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

The crimes:

“The Jefferson Bottles”: a billionaire oenophile makes it his mission to take down a fraudster selling new wine in old bottles.

“Crime Family”: a Dutch woman turns informer on her crime boss brother.

“The Avenger”: a documentary filmmaker goes after one of the key figures behind the Lockerbie bombing.

“The Empire of Edge”: insider information fuels a high-profile hedge fund.

“A Loaded Gun”: a university neurobiologist goes postal at a faculty meeting.

“The Hunt for El Chapo”: the Mexican, and ultimately U.S. authorities, finally get their man.

“Winning”: television producer Mark Burnett and the making of Donald Trump.

“Swiss Bank Heist”: a tech guy blows the whistle on a Swiss bank.

“The Prince of Marbella”: the pursuit of a high-rolling arms merchant.

“The Worst of the Worst”: a top death-row defence lawyer represents one of the Boston Marathon bombers.

“Buried Secrets”: an Israeli billionaire gets involved in the dirty business of resource development in Guinea.

“Journeyman”: a look at the life of chef/author/TV personality Anthony Bourdain.

The book:

All of these stories first appeared in The New Yorker. But even having such a prestigious publication behind you doesn’t always land you access. Keefe begins his prefatory remarks by talking about how many of these pieces were “writearounds”: “an article about a subject who declines to grant an interview.” But, he goes on to say, this does not diminish them. “Some journalists hate writearounds,” he tells us, “but I’ve always enjoyed the challenge they pose. It takes a lot of creative reporting to produce a vivid portrait of someone without ever getting to speak to them, but these pieces are often more revealing than the scripted encounters you end up with when the politician or CEO actually cooperates.”

What Keefe says here rhymed with something Michael Lista talks about in his true-crime collection The Human Scale, a book I was reviewing at the same time as I was reading Rogues. Lista describes “end-runs” (it means the same thing as writearound) and says that writing his own fair share of them “proved something profound to me: the interview isn’t necessarily the best way to know the subject of a story.”

I agree wholeheartedly, and indeed I would go even further and say chances are that a writearound or end-run is more likely to reveal something significant about the subject of a piece than one where there is a formal sit-down interview “for the record.” Because what are most interviewees going to say? Only what you would expect them to say. They have no interest in telling the truth while (ostensibly) setting the record straight or explaining themselves. They only want to shape the narrative in what are obviously self-serving ways. The reporter or biographer is better off just ignoring them and doing their own research. But writing about celebrities or people in a position of power, and the compromises that are necessarily made, is something I’ve considered at length elsewhere.

Turning to the people Keefe is writing about here, what would talking to Mark Burnett or Donald Trump have told him? I would expect Burnett to be smarter and more careful in how he expressed himself, but I’m pretty sure neither individual would say anything but what I’d expect them to say. In other words, nothing much. The futility of interviewing people like this is underscored when Keefe does, somewhat surprisingly, get to talk to Beny Steinmetz (“by some estimates, the richest man in Israel”) about his buying up mountains of iron ore in Guinea. It goes down in a totally predictable way. The point isn’t that Steinmetz just blows a lot of smoke, it’s that all he ends up saying is exactly what Keefe must have known he was going to say. He did nothing wrong. Other people are out to get him. They’re the bad guys. We all know how this story goes. So why even bother?

And why would the subjects bother, assuming they knew Keefe wasn’t just going to be a tool? At least for wealthy rogues it makes more sense to operate in the darkness. This ties into another connected theme: privacy.

In my notes on The Missing Crypto Queen I talked about how, whatever their other functions, the main reason for having cryptocurrencies is that they do an end run around the law (taxes and other financial regulations) and are used mainly for the purpose of money laundering and to keep shading dealings away from the prying eyes of law enforcement. I was thinking of that again when I came to a part in the story about sketchy Swiss banking practices and how fanatical they were to maintain their clients’ privacy. And not just their clients. Called before a committee of the British House of Commons, one bank CEO named Stuart Gulliver talked about how, at his institution, he had implemented “root and branch” reform:

But it was hard to see him as an agent of change. When committee members inquired how he chose to receive his personal compensation from the bank, Gulliver acknowledged that for many years he was paid through an anonymous shell company that he had set up in Panama – through Mossack Fonseca [the Panamanian law firm that was shut down after being exposed in the so-called Panama Papers as being involved in various tax evasion and money laundering schemes]. Gulliver insisted that he had always paid his taxes and that he employed the Panamanian shell simply for “privacy.” But he admitted his “inability to convince anyone that these arrangements were not put in place for reasons of tax evasion.”

I can see why that might be a hard sell.

It’s easy to feel ambivalent about privacy. It’s not well known, but the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade was based on finding a Constitutional right to privacy. And fifty years later, privacy is seen as an important right in an age of non-stop monitoring and surveillance. But at the same time, privacy is also used as a shield by bad actors, particularly those with deep pockets, who can afford to buy the sort of cover that allows them to work in secret. Like people being paid in crypto, or setting up shell companies in offshore tax havens. When Keefe starts looking into Beny Steinmetz he begins by noting how “Despite his great wealth, Steinmetz has maintained an exceptionally low profile.” Despite? I think most billionaires avoid appearing on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous or as one of the Rich Kids of Instagram. “He’s a very private guy,” one of Steinmetz’s friends tells Keefe. This is said, by the friend, to be mainly because Steinmetz is a family guy, but it has other obvious benefits. When being investigated on charges of corruption, it comes in particularly useful.

But how do you prove corruption? By its nature, corruption is covert; payoffs are designed to be difficult to detect. The international financial system has evolved to accommodate a wide array of illicit activities, and shell companies and banking havens make it easy to camouflage transfers, payment orders, and copies of checks. . . . The result . . . is “a web of corporate opacity” that is spun largely by wealthy professionals in financial capitals like London and New York. A recent study found that the easiest country in which to establish an untraceable shell company is not some tropical banking haven but the United States.

So what do you want? Protection for the little guy, a right to be left alone and to not have your data harvested with every click and text? Or more transparency for billionaires and corporate bad actors? It’s hard not to think that the rich and powerful are always going to find some way to weaponize every nice thing that comes along, so I guess we’re stuck with taking the bad with the good. All you can do, and probably should do, is be suspicious of any rich person with secrets.

This is a solid collection of reporting that reads long in a good way. The last story on Anthony Bourdain seemed the most of out of place, though I guess his drug use made him into a bit of a “rogue.” In any event, I can understand Bourdain’s popularity though his beat – food and travel – are subjects that don’t interest me much and I never watched his show. I also managed to avoid ever seeing more than maybe a couple of episodes of The Apprentice, and it’s interesting how I guess it’s taken for granted that Trump (and maybe Burnett) were both rogues without being involved in anything illegal. That we know of. But of course, we’d likely never know.

Noted in passing:

It’s often remarked how stupid even highly educated and indeed highly intelligent people can be. I was thinking of this when reading about Amy Bishop’s meltdown at a meeting of the faculty that had recently denied her tenure, which ended with her killing three of them. One of the profs in attendance who had voted against Bishop receiving tenure considered herself to be close to Bishop, and before things went to hell had “made a mental note to ask Bishop how her search for a new job was going.”

I have a hard time imagining how she thought Bishop, who she must have known was someone who did not enjoy robust mental health, was likely to take such a friendly inquiry. As it is, she ended up on her knees begging Bishop to spare her and her life was only saved because Bishop’s gun jammed. Bishop did actually try to shoot her twice.

I may have already known that the bulletproof glass in the president’s armoured car (nicknamed “The Beast”) was 5 inches thick, but it still surprised me. How do you see anything out of glass 5 inches thick?

Even more impressive though was the front door to one of El Chapo’s safe houses. Breaking this down turned out to be no easy matter.

The marines readied their weapons and produced a battering ram, but when they moved to breach the front door, it didn’t budge. A wooden door would have splintered off its hinges, but this door was a marvel of reinforced steel – some of the marines later likened it to an air lock on a submarine. For all the noise that their efforts made, the door seemed indestructible. Normally, the friction of a battering ram would heat the steel, rendering it more pliable. But the door was custom-made: inside the steel skin, it was filled with water so that if anyone tried to break it down, the heat from the impact would not spread. The marines hammered the door again and again, until the ram buckled and had to be replaced. It took ten minutes to gain entry to the house.

That’s some door! Provides quite a bit of privacy, I would think.

I’m always amazed at how cheap really rich people can be. Beny Steinmetz made a killing flipping part of his company’s interest in the iron ore range, turning a profit of over $2 billion. However, his company apparently only offered one of the parties to the deal $1 million to destroy some documents they were supposed to have. The payoff would have gone up to $5 million, but only if the company was able to win at trial and hold on to the assets. If I’d been offered such a cheap bribe I would have rejected it just on general principle.

Takeaways:

It’s hard to go through life trusting no one, but at the very least you shouldn’t extend trust to anyone who doesn’t trust you.

True Crime Files