration official responsible for diversion control had argued for $10 million. The book gives no basis for assigning Udell a direct role in that negotiation, but the episode shows the regulatory and political pressures surrounding the company whose legal division he led.

The Federal Case and Guilty Plea

In May 2007, federal prosecutors announced an agreement under which Purdue would plead guilty to felony misbranding and its leading executives, including Udell, would plead guilty to misdemeanor versions of the offense. The company admitted that for six years it had marketed OxyContin as less prone to abuse and less likely to cause narcotic side effects than immediate-release versions. Purdue agreed to pay $600 million in fines and other penalties. The executives’ $34.5 million in fines was paid by the firm on their behalf. The penalties were equivalent to about 90 percent of the company’s profits from the drug’s launch in 1996 through 2001, when Purdue stopped using insert language that described the timed-release mechanism as reducing a drug’s abuse liability.

The settlement did not mean that Udell’s lawyers accepted the prosecution’s moral characterization of him. At sentencing, his attorney argued that he had personally done nothing wrong and had promoted prescription monitoring when much of the industry opposed it. She also cited his role in urging Purdue to remove the 160-milligram pill from the market after safety concerns emerged and in suspending shipments to Mexico after Americans began traveling there to obtain the drug. Those points formed the defense’s case for distinguishing Udell’s individual conduct from the company’s admitted marketing practices; they did not undo his guilty plea.

His lawyer characterized the conviction as a severe personal penalty and argued that incarceration would add stigma without being justified by personal wrongdoing. The other executives’ attorneys likewise stressed their clients’ individual records and disputed the implications of the misdemeanor pleas. The book preserves these arguments alongside the agreed facts of the settlement, rather than treating the defense’s account as a replacement for the company’s admission. That tension is central to Udell’s portrayal: the case established criminal responsibility through the plea, while the defense and, later, his family continued to contest what that responsibility said about him personally.

Sentencing and the Families’ Challenge

For parents who had lost children, the settlement’s financial scale did not answer the question of accountability. Lee Nuss had asked the judge to reject the agreement, arguing that money could not meaningfully punish a company of Purdue’s resources. She carried a small brass urn containing her son Randy’s ashes when she traveled. During testimony, she addressed Udell and the other executives, identifying the ashes as those of a young man who had died after taking OxyContin. Purdue’s lawyers had previously asked a judge to remove the urn from the courthouse during Karen White’s whistle-blower case. Nuss had responded to that earlier removal with laughter and the conviction that her son would still be present in spirit; at sentencing, the urn made that insistence literal and public.

Nuss waved the urn toward the executives and returned to her seat. Her gesture brought an individual loss into a proceeding otherwise organized around pleas, fines, and legal terms. The episode does not establish what Udell privately thought or felt; it shows instead the distance between the defense’s focus on his personal character and the families’ demand that the people responsible for the company’s conduct confront its consequences. The executives were not to serve jail time under the plea agreement, though the judge retained authority to approve its terms and set probation and community service.

Community Service and Later Life

Udell completed his court-ordered community service in Connecticut, where he counseled veterans at a Veterans Administration hospital on job skills. He later founded the Connecticut Veterans Legal Center, which helped hundreds of veterans address problems including evictions, dishonorable discharges, and crimes related to substance use. After fulfilling his required service hours, he continued working with the center. Michael Friedman also performed community service there. A local newspaper described the executives’ initial service as volunteer work, a description that obscured its court-ordered origin; Udell’s continued involvement, however, outlasted the requirement.

When Udell died unexpectedly of a stroke in 2013, aged seventy-two, a local newspaper presented his work with the veterans’ center as a redemptive outcome of the sentence. His son Jeffrey, a former federal prosecutor, offered a starkly different emphasis. He recalled his father’s fingerprinting at the guilty plea, three years of supervised release, and need to consult a probation officer before crossing state lines to visit his grandchildren. Jeffrey maintained that the government had presented no proof of his father’s wrongdoing and described the conviction as an indignity imposed on a man he considered deeply principled. The book records this as the family’s position, set against the guilty plea and the company’s admitted conduct.

Narrative Significance

Udell’s story complicates any simple division between punishment and vindication. His lawyers’ account of his actions within Purdue, the company’s guilty plea, Nuss’s public testimony, and his later service to veterans each illuminate a different measure of responsibility. The settlement imposed substantial financial penalties and a criminal record, but no prison sentence; its community-service requirement also led to work that Udell chose to continue. Meanwhile, the families’ testimony resisted the conversion of deaths into a corporate accounting, and his son’s defense resisted the conversion of a corporate plea into a judgment on his father’s whole character. The book leaves those accounts in unresolved proximity: Udell could be remembered as a veterans’ advocate and as a senior Purdue executive convicted in the OxyContin case, without either fact erasing the other.