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Patrick Radden Keefe

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Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks Kindle Edition

by Patrick Radden Keefe (Author) Format: Kindle Edition

4.3 1,898 ratings

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the award-winning author of Empire of Pain and Say Nothing—and one of the most decorated journalists of our time—twelve enthralling true stories of skulduggery and intrigue

"An excellent collection of Keefe's detective work, and a fine introduction to his illuminating writing." —NPR

“Fast-paced...Keefe is a virtuoso storyteller." —The Washington Post

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 reflect 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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June 28, 2022
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From the Publisher

Editorial Reviews

Review

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker, GOODREADS

“The journalist Patrick Radden Keefe has made a career out of deep dives into fascinating characters — and he’s very good at it. In between his regular contributions to The New Yorker, he has published an exposé of the Sackler family and an account of the Troubles in Northern Ireland…With ROGUES: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks we’re treated to the same level of journalistic rigor, and the same passion for breaking open mysteries, in an unmistakably bingeable package.”
— New York Times Book Review

“A new book by Keefe means drop everything and close the blinds; you’ll be turning pages for hours. “Rogues” is a collection of Keefe’s New Yorker articles about criminals and con artists and more. It’s highly entertaining, of course, but what shines through most brightly is Keefe’s fascination with what makes us human even when we’re at our most imperfect.”
—Los Angeles Times

"Rogues is a wonderful book, not only because Keefe's prose is masterful, but because he has a preternatural gift for reading people."
— NPR

“Rogues is a fast-paced and frequently suspenseful read...Keefe is a virtuoso storyteller, able to create suspense with his descriptions of how those crimes unfolded."
— The Washington Post

"Extraordinary"
— Wall Street Journal

"Patrick Radden Keefe is the Sherlock Holmes of long-form nonfiction, a relentless investigator who turns his reporting into irresistible storytelling."
— Tampa Bay Times

"One of the finest non-fiction writers of his generation."
— Toronto Star

"A king of contemporary nonfiction."
— Entertainment Weekly

"Iconic...Keefe delivers masterpieces."
— Oprah Daily

"[Keefe] excels at shining a beam into the murky inner workings of the world and the human psyche. It’s a superpower that produces riveting and revealing tales that, as Keefe writes in the preface, may help us better fathom our own inner workings."
— Nashville Scene

"[Keefe] makes full use of journalistic tools for fact-finding: keen observation, meticulous research and insightful interviews ... As a result, each essay is a taut, highly honed yet powerful reflection on the creative and corrosive effects of obsession."
— Bookpage (starred)

"From the prize-winning, bestselling author of Empire of Pain and Say Nothing—and one of the most decorated journalists of our time—twelve enthralling stories of skulduggery and intrigue."
— Bookshop

About the Author

PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of the New York Times bestsellers Empire of Pain, winner of the 2021 Baillie Gifford Prize, and Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction, was selected as one of the ten best books of 2019 by The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune and The Wall Street Journal, and was named one of the “10 Best Nonfiction Books of the Decade” by Entertainment Weekly. His previous books are The Snakehead and Chatter. His work has been recognized with a Guggenheim Fellowship, the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing. He is also the creator and host of the eight-part podcast Wind of Change.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

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.

Product details

ASIN ‏ : ‎ B09HGQ81JY
Publisher ‏ : ‎ Anchor (June 28, 2022)
Publication date ‏ : ‎ June 28, 2022
Language ‏ : ‎ English
File size ‏ : ‎ 6556 KB
Text-to-Speech ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Screen Reader ‏ : ‎ Supported
Enhanced typesetting ‏ : ‎ Enabled
X-Ray ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Word Wise ‏ : ‎ Enabled
Sticky notes ‏ : ‎ On Kindle Scribe
Print length ‏ : ‎ 356 pages

Best Sellers Rank: #149,566 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #21 in Biographies of White Collar Crime
- #70 in White Collar Crime True Accounts
- #161 in Biographies of the Rich & Famous

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Patrick Radden Keefe

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Patrick Radden Keefe is an award-winning staff writer at The New Yorker and the bestselling author of five books, including Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, which received the Baillie Gifford Prize for Nonfiction and was a finalist for the FT Business Book of the Year, and Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland, which received the National Book Critics Circle Award. His most recent book is Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks. The recipient of the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing and the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, he is also the creator and host of the 8-part podcast "Wind of Change," about the strange intersection of Cold War espionage and heavy metal music, which was named the #1 podcast of 2020 by Entertainment Weekly and the Guardian and has been downloaded more than 10 million times. He grew up in Boston and now lives in New York.

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15 customers mention "Writing quality"13 positive2 negative

Customers find the book well-written, enjoyable, and easy to read. They also describe the stories as fascinating and excellent non-fiction.

"...heart-rendering, exciting, minutely detailed, with absolutely incredible reporting and writing...." Read more

"Great writer with terrific grasp and control of material. Some of these portraits just make you sigh. If only….." Read more

"Some of the stories were interesting and some were somewhat Grim. Well written stories about some people who were on the wrong side of the law." Read more

"Very well written and easy to read. With such diverse story lines I just found some of the stories not my cup of tee...." Read more

12 customers mention "Readability"12 positive0 negative

Customers find the book interesting, engaging, and well-researched. They also say it provides additional insight about controversial people and is enjoyable reading. Readers also mention that the book is minutely detailed.

"...The difference is that these folks are real, the facts around them are real, their actions are real, and many come with consequences that affect..." Read more

"...Thank you for making these essays accessible and so informative!" Read more

"...But, all in all, well written and interesting." Read more

"...them in the New Yorker you will find each story an absorbing piece of investigative journalism...." Read more

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Michael P. Williams, Esq.

Glorious! Phenomenal!

Reviewed in the United States on August 12, 2022

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This is the third book I've purchased and read authored by Patrick Radden Keefe.; all of them so markedly different; all so all uniformly PHENOMENAL.

This book -- I don't believe it's a "stroll down PRK's Memory Lane," or something to the effect of "PRK's "greatest hits" (there's an unintended 'double entendre!'); he and his teams chose wisely as they beautifully constructed a book about lawbreakers/law enforcement/drug manufacturers/drug users/$$$moneyMoneyMONEY$$$...truly a book about Rogues, Charlatans, etc. Gripping, fascinating, scary, heartwarming and heart-rendering, exciting, minutely detailed, with absolutely incredible reporting and writing.

If you've read this far, please check out my review of PRK's "Empire of Pain.". This book, extremely important in numerous ways, is so much different than " Rogues;' it's a book I would hope EVERY inhabitant of this planet should/would read. It's that brilliant, it's that important, it's a book (like, for example, Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs & Steel" which, in a larger context, explains in detail how the world works - and how it doesn't work). All while weaving a factual, nonfiction tapestry which deliciously reads like a Miss Marple mystery; "Rogues" decidedly works on so many levels...

Now, this is not to say that "Rogues" is a "summer beach book;" it can be, and, perhaps PRK would argue, justly, that it's the type of "summer beach books" you'd want to read (remember, "Rogues," "Scoundrels" and "Grifters!" Oh My!) -- the stuff is plenty juicy... Just don't 'turn off your brain' -- not that it's a 'Webster's in one hand, "Guns, Germs & Steel" in the other type of book (again, I hope that somehow, every person on earth should read "Guns, Germs & Steel;" part of the enjoyment comes from learning FACTUAL info about how humankind got its start...and what followed...but a dictionary is an invaluable and most necessary resource when reading it); "Rogues" is a book with fleshed out and fleshy characters...a lot like "Casablanca," actually! The difference is that these folks are real, the facts around them are real, their actions are real, and many come with consequences that affect EVERYONE on our planet, directly or indirectly.

PRK, if, for whatever reason you agree or disagree with my review/characterizations, let's chat...

12 people found this helpful

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Christian Josi

Riveting Anthology of Great Old-School Style Longform Magazine Essays

Reviewed in the United States on November 26, 2022

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It's hard to say anything that hasn’t already been said about this book, a compilation of twelve extraordinary New Yorker essays from Patrick Radden Keefe about some of the more colorful characters and stories of our time. After all, the book has sucked up an awful lot of oxygen in the literary room since its release in June of this year. It is the very definition of blockbuster and deservedly so.

One thing that does strike me is that is can be easy to to view "Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks" as a book all about bad people. While bad people certainly factor in, several of the essays are actually stories of good people who've nailed bad people. Others, per the word “Rebels" that’s kind of hidden in the title, are decidedly not bad folks, just different thinkers, such as Mark Burnett and Anthony Bourdain. Not a huge deal, just something that's occurred to me.

The larger thing that strikes me, however, and what really draws me to weigh in on a type of book I tend to leave to others, is what it is made of--and that is the great, old-school long form essay traditionally crafted by great writers for great magazines which when combined under one theme make for such excellent books. Joseph Mitchell's "Up in the Old Hotel" -- another anthology of New Yorker essays which came out in 1992 -- is a great example of this and if you've not read it, you must.

Of course The New Yorker, where again the essays that make up "Rogues" originally appeared, is as strong and reliable as ever in that area, but with few occasional exceptions, it begins and ends there nowadays. And this is tragic. So if by expressing my delight in Keefe's great work I can flag this unfortunate truth and perhaps make some people think about it, then this time and energy of mine was well spent indeed.

14 people found this helpful

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BlueWrit

Great selection of character profiles. Non-fiction.

Reviewed in the United States on April 2, 2024

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Great writer with terrific grasp and control of material. Some of these portraits just make you sigh. If only…..

One person found this helpful

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Amy Hawley

Unusual Short Stories About Real Rogues

Reviewed in the United States on February 17, 2024

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Some of the stories were interesting and some were somewhat Grim. Well written stories about some people who were on the wrong side of the law.

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DMV mom

Karma lives and Thrives!

Reviewed in the United States on January 9, 2024

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As a long time New Yorker subscriber I had read most of these as they appeared, PRK has a great organizational style, and reading some of these again in a curated collection makes me appreciate his perspective all the more. My favorite story is that of the Thomas Jefferson wine bottles! They were wine bottles and not Thomas Jefferson’s bottles of wine. Both the con man and the tumid Mr Koch are flawlessly described and developed.
Great collection from PRK. Thank you for making these essays accessible and so informative!

One person found this helpful

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Kenh

Loved the diversity...but not all the stories

Reviewed in the United States on September 23, 2022

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Very well written and easy to read. With such diverse story lines I just found some of the stories not my cup of tee. But, all in all, well written and interesting.

3 people found this helpful

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Weagle

No theme necessary to headline this terrific collection of in-depth stories

Reviewed in the United States on November 16, 2022

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As PRK says in the forward, in-depth articles can take the better part of a year to research and write. These twelve articles may have previously been published, but unless you caught them in the New Yorker you will find each story an absorbing piece of investigative journalism. Although he collects them under the title “Rogues,” I don’t think you need a theme. They’re all fascinating, well-researched, and insightful. The story on Mark Burnett, the man behind The Apprentice television show is particularly interesting in a “look what he wrought” kind of way.

3 people found this helpful

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Jody

dense

Reviewed in the United States on March 23, 2023

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The only chapter in this book I enjoyed was the last, on Anthony Bourdain. Probably sentimental on my part, I’m willing to own that. The rest of the book I can’t really review, as the other tales were too dense for me. It seems I’m a lazy reader.

One person found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

zee

Great journalist

Reviewed in Canada on March 20, 2023

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Had the story before it became mainstream news

OlgaNM

For fans of the author and the best investigative journalism

Reviewed in Spain on November 22, 2023

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I wasn’t familiar with the author of this book, although when I heard about it, I decided I had to read it. I am sure that many readers might have read some of the pieces included in this anthology, as he writes for The New Yorker and has gained many accolades and awards thanks to his articles, his books, and his podcasts. In a time when fake news seems to dominate much of the public discourse, and the line between reality and fiction has become porous (at times, it feels like a sieve), the press should play an important part in keeping us informed. This is not always the case, unfortunately.
This collection of essays illustrates what investigative journalism can offer people who want to learn more about a subject (individuals in this case) and goes deeper and beyond a loud and attention-grabbing headline.
The description mentions some of the subjects treated in this book, and it would be possible to read just the articles one is interested in, as they are quite varied: from wine collectors and dealers (millions worth of fake bottles of wine anyone?), the sister of a Dutch gangster (not that I knew there were Dutch gangsters, but it stands to reason), people who pursue an explanation for the death of one of their relatives, financial scandals, mass shooters, Mexican narcos, TV producers (who “resurrected” Donald Trump), Bank heists, defense lawyers who defend death penalty cases, or famous TV chefs, among others, there is something for almost everyone.
I didn’t know some of the cases or people Radden Keefe writes about, and even those I had heard about, in their majority I had never followed in any detail, but I read the book cover to cover and I was amazed by the amount of things I learned, and by how even-handed and deep an account the author achieved. In some cases, those he writes about collaborated with the pieces, in some, they refused to be interviewed, but even when they agreed to be interviewed, there are always other sources of information and other points of view depicted, to allow us to get a sense of how others see the individuals as well. Radden Keefe includes details of meetings and conversations but doesn’t become a part of the story. The book, and the articles, are about the people he investigates, and they are allowed to speak for themselves (if they want to). Otherwise, he creates as full a picture as possible with the information he can gather.
The writing style is engaging, and the author builds up a story about all of the individuals and their actions that is gripping and difficult to put down. I marked many passages and memorable quotes, and I was surprised by how relevant their content is, considering that some of the pieces are more recent than others. Perhaps things and/or people don’t change that much after all. Ah, readers need to remember that this is a non-fictional work, and although all the articles include some kind of closure, it is not an ending in the traditional sense. So, be prepared for uncertainties, “to be continued”, and even some stories that end anything but “happily”.
Those who already know the author will enjoy this book, even if they have read some of the pieces, although they can always check the index and see if there is enough new material for them. Those who haven’t but have a wide range of interests and are always curious about people and why they do what they do will find it fascinating. This is not a psychology treatise but reading it makes us wonder and think. And that is a great thing in these times. Highly recommended.