Then there’s Amy Bishop, a neurobiologist denied tenure at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, who, during the last department meeting of the semester, blocked the conference room door and shot six of her colleagues, killing three. It’s a muddied world he covers, where just about everyone is tainted, though even the most sinister rogues have some mediating human qualities.Īmong the more menacing group of transgressors Keefe writes about is Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, whose pre-terrorist college life displayed “a painfully American banality: cinder-block dorm rooms, big-screen TVs, mammoth boxes of Cheez-Its.” Wim Holleeder, the Dutch gangster who allegedly has a hit out for his own sister, comes across as wily and even quirky during his trial - “shifting in his chair, shaking his head, taking his eyeglasses off and twirling them like a propeller” - though Keefe makes no bones about the man’s overall brutality and drug kingpin Joaquín Guzmán Loera, “El Chapo” - at one point one of the most feared criminals in the world - “distinguished himself as a trafficker who brought an unusual sense of imagination and play to the trade.” Patrick Radden Keefe tells us in the preface to in his new book, Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks, that the 12 long-form essays “reflect some of my abiding preoccupations: crime and corruption, secrets and lies, the permeable membrane separating licit and illicit worlds, the bonds of family, the power of denial.” In this, of course, the stories are similar to the concerns in his previous two books: Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland and Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty.

‘Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks’ by Patrick Radden Keefe | Photo: Courtesy

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