Barcelona (EFE).- The North American journalist Patrick Radden Keefe explores the limits between what is legal and what is illegal in his new book, “Thugs”, through twelve real portraits of murderers, rebels, swindlers and impostors, which he confronts from journalism research.
In a press videoconference, Keefe said from New York that he wanted to address these biographical profiles, as he had always seen in his admired New Yorker magazine, where they were published, “halfway between narrative journalism and true crime”, always at from “true stories that could be read like a book of stories”.
“Maleantes” (Reservoir Books in Spanish and Periscopi in Catalan) is his third book after “Don’t say anything” and “The Empire of Pain”, always based on reports published in the New Yorker, and this time he deals with characters who occupy the dark side of the human being, who “try to bend the world and that leads them to break the law.”
Chapo Guzmán and his life after escaping from prison, the controversial “devil’s advocate” Judy Clarke who fights against the death penalty representing the worst criminals, among them the Boston marathon terrorist, parade through this dark catwalk. Dutch criminal William Holleeder and his own sister’s efforts to get him released; or a DEA agent on his crusade against one of the world’s most powerful arms dealers.
Not in all cases was the character approached through a personal interview, as was the case with the Swiss computer technician Hervé Falciani, whom he met in Paris for four hours.
Falciani was seen as “the Snowden of the Swiss banks,” Keefe says, but shortly after talking to him he realized that “he was an impostor, he seemed to be fabulating, and I concluded that he was a thief who wanted to trade with that data.” .
Looking for a different approach to some of the characters, he could not avoid talking about Donald Trump, but “indirectly through Mark Burnett”, the author points out, adding: “There were many people who wrote about Trump, but as a journalist I thought that the press was Giving Trump the oxygen he needed and wanted to write about him in a different way.”
Burnett was a reality show producer after becoming an undocumented Englishman in the United States, having worked as a babysitter or selling T-shirts in California, first creating “Survivors” and following the success he produced the business version, “The apprentice” (The Apprentice).
For the latter, he chose Donald Trump, “then a lesser-known tycoon, whom people laughed at because he was a loser, and the program had million-dollar audiences.”
Although Burnett did not want to talk to Keefe, “two of his ex-wives did and many of the workers from ‘The Apprentice’, who felt guilty because they had mistakenly sold the image of a responsible Trump to the population.”
Of all the “thugs” perhaps the most benevolent is the cook Anthony Bourdain: “he was not a criminal, I met him, I was writing about him for a year, but he always considered himself an outlaw, because he traveled all over the world and met different people with his mobile banquet.
Both the case of Trump and that of other of the book’s protagonists have a recurring constant, “self-deception” and Keefer’s manifest interest in revealing “the reasons why people act badly and the stories they later tell about these mistakes.” from that self-deception, always presenting themselves as the good guys in the stories”.
He is aware that he humanizes the bad guys too much, and insists: “I don’t justify them, but I’m not a preacher accusing them either.”
Keefe defends the need for investigative and in-depth journalism, for which he believes there is an audience, “although they are not always willing to pay for it.”
He himself feels privileged, because for each report he probably talks to fifty people and can spend a year working on the article.
Asked about a case he would like to investigate, he said that one day he would be interested in writing about the Cold War period, “in which the fight against communism justified committing atrocities, and behind that philosophy there is also self-deception, as if there were just causes that justify the means used”.