Name: Rogues
Rating: 3.9 (135 reviews)
Author: Patrick Radden Keefe

What’s in it for me? Get a fascinating look into the lives of some of society’s most controversial figures.

Most of us are used to consuming news in bits and bytes, getting a jumble of stories into our news feeds with the most sensational headlines – the most shocking news. But what about the people behind those stories? Behind every cartoonish portrait of a villain is a story. A history. A bundle of desires. A concerned family.

Teasing out that history is the specialty of Patrick Radden Keefe. In the decades he’s worked as a journalist, he’s written about all sorts of people, from drug traffickers to whistleblowers, from dedicated lawyers to cunning conmen. In Rogues, Keefe collates 12 of the most significant profiles he’s written over the course of his career as a journalist.

In this Blink, you’ll take a deep dive into four of these stories. Each story examines the key questions that Keefe explores in his journalism: What influences the ethical choices that people make? And, how do the stories we tell about them affect how we understand those choices?

In this Blink, you’ll discover

why notorious drug trafficker “El Chapo” managed to escape arrest for so long;
what could have caused academic Amy Bishop to become a mass murderer; and
why a whistleblower could be seen as both a common criminal and a hero.

A sister torn between family loyalty and her conscience.

What does family loyalty look like when your brother is a vicious killer? That’s a question that plagued Astrid Holleeder all her life. Her brother, Willem, was a Dutch mobster who had kidnapped and murdered tens of people. But Astrid felt a deep sense of responsibility toward him.

They were, as she said, “bound by misery.” They’d grown up with an alcoholic father who violently beat his family in drunken rages. Their childhood was about trying to survive and living by their wits. As painful as that history was, it was one Astrid shared with her brother. They had survived, together.

So, how could she betray him to the police?

For a long time, she didn’t. On the contrary, she shielded him from the police and the justice system. As a criminal lawyer, she built intricate cases defending him. She lied to the police on his behalf. And she worked to shield him from other gangsters who were out for his life.

But, one day, Willem crossed a red line. He authorized a hit on another member of the family, his brother-in-law, Cor van Hout. Willem and Cor had been partners in crime. But their relationship soured when they had disagreements about how to run the family crime business.

At around the same time, Cor had experienced multiple assassination attempts, including one that finally killed him. Astrid put two and two together: her brother, Willem, was behind the murder. He had killed Cor, and in so doing had deprived her sister of her husband, and her nephews and nieces of their father. Astrid had always believed in family loyalty, but Willem’s actions showed that he didn’t. He was only out for himself.

At that moment, Astrid resolved to turn him in and became a key state witness against him.

Her actions have cost her, dearly. She lives in hiding, moving from safe house to safe house. She constantly fears for her life. And, perhaps most painful of all, she has no contact with her brother, the person to whom she was once so close. But she doesn’t regret her actions. If she hadn’t turned him in, she’d have remained an accomplice to his crimes.

Astrid’s brother, Willem Holleeder, was eventually apprehended thanks to his sister’s testimony.

But what happens when the family and entire community of a criminal are determined to protect him from arrest? He becomes very hard to catch. In the next story, you’ll hear how a notorious drug trafficker evaded police for decades and what eventually brought him down.

A drug trafficker who felt invincible – until he wasn’t.

Mile-long tunnels burrowed underneath the Mexico-US border. Bathtubs that lifted up to reveal secret rooms hidden beneath. Communicating via a network of confidantes so that his calls could never be traced.

These were just some of the measures that one of the world’s most notorious drug traffickers, Joaquín Guzmán Loera – or El Chapo – employed to ensure he evaded capture by police. So, what possessed this cautious man to let down his defenses?

A disturbed academic who was a “ticking time bomb.”

What would possess a middle-aged academic to pick up a gun and shoot at her colleagues in an otherwise completely ordinary staff meeting?

That was the question that bamboozled Amy Bishop’s friends and family. It also deeply puzzled the investigators assigned to work on her case. Bishop had no criminal history. She didn’t take drugs. She was a mother of four in an apparently happy marriage. And yet, she’d pulled out a shotgun and killed three of her colleagues. Her deadly spree would have continued if the gun hadn’t jammed.

Heroic whistleblower or greedy criminal? It depends on who you ask.

In Switzerland, private banking is sacred. In fact, the Swiss government has gone to great lengths to ensure that client information is kept confidential. Switzerland has become a tax haven for very wealthy individuals wanting to hide their enormous wealth. This policy has paid off handsomely for Swiss banks like HSBC.

Or it did pay off handsomely before an employee by the name of Hervé Falciani collected the data of more than 100,000 clients and gave it to the French authorities. What motivated Falciani to betray the bank? Was he motivated by noble ideas or greed?

Key ideas in Rogues

What is Rogues about?

Rogues (2022) is a compilation of veteran journalist Patrick Radden Keefe’s most famous profiles for the New Yorker Magazine. Keefe delves into the lives of notorious criminals and con artists, exploring their complex motivations. He examines the societies that made them and the systems we have for bringing people to justice.