In “The Empire of Edge,” a trader and a doctor conspire to commit insider trading, while a billionaire hedge-fund manager gets away with most of the loot. Some zoom in on the incentives and choices that transform an ordinary person into a criminal. “I still love him, in spite of everything,” Astrid says of the brother who she fears may murder her in retribution. But Keefe’s reporting never lingers at surface level this story cracks open the conflicted loyalties of siblings raised in a family of criminals. Here’s how Keefe begins a feature titled “Crime Family”: “Astrid Holleeder has arresting eyes that are swimming-pool blue, but that’s all I can reveal about her appearance, because she is in hiding, an exile in her own city, which is Amsterdam.” On the surface, this is a cloak-and-dagger tale of a Dutch gangster whose sister, Astrid, risks her life to testify against him. Evidence in favor: Guzmán read about himself and felt seen.Įach chapter of Rogues draws back a curtain to reveal shadowlands. “The challenge for a nonfiction writer is to achieve a poetic precision using the documents of truth,” the historian Simon Schama told Publishers Weekly in a 2014 interview, “but somehow to make people and places spring to life as if the reader was in their presence.” The people and places that Keefe describes do come alive on the page, to the reader’s great pleasure, but only their subjects know whether the portraits are true to life. But it illustrated for him “the uncanny intimacy that a reporter can feel with a subject he has never met.”įor a reporter at Keefe’s level of journalistic tradecraft, that uncanny intimacy spins into uncanny accuracy - and page-turning prose. It was from an attorney representing the family of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the infamous drug lord known as “El Chapo.” The New Yorker had recently published Keefe’s story, “The Hunt for El Chapo,” (included in this compilation), and Guzmán wanted Keefe to ghostwrite his memoir. Keefe then relates an unsettling phone call that would seem to back his claim to vivid portraiture. “It takes a lot of creative reporting to produce a vivid portrait of someone without ever getting to speak to them,” he writes, “but these pieces are often more revealing than the scripted encounters you end up with when the politician or the CEO actually cooperates.” In the preface to Rogues, Patrick Radden Keefe’s collection of spellbinding New Yorker features, Keefe explains that he’s become a specialist in “the writearound” - articles whose subjects refuse to grant interviews.
Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooksīy Patrick Radden Keefe.
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