But it illustrated for him “the uncanny intimacy that a reporter can feel with a subject he has never met.”įor a reporter at Keefe’s level of journalistic tradecraft, that uncanny intimacy spins into uncanny accuracy - and page-turning prose. It was from an attorney representing the family of Joaquín Guzmán Loera, the infamous drug lord known as “El Chapo.” The New Yorker had recently published Keefe’s story, “The Hunt for El Chapo,” (included in this compilation), and Guzmán wanted Keefe to ghostwrite his memoir. Keefe then relates an unsettling phone call that would seem to back his claim to vivid portraiture. “It takes a lot of creative reporting to produce a vivid portrait of someone without ever getting to speak to them,” he writes, “but these pieces are often more revealing than the scripted encounters you end up with when the politician or the CEO actually cooperates.” In the preface to Rogues, Patrick Radden Keefe’s collection of spellbinding New Yorker features, Keefe explains that he’s become a specialist in “the writearound” - articles whose subjects refuse to grant interviews. Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooksīy Patrick Radden Keefe.
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