Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks

“As we discussed the case, I noticed that Koch seemed anything but aggrieved. He has thrown himself into his battle against Rodenstock and phony wine with the same headlong enthusiasm that he devoted to collecting wine in the first place. ‘I used to brag that I got the Thomas Jefferson wines,’ he said. ‘Now I get to brag that I have the fake Thomas Jefferson wines.’”

Keefe suggests here that in some ways, Rodenstock’s crime was victimless. Koch has “enthusiasm” for his new quest that matches his original interest in the Jefferson bottles. This underlines that he has been compensated in elevated social standing and emotional satisfaction. Koch is so wealthy that status and pride are more important to him than any monetary loss.

“When she moves through Amsterdam, she does so in secret, and sometimes in disguise: she has a collection of fake noses and teeth. Holleeder typically dresses in black, but if she suspects she’s being followed, she may duck into a bathroom and emerge in a wig and a red dress. Occasionally, she has posed as a man.”

In this description of Astrid, Keefe portrays her as more like a spy than a lawyer in hiding. She is equipped for her new life, ready to change clothes or her gender presentation to preserve her safety. Keefe highlights her creativity and dedication, creating excitement and anticipation in the reader. This episode contrasts sharply with the family tragedy that undergirds the rest of the narrative. Keefe is also practicing a kind of disguise, presenting the reader with one genre only to switch to another pages later.

“If Wim needed to say anything potentially incriminating, he whispered it into her ear. ‘We got better at it, sharing the secret, letting them live off the Heineken money,’ Astrid told me. She recognizes now that her instinct to be loyal to her family amounted to a form of moral compromise. ‘That was when we all became accomplices,’ she said.”

Astrid emphasizes the role of codes and secrecy in her family culture—a motif that appears in other essays in Keefe’s collection, as it is something many of his subjects have in common. The act of whispering is often personal and intimate, underlining the sibling bond the reader knows will eventually break. Astrid’s word choice here presents deception as a learned skill, one that changed her irrevocably. She calls herself an “accomplice,” underlining that Wim’s criminality is not something she is exempt from.

“Some relatives of Lockerbie victims refer to the payment as blood money. ‘The money is supposed to be the end of it for them. But for me the money was the beginning, because it enabled me to try to get what I really wanted—the story.’ When I asked Grucza what he thought of Dornstein’s conviction that he could track down terrorists in Libya, he replied, with a chuckle, ‘I figured he was either completely insane or pretty much right.’”

Dornstein’s words about monetary compensation from the Libyan government underline his commitment to narrative above all else, and his sense that his brother’s death was a kind of beginning for him. While others might reject the money, he sees it as the key to what he wants most. Keefe’s question to Dornstein’s cameraman reveals another perspective—he can look at the situation with humor, and sees Dornstein as potentially “completely insane.” While Dornstein presents his quest as the only possible response, others stress that his dedication is unique, and perhaps detrimental.

“It might seem abstract and philosophical, Dornstein said, but this is the way he came to understand his role as avenger. He surveyed books about Jews tracking down Nazis, and Israelis hunting the terrorists who attacked the 1972 Munich Olympics. His reckoning, he told me, would come not in an act of retribution but in the delivery of a message: ‘Twenty-five years ago, on a day of your choosing, you put a bomb in an airplane, and the course of my life changed. Now, on a day of my choosing, I will come to your home and I will knock on your door and say, “I was on the other side of that act.”’”

Dornstein sees narrative truth not merely as an emotional project, but a moral one. Keefe makes particular note of his bookshelves: stories of Nazi hunters and Israeli vengeance for murdered athletes, who, like David Dornstein, died in a terrorist attack. Ken Dornstein sees himself as part of a tradition, in which words are a weapon of justice. He underlines the power of choice—someone chose his brother’s death, and someday he will choose to remind them of the consequences.

“Once, when Gilman was traveling in Istanbul, he forgot about a scheduled consultation. Unable to reach him, Martoma had his assistant make multiple calls to try to track the doctor down. Eventually, a hotel employee discovered Gilman by himself, reading, and alerted him to the calls. ‘I was in a foreign country, and he couldn’t find me,’ Gilman testified. ‘It was touching.’”

The anecdote here speaks to Martoma’s persistence, bordering on obsession, in his search for information from Gilman. While Gilman’s words make the episode seem intimate, even emotional—as though Martoma had lost someone he cared for—Keefe’s word choice reminds the reader of a harsher reality. Gilman “testifies” to this episode in court, not in a personal conversation with Keefe. Martoma thus played on Gilman’s emotions to increase the sense of connection between them.

“Martoma always feared exposure of the Harvard incident, Rosemary said: ‘It was like a dagger that had been hanging over his head.’ (SAC performed background checks on prospective employees, but it is not known whether the firm detected this blemish in Martoma’s record. Of course, SAC could have learned of it and hired him anyway; forging a law school transcript and mailing it to twenty-three federal judges demonstrates impressive comfort with risk.)”

It is striking that Martoma dreads exposure of his own secrets more than he does a prison sentence—underlining his obsession with his image and his family’s conception of him. Rosemary makes a literary allusion—Shakespeare’s Macbeth hallucinates a dagger in the air, seeing it as an omen of his actions before murdering the king. In this comparison, Martoma is a doomed but also somehow powerfully tragic figure. Keefe’s aside punctures the drama of the moment, since he points out that Martoma’s history, while a source of shame for him, could well have been a professional asset in the cutthroat world of asset management.

“The Bishop family home in Braintree, at 46 Hollis Avenue, is a gabled Victorian with a gracious covered porch. It was built in the nineteenth century by a dentist who ran his practice from a cottage on the property. The front lawn is dominated by a giant copper beech whose knuckled branches are sturdy enough to support climbing children. When Amy’s little brother, Seth, was a boy, he would ascend the tree, then panic, unable to get back down. His mother, Judy, would issue branch-by-branch instructions until he reached the ground.”

Keefe focuses on the peaceful setting and aesthetics of the Massachusetts setting of Amy Bishop’s early life. The house is large, “gracious,” and old, with a tree made for “climbing children.” It is a domestic idyll: The young Seth is unnerved by the descent but his mother is there to assuage his fears and come to his rescue. None of this presages the incubation of a mass murderer. It contrasts sharply with what the reader learns later about the family—there are no outward signs of danger, loss, or grief, despite the reality.

“Amy’s parents, and her friends, tend to refer to Seth’s death as ‘the accidental shooting’ with a robotic insistence that can sometimes feel like spin. When it comes to the shootings in Alabama, they often employ the passive voice, as though Amy had no agency in the matter. Once, when I was talking with her friend Brian Roach, he referred to ‘the accident in Alabama.’”

Here, Keefe underlines the Bishops’ use of language to soften harsh reality. Amy’s supporters talk about Seth’s death as an accident with a “robotic insistence”—they repeat it as if reading from a script. Keefe notes that they even make her mass shooting of her colleagues sound like an event that somehow happened without Amy’s involvement. In this version of events, Amy is the victim of tragedy, not an adult who made decisions that deprived others of their lives.

“Guzmán developed ‘a Zorro-like reputation,’ Gil Gonzalez, who pursued him in Mexico for the DEA, told me. In dozens of narcocorridos, the heraldic Mexican ballads that glorify traffickers, singers portrayed Guzmán as a country boy turned cunning bandit who had grown rich but not soft, his cuerno de chivo, or ‘goat horn’—Mexican slang for an assault rifle with a curved magazine—never far from his side. Yet Guzmán himself remained maddeningly obscure.”

The comparison of Guzmán to Zorro emphasizes his proximity to legend and status as a folk hero. The narcocorridos emphasize his wealth and his undiminished machismo—his weapon is always nearby. As little is known about him or his whereabouts, he emerges here as a legend, buttressing Keefe’s overall interest in the power of narrative in stories about criminals and con artists.

“There had always been some sympathy for the drug trade in Sinaloa, but nothing deepens sympathy like charity and bribes. Eduardo Medina-Mora, Mexico’s ambassador in Washington, described Guzmán’s largesse in the state: ‘You are financing everything. Baptisms. Infrastructure. If someone gets sick, you provide a little plane. So you have lots of local support, because you are Santa Claus. And everybody likes Santa Claus.’”

The description of the drug trade’s importance in Sinaloan life brings out the theme of The Overlap Between Corruption, Wrongdoing, and Everyday Life. In an impoverished area with few opportunities, drug traffickers fill the vacuum. The comparison to “Santa Claus” introduces yet another legend—the drug trafficker as a benevolent father figure where the state fails. Keefe’s evidence shows how a man like Chapo Guzmán, responsible for murders, could still retain popular support.

“Burnett has made many programs since The Apprentice, among them Shark Tank, a start-up competition based on a Japanese show, and The Voice, a singing contest adapted from a Dutch program. In 2018, he became the chairman of MGM Television. But his chief legacy is to have cast a serially bankrupt carnival barker in the role of a man who might plausibly become the leader of the free world.”

Keefe’s stylistic and tonal choices here are striking, establishing why he is interested in profiling a television producer as a subject of wrongdoing and criminality. He begins with a catalog of Burnett’s anodyne, conventional successes in television. But, he insists that Burnett’s chief legacy is his endorsement of Trump, who is accompanied by a catalog of his worst attributes. The contrast between a “carnival barker”—a con artist no one takes seriously—and the “leader of the free world”—betrays Keefe’s distaste for Trump and Burnett’s decision to promote him.

“He later described himself as the quintessential undocumented immigrant: ‘I had no money, no green card, no nothing.’ But the California sun was shining, and he was eager to try his luck. Burnett is an avid raconteur, and his anecdotes about his life tend to have a three-act structure. In Act 1, he is a fish out of water, guileless and naive, with nothing but the shirt on his back and an outsized dream. Act 2 is the rude awakening: The world bets against him. It’s impossible! You’ll lose everything! No such thing has ever been tried! In Act 3, Burnett always prevails.”

The language here showcases Burnett’s flair for the dramatic. He emphasizes his initial poverty, in contrast to the promise of the landscape around him. Keefe compares him to a playwright, casting his story as a heroic epic, with Burnett overcoming undaunted in a hostile world that would thwart a lesser man.

“Trump’s wish list included Elton John, Aretha Franklin, and Paul Anka—who, he hoped, would sing ‘My Way’—but they all claimed to be otherwise engaged. The event ended up with sparse crowds and a feeble roster of performers. Burnett eventually played down his role in the inauguration. His representatives told me that ‘he did not produce’ the event. One person who knows Burnett pointed out, ‘It wasn’t successful, so he probably doesn’t want to be associated with it.’”

The inauguration anecdote betrays that Burnett and Trump have a similar desire to be seen at all times as wildly successful. Trump desperately wanted to have prominent entertainers celebrate him. Burnett’s choice to “play down” his role suggests that he edits his own life with the same ruthlessness as his television shows. Keefe’s source indicates that this is because Burnett is only interested in success stories, and Trump’s presidency does not fit that goal.

“Was this a liaison from a foreign-intelligence service? Was it someone from the Network? When they looked up the number and summoned the woman for an interview, they discovered that Myriam was a philosophy student and a part-time secretary from Geneva—‘a romantic conquest’ of Falciani’s, as one investigator put it. (Apparently, Falciani, mindful that his wife or his mistress might inspect his contact list, had added ‘government’ to throw off suspicion.)”

Keefe uses a series of rhetorical questions to ramp up suspense for the reader, inviting them to immerse themselves into the role of investigator. Rather than a conspiracy, the questions reveal only domestic intrigue. Just as Falciani was skilled at smuggling information at work, so too was he secretive in his personal life. In the eyes of some, this general sneakiness undercut his credibility and self-presentation as a noble crusader.

“Falciani seemed a bit glum, and it struck me that one problem with adopting the vestments of a transparency advocate in order to stay out of a Swiss prison cell is that you are obliged to keep wearing them. I asked Falciani if it had been worth it to upend his life. He hesitated, then said yes. ‘It used to be that when people thought of Switzerland, it was chocolate, watches, and rich people,’ he said. ‘Now it is also corruption.’”

Keefe’s tone here suggests he finds Falciani compelling, if not precisely sympathetic. He calls Falciani’s politics “vestments,” comparing him to a priest, but also using a metaphor that emphasizes the ability to change one’s outfit at need. Transparency work, Keefe points out, is less glamorous than Falciani’s embellished stories of espionage and conspiracy. The closing anecdote, on the other hand, affirms the power of stories: Falciani claims without much evidence that changing the narrative around Switzerland is sufficient reward for his challenging circumstances.

“But, along with Persian carpets and silk flowers, the grand salon was decorated with framed photographs that showed him posing with Saddam Hussein’s psychopathic son Uday, and with al-Kassar’s longtime friend Abu Abbas, the former head of the Palestine Liberation Front, who was responsible for hijacking the Italian cruise ship the Achille Lauro in 1985. ‘How do I know who’s good and who’s bad?’ Al-Kassar would say of his associates. ‘The bad people for you may be the good people for me.’”

The description here underlines that wealth and luxury, while eye-catching, can obscure harsher realities. Keefe’s deliberate juxtaposition of “Persian carpets and silk flowers” with the photographs of dictators and supporters of terrorism posits that there are two Monzer al-Kassars: the performing prince and the ruthless pragmatist. The quote from al-Kassar confirms this, as he rejects abstract morality in favor of self-interest.

“They needed people who had the nerve to walk into the home of a dangerous criminal, the acting ability to play criminals themselves, the presence of mind to improvise should the situation go awry, and a sufficient grasp of the American legal system to ensure that the whole charade would be explicable to a jury.”

Keefe’s language here points out that to capture a criminal, one needs individuals a criminal will find credible and nonthreatening. This underscores the porous boundary between licit law enforcement work and criminal underworlds. The “actors” in this drama must be comfortable with deception but also adept at identifying the legal traps al-Kassar could fall into.

“This was deliberate: like the pope stooping to embrace a disfigured pilgrim at St. Peter’s, the women were indicating that Tsarnaev was not a leper. Such gestures weren’t aimed only at jurors. A training guide that Clarke helped prepare for defense attorneys in 2006 notes, ‘In capital cases, appropriate physical contact is frequently the one gesture that can maintain a defendant’s trust.’”

Keefe’s wording compares Clarke and her team to religious figures—they are like a “pope” embracing those typically considered outside society’s notice. Clarke, like many of Keefe’s subjects, is also a performer. But her performance is more practical and calculated: Physical contact with her clients helps her connect with them.

“He went with a friend to the gym. It was precisely this eerie remove that had led authorities to identify him as a suspect. FBI officials, examining surveillance footage of the marathon, noticed a man in a baseball cap who did not react when the first blast sent everyone else scrambling.”

This description of Tsarnaev’s activities on the day of the bombing juxtaposes the horrific and the ordinary. After killing people and altering others’ lives forever, Tsarnaev goes to the gym. Keefe calls this “eerie remove” suggesting Tsarnaev, for all Clarke’s efforts to humanize him, is apart from the rest of humanity.

“When I asked Fox why Cilins would confide all of this to him, he shrugged. ‘There’s an element of arrogance,’ he said. ‘Or of complete naïveté. Of believing they did what they did and there was no big deal.’ Cilins seemed proud of his work in Conakry. He told Fox that in his view the history of Guinea would henceforth be thought of as dividing into two periods—‘before and after BSGR.’”

This interview underlines that criminal enterprise depends on mass self-deception. Cilins is either “arrogant” or “naive”—in either case, he is incapable of recognizing the immorality of corruption. He casts himself as part of history, and not a shameful episode, but a small participant in the remaking of a nation.

“Paul Collier argues that there are often three parties to a corrupt deal: the briber, the bribed, and the lawyers and financial facilitators who enable the secret transaction. The result, he says, 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.”

As much as Keefe focuses his work on unique and notable individuals, the analysis here underlines that systems undergird his tales of ambition and malfeasance. Every Steinmetz depends on professional intermediaries to conceal the legally dubious parts of his work. Keefe also underlines that the story of Simandou is not limited to Africa, or Guinea—the world white Anglophone readers are prone to think of as civilized is just as prone to corruption.

“With his Sex Pistols T-shirt and his sensualist credo, there is something of the aging rocker about him. But if you spend any time with Bourdain, you realize that he is controlled to the point of neurosis: clean, organized, disciplined, courteous, systematic. He is Apollo in drag as Dionysus.”

In comparing Bourdain to an “aging rocker,” Keefe effectively captures his colorful, hedonic past and demanding lifestyle. But this outer appearance is a mask, or perhaps an act for the cameras, as Keefe points out that the real Bourdain is “controlled” and plans out every detail of his life. The analogy to the famously antonymous Greek Gods—the cerebral and cool Apollo versus the earthy and orgiastic Dionysus—underscores that Bourdain is an artist, one whose art is precise, while giving an air of the chaotic.