Rogues True stories of grifters, killers, rebels and crooks

Patrick Radden Keefe, 1976-

Book - 2022

"From the prize-winning, New York Times bestselling author of Say Nothing and Empire Of Pain, twelve enthralling stories of skulduggery and intrigue by one of the most decorated journalists of our time "I read everything he writes. Every time he writes a book, I read it. Every time he writes an article, I read it ... he's a national treasure."--Rachel Maddow. Patrick Radden Keefe has garnered prizes ranging from the National Magazine Award to the Orwell Prize to the National Book Critics Circle Award for his meticulously-reported, hypnotically-engaging work on the many ways people behave badly. Rogues brings together a dozen of his most celebrated articles from The New Yorker. As Keefe says in his preface "They refl...ect on some of my abiding preoccupations: crime and corruption, secrets and lies, the permeable membrane separating licit and illicit worlds, the bonds of family, the power of denial." Keefe brilliantly explores the intricacies of forging $150,000 vintage wines, examines whether a whistleblower who dared to expose money laundering at a Swiss bank is a hero or a fabulist, spends time in Vietnam with Anthony Bourdain, chronicles the quest to bring down a cheerful international black market arms merchant, and profiles a passionate death penalty attorney who represents the "worst of the worst," among other bravura works of literary journalism. The appearance of his byline in The New Yorker is always an event, and collected here for the first time readers can see his work forms an always enthralling but deeply human portrait of criminals and rascals, as well as those who stand up against them"--

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Subjects
Genres
True crime stories
Published
New York : Doubleday [2022]
Language
English
Main Author
Patrick Radden Keefe, 1976- (author)
Edition
First edition
Item Description
"The pieces in this work originally appeared in a slightly different form in The New Yorker." -- Title page verso.
Physical Description
xv, 348 pages ; 24 cm
ISBN
9780385548519
9780385675451
  • Preface
  • The Jefferson Bottles How could one collector find so much rare fine wine?
  • Crime Family How a notorious Dutch gangster was exposed by his own sister.
  • The Avenger Has the brother of a victim of the Lockerbie bombing finally solved the case?
  • The Empire of Edge How a doctor, a trader, and the billionaire Steven A. Cohen got entangled in a vast financial scandal.
  • A Loaded Gun A mass shooter's tragic past.
  • The Hunt for El Chapo Inside the capture of the world's most notorious drug lord.
  • Winning How Mark Burnett resurrected Donald Trump as an icon of American success.
  • Swiss Bank Heist The computer technician who exposed a Geneva bank's darkest secrets.
  • The Prince of Marbella The decades-long bank to catch an elusive international arms broker.
  • The Worst of the Worst Judy Clarke excelled at saving the lives of notorious killers. Then she took the case of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev.
  • Buried Secrets How an Israeli billionaire wrested control of one of Africa's biggest prizes.
  • Journeyman Anthony Bourdain's movable feast.
  • Acknowledgments
Review by Booklist Review

Prize-winning and best-selling Keefe follows his highly lauded Empire of Pain (2012) with a collection of New Yorker pieces of astounding variety, each more riveting and extraordinary than the last. A wine connoisseur turned counterfeiter creates vintages said to have provenance in Thomas Jefferson's collection. A stock trader cultivates a relationship with a respected doctor to gain leverage for an insider deal. An Israeli billionaire hopes to monetize a rich iron ore deposit in an African country rife with corruption. Keefe provides scrupulous detail and keen insight into notorious criminal minds in profiles of a powerful international arms dealers, a Dutch gangster who is betrayed by his sister, and the notorious drug trafficker El Chapo. The ego is prominently examined in a portrait of Mark Burnett, creator of hit reality television shows Survivor and The Apprentice, and his role in Donald Trump's ascent. The pièce de résistance is the closing profile on chef turned television star and provocateur Anthony Bourdain, whose humanity and vulnerability are shown with incredible sensitivity. Many of Keefe's subjects exemplify greed, power, and self-delusion, but he also illustrates with remarkable nuance the stigma of mental illness and the compulsion toward ethical principles, reminding us that the arc of the moral universe is long, but it does bend towards justice.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

The 12 essays in this superlative collection from New Yorker staff writer Keefe (Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty) reflect, as he says in his preface, his abiding preoccupations: "crime and corruption, secrets and lies, the permeable membrane separating licit and illicit worlds, the bonds of family, the power of denial." "The Jefferson Bottles" chronicles how the sale of bottles of wine that supposedly belonged to Thomas Jefferson, for hundreds of thousands of dollars, resulted in a lifelong crusade against wine fraud by billionaire Bill Koch. "Crime Family" charts the daily life in hiding of Astrid Holleeder, a Dutch woman who brought down her own crime family by testifying against her brother. "A Loaded Gun" explores why neurobiologist Amy Bishop shot and killed three colleagues at the University of Alabama decades after she was suspected of killing her own brother. "Winning" takes a look at the rise of Donald Trump from the point of view of Mark Burnett, creator of The Apprentice, and in "Journeyman," chef Anthony Bourdain, more rebel than rogue, muses on dining with Barack Obama. Every one of these selections is a journalistic gem. Immensely enjoyable writing married with fascinating subjects makes this a must-read. Agent: Tina Bennett, WME. (June)

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Journalist Keefe has written about political upheaval in Northern Ireland (Say Nothing) as well as Empire of Pain, about the Sackler family and its responsibility for the explosion in opioid addiction. This is a collection of his long-form magazine articles that deal with the common theme of people living outside the law. There is a profile of Mark Burnett, the reality TV show producer who helped resurrect Donald Trump's business and public reputation. There are also stories about rebels such as Anthony Bourdain, a vintage wine forger, an arms dealer, and Judy Clark, a death penalty defense lawyer who has represented many notorious criminals. Keefe has turned up a captivating backstory of a woman named Amy Bishop, a middle-aged, Harvard-educated college professor who went on a shooting rampage and murdered several colleagues. In some cases the author is able to talk to the subjects of his stories and in others he relies on interviews with others. The author narrates the stories himself and does so with warmth and animation, making them entertaining. VERDICT This is a good addition to any popular nonfiction collection. The wide variety of people profiled gives the book broad appeal.--Susan Cox

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review

In these days of disposable tweets, fake news, and celebrity insta-pundits, there is still a place for long-form journalism, as this sharp collection of essays from award-winning writer Keefe shows. Keefe, a Kirkus Prize finalist for Say Nothing, is one of our most diligent investigators and skilled journalists. In this gathering of his New Yorker articles, the author covers subjects ranging from the counterfeit wine business to Swiss banking to the illegal arms trade. Each piece revolves around a particular person, often a nefarious character--e.g., El Chapo, Dutch gangster Wim Holleeder, and Amy Bishop, a university academic who, after being denied tenure, shot and killed several colleagues. Elsewhere, Keefe profiles a lawyer who specializes in defending serial killers and mass murderers, and Mark Burnett, who created junky but addictive TV shows like Survivor and The Apprentice. In some cases, the author interviewed his subjects; in others, he had to piece the story together from the opinions of other people and public records, a challenge Keefe seems to enjoy. He is aware that examining the background of a criminal can make them seem unduly sympathetic, even like victims themselves. He does his best to stay on the right side of the line, noting that El Chapo, while slightly comical in his liking for Viagra and gourmet food, was responsible for countless murders. Keefe effectively shows how we can seek to understand why people commit evil acts without absolving them. Some of these articles are more successful than others in finding the core of their subject. For example, Keefe clearly respects celebrity chef Anthony Bourdain, and he colorfully chronicles his explorations of Hanoi's hawker stalls. So the fact that Bourdain committed suicide in 2018, mentioned only in a coda, comes as a shock. Nevertheless, there is plenty to like in this book, and as always, Keefe writes with flair, color, and care. Thought-provoking examinations of human motivation, choices, follies, and morality. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

PREFACE ONE OF THE STRANGER moments in my career as a magazine journalist was a phone call in May 2014. I had just published "The Hunt for El Chapo," an article in The New Yorker about the criminal career, and eventual capture, of the fugitive Mexican drug baron Joaquín Guzmán Loera, and I got a voicemail in the office from an attorney who said that he represented the Guzmán family. This was, to put it mildly, alarming. I had developed a minor specialty, over the years, in what editors call "the writearound": an article about a subject who declines to grant an interview. Some journalists hate writearounds, but I've always enjoyed the challenge they pose. It takes a lot of creative reporting to produce a vivid portrait of someone without ever getting to speak to them, but these pieces are often more revealing than the scripted encounters you end up with when the politician or the CEO actually cooperates. When I wrote about the reality TV producer Mark Burnett, he wouldn't talk to me--but he had two exwives who did, and in the end, I think I learned more about Burnett from speaking to them than I would have from Burnett himself. In the case of El Chapo, the drug lord was locked up in a Mexican prison by the time I started my piece, and not giving interviews, so I had taken it for granted that he wouldn't be sitting down with me. Nor did I ever entertain the notion that when the article came out, he might read it. Despite running a multibillion-dollar narcoconglomerate, he was said to be practically illiterate. Even if he couldread, he did not strike me as a New Yorker subscriber. But when my article was published, it contained a series of revelations that were subsequently picked up in the Mexican press. So somehow, it must have come to his attention. I waited a while before calling the lawyer back. I figured that he would probably raise objections to some detail or other in the piece (and worried that it might be the passage in which I revealed that El Chapo was a prodigious consumer of Viagra). I spoke to a source of mine who made some discreet inquiries and was able to confirm that this attorney really did work for the Guzmán family. "Just call him up, I'm sure it's no big deal," my source said. Then he added, "But use your work phone, and never, under any circumstances, give them your home address." Summoning my nerve, I called the lawyer back. He spoke with an accent, in a starchy, formal idiom, and when I told him, as casually as possible, that it was Patrick Keefe from The New Yorker, he announced, with an almost theatrical seriousness, "We have read your article." "Oh," I said, bracing. "It was"--dramatic pause--"very interesting." "Oh!" I blurted. "Thank you." I'll take "interesting." Could be worse. "El Señor . . . ," he began, before lapsing into another pregnant pause. "Is ready . . ." Seconds ticking by. I clutched the phone, my heart hammering. "To write his memoirs." In advance of the phone call, I had gamed out the conversation like a high school debater: If he says this, I'll say that. I had prepared for every contingency, every direction the discussion might take. But not this one. "Well," I stammered, floundering for something remotely coherent to say. "That's a book I would love to read." "But sir," the lawyer interjected. "Is it a book you would like to write?" I confess that when the opportunity to ghostwrite El Chapo's memoir was first presented, I did give it a moment of serious consideration. During his years on the run, he had become an almost mythical figure, and, as a journalist, the idea that I might get to hear his story in his own words was genuinely tantalizing. But before getting off the phone that day I had already declined the offer. Guzmán was responsible, directly and indirectly, for thousands of murders, maybe tens of thousands. There would be no way to accurately write his story that did not explore that side of things--and the lives of his many victims--in great detail. But it seemed unlikely that this was the sort of book El Señor was envisioning. The whole scenario felt a bit like Act I of a thriller in which the hapless magazine writer, blinded by his desire for a scoop, does not necessarily survive Act III. "Even under the best of circumstances," I pointed out to the lawyer, trying to be as tactful as possible, "the relationship between ghost writer and subject can occasionally . . . fray." The lawyer was very courteous about the whole thing. After another brief phone call a week later (in which he said, "As you continue to consider our offer . . . ," and I said, "No, I've considered! I've considered!") I never heard from him again. What had started as a genuinely frightening experience became an amusing dinner party anecdote. But the encounter also seemed emblematic of the adventure of magazine writing: the uncanny intimacy that a reporter can feel with a subject he has never met, the strangeness of putting a story out into the world for anyone to read and watching it assume a life of its own. I was in junior high school when I first fell for magazines. This was the late 1980s, and magazines--the physical thing, these bright bundles of stapled paper--were ubiquitous and felt as if they would be around forever. In our school library there was a "periodicals room," where one wall was festooned with the latest issues of Time, Rolling Stone, Spin,U.S. News & World Report. And, of course, The New Yorker. Nobody used the adjective "long-form" back then; that would come later, to distinguish the sprawling stories more typical of magazines from snappier pieces on the web. But even as a student I came to think that at least where nonfiction was concerned, a big magazine article might be the most glorious form. Substantial enough to completely immerse yourself in but short enough to finish in a sitting, these features had their own fine-hewn structure. There was an economy in the storytelling that felt, in contrast to the nonfiction books I was reading, both attentive to the reader's attention and respectful of her time. So I grew up reading The New Yorker and nurturing a secret fantasy that I might someday write for the magazine myself. For a long time this was just a fantasy; it took many years of false starts and strange detours (law school is not a route I would recommend to aspiring journalists) before the magazine published my first freelance piece in 2006. The paradox of magazines is that they're both perishable and permanent. Printed on flimsy paper, they're eminently disposable, like a Dixie cup, designed to be discarded. Yet at the same time, people hold on to them. I used to love, as a child, arriving at the house of some family friend to discover a shelf of National Geographics, those resplendent yellow squared-off spines all lined up in a row. In the conventional narrative, the internet killed magazines. And in many ways, it did. It upended not just the economic conditions that allowed magazines to flourish but also a whole culture of metabolizing the printed word: when you hurried home to snatch the latest issue from your mailbox, or stood for an hour at a newsstand to flip through the offerings, or toted around an old issue as it gradually tattered in your backpack. In another sense, though, the web saved the magazine story, retrieving it from the recycling bin and giving it permanent life. A big magazine feature used to be as evanescent as the cherry blossoms: here today, gone next week. Now it's just a click away, forever. And this only accentuates a deeper paradox in the form itself. If I'm going to devote the better part of a year to researching and writing an article, and you're going to devote the better part of an hour to reading it, I'd like to try to tell the complete and definitive version of the tale. I want to capture the reality of a story, in all its vivid, dynamic glory, and pin it down, like a lepidopterist with a butterfly, arranging it under glass, just so. But of course, life doesn't stop when you publish. The story keeps moving, unfolding, fluttering its wings. Your characters continue to act, often in confounding ways. After all, they're real people. They break out of prison again, like Chapo Guzmán. Or they see a legal defeat turn into a victory, like the undefeated death-penalty lawyer Judy Clarke. Or they suddenly kill themselves, like Anthony Bourdain. These stories were written over a dozen years, and they reflect some of my abiding preoccupations: crime and corruption, secrets and lies, the permeable membrane separating licit and illicit worlds, the bonds of family, the power of denial. I've never had a particular beat (a great luxury of magazine writing), and instead I tend to pursue stories that pull me in for one reason or another, because of the complexity of the characters or the intrigue of events. But certain themes keep recurring, and these pieces are connected by other small coincidences. El Chapo ends up residing in the same bleak supermax prison as Judy Clarke's client Dzhokhar Tsarnaev. The arms trafficker known as the Prince of Marbella is erroneously accused of involvement in the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103, a crime that Ken Dornstein, whose older brother was on the plane, spends a quarter of a century trying to solve. Reporting a story can be a wonderfully consuming project, so consuming that when the undertow takes hold, I sometimes feel as if I could happily float away, following the research wherever it takes me. But I always remind myself that I have to come back and tell the story, and hopefully capture, in the telling, some of what made it feel so captivating to me in the first place. These are wild tales, but they're all true, each scrupulously fact-checked by my brilliant colleagues at The New Yorker. Together, I hope that they illuminate something about crime and punishment, the slipperiness of situational ethics, the choices we make as we move through this world, and the stories we tell ourselves and others about those choices. Excerpted from Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks by Patrick Radden Keefe All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.