Kevin Canfield: You grew up reading crime stories, among other stuff, in The New Yorker. Like Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty, his prizewinning 2021 book about Big Pharma profiteers and the opioid epidemic, Keefe’s magazine crime reporting is informed by his self-avowed fascination with “the power of denial” and “the permeable membrane separating licit and illicit worlds.” In a recent video interview, he answered a few of my questions about these and other subjects. “Nothing deepens sympathy like charity and bribes,” Keefe writes. Until 2019, when he was convicted of multiple crimes and locked up for life in an American prison, Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán tightened his grip on the Sinaloa cartel by paying for baptisms and bankrolling ostensibly legal businesses.

But the international dragnet isn’t always a match for crime bosses who mount populist charm offensives. Drug Enforcement Administration had an astonishing 80-plus offices in more than 60 countries.

Whether his subject is a drug cartel kingpin, a Wall Street swindler or an amoral weapons dealer, his stories don’t lack for memorable facts and elegant aphorisms. Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks collects a dozen pieces he’s penned as a staff writer for The New Yorker. If Say Nothing confirmed that he’s among the finest true-crime storytellers working today, Keefe’s new book suggests he won’t soon relinquish that status.

Rogues radden keefe