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

Rogues Review

Patrick Radden Keefe is the finest practitioner of the long-form magazine profile currently working, and Rogues is the evidence. The book gathers twelve pieces from The New Yorker, most of them running 8,000 to 15,000 words, and even in this concentrated form the quality is consistently extraordinary.

Twelve Lives at the Edge of the Law

The subjects range widely: Rudy Kurniawan, who perpetrated perhaps the most audacious wine fraud in history by making new wine taste like old and fooling the world’s most sophisticated palates; Sinaloa Cartel hitwoman Josefina Reyes; the family that started the opioid crisis (a preview of material that became Empire of Pain); a Scottish private investigator; Anthony Bourdain. What unifies them is Keefe’s interest in people who want things with an intensity that the conventional world cannot accommodate, and who have found ways around the conventional world’s constraints.

The Craft of the Profile

The craft on display is worth examining as much as the content. Keefe has an extraordinary ability to get difficult subjects to talk — to be in the room with people who have every reason to remain silent, and to emerge with material that illuminates their interior lives. His profiles are structured not chronologically but with a novelist’s sense of what information the reader needs to understand a revelation and when. And his moral intelligence — the ability to be interested in rather than merely judgmental of people whose actions were harmful — is what makes the pieces feel humane rather than exploitative.

The best piece in the collection is probably “The Jefferson Bottles,” the wine-fraud story, which manages to be simultaneously a fascinating account of the wine world’s vulnerabilities — bottles supposedly owned by Thomas Jefferson sold for fortunes, and the billionaire Bill Koch’s obsessive crusade to expose the fakes — and a portrait of a man whose desire to belong to a world that excluded him produced both his fraud and his charm. It is the kind of journalism that makes you rethink your assumptions about the differences between criminals and everyone else.

A Gallery of Standouts

What is remarkable about Rogues is that there is no filler — a rarity for any anthology. “Crime Family” follows Astrid Holleeder, the Dutch lawyer who lived in hiding after testifying against her own brother, the notorious gangster Willem “Wim” Holleeder, turning a true-crime tale into an agonising study of family loyalty and betrayal. “A Loaded Gun” investigates the neurobiologist Amy Bishop, who murdered three colleagues at the University of Alabama decades after the unexplained shooting death of her own brother, and becomes a meditation on denial and the stories families tell themselves. Elsewhere Keefe profiles a Swiss banking whistle-blower, an international arms dealer, the reality-TV producer Mark Burnett, and — in a tender outlier among the grifters and killers — the chef Anthony Bourdain. Across all twelve, the through-line is what Keefe calls his abiding preoccupations: the permeable membrane between licit and illicit worlds, the bonds and treacheries of family, and the human capacity for self-deception.

A Journalist at the Top of His Field

These pieces are the magazine work of a writer better known for his books — Say Nothing, about the Troubles in Northern Ireland, and Empire of Pain, about the Sackler family and the opioid crisis, a subject this collection previews. Keefe has collected nearly every major honour in the field, from the National Magazine Award to the Orwell Prize to the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Rogues is essentially a highlight reel of why. The one honest caveat is structural: this is a collection, not a sustained narrative, so the pieces do not build on one another the way a single book-length investigation does, and devoted New Yorker readers may have encountered several of them already. But gathered together, they reveal the consistency of a singular sensibility — and for anyone who has not read them, they are close to the platonic ideal of long-form reporting.

The Moral Intelligence Beneath the Crime

What finally distinguishes Rogues from ordinary true-crime writing is its refusal of easy judgement. Keefe is fascinated rather than appalled, curious rather than condemning, and the cumulative effect of reading twelve of these portraits back to back is a destabilising one: the comfortable boundary between the criminal and the law-abiding starts to dissolve. His subjects are not aliens but people who wanted something — status, belonging, money, escape, revenge — with an intensity the conventional world could not accommodate, and who found their way around its rules. Keefe is equally sharp on the institutions that are supposed to police such people, repeatedly showing how banks, auction houses, universities, and governments protect their own interests rather than their stated missions. It is this double vision — sympathy for the rogue, skepticism toward the system that produced and pursued him — that gives the collection its unusual moral weight and keeps it from ever feeling exploitative.

Verdict

Rogues is the best possible introduction to Patrick Radden Keefe’s work and a master class in the long-form profile. Meticulously reported, elegantly structured, and morally curious rather than censorious, it asks large questions — about crime, institutions, family, and the thin line separating the law-abiding from everyone else — through small, particular, unforgettable lives.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — Twelve flawless pieces of reporting from the finest long-form journalist working today — humane, gripping, and consistently revelatory.

Reading Guides

• Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe — Full Review
• Best True Crime Books: 10 Essential Reads That Defined the Genre