Poured Over: Patrick Radden Keefe on Rogues

“It’s so painful to me to feel as though the very notion of objective truth or that journalism could be a vehicle for expressing a kind of objective truth is under assault today.” Patrick Radden Keefe is one of the best longform journalists working today, and we’d follow his dogged reporting anywhere, from bestselling books like Say Nothing and Empire of Pain, to his work as a staff writer at The New Yorker, some of which is collected in his latest book, Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks. Patrick joins us on the show to talk about the art of the write-around and why access is overrated, how one story can lead to the next (or not), writing about morally complicated people (and the stories they tell themselves), the importance of media literacy and getting the facts right, his literary influences and much more with Poured Over’s host, Miwa Messer. And we end the episode with TBR Topoff book recommendations from Marc and Becky.

Featured Books:

Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks by Patrick Radden Keefe

Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe

Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe

Snakehead by Patrick Radden Keefe

Poured Over is produced and hosted by Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang. New episodes land Tuesday and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.

Full transcript for this episode of Poured Over:

B&N: I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over. And I am super beyond excited for this conversation with Patrick Radden Keefe, you are familiar with his byline, obviously from The New Yorker and his two most recent books Say Nothing and Empire of Pain, which are, frankly, two of the best pieces of nonfiction I’ve read in a really long time. And I’m certainly not alone in that. Patrick, it’s really good to see you. But I have a question because I learned something about you I didn’t know until I was researching, which was, you have two master’s degrees and a law, I knew about the law degree, I did not know about the two Master’s degree. So multiple degrees, and you go into journalism, which seems like a really good way to pay off student loans. Dude, how did we get here?

Patrick Radden Keefe: Yeah, yeah, you might ask. I always wanted to be a journalist. I actually specifically wanted to write for The New Yorker, really going back to high school, which is when I started reading it, the strange thing about the journalism as a career is there’s no real, it was a mystery to me how you did that. I didn’t know how you got in. I didn’t know what the ground floor was, what that looked like. And so I liked school, I got a fellowship to go to grad school, I got a fellowship to go to the UK for a couple of years. And I did two different degrees there. So that was free. And then law school was a thing where I, while I was in grad school, I was actually sending off, I shudder to think now I was sending off these articles that I would write. And I would, I mean, this is a long time ago. So I would print out the articles and send them in a manila envelope to The New Yorker and say, Hi, I’m 23 I’ve written this article, perhaps it would be a good fit for The New Yorker, and didn’t make a lot of progress. Things were not looking good. And so I thought, I’m gonna have to get a real job someday. And that was the reason I went to law school.

B&N: Okay, because also one of those master’s degrees is from the London School of Economics. And I bring that up because the way you approach many of your pieces and Rogues, is the new book. It’s out now, True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks. And when you’re covering the crooks, you need to be able to follow the money.

PRK: I’ve always been interested in the business side of crime. That’s just an angle on criminality that I has always really intrigued me. And I’m not I’m not the most numerous, you know, good numbers guy. I can barely balance my checkbook. But the I do think it’s a sort of, it’s an interesting lens on bad guys. And I should say in some cases, that’s people like Chapo Guzman running the Sinaloa Cartel or this guy wrote about who’s the biggest mobster in Amsterdam. In other cases, it’s it’s like the white collar bad guys, the bad guys who don’t necessarily ever get criminally charged. There’s a big story about this guy, Steve Cohen in the new book, who ran a hedge fund that got into all sorts of trouble for insider trading. And he was never personally charged. And today, he’s the owner of the New York Mets.

B&N: It reads like an episode of Billions. It really does. I mean, you get into these details. And especially in that case, I remember when that was playing out in the papers in New York, and I’m thinking, okay, there will be jelt Oh, and there was not.

PRK: Yeah, you know, it’s funny, you should say that, because that story came out in The New Yorker, before billions came up, but they were working on the show, and the writers of Billions had me come in and talk to them. So I had a conversation with them about that one.

B&N: But here’s the thing. You’ve it’s pieces from maybe 12 years of your career at The New Yorker, and you’ve been there for almost two decades. I mean, you started and what ’06?

PRK: ’05 was the first time, the piece came out in ’06. Yeah.

B&N: Okay. So I mean, you’ve been there more than a minute, how do you sit down with all of these pieces, and I’m gonna come to the follow up pieces that you get to do. But how did you decide what made it into Rogues?

PRK: Part of what I love about my job and about writing magazine articles for a living is that you get to be a little bit of a dilettante, you get to just sort of move from subject to subject, you’re not really a specialist in anything. Different people work in different ways. And I happen to be somebody who I like to plunge into something and really absorb it. But then I find that I get bored at a certain point. And so I like to kind of get in, soak it all in, tell my version of the story and then move on to something completely different. And I always think that it’s the variety that I like, and the fact that I’m not constrained. There’s no one story that I have to keep telling. When I looked back to put this collection together. You have this sudden moment where you’re like, Oh, God, I only have two or three themes. You know, I in fact, I keep writing the same story in some way or another. To some extent, these are some of my favorites, picking out ones that that really lingered with me or ones where I felt as though I told the story in a particularly effective way. I know the title is Rogues. And I realized in retrospect that I’m interested in deviant behavior of one sort or another why it is that people skirt the rules or break the rules, or, you know, sometimes they’re not breaking the rules. But what they’re doing is they’re, they have these powerful personalities. And it’s like, they find a way to raise the speed limit, like they’re doing something that really shouldn’t be a crime, but, but they managed to kind of make it legal. And those types of themes are really interesting to me. And then themes about the stories that people tell about their own decisions and the denial that comes with that. And often family plays a role. But it was sobering for me to look back. And I think of myself as just kind of I can go anywhere. I’m a free agent, I can tell any story I want. And the reality is no, no, you keep back, you keep kind of coming back to the same well.

B&N: And a piece of that, though, is a technique known as the write around which if anyone is read gay to Louise’s legendary Esquire story, Frank Sinatra has a cold, essentially, it means you don’t have access to the you didn’t have access to El Chapo, you didn’t have access to Gerry Adams, when you’re working on say nothing, you didn’t have access to Judy Clarke who shows up in your book. And she’s not necessarily one of the rogues we’re talking about. But she is an important person, we are going to come back to Judy, but you know, you didn’t have access to the Sacklers for Empire of Pain. So can we talk about the write around for a second? Because you do this really well?

PRK: Oh, thank you. I mean, I’m a big believer in the right around. It’s funny, you know, at the New Yorker, we have what we call the ideas meeting. So every Tuesday, everybody sits around a table. And the price of admission to the meeting is you need to come in with three ideas for things that could be articles in the magazine. And it’s a little intimidating, because you do all your research and you come in and you pitch the ideas, and you see whether the editors and particularly the main editor, David Remnick, are into it. And I’ve been going to these meetings for years, because they’re fascinating. But there’s this funny thing that happens, which is that I’d say every six months, we’ll be in the meeting, and somebody will say we should write a profile of Beyonce. And everybody will kind of roll their eyes and say, we’ve been asking for years, she won’t do it, you know, she won’t give us access. And then we sort of move on and decide, okay, well, no Beyonce profile, because she doesn’t want to play ball. And I think that’s pretty typical, at a lot of publications, where you want to write about somebody, and if they don’t want to be written about and they don’t want to engage, then you just sort of move on. And occasionally you do this thing called the write around, as you say, where you sort of have a central void in the in the article, but you don’t let that stop you. And I think you often have to work a lot harder to do those pieces. Because, you know, in my case, I’m trying to find people who know them. It’s like, you know, there’s a big story in Rogues about Mark Burnett, who was the reality TV producer who made the apprentice and he wanted nothing to do with me, wouldn’t talk to me. But he had these two ex wives who I tracked down, and they were happy to talk with me on the record about him. And so you have to kind of do that work. When I was writing about the Sacklers, I was able to get all of these emails, these incredibly. And so even though they wouldn’t talk to me, I was able to kind of tell the story in their words. And I also think, I tend to think that access is a little overrated. I mean, I’ve written about billionaires. I’ve written about famous people where they say, okay, you can have an interview, you’re going to show up in this hotel conference room, on this day, there’s going to be a PR person in the room, there’s going to be a lawyer in the room, they’re going to tell you there’s certain things you can ask. And to me that often feels uncomfortably close to pub to PR to public relations. I much prefer to feel unconstrained. Like I can tell the story as I see it.

B&N: Yeah, I think right now, access journalism is super overrated. I’m not the only person who feels that way. But in media literacy is something that is so important, and we sort of treat it as an afterthought. And it’s like, no, you actually need to be able to apply critical thinking to things like stories in The New Yorker, or I mean, do I really need to read Sean Penn interviewing El Chapo and Rolling Stone? And you wrote a really great follow up piece to that. And this is part of what we’re talking about. I mean, it was, as you describe it in The New Yorker, two guys blowing out. And I’m thinking Sean Penn, El Chapo. I, why, and, again, it’s a stunt, it’s a total stunt, it doesn’t need to exist.
PRK: And on top of that, I mean, that’s a particularly vivid example in the sense that, you know, I think often with access journalism, the idea is you don’t really want to offend the person that they’re, they’re kind of using the access they give you as like a chip that they can barter. And so as a consequence, you get you know, I mean, For years, we’ve had really favorable coverage of for instance, Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump. And I think a lot of that is driven by the way in which they’re relating to the press corps in Washington. I mean, they’ve kind of handled it really brilliantly, right. Like they have a way of getting their message out. But I think that they often use journalists to do that sort of thing with Sean Penn. It’s even more extreme, right? Because there you have a guy who wants to go and bro out with Chapo Guzman, in Mexico, in terms of the kinds of questions he’s asking, you know, he doesn’t want to piss off his host, right? Because his host has killed lots of people. But for me, the frustration is so then we get this big interview with Chapo Guzman, in which he doesn’t ask a tough question.

B&N: How long did that original story take to report?

PRK: So that one actually came together really quickly. I mean, he these pieces often take a long time, together all often work on a story for six months, sometimes a year. And that was a sort of a fast break. Because what happened was, I had written another piece in The New Yorker, which is also in Rogues, about this guy who was known as the prince of Marbella, this very colorful, charismatic arms broker who lived in the south of Spain. And he was brought down by this special unit of the Drug Enforcement Administration, and so I really got to know some of the people in that unit when I was working on that story. And then when El Chapo was caught, this is, if you’re keeping track, this is the first time he was caught. After the first time he broke out, but before the second time, he broke out. And the second time he was caught, there was this moment where he’d been captured. And I’d already written a big story about him, which is not in the collection. But I wrote a cover story for The New York Times Magazine about his cartel, and I’d written about this unit of the DEA. And so I was really well positioned to just very quickly figure out what what was the real story of this capture. And so you could probably look at the dates, but I think it was like maybe two months from the capture to when that piece came up, which I realized, if you’re, if you’re a newspaper reporter, two months seems like a long time. But for me, that’s very, very fast.

B&N: So the arms dealer gets you to El Chapo, the drug lord, which gets you to the Sacklers, because that’s where you find the connection between heroin and oxycodone. And it’s there is other reporting that had been happening at the same time, you’re very generous about making sure that credit goes where it’s supposed to. But when you’re deep in a story like this, I mean, when you’re dealing with Marbella, and Mexico, and New York, and Florida, and Connecticut, and all of these, basically, you’re immersed in this story, you’ve got to be able to take a step back so that readers like me can have whatever response we’re going to have to what you’ve written. So how do you do that?

PRK: Oh, it’s such a great question. I think about this all the time. And actually, specifically with the Sackler book, I thought about this, because a lot of it’s so outrageous. And because I think there’s a style in journalism is very, very prevalent during the Trump administration, where you had journalists who felt really outraged. And then they would write about something that they found outrageous. And they’re putting their outrage on the page, they’re sort of putting a lot of spin on the ball and saying, Look at this, it’s so outrageous. And I think some readers, if they share the outrage, there’s this kind of unholy thing where it’s like, let’s be outraged together. And it’s interesting, it all just begins to feel a little overheated. And I think my style in general, and then specifically with that book was I thought you need to be the material itself is so shocking, that actually, you need to be kind of calm. And you can have these moments where you’re sort of winking at the reader and saying, like, Look, I get it, I get how ridiculous this is. But it’s better to have a pretty sober narrative voice. And that tends to be my approach. And I think, you know, to the broader question of how it works with other stories. I’ve thought about this a lot. And I think there’s a weird combination of attributes, you need to do this kind of writing. And there’s somewhat intention. So when you’re reporting when you’re going out, and you’re meeting people, and you’re interviewing them, I think you really kind of want your heart on your sleeve. Like I think it’s important to be very compassionate, and to try and understand people and be empathetic, even when the people have done awful things. I’m always trying to kind of, you know, meet people where they are and understand them and not be too judgmental. As I’m getting the story. I never want to kind of draw a picture of somebody that’s like a caricatures villain because I think most people are more complicated than that. It’s more complicated to wonder. I know people do terrible things. I want to know how to get to do those things. And I want to know what what they tell themselves about those things, because most of the time, they don’t think they’re the villain in the story. They think they’re the hero in the story. And so it’s it’s questionable how how do you how do you see it? So I think when you’re Reporting you want to eat, that’s what you want. When you sit down to write, I think you need to be bloodless, I think when you sit down to write even if you feel compassion for people. In my case, if you’re doing the kind of writing that I’m doing, I think you do need to make moral judgments. And I think sometimes there are people who when you’re reporting about them, you actually develop a kind of warm feeling towards them. But when you sit down to write, you can’t pull punches, because you’re afraid of how it’s going to make them feel your only loyalty really, is to the truth. And so those things are kind of intention. You know, the, there’s the sort of persona that I have when I’m out there trying to gather the material and get the story. And then there’s a kind of a little bit of a coolness that I need to adopt. When I sit down to tell it.

B&N: As you mentioned earlier, the pieces in Rogues are some of your favorites from The New Yorker, three of the pieces you wrote from The New Yorker, though, when you turn them into longer form books. So there’s snakehead, there’s say nothing and there’s Empire pain. When do you know that you can flip the magazine story into a book? I mean, you very specifically call out the El Chapo story. He reached out to you and said you want to ghost write mine? Yeah, yeah, that seems like an easy no. But oh, I can think of a million reasons.

PRK: We probably would not be having this conversation right. Now. If I had said yes to that particular offer.

B&N: I can imagine I can imagine some consequences for that. But how do you know I mean, you’re working very closely with your editor at the New Yorker who you’ve worked with for quite some time. And I’m a huge fan of your book editor, Bill Thomas, who’s as far as I’m concerned, one of the best in the business. So how do you know when that shift is coming, or, or that you want to pursue a story and make it bigger, because magazine pieces don’t always translate into books, which I don’t think everyone recognizes.

PRK: And I don’t think you want to do the, you know, at least for me, like, I certainly would not want to do the thing where you just kind of pad out a magazine article, you sort of stretch it out, but there’s not much more there. I think that the long magazine article might be the perfect form. And nonfiction I love the idea of a story that you can, it’ll take you maybe 45 minutes to read, but you can just make yourself a cup of coffee or a cup of tea, get a comfortable chair. And there’s the freedom of knowing that you’ll be you’re going to be really immersed in it. But also that this isn’t some huge undertaking with a book, you know, you’re just kind of be in and out. And in an hour, you will have read the story and you can move on with your day. You know, with the El Chapo piece, there was interest in having maybe maybe do a book after that piece came out. But the issue there was that I felt as though I didn’t know how to. That’s a fun piece. It’s a rollicking story. It’s funny, and I wanted to kind of lean into the craziness of that world. But the thing that I struggled with was, how do you kind of have fun with the nicknames? And the you know, it’s like watching an action movie. And it’s all kind of entertaining and wild. How do you offset that with the knowledge that like, fundamentally, this is an awful guy who’s created us as a terrible, terrible legacy in Mexico. And I didn’t, I thought that was like a high wire act that I could pull off in an article, it would be much, much harder in a book. So I decided not to do it there. I saw, I think I have to feel as though there’s much more there turns that the story can take, it’s a weird thing to say, because these articles are so long. But you know that I could write like a 15,000 word article and feel like I don’t only scratch the surface. But that’s often that’s been the case with the ones that I’ve expanded is when I tell a tell the story in the magazine, and then feel like oh, there’s there’s so much more here.

B&N: One of the pieces you include in robes is the story of Ken Bornstein, whose brother was killed in Lockerbie bombing. And there’s a moment in the story. And I don’t feel like this is too much of a spoiler because it was published in The New Yorker. But Ken is put in contact with a Brit whose daughter died, who’s decided something about a suspect’s culpability that Ken sort of ends up wrestling with. And it was something I wasn’t expecting, because here was this American guy who had been very clear that he was going to find out what happened. And here he is, and he’s sitting in that discomfort and he’s not actually going either way. He’s not sure he believes this guy, but boy does this guy believe in this particular cause.

PRK: And that story, it’s about a story of a guy who was a college kid and his big brother who he worshipped, was killed in this terrorist attack. And he basically spent the rest of the next 25 years of his life trying to figure out who built the bomb. You know who the author of this terrible incident was. He became a trained as a private detective. He became a journalist. He was totally obsessed. And I think what I found beautiful about that story. I mean, I should say what’s so crazy is that he figures it out after 25 years, he actually identifies the bombmaker. So on the one hand, it’s just a fun gumshoe story about somebody who never gave up. And you have this kind of Ahab like quest that actually pays off. But what was most intriguing to me from a kind of deeper emotional point of view, is that that work that he was doing was his way of healing, right, it was his way of like dealing with the loss of his brother. And I’ve, you know, I’ve written a lot about people who’ve, who’ve lost loved ones or experienced trauma. And I think it’s often the case that people will who’ve experienced great grief and loss will, they’ll search for a sort of organizing principle, like something they can kind of put their energy into. And I think there’s something quite beautiful about that idea. And in this case, Ken ends up, you know, getting to know this guy, Jim Swire who lost a daughter in the same attack. And Swire has been doing his own detective work. And his conclusions are the exact opposite of Ken’s, like they think different people did it. And yet, as much as they’ve come to these very different conclusions, I think they see they each see and the other somebody who’s like, built a life and like found a way to keep moving and get out of bed in the morning by undergoing this kind of huge research project. And so there’s a sort of respect and a compassion they have for each other, even though they come out in totally different places. And I found that moving myself very beautiful.

B&N: Which brings me to Judy Clark, you describe her as one of the best Death Row attorneys in America? If not, where Yeah, I mean, without a doubt the best. She has a client, which if you’re from Boston, she has a client that is not unsurprising for the work that she does. But I think there are some people who have some feelings about it. And that’s Dakar Charna have and I hope I’m pronouncing his name properly, but he and his brother detonated a couple of bombs at the Boston Marathon a number of years ago. And if you’ve seen the footage, it is horrifying. It is absolutely horrifying. But Judy believes in what she does. And she is very good at what she does. And she is currently his attorney. And you had to do a ride around here because she hasn’t given an interview and 20 years.

PRK: Yeah, it’s funny, man, a lot of the time the people the the profiles that I’m writing are about people who’ve, who’ve behaved really badly, and they don’t want to talk to me often because, you know, they don’t want to see a piece come out cuz it’s gonna be focused on on bad things they’ve done. In the case of Judy Clarke, she’s just very, she hasn’t talked to Doug hasn’t given an interview in 20 years. And I think the profile, you know, I admired her, she’s this death penalty advocate who has made this very particular choice where she represents the worst of the worst, as the title suggests, and so she’s not getting innocent people off of death row. This is somebody who’s all of her clients are guilty, and they’re guilty of the worst crimes. But her belief that the death penalty is wrong is so intense that she thinks those are the clients you could approach to focus on. And I think she’s a morally complicated person. I think there’s all kinds of people who could look at what she does and take objection to it, either because they believe in the death penalty, or because they are opposed to the death penalty, but they think, hey, a lawyer of your talents, shouldn’t you be down south trying to get innocent people off of death row. But, you know, I found her to be a really revealing an interesting character. What was interesting there, right was I had to do a write around because she wouldn’t talk to me. But I talked to all these people who knew her. And I got, you know, a lot of records from other cases. But then also, I went to Boston. And I was there for about four or five weeks over the course of this trial. And so it was kind of strange, because she wouldn’t give me an interview. But I would sit every day in a courtroom, she was like, close enough to touch. And I could watch her. And part of what I wanted to do there was I thought of this, I don’t mean to sound flip at all. But when we were talking about the piece, we said, it’ll be a little bit like watching an undefeated athlete who’s probably going to lose for the first time. So part of it for me was she’s such a skilled lawyer. I wanted to be there and see the way she tried that case in a room.

B&N: You were also dealing, though, with secrecy laws that were applied, because this is it was tried as a terrorist case. And so how does that make your life more difficult? Because I mean, essentially, you still don’t have access to everything you need, but we’ve read the piece. Everything’s there.

PRK: Yeah, it’s hard. I mean, it’s funny. I just recently published a piece in The New Yorker, which is about another big criminal case involving a guy who worked at the CIA and he’s under those same restrictions where he’s not allowed to talk to anyone and there’s a lot of kind of government secrecy surrounding it. Secrecy is a subject I’ve always been interested in. It’s kind of one of those themes that I keep coming back to and as a reporter, I sort of like the challenge of, I almost like the constraints where I sort of have to figure out how to be creative. And I always think it’s like if the, you know, if the front door is closed, we’ll then go around and try the back door. And if the back door is closed, then you try and find an open window. And if there’s no open window, you try and Jimmy a window, you always have to be creative to kind of find your way in and get what you need. And that was very much true. That case doubly true, right? Because I was writing about Clark, but also her client, and I couldn’t talk to either of them, even though I would sit there in the courtroom just feet away from both of them.

B&N: Is it the chase? Is it the story itself that keeps you going? Or is it the detail? Or is it really just the people?

PRK: Listen, I there’s probably a 10 year old kid in me, I say this as the parent of a nine year old and a 12 year old, where it’s like, if you hold something behind your back and say, I’m not going to show you, I’m going to do everything I can to figure out what it is. So there’s probably a little bit of that. And I just get drawn into the story. I love the research. And then I really love trying to take spending months and months months researching and then an often these are very complicated stories. And then the question for me is, how can I turn this into just a, it just a really absorbing yarn? How can I and especially the challenge of taking a story that’s about a subject that that a reader might normally kind of skip over. It’s like insider trading on Wall Street, there’s a lot of readers who I think when they see a story like that in the newspaper, they’re just gonna turn the page, or they’re not going to click on it, because they think is not my kind of thing. The challenge for me is how can I you know, this is not the story about Steve Cohen at SAC capital, I found this story about a young Indian American guy who goes to work for Steve Cohen. And he’s trying to get inside information from this old doctor who knows about these drug trials, and the doctor lost a son to suicide. And so they develop this kind of weird father son relationship. It’s kind of a platonic seduction. And the young guy slowly gets this input inside information out of the doctor. And then the third character in the story is Steve Cohen. Because the authorities go and they figure this out, they go to the young guy, and they want him to flip on Steve Cohen and turn over his boss, and he won’t, and nobody knows why. To me, that’s an opera, you know, that’s a sort of human incredible human drama that takes place in the world of insider trading. And so the challenge is, how can I can I make the human story vivid enough that I can pull you into that world? So that before you even know it, you’ve engaged with stuff that you know, might otherwise not be of interest?

B&N: Does justice actually exist?

PRK: Oh, God, I mean, not the way we want it to, I’m afraid. I think sometimes it does. I think Justice is not evenly distributed. I think that you know, it hits some people with overwhelming force. And I should say, you know, often depending on where they grew up in the color of their skin, and others not at all. And it’s a strange one, because some of the stories in the book are about people who a number of them are about people who did terrible things for a long, long time and got away with it for a long, long time. And then eventually justice comes for them. So the gangster in Amsterdam, who ends up actually it’s only his when his sister turns on him secretly that he gets caught Chapo Guzman, the prints of Marbella, the arms trafficker, these are people who were doing outrageous things for decades, it’s a little bit like, you know, it’s funny we look, we look at Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein. And when they finally get caught, you realize that it was all kind of an open secret. And everybody starts saying, Well, how do they get away with it for so long? That’s a big question that I’m really fascinated with is, is how do people get away with it so long? How do they manage to sort of skirt accountability? So in those stories, eventually justice comes, but it’s like it comes decades later, when the damage is done. And then like the stories of the Sacklers, or, you know, my book about Northern Ireland Say Nothing. I think it’s the case that often, real justice never comes. I wish I had a more optimistic answer on this. But I’m afraid the more that I study the system, and that is the criminal justice system and how it works, the more skeptical I become.

B&N: Yeah, but skepticism isn’t necessarily the worst thing. I don’t think we can find solutions. If we’re not skeptics. I mean, if we sit there and buy into the whole thing. I don’t think it gets us where we need to go. I think asking questions and not settling for what’s just sort of dumped on your lap. I think that’s kind of the beauty of what you do where you just chase the story. And sometimes you get two or three stories out of one moment, which is kind of great.

PRK: Yeah, I do think that as consumers of media. In the case of the Sacklers, and Purdue pharma over the years, you’ll have these corporate settlements where the government sort of slaps the company on the wrist. And in the most recent moment, amazingly was there was a there was a moment where the company pled guilty for the second time to criminal charges. And there are all these headlines that says like, Department of Justice gets $8 billion penalty from Purdue Pharma. And all these people would, you know, share that headline on Facebook and on Twitter and say, finally, look at that justice is done $8 billion. And of course, I was sitting there at the time working on my book, and I knew that Purdue pharma was bankrupt, it didn’t have 8 billion dollars, it was a fake number that the government wanted to put out there in the world to make it look like they were doing something. And Purdue was perfectly happy to have it look as though you know, there’s this big number, when anybody if you look closely, and you sort of look behind the headlines, what you find is, this is actually a kind of weird conspiracy between the government and the bad actor. And they’re all trying to say like, you know, nothing like we’re all doing our job here, folks. And I think the more that I learn about that kind of thing, the more I think any of us should be a little bit skeptical of a headline and try and look underneath the hood.

B&N: Especially if you’re getting your news off of the internet, can we just we have to stop for two seconds, because we’re all on books are part of the whole social media ecosystem. And we’re all there and we do what we do. But there are times where I look at stuff and I’m like, There’s no way I’m going to click on that I will not give you the satisfaction, you cannot have that data. Yeah, I just wish more people would, you know, raise an eyebrow and just be like, No, you can’t have my data. And yet, here we are. And it’s a giant mess.

PRK: It is. And I mean, it’s funny, I’m very torn about a lot of this stuff. Because I think in some ways, social media is wonderful. It’s very democratic, that every day there are things that I discover people, new thinkers, new voices, that I wouldn’t have found if they hadn’t come to me, through Twitter, and I, there’s all kinds of ways in which the internet and social media make my job easier. And I’m able to kind of get more information and put the word out. It’s funny. Last week I was in I was in Northern Ireland, earlier this week, doing a little book tour, and I had written this book Say Nothing about the troubles. And it’s long been a problem there that there are different versions of truth. It’s like you have your truth. And I have my truth, these different communities tell these wildly different stories about history. And we were sort of joking when I was talking to people there because I was saying, Well, you guys had a head start, but the rest of the world has caught up with you. Like, you know, you know what I mean? Like this is kind of where we all live now is the idea that I have my truth, and you have your truth. And there’s different kinds of media ecosystems in which people live that tell these vastly different stories. And that to me, as somebody who cares a lot about facts, and who builds each of these magazine articles, it’s like, I have to eke out every little fact. And then you put them together into a collage. And that’s how you tell the story. But, each fact is hard one. And I have a fact checker who comes in and checks every fact before it gets published. It’s so painful to me to feel as though the very notion of objective truth or that journalism could be a vehicle for expressing a kind of objective truth is under assault today.

B&N: I know I referenced gay to lease. And Frank Sinatra has a cold earlier, but the thing is, you live in facts. You live in the gray, you’re chasing these people, you’re chasing these stories. Yes, you have fact checkers in more than a couple of lawyers. But let’s talk about literary influences for a second, because it’s clear that you know how to put sentences together and not every writer does quite what you do in the way you do it. So who’s in your personal canon?

PRK: Oh, goodness. Um, I mean, one of the things that’s very weird about having the job that I do now, I told you earlier about how I would send off those articles to The New Yorker. You can actually see over my shoulder there. There’s a rejection letter. I had so many I had to pick just one to frame but I it’s like, it keeps me very humble to, to walk by that every every day, this rejection letter from the New Yorker. I’m from like, more than 20 years ago, but some of my heroes are my colleagues now. I mean, which is such a strange thing to say, right? But I mean, I remember reading Larissa MacFarquhar, or actually her husband, Philip Gourevitch. I started reading them at about the same time. And you know, I know them now. It’s such a strange feeling. David grin was a I can tell you exactly where I was. When I read his first piece in The New Yorker was called The Old Man and the gun and I was at law school, my first year of law school. And I you know, I opened the New Yorker, pizza place after class and I thought, Who is this? You know, what is he doing? He was sort of operating in a different way from what I had encountered. Robert Caro is obviously a big one. But there’s I’m learning all the time for people. I mean, Clint Smith published this incredible, incredible book last year. Somewhere on my shelf probably behind you somewhere.

B&N: No, it definitely is. Because he was one of the first shows we did. He is extraordinary. Yeah, one of the smartest guys out there.

PRK: He’s incredible.I mean, I could go on and on Katherine boo, you know, her book Behind the Beautiful Forevers. Calvin Trillin, who had a great he had a great who’s a New Yorker, longtime New Yorker writer who had a great book called killings, which was a collection of his crime writing. So that was a book I thought about when I was putting together we could be here all day, I could go on and on.

B&N: Basically, you’re hitting all of these sweet spots. I mean, they’re all amazing voices. Larissa MacFarquhar also did a fantastic profile of Louis Auchincloss, who’s a writer, you know, he had his moments, and I think fewer people know who he is now. But he was a very certain kind of New York writer, and just a nice guy. And I just I remember that piece, very fondly. And certainly Gurevich is reporting on Rwanda is

PRK: Amazing. It’s incredible. And I think I mean, for me, those are the kind of, especially early on, there would be pieces where I would want to take them apart, like what I did was, I would read them and be so excited. And then it was this question of how and the first piece that this ever happened with actually was 1995, just after the OJ Simpson verdict, Henry Louis Gates published a piece in The New Yorker called 13 ways of looking at a Black man, which is amazing piece. And I remember reading that piece, and it was just it completely changed the way I thought about the Simpson trial and verdict. And but I put more, but it was more on a level of craft, I was just like, Okay, how many people that he talked to for this? And how did he end he brings in these voices, but then we’ll come back to them. And it was like, it was like taking apart a, you know, a Swiss watch, and try and then try and put it back together. Those for me are the really, the formative pieces were the ones where I was, I would read, I read it the first time for enjoyment. And then I read it the second time, the way you would try and understand a magic trick, you know.

B&N: So clearly, you were meant to be a magazine guy is what you’re saying.

PRK: He hadn’t figured it out. I mean, listen, I love books. And I think the I’ve I’ve had a wonderful, a wonderful experience writing books, particularly the last few books imposed on big audiences. And it’s been wonderful to meet people who’ve, who’ve enjoyed this. And part of what we wanted to do with this new one was, there are a lot of people who found my work through Empire of Pain or Say Nothing more through that through this podcast, I did wind of change, who you know, who aren’t necessarily people who have always read The New Yorker, right, like not everybody nerds out on the New Yorker every week. So it was a way to hopefully introduce them to some of those pieces.

B&N: Are you working on a new book? I mean, I realize this is just out in the world now. But you do tend to juggle projects and keep a couple of things going at once.

PRK: Yeah, so I’m back, I am going to do another another big book for Doubleday. We haven’t yet we’re sort of having a bunch of conversations about what it should be about. So people have ideas, you know, you can find me on my website, always looking for pitches. I kind of know the ingredients that I’m looking for. I like big sprawling stories that have interesting turns and often kind of touched on power and family and these types of questions. So I’m trying to find the right the right thing. And in the meantime, we’re doing magazine stuff and we’re trying we’re working on my book, Say Nothing, we’re turning it into a limited series for FX. So I’ve been working on that as a producer, which is fun, whole new skill set. Yeah, it’s a very different very different world.

B&N: A whole new skill set.

PRK: I’m learning every day.

B&N: That sounds pretty great. And you know we can be patient. We can be patient for the next book because Rogues really it is it is the perfect time for this book to come out. Patrick Radden Keefe, thank you so much for joining us on pored over Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks is out now.

PRK: That was such a pleasure. Thanks for having me.