(Urged by a self-help guru to jot down his number-one life goal, Burnett writes “more money.”) Most consequential among his shows is The Apprentice, which Keefe strongly suggests laid the groundwork for Donald Trump’s 2016 presidential bid.īut of course even when money is the main thing, it is rarely the only thing. Closer to home, there’s Mark Burnett, a self-identified undocumented immigrant turned nanny turned Hollywood producer whose single-minded pursuit of wealth helped create reality television. Nearly as dumbfounding is the way a jovial Syrian arms dealer living large in a mansion on Spain’s southern coast shrewdly manipulates international law (largely unenforceable anyway) while never actually breaking the national laws of any of the multiple countries in which he trades black-market weapons. In a 2014 piece, the unlawful escapades of the Mexican drug lord familiarly known as El Chapo and the quantities of money, product, and people his operation moves around on a daily basis are eye-popping. Readers of Rogues are hereby encouraged to fasten their seatbelts.

Money not only makes the world go round, but on occasion the sums are so vast they nearly cause it to spin off its axis. In most of the morally deranged subcultures that Keefe probes in these pieces, avarice rules. If the latter adjective sounds critical, it emphatically is not. Patrick Radden Keefe (Phillip Montgomery)Īmong the “abiding preoccupations” to which Patrick Radden Keefe ’99CC confesses in the preface to Rogues are “crime and corruption, secrets and lies” and “the permeable membrane separating licit and illicit worlds.” These preoccupations are front and center in this collection of twelve magazine articles written over twelve years (2007–2019), making the experience of reading this book both exhilarating and unnerving.

Rogues true stories