Here's Where It Gets Interesting - The Immoral Choices of Rogues with Patrick Radden Keefe

Episode Date: June 20, 2022

In this episode, Sharon is joined by writer and author Patrick Radden Keefe, whose new book, Rogues, tells twelve stories of people with big personalities–the grifters, the rebels, the crooks, the crime families, and the people who don’t play by the rules. Patrick talks about how he researches his larger-than-life stories, and gives us a few teasers, like what it was like to interview a woman who is in the Witness Protection Program after testifying against her own brother, and how deeply he dove into the world of wine fraud and revenge. Patrick is fascinated by the choices people make, and what it takes to get inside their minds where they justify their actions, and perhaps even consider themselves the hero of their own stories. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This episode is brought to you by Canon Canada. From street interviews to vlogging or filmmaking, great content gets even better when you're shooting with great gear. That's what Canon's Level Up sales event is all about. With awesome deals on their range of cameras and lenses, you can grab everything you need for that shot or scene you've been dreaming of for less.

Whether you're helping that special person take their content up a notch or adding that extra quality to your own shoots, Canon's got you covered. Shop the Level up sales event today at canon.ca. Hey friends, welcome. So delighted that you're here with me today. And today I have the pleasure of chatting with Patrick Radden Keefe, who is a phenomenal writer. He writes for the New Yorker. He's written a book that I've recommended to many of you called Empire of Pain. And he's a new book out called Rogues. And I'm just so excited to hear from him. I know you're going to love this conversation. So let's dive in. I'm Sharon

McMahon. And welcome to the Sharon Says So podcast. I'm super excited to be chatting with Patrick Redden Keefe today. I am such a fan of your work. Thank you so much for joining me. Oh, thank you. I'm so pleased to be with you. I find your writing so riveting. You have such a knack for crafting a story based on true things that makes you want to keep reading, like writing a page turner that's based in reality is no small feat. I'm so pleased to hear you say so. When I write, I think about myself as a reader and I think about what draws me into a book or a magazine article and what pushes me out of it. And so I'm always trying to just pull you in any way I can. And that's one of the challenges too with writing nonfiction is because sometimes what would make a really great plot point didn't really happen so you can't you can't do it but sometimes what

happens in real life is way weirder than any fiction you could have invented that's very much the way I think about it I mean you're absolutely right sometimes you want the story to go someplace and it just doesn't go there which can be. But the flip side is I think of it as like found art or you're walking on the beach with your kids and they find some some weird rock or seashell. That's kind of my whole job is to go out and talk to people and interview people and dig into court documents. And the stuff that I stumble across in the real world is often so much weirder and more dramatic than anything I could invent if you put me in a room with a typewriter. It's endlessly fascinating. It is so true that if you tried to include some of these plot points in a fiction book, your editor would be like, come on. Yeah, come on. Come on. Right. No one can suspend their disbelief that

much. That's the thing. But it's what's so wild about real life is that often it just it takes you to these crazy places that you're absolutely right in a in a thriller. If you went to a movie or you picked up an airport paperback, it would seem over the top. Totally. So if anyone is not already familiar with the work of Patrick Radden Keefe, you're a writer for the New Yorker. You also write books. One of the books that I've enjoyed the most is Empire of Pain. I have a new book coming out that I want to talk about, but I would love to hear more just a little bit about what made you write Empire of Pain? What was it about the story? And give us a little synopsis of it. Yeah. I mean, as you said, I work at the New Yorker. I'm actually at the New Yorker right now. It's not that I have New Yorker posters on the wall in my house.

I'm in the office. In about 2016, I stumbled across a story that seemed really fascinating to me, which was that the opioid crisis had obviously had a huge impact on every corner of American life. I think there are few people in this country at this point who don't know somebody who's been impacted by this terrible public health crisis that goes on today. And what I learned is that, you know, there are many, many causes for the opioid crisis, but there was this one company in particular, Purdue Pharma, which had kind of kicked it off. It was kind of the tip of the spear with this drug OxyContin, which was introduced in 1996. I learned that the company was

owned by this family, the Sackler family. And I knew the Sackler name because I had been to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and there's a Sackler wing. And I actually grew up in Boston, and there's a Sackler Museum at Harvard. And I lived in Washington, D.C. for a while. And on the mall, there's a Sackler Smithsonian Gallery. family that put their name up on all these fancy art museums had made billions and billions of dollars through its role essentially in helping kickstart this terrible public health crisis that's killed hundreds of thousands of people. And that disconnect was what got me started on that project. The idea that you had a family that was at that point still really celebrated and,

you know, go to fundraisers and ribbon cuttings and people thought of them as these great kind of paragons of generosity. And then there was this dark side to that family fortune. And I wanted to kind of connect those two stories and look at both sides. I found so much of the history of the Sackler family that was absolutely riveting. And their connection with the FDA. Oh, my goodness. I just I had to keep turning the pages. How hard was it to get access to some of that information?

It was pretty hard. I mean, I've written unflattering stories about billionaires. And it's never easy because they, you know, they often won't talk. They have lawyers who they they kind of sick on you. They have these very aggressive PR people. And the Sacklers, all of that was true with them. Initially, I wrote an article in The New Yorker. And then it was announced that I was going to do this book. I hadn't even started writing. And when the announcement was made, I got a 17-page single-spaced letter from a lawyer

threatening to sue me. And it kind of went from there. Like, this lawyer just kept sending me these menacing letters for years. So I was really writing not with their cooperation, but actually with them actively trying to thwart me along the way. But to be honest with you, part of what this story is about is I think when people know the story of the Sacklers, and they know what the family was involved in over the decades, and they know how long the opioid crisis has lasted. I mean, OxyContin was introduced in 1996. A lot of the time people say, well, how could they get away with it for so long? And it's funny because I think there are other cases like Harvey Weinstein, Jeffrey Epstein, where when the game is up, everybody suddenly says, but how did they get away with it for so long beforehand? And I think that the answer is often that they surround themselves with these lawyers, these PR people, they have political influence. And so part of what I was trying to

do, even as I got these incoming threats, was I thought, that's part of the reason I need to tell this story. It's part of the reason it's so significant. Yeah. If it didn't cement it in your mind, this 17 page single space letter from a lawyer, that probably I would imagine it would for me be like, well, now I'm really doing it. 100%. I mean, it is one of those weird things where it's like, on the one, I won't listen, I won't lie. It's intimidating. I mean, it's designed to be intimidating. And so you do have a moment where you kind of think, oh my God, am I, am I up for this? What am I taking on here? And I was telling the story of people who'd really been ruined in the past because they tried to challenge the family

and the company. So you take all that seriously, but at the same time, you're absolutely right. There's another sense in which you're like, I must be doing something right because they seem very worried about this. Right. Like you're I'm obviously very close to the target because the amount of incoming flack has just picked up dramatically. Totally. And that was very much my experience kind of throughout. I mean, honestly, right up to the very end. I remember I was doing the book was just coming out. I was doing a segment on the Today Show. And even as I was taping that segment on the Today Show, there are people were frantically texting the producer on the segment. And then as soon as the book came out, silence, they went

totally silent. Once they realized that it was too late, like the jig was up. Yeah. That's fascinating. You have a new book coming out and of course, anything with your name attached, I'm always excited to read. So tell us about your new project. And I would also love to hear about what it has been like. You have to have been juggling multiple projects because you don't release this Sentinel book in 2021. And then another book in 2022, you have to have been working on these simultaneously, right? So I like to have different things going on. I will admit when I started this career, I found that I think like anybody in any line of work, I have up days and down days. You

know, I have days when work is great and I love it. And I have days when I'm really frustrated and discouraged. And I found that it was really useful to have a few projects going at a given moment, because if I was really discouraged in one thing, rather than just like sit on the couch and eat ice cream, which is kind of what my natural tendency would be to do, and just wait for the mood to pass, it was nice to be able to kind of channel my energies into something else. And so it's always good for me to have a few things going at a given time. And given the kind of reporting that I do, a lot of the time you're waiting to get court documents or you're waiting for some legal process to open up. You're trying to persuade somebody to talk to you. It's kind of a stop,

start business. And so I've always got things going on. So I had a book that came out a couple of years ago about the troubles in Northern Ireland called Say Nothing. And so I've always got things going on. So I had a book that came out a couple of years ago about the troubles in Northern Ireland called Say Nothing. And then I started as well. I was still working on that. I started working on a podcast called Wind of Change that came out in 2020. It's about something totally different. It's about heavy metal music during the Cold War. And then while I was working on Wind of Change, I also got started on Empire of Pain. And then before I was done with Empire of Pain, I started pulling together the pieces of what would be Rogues, this new book. So I'd like to have a little bit of overlap there.

Otherwise, honestly, there would just be a lot of downtime and I wouldn't know where to put my nervous energy when I hit a roadblock in a project. True. That makes complete sense that especially when you're doing these big long-term sort of investigative pieces, it's not like everything is just available via the Google interwebs where you just like, let me Google. OK, perfect. It takes sometimes a long time to accumulate all the information you need to write the story. So it makes complete sense in my mind that you would want to have like, OK, well, I'm waiting for that, I'm going to work on this thing over here. I mean, it's funny. The thing about doing this sort of research on the web is that there is a ton of stuff that's available now that didn't used to be.

But I also think sometimes people can lose sight of the fact that not everything is on the internet. Like sometimes you need to go to a library or an archive or persuade somebody to share their family papers with you. Sometimes there's stuff that's out there in hard copy, the old fashioned way. And that's the only way to get the information. Do you ever worry or have the thought that like in 30 years, investigative journalists, historians are going to be hamstrung by the fact that all of our communication is digital? Oh, that's so interesting. I don't know. I mean, I think it's going to be good and bad. I mean, the digital thing, right? I'm just thinking a lot of what I do if I'm

writing about people who are dead is I go and I try and find the letters of people. So with the family, there were these old, the older, the first generation of Sacklers, they were very private, so they didn't leave their letters anywhere. But they were friends with the kinds of fancy people who when they die, they leave their letters to universities or their papers, you know? And so what I would do is get access to those archives.

And in those archives, I found all these letters from the Sacklers. So I'm just thinking, if you had somebody today who doesn't write letters in the same way, it really all depends on whether their email archive, it's like when somebody dies, do they give their Gmail to the University of Rochester? I don't know what that looks like. I've often wondered, you know, because so much of history is known via the primary source documents of average ordinary people, like writing in a journal,

writing a letter to a friend, just making notes in the margins of a cookbook, things along those lines. When all of our communication has gone to text messages, DMs, and emails. I mean, a lot of people today, Patrick, don't even send emails anymore. Like email is dead to a lot of people like that. I'm going to use that for work and I'll give you my email so you can send me a coupon, but I'm not writing to anybody. I'm not writing you an email unless we have some kind of business between us, you know? So that is, I think that is something that nobody knows the answer to yet. Like what will happen when a researcher requests you know, when the president of the United States, a former president of the United States dies of old age, presumably their personal emails are going to be a matter of great historical interest. And I sort of assume that like if it's the Bush

Library or the Clinton Library or whatever it is, there's some prearranged thing where they're going to get them and it'll all be archived. But you're totally right. For the average person, it is sort of an interesting question. I think about this all the time in a different context, which is I'm sure you've had this experience, too. But somebody, you know, dies and they're still on Facebook and like Facebook still reminds you of their birthday. Sometimes a family member takes over the page.

I actually kind of like this. It's a little weird, but I, but I like it too. Sometimes a family member will take over the page and on the birthday, they'll post photos and you're just kind of reminded in a nice way, but it does. It's one of those interesting questions, right? It's like, who keeps the password? Who maintains the account when somebody's gone? Yeah. Like if in the future, I want to write a biography of Patrick Radden Keefe, how do I get the text messages between you and your grandma? Yeah. Right. You know what I mean? Like that, that's what I'm

talking about. Like, how am I going to accurately, because this, this idea of who we are online is often not who we are in real life. We have a carefully curated image that many of us maintain online and we're different people in the DMs. And obviously it would be nice if those two were aligned, but for a lot of people, that's not true. And the other thing that's weird about that is that it's not all in the same place, right? So there are people I email, there are people I text on my phone, there are people I communicate with on WhatsApp, there are people I communicate with on Facebook messages, DM on Instagram, people I DM on Twitter. None of it is all in the same place. It's very decentralized. There is no, like, here's my box of letters that is on the top shelf of the closet. Right. Write the biography.

Yeah. With my pictures, you know, like the 1400 letters between John Adams and Abigail Adams. Here we go. You know? Yeah. I just, I know nobody knows the true, the true scope of what that's going to be like in the future. But it's something that I wonder about sometimes. I'm Jenna Fisher. And I'm Angela Kinsey.

We are best friends. And together we have the podcast Office Ladies, where we rewatched every single episode of The Office with insane behind-the-scenes stories, hilarious guests, and lots of laughs. Guess who's sitting next to me? Steve! It's Steve Carell in the studio! Every Wednesday, we'll be sharing even more

exclusive stories from The Office and our friendship with brand-new guests, and we'll be digging into our mailbag to answer your questions and comments. So join us for brand new Office Ladies 6.0 episodes every Wednesday. Plus, on Mondays, we are taking a second drink. You can revisit all the Office Ladies rewatch episodes every Monday with new bonus tidbits before every episode. Well, we can't wait to see you there.

Follow and listen to Office Ladies on the free Odyssey app and wherever you get your podcasts. I'm super interested to talk about your new project, which is a book called Rogues. Tell us about it. So Rogues, I've been working at The New Yorker now since 2006. And Rogues is a, it's kind of a greatest hits collection of 12 stories that have come out. I think the first story is from 2007. So come out over the last 15 years or so. And they're mostly about people behaving badly in some way, shape or form. So some of it is about criminals and killers, but it's but it's kind of a continuum. There's also a big piece about the late Anthony Bourdain and obviously not a criminal, but a guy with a somewhat roguish personality who kind of sort of skirted the rules in some ways and made a life that a lot of people

really envied and wish they had. And then on the other extreme, there's people like Chapo Guzman, the head of the Sinaloa cartel, who was about as criminal as it gets, and then a mix of very, very different people in between. But I wanted to put together a collection of really the most sort of fun, big, sweeping stories about fascinating, forceful personalities. It's mostly about people with big personalities. I love the subtitle too. True stories of grifters, killers, rebels, and crooks. I would imagine Anthony Bourdain falls into the rebel category. He'd be a rebel. Yeah, exactly. We had to stretch it to accommodate him. But the thing about Tony is that he, I got to know him pretty well. I spent a year working on this piece and we stayed friends afterwards and he would be very happy to be included in a collection of Hulk rogues. I think

he would like that. He probably would. He wasn't out there just eating rotten shark meat for nothing, Patrick. Oh, exactly. Yeah. I think the line I use in the piece is he had a talent for badassery. Totally. So we know that he is one of your rebels in this book, Rogues. And you have a fascinating story about the head of a cartel. Who else did you elect to include in this? So there's, gosh, there's a really wild story about, it's a crime story set in Amsterdam, of all places. So I had not known, I've been to Amsterdam, I did not know that there's a very serious underworld there with

organized crime. And there's a story about a woman named Astrid Hollader. She had this fascinating story. She grew up in a crime family. Her big brother was the biggest gangster in Amsterdam. family. Her big brother was the biggest gangster in Amsterdam. And her little sister married his partner in crime. And so she grows up in this crime family. She becomes a lawyer and she's a criminal lawyer who defends her brother. So she's like the lawyer in the family. She's like the Robert Duvall character in The Godfather, kind of. And what ends up happening is her brother is actually an awful guy. This guy, Vim, and very abusive. And so slowly she starts, she and her sister start wondering, what if we betray him? And he was very careful about what he did.

Like nobody could get into his kind of inner circle. The authorities could never get him. They suspected him in all these murders, but they couldn't pin any of them on him. And so what happens is these two sisters start wearing a wire on their own brother to turn him in. And so it's about this clash between these siblings. I mean, the really crazy thing, without getting too much away, is she now lives in hiding because she ended up testifying. She was the star witness against her brother but then he decided he wanted to kill her so when i arranged to meet with her i had to do it with all this subject she was like i went to amsterdam and literally you know i was told be on this street corner at this time a driver came and picked me up took me to an undisclosed location

and so she sort of moves through the city in secret. She sometimes wears disguises. She travels in a bulletproof car. I mean, the whole thing is just wild. It's like you said at the beginning, you couldn't really make it up, but it's true. That is fascinating. How did you find out about that story? I think that is something that a lot of listeners will wonder about. Like, where do you find these stories? Yeah. So in that case, it's funny. The thing about The New Yorker and these long articles, I love a long magazine article.

You know, the sort of thing. I kind of think it's the perfect nonfiction form because it's longer than something you'd read in the newspaper. But you can read it in a sitting. It's the sort of thing that takes you maybe 45 minutes to read and you're in and out. You can kind of get enveloped in the story and invested in the story. And so part of what I wanted to do with this book, having written a couple of big books recently, was do something that people could almost kind of graze, you know, like a buffet. You can sort of pick and choose and find different points of entry with these stories. pick and choose and find different points of entry with these stories.

And one of the nice things about writing at that length is that I can read something in the newspaper. And a lot of the time, it's that tip of the iceberg thing where I'll read a little account in the newspaper and I'll think, oh, boy, there's a bigger story here. You know, it's a fascinating newspaper article that takes you five minutes to read. But I'll think I think I could probably go a little deeper on this. And so in her case, what happened is she wrote a memoir in Dutch and there was an article about how, you know, there's this book that's become a bestseller in Dutch by this woman. And I thought, God, that sounds so fascinating. I wonder if I could meet her. And at that point, she had given hardly any interviews because she was, in hiding. It was hard for her to meet anyone. And that too was really weird to me that she was, you know, imagine just the biggest bestselling author having a huge, huge book that

just sells hundreds and hundreds of thousands of copies, but they are never able to do a reading. They're never able to sign books for readers. They're never able to meet any other readers in her case, because she was afraid that if she went out in public and people knew she would get killed. So what happened there was that I, I made contact through her publisher. We arranged to do this. And I'll tell you, there's a cool postscript to this story, which is that every fall we have this event in New York called the New Yorker

festival where the writers will do events. And we interviewed people we've written about. We decided to have her come. But we couldn't announce it in advance because she was worried that if her brother knew, literally somebody would come in and potentially kill her at the event. So we announced that I was going to do a version where I just told the story as a kind of dramatic rendition. And people came and everybody had to, I think where people started to wonder,

because when they showed up, they all had to sacrifice their cell phones at the door and they all came in and I started talking for like 15 minutes. And then suddenly Astrid walked on stage and it was amazing. You could hear a pin drop. Everybody was really kind of breathless. It was an amazing moment. That is super fun. What is your favorite story in the book? Do you have one? Do you have a favorite child? So there's probably two and they're very different. One is the lightest of the stories, which is actually the first story in the collection called the Jefferson bottles. And to this day, it's probably the most fun I've ever had writing a magazine story. It's about counterfeit wine, which I know is a weird concept, but if you've ever had the

experience of, you know, ordering a bottle of wine at a restaurant, you wonder, is this really worth the money I'm paying? So it's about how a lot of very wealthy people build these huge wine cellars where they, you know, they spend millions of dollars on wine. And it's about a guy who was a wine fraudster who realized that's the perfect con is you can sell people bottles that they think are like 1982 Petrus or whatever. And they'll just never know the difference because in many cases they have these huge sellers and they don't even open the bottles. And then if they open them and they taste them, most people can't taste the difference between the whole thing and the counterfeit.

And so for that one, I drank a lot of wine, hung out with this one guy, Bill Koch, who lives down in Florida. And what was great about the story is it was about an Austrian wine fraudster who kind of crossed the wrong guy. He had bought a ton of wine and he found out that he'd been crossed, that he'd been sold these fakes. And he decided he was going to go to the ends of the earth to investigate the fraudster. And so it's about the clash between them. So that was really fun. And then the other one is very different, very dark, about a woman named Amy Bishop, who was a mass shooter in Alabama in 2010. She shot a bunch of her colleagues at the University of Alabama. Very unusual to have a woman who was a mass shooter. And what the story is actually about is her history in Boston, where she grew up, and about this terrible story that came out after that mass shooting, which is that in the 1980s, she had shot and killed her brother with a shotgun. And there was only one witness. It was their mother. And the mother, if you can imagine, has two kids, only two kids, a daughter and a son. And she sees the daughter shoot the son.

only two kids, a daughter and a son. And she sees the daughter shoot the son. And when the cops show up, the mother says, I saw the whole thing. It was an accident. And so that piece is my exploration of whether that really was an accident or whether the mother made a terrible choice in the 80s, having just lost one child to save the other. That's fascinating. I would love to hear more about how you got into doing this kind of writing what was the genesis of your writing career did you have a moment where a beam of light descended on you where you're like this is your career I mean not a beam of light I think I come from a big storytelling family so my mother's actually from Australia, but my father comes from a big kind of Irish Catholic family in Boston. And there's a real gift of gab thing

going on where Thanksgiving dinner, everybody would get around, turn and sit down and tell and retell these famous stories. And so I sort of grew up in that kind of oral tradition of, can you spin a good yarn? And I think I knew pretty early I wanted to write. To be honest with you, I thought for a long time I wanted to write fiction. I just wasn't very good at it. I wrote short stories and did a lot of fiction writing in college, but I could never get anybody to publish any of it because it was garbage. But I knew I wanted to write. And so it took me a little while to figure out how to make it happen. I read The New Yorker growing up. I loved it.

I mean, not, you know, I started reading in high school and I thought that'd be cool. But I didn't know anybody who wrote for The New Yorker. I didn't even really know how you start a career in journalism, to be honest with you. So I actually went to law school. I trained to be a lawyer because I thought I got to have some kind of job. But in the back of my mind, I was always thinking, I got to make this work. I got to be a lawyer because I thought I got to have some kind of job. But in the back of my mind, I was always thinking, I got to make this work. I got to make this work. And there's this little story I tell in the in the acknowledgments of my book. But my the woman who was then my

girlfriend and is now my wife, when I finished up law school, I was supposed to go to a law firm and she already had a job. And she said, I'll tell you what, take a few more months, just a couple more months and try and make it work. Try and get that first assignment at a magazine rather than be a lawyer. Because she said what she said is, I think you'd be a miserable lawyer. What she meant was, I think you'd be a terrible lawyer, both of which are true. And so I did. And a couple of months later, this is just a few months out of law school. I had just passed the bar. I was supposed to go and work for a firm.

And I got my first assignment at The New Yorker. Wow. And to have your first assignment, Patrick, be The New Yorker, you do know how rare that is, right? Well, I should say I had done a couple of little things before then. It wasn't the first ever journalism assignment. It was the first one where, yeah, it was like a big 8,000 word piece. Somebody was really going to pay. Yeah, listen, I mean, I was very, very lucky. I was really lucky. And I think that it's funny when I talk to young people who want to do this kind of work, I say, I think a lot of it is about, you know, you have to accept that it's kind of a precarious industry. It's not, you know, it's not a growing industry, the magazine industry, I'll put it to you like that. The economic circumstances are not all that promising. And I think you have to be able to metabolize rejection pretty well. You got to just

deal with the fact that you're going to get rejected left and right. And I think you have to accept that there's some serendipity, there's some dumb luck. So I'd like to tell you it was all hard work and talent, but I'm pretty sure that a fair amount of dumb luck played in as well. Hmm. What do you hope people get out of reading Rogues? What do you hope that people get when they close the last chapter? What do you hope they take away? Well, I think I'm very fascinated by the different choices that people make, sometimes the really immoral choices that people make, and then the stories that they tell themselves and other people about the decisions they make. There's a line that

screenwriters use in Hollywood that I often think about, where they say, you know, the villain in the movie doesn't actually think that he's the villain in the movie. He thinks he's the hero of the movie. He's watching a whole other movie than the one you're watching. And in his version of the movie, he's not the villain. He's the hero. And I've always been interested in that idea of barely out of her teens, she led this bombing mission to London and she planted these huge car bombs in London and detonated them. And in her version of the story, what she was doing was a righteous thing. And I think for me, looking at it from the outside, clearly it's not. But I'm curious, like, how do you get to that place where you believe that that's a righteous thing to do? And you get up each morning and you look at yourself in the mirror and you tell yourself, I did the right thing. Society might say it's wrong, but I did the right thing.

And that's kind of the approach I try and take. I try and try to do that even with the Sacklers, who I think a lot of people think are pretty morally reprehensible. I agree. I think they're morally reprehensible, but I want to understand how they see it. And so this story, the stories in Rogues, in each of these 12 stories, there are people who make choices that I wouldn't make. And it's not that I think my job as a journalist isn't to judge, because I do judge them. But it's that I want to get close enough to them. I want to be intimate enough with them that you, the reader, can sort of see how they got there. One of the big stories in the book is about this woman,

Judy Clark. And she's such a fascinating character. She's a death penalty lawyer. All she does is death penalty cases. And she is a big opponent of the death penalty. But the interesting thing about Judy Clark is there's a lot of people who it turns out are on death row and they're innocent, right? That they when they get a lawyer to come in and look at things that they'll be exonerated. She's not focused on those people. She's focused on the worst, what are referred to as the worst of the worst. So she takes the cases that are like, I wrote about her representing the Boston Marathon bomber. She represented the Unabomber. She represented Zacharias Moussaoui, the 20th hijacker on 9-11. So she takes the worst cases and tries to save them from the death penalty. And that in and of itself is a kind of an interesting moral choice that some people might

disagree with and wonder if that's the way you should spend your life. But she's very fiercely devoted. But her whole thing is she's trying to figure out how did they get that way? How did my clients get that way? They weren't born evil. So what was the journey that they took to do these terrible things? And that's a question that I'm really fascinated by as well. And so I think that, you know, that would be my hope. I think the stories are fun. There's a lot of suspense. There's a lot of drama, a lot of surprise. But on a deeper level, I hope that it makes you think about the psychology of people who,

you know, in some cases do little things that are bad and in some cases do big things that are bad. But I think each of us, I'm sure for you, you know, for anybody listening, certainly for me, we move through life. We try and live a righteous life. And sometimes you make little steps in one direction or another that maybe you wonder about, is this the right thing to do? And so I think in a strange way for each of us in our day-to-day life, we're kind of reckoning with a smaller version of that. to see the psychology of people who do really awful things sometimes and wonder how they got from somebody who was presumably innocent and pure at birth to doing those things.

What does understanding them, what do you think that brings to the table? What do you gain from understanding how maybe somebody gets to be the Boston Marathon bomber or whatever type of criminal somebody might be? What's the benefit in understanding them? Well, I mean, I think that there's a couple of benefits. I mean, I think some of it is about prevention. I think some of it is that there are all kinds of things that turn people bad. And it is really interesting to ask these questions and wonder,

because that then raises the possibility that you might be able to intervene earlier. And I should say, the book isn't just about violence. I mean, there's stories about tax evasion and insider trading and all kinds of, you know, wine fraud. But I mean, anytime any of these types of things happen, people will often look back in retrospect and say, how could it have been prevented? You know, what could have happened along the way? So there's those types of questions. For me, there's a really interesting aspect, too, which is just that, again, to the idea that, you know, that we all move through life making moral choices of one sort or another. Maybe they're the right ones.

Maybe they're not. And they're often hard decisions. I'm really interested in what I think of as kind of soft corruption. So some of the people in the book are, you know, there's a guy who runs a hedge fund, Stephen Cohen, a famous, now owns the New York Mets. But he ran a hedge fund that got in a lot of trouble for insider trading. There are people who I think ultimately make the wrong decision, but they don't look like criminals to most people. You know, they seem like they're just business people. Often they're white collar criminals.

And I'm really interested in the kind of incremental steps that people get to take to that bad place. Because I think it's very often the case when you look at the lives of some of these people, that they, the choices they make are actually understandable. I'll give you a good example. When I was working on that story about Amy Bishop, the shooter in Alabama, when my editor first pitched that story to me, I said, I don't want to write about that. That woman's crazy. And I don't care why she killed her colleagues. Like, I just don't, I don't, I don't want to understand her psyche. And he said, no, no, no, you don't understand.

She's not the heart of the story. The heart of the story is the mother. So the mother, it's the 1980s. The mother sees one child kill the other and the cops come to the door. And do you tell them my daughter just murdered my son? Or do you say, the shotgun went off by accident? And what he said to me was, Amy Bishop is like a cipher. Nobody's really ever going to understand why she did what she did. The mother's decision, anybody who's had parents would have to take a second and think, what would I do? What would I do?

I have two kids, right? Like it does, it does make me wonder. I guess what I'm saying is I think it's very comforting sometimes when we see the headlines to think, oh, those people have nothing to do with me. I would never be in the same universe as them morally. And I'm kind of interested in like implicating us a little bit and wondering, are there small ways in which you could see yourself going in that direction? Because I think that if we think that way, it might make us a little bit more sensitive and sophisticated about the way we think about the choices we make in our own day-to-day lives on a much smaller scale. I love that. You're so right that nobody wakes up one morning is like,

you know what, today is the day I become a bad guy. You know, most people would not have had that experience. It's a series of incremental choices off the straight and narrow. And then when you turn around, you'd be like, dang, how'd I get over here? Yeah. Yeah. How'd I get over here? And that's, it's those incremental steps that I'm most interested in. A lot of the time we see these people when they're over here already, we see them at like at the extreme. Yes. The question is, can we retrace and see where they came off the tracks? Totally. I totally feel that. Yeah. That is the, like the, the first steps off of the straight and narrow or the railroad tracks or whatever kind of imagery you prefer. Those are very interesting.

I totally get what you're saying there. I'm always interested in weird psychologies. I mean, I think this is part of the reason that we gravitate to true crime as a genre, right? Is that the human mind is a puzzling thing. Well, isn't that the truth? And if we could easily make sense of it, it would be a very different world. Part of the reason the world is so interesting is because we can't. Yeah, is that it's such a mystery. Yeah. So people can read your work in The New Yorker. They can read your books. They can pre-order Rogues, True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels, and Crooks. Where else can they find you online?

I'm very active on Twitter at P. Radden Keefe. And also on Instagram. I'm less active on Instagram. I'm still sort of figuring out. You're going to have to teach me Instagram. I don't really know. I'm there, but I'm not really there. I don't really know what I'm doing, but I'm there. I have a little, I planted a little flag on Instagram and those are the big ones for

me. Yeah. But mainly Twitter. I feel ya. Yeah. People usually have a platform that feels like home to them. Yeah. And people can usually tell if it's not your home. If you're out here like, yay, I have a book. Congrats to me. You know, like they can tell if it's not your home. I've got all the hallmarks of like an out of town tourist on Instagram. Yeah. You're wearing like an orange polo and some cargo shorts.

Right. I'm very badly sunburned. I got binoculars. Yes. Well, thank you so much for doing this. This is absolutely fascinating. I cannot wait for everybody to pick up Rogues and I will see you again. Absolutely.

Thank you so much. This was a real pleasure. Thanks for having me. Yes, absolutely. Thanks, Patrick. Thank you so much for listening to the Sharon Says So podcast. I am truly grateful for you. And I'm wondering if you could do me a quick favor. Would you be willing to follow or subscribe to this podcast or maybe leave me a rating or review? Or if you're feeling extra generous, would you share this episode on your Instagram stories or with a friend?

All of those things help podcasters out so much. This podcast was written and researched by Sharon McMahon and Heather Jackson. It was produced by Heather Jackson, edited and mixed by our audio producer Jenny Snyder, and hosted by me, Sharon McMahon. I'll see you next time.