The New Yorker Radio Hour - Jane Mayer, David Grann, and Patrick Radden Keefe on the Importance of a Good Villain.

Episode Date: July 16, 2024

During the 2023 New Yorker Festival, three legendary staff writers got together to discuss the craft of investigative journalism: digging for information like detectives, and then presenting it in a way to rival the best thrillers. For each of these writers, the “bad guy” —whose actions usually set the story in motion – needs to be presented in three dimensions; trusting the reader to grapple with that person’s perspective is key to an engrossing story. “I look at these big, boring issues often, like economic inequality or corruption in politics,” Jane Mayer says. “You take a subject like campaign finance – the Citizens United decision and how it’s corrupted politics. If you can find somebody like [Charles or David] Koch and explain there actually was a billionaire behind so much of this, and he has a story, and he has a family, and there are always screwed-up fathers and sons involved in these families. . . . It means that you’re able to explain the ethical choices people make.” Mayer is best known for her book “Dark Money,” about the Koch brothers; David Grann wrote “Killers of the Flower Moon” and “The Wager,” both best-sellers; and Patrick Radden Keefe covered the Sackler family’s opioid dynasty in “Empire of Pain,” and a murder during the Troubles in Northern Ireland in “Say Nothing.”  They were joined by their editor, The New Yorker’s Daniel Zalewski.   New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and this is Patrick Raddenke. You know, occasionally I'll be on the subway and I'll see people reading The New Yorker. And there was a week when I had an article in the magazine. And I saw somebody pull the magazine out of their bag and turn the pages and turn to my article. and what I was thinking, you know, internally was like, should I say something? And I started sort of inching my way over.

And then just as I, like, reached out to tap her on the shoulder, I saw her get to the end of the first paragraph and flipped to the next article. And so, like, that, that mortifying moment is always in my mind. Anytime I sit down to write, because the truth is, right? But the New Yorker, we've got the privilege. of publishing many of the best writers out there. Patrick Raddenkief is certainly one of them. And not long ago, three of our writers got together

to talk shop at the New Yorker Festival. Shop in this case is the craft of investigative journalism, digging detective-like for information and then creating a truthful narrative that sometimes has the tension and release of a genuine thriller. The writers were Jane Mayer, best known for her book, Dark Money, about the billionaires Charles and David Koch,

David Gran, who wrote Killers of the Flower Moon and The Wager, both huge bestsellers, and Patrick, who's known for his reporting on the Sackler family opioid dynasty and his book, Say Nothing, which is about a murder during the troubles in Northern Ireland. They were joined by their editor, the magazine's gifted features editor, Daniel Zaleski. Here's Patrick. When I was working on my book, Say Nothing, David and I used to actually have offices next to door to each other in the old New Yorker offices, which was incredible for me to have the opportunity to have David next door and just be able to chat with him about various issues.

And there was a moment at the end of the research process for that book, four years into the process when I one day stumbled on, it's about this murder that happened in 1972. And almost by accident, I stumbled on the identity of the murderer who is somebody who was still alive and had never been identified. And it was this huge revelation, but then something I needed to think really carefully about, like what's the responsible way of doing this to point the finger at somebody and accuse them of murder in a book? And then also

from a storytelling perspective, how would you handle that? And as I was sort of wrestling with this, I thought, I think I'll ask David Graham. And I called him up. You know, it was a little bit, I was joking. You know, it's like, I happen to have Marshall McLuhan right here.

And similarly, my book about the Sacklers, one of my touchstones going into that was Jane's work on the coax, right? How do you look at a systemic problem through the lens of the history of one family? The issue is that nobody's obliged to read any of this stuff, right? Like we're playing for keeps.

We spend months and months and months and months working on these stories, but the truth is that a magazine article, unless it's really good, is a pretty disposable thing, right? So I think that part of what is important, is, at least in the way, I look at these big boring issues often, like, you know, economic inequality or corruption in politics, which includes having to write about campaign finance, there's nothing duller in the world, right? And so, so, but what, what I think is really important is, at least to me when I'm doing these things, is to put, put a face on it, tell it,

explain that there's agency in this, there's a person behind this who's made a moral or ethical choice that has resulted in people's being damaged or a system being damaged the way it is. And so that's why, you know, you take a subject like campaign finance, citizens united the decision and how it's corrupted politics. If you can find somebody like the coax and explain, there actually was a billionaire behind so much of this. And he has a story. And he has a family. and they're always screwed up fathers and sons involved in these families. And, you know, bringing that alive, it brings, I mean, it means that you're able to explain the ethical choices people make. And I think you and I have spent a lot of time thinking about this and trying to take those piles of facts and all of those numbers and the investigative reporting

and bringing it alive by showing that this is actually a story about a person. Yeah, and I think a related aspect of that is I think all three of you guys have a real respect for the competence of the villains in your story. Meaning all three of you have a kind of connoisseurs. I mean, there's a reason why Patrick's book, a collection of magazine pieces is called rogues, right? Because there's a certain appreciation you have to have for the grifter, for the scam artist, for the unethical stock trader. If you don't look at them with that rigor and care, you may not quite see sort of what is wrong here, but not just what's wrong, but what's a threat because the opposition to what you believe in is so formidable. One of the great things about the New Yorker is that it gives you the space to really develop the character and have nuance. And I was thinking about Patrick, your portrait of the Sacklers is one that what makes it so interesting

is they begin in the very beginning as kind of idealists who go awry. And so it's not like people or, you know, they're born, you know, conniving and twisting their mustache and saying, I'm going to take this down. You know, you see the corrupt, them get corrupted, kind of. And it's a long arc of a story in a person's life. and you can see what we have the space to do is tell it. And I think fundamentally what you're trying to do is you're really asking yourself a question about why and how.

And when you ask those questions, it inevitably leads you to deconstruct how something happened and to understand even the villains, even when they are evil, you are trying to understand them, to decode them, to figure them out, and then to show them. And I think also it requires more than anything else, a trust in you all.

I mean, when I write a story, I have an enormous sense of trust in the reader that I don't need to begin a story telling you this person was wrongly executed or this person, quick, he's evil, blaring lights, this is the villain, he is awful, he's genocide. If I show you that we, are in all of these stories, not just readers, but we are discerners, we are jurors, we are

adjudicating. They, you know, and I think that is what can have the real power of literature to let us figure out the answers as well. Patrick and David, there must be moments when you've had an idea in your head, you know, this would be a great story. I mean, I have this all the time where I think this would be great if I could know this. And sometimes you realize this is going to remain a secret for gades to come or may never get known. What is a story where you thought, I don't think I can do this, but then you got to feel, yes, I can't. David, do you have an answer to that? I remember the challenge one of the stories we did early on was on the Aryan Brotherhood of Howe. And, you know, I was always

looking for scouring for story ideas. And in the old days, the best place I always found to find story ideas was in little briefs and metropolitan newspapers around the country, which, sadly, now they're not as many of these newspapers. And usually they'd just be like an inch long. And, you know, just a little summary. And I remember reading in a California paper, a little summary, and it said something to the effect of, you know, members of the Aryan Brotherhood, you know, this murderous prison gang,

were arrested while in prison. Arrested while in prison. And that was basically it. And I thought, how about how do you get arrested in prison? And then I did a little more research. learned out that the leaders of the gang that were arrested were actually in solitary confinement in the, you know, the most draconian prisons in the country. I learned that there was a member of the gang who had been like number two in the gang who had defected from the gang at a

certain point under mysterious circumstances. And I learned which I did not know that there was the equivalent of a witness protection program in prison, which is you're still in prison, but they don't list you in the prison. It's not public. So I couldn't find the person. So I couldn't find the person. So I spent weeks and weeks trying to find this ghost prisoner. And then eventually I got somebody in the government to tell me where he was. And so I called up the prison and I said I'd like to meet with, I think his name was Thompson. And I'd like to meet with him. I'm going to write him a letter. Can you give me just the basic information? They said, we have no prisoner here by that name. And then several hours went by and the official who had been helping me locate the person called me up and

They said, they were getting ready to move them out of the prison. They think you're a sleeper agent trying to come and to kill him. Now, I'm not much of a sleeper agent when you take one look at me, sadly. And this official said, no, no, he really is a reporter for the New Yorker and come on down. And so I was eventually able to meet this person. He had these mesmerizing blue eyes like I've never seen before, Charles Manson-like eyes. And he began to tell me this story about why he had left the gang, how the gang operated, the methods they used. This man had murdered many people.

He also had some element of a conscience because he had left the gang when he believed that they were starting to kill what he considered innocence, the father of somebody who had snitched. He thought that was outside our rules, and that's why he left the gang. I have faith in you as a reader to be able to hear from him. how he got sucked into the gang, recognize the crimes he is committed, and see some of the gray as well to form your own judgments. My job is to show who he is and what the gang is

and I have that confidence. So I think that is how you do it. But you're honest about it, and you confront the evil by showing it. I think there's a kind of moral vanity in reading about a certain kind of evil person and saying, well, they are just completely different from me. I would never have anything in common with them.

We are two different species. I wrote a big piece a number of years ago about a woman named Judy Clark, who's a death penalty lawyer, and she represents famously the worst of the worst. She takes only people who've done really, truly, the most horrific things. terrorists who've planted bombs in public places, mass murderers, child rapists. And her objection to the death penalty is so intense that she believes, even in those cases,

those lives should be spared. What she's trying to do is humanize her clients, these awful people, and say, yes, they're these awful people, they've done these awful things, but nobody's born evil. And so her perspective is that, you know, things happen to people, they change, over time. And I don't know that philosophically, I'm all the way there with Judy Clark. I think evil exists. But I think that the job of the journalist is not to platform it in the sense that you're giving a kind of uncritical megaphone to this person, but to sort of get close enough

to them and try and ask yourself how they got there. Where did they diverge? Like what was the off-ramp that they took from the, you know, from the road that the rest of us are on. You're trying to kind of see them in enough vivid, intimate detail that you really kind of create an encounter between the reader and that person. That's Patrick Raddenkief, along with Jane Mayer and David Grand, more in a moment. As you know, I've often had problems getting FaceTime with some of the people who are really powerful, who have, layer after layer of public relations people,

keeping people like me at a great distance. But because of that, what I think is really important to do is to find other people, other sources on them who will be able to give you a three-dimensional picture. Among the people that turned out to be great sources was, I rented a summer house once

from a man who was a very high-end jeweler. and he turned, you know, and who knew, but he turned out to be the jeweler for the Koch family. And so he became the most incredible source because Mrs. Coke would come in and complain about Mr. Coke and how cheap he was and of what she wanted to buy. And then they became such good friends that the jeweler became her gym buddy. and he would work out with her and then call me. And there was somebody who I'm just trying to make sure not to get too much way, but there was someone in a household of a billionaire. I wrote about a different billionaire who really was an employee who disliked the family so much

that this person wound up when the family was out photographing what was in their briefcases. sending it. So you do what you can, but really... Apparently. I have to say that, though, that of some of the best sources are mothers. And it made me realize why the word mother load,

because I was thinking of Mike Pence's mom, who I sat down with. She was incredible, and his brother came up, came to, and we all sat down for coffee. I've always found that, um, that ex-wives are also. As a reporter, you are terrified that you're getting something wrong constantly. Like, you live with that fear. And I remember when I was working on Killers of the Flower Moon, um, I had thought that was a story, um, about this singular evil figure who had

committed these crimes against members of the Osage Nation, systematically killing them for their oil money, who had committed these crimes with a few henchmen, because that was the theory laid out by the FBI at the time. But over time, I kept meeting with members of the Osage Nation, and a lot of the Osage elders kept telling about other suspicious deaths in their family that weren't ever investigated and weren't part of the FBI case, and that had no links to this killer. And then at one point I remember going to the archives in Fort Worth, Texas, and I found this old booklet, and it was listing members of the Osage Nation whose fortunes were being managed by these white guardians under this very racist system. And I noticed under one of the names

of the guardians, they had about five Osages whose fortune they managed. And it kept saying, after the first name, somebody had written the word dead, and after the next name dead, and after third name dead, four, fifth, all five listed as dead in a span of just a couple years. And I said, that's so weird. I started going through this booklet. I noticed another guardian had like 15 Osages, who's fortunate they had managed, and it had about a 50% mortality rate. It defied any natural death rate.

It was easier to think of these crimes as being perpetrated by a singular evil figure, a psychopath who was different than us. And instead, this turned out to be about a culture of killing and a culture of completely and about a lot of ordinary people who are committing these crimes because of greed and prejudice. I think a lot of what you guys end up publishing, you're witnessed to a culture in which, say, on Wall Street, everyone thinks that what they're doing is just fine. Jane, you were talking about the enormous institutions that exist to block people like you. I can remember a time when I'm I got a call myself as the editor that was basically saying,

you know, we're going to run a story saying that Jane Mayer is a serial plagiarist. Do you have any comment? And I was stunned by this, you know. And it turned out, well, you tell them what was going on there? It was a nightmare. Yeah, that was the coax again. They had hired the former commissioner of police in New York City. And I had heard a little bit about it that somebody,

there was some detective doing something about me, and I thought, boy, they're going to be really bored. And what they came up with was they were going to frame me as a plagiarist. They'd run 11 years worth of work, including a couple books, through those plagiarism, algorithm detection things, and found four sentences that looked like other sentences. And they'd given a huge binder of opposition research on this to Tucker,

Carlson. He called for comment, and he said, we're going with us tomorrow morning. And I said, Tucker, you know I'm not a plagiarist. Nobody's ever accused me of that. And he said, I know no such thing. And so I called the authors of the four sentences, one of which appeared in a Washington Post piece that turned out to have been edited by my husband. When I called the reporter, he said, not only did you not plagiarize, but you credit me by name in the next paragraph, and in the New Yorker, it's a link to my work. Overnight, I was able to take it apart. I sent this to Tucker Carlson and said,

if you go ahead with this, this is a textbook example of libel, and I'm going to sue. And I took the dog for a walk, came back, and said, we're not going with it. But I did wonder, then the New York Post had been sort of following this whole whole thing. And so then to their credit, they ran a story that said, smear disappears. We wonder who was behind it. It was such a brilliant act of reporting jujitsu, where it's like, you know, they're doing this thing against her, and she just uses all of her reporting might in like on deadline, like to save herself and shame them for what they did. Thank you for not believing it.

Yeah. Well, and the thing is, it's important to recognize. It's just important to kind of understand and what the people on this stage sometimes go through. I do remember once where, it was actually after the Aryan Brotherhood story, where I got a letter from an associate of the gang, came to my home, which was a little unsettling, and it said, your name is now in the hat. And that meant, in the Aryan Brotherhood,

if your name was in the hat, it meant you were marked for death. I was very nervous. I called a problem, prosecutor who had been investigating them and I said, you know, very anxiously, I said, you know, I hear my names in the hat. And, and the prosecutor said, well, David, look at it. It's a really big hat. My name's in the hat. My name's in the hat. My wife's in the hat. Joey, who's selling hot dogs down there, he's in the hat. I think you'll be at the very bottom. You're fine. David Gran, along with Patrick Raddenkeef and Jane Mayer. You can read work by all of them at New Yorker.com. Pretty good summer afternoon, I'd say.

I'm David Remnick, and that's the program for today. See you next time. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Yards, with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul, and Alicia Zuckerman. With guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable,

Alex Parrish, Victor Gwan, and Alejandra Deccett. And we had additional help from Ursula Sommer. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.