Patrick Radden Keefe - Rogues : True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks

ONE OF THE STRANGER moments in my career as a magazine journalist was a phone call in May 2014. I had just published The Hunt for El Chapo, an article in The New Yorker about the criminal career, and eventual capture, of the fugitive Mexican drug baron Joaqun Guzmn Loera, and I got a voicemail in the office from an attorney who said that he represented the Guzmn family. This was, to put it mildly, alarming. I had developed a minor specialty, over the years, in what editors call the writearound: an article about a subject who declines to grant an interview. Some journalists hate writearounds, but Ive always enjoyed the challenge they pose. It takes a lot of creative reporting to produce a vivid portrait of someone without ever getting to speak to them, but these pieces are often more revealing than the scripted encounters you end up with when the politician or the CEO actually cooperates. When I wrote about the reality TV producer Mark Burnett, he wouldnt talk to mebut he had two ex-wives who did, and in the end, I think I learned more about Burnett from speaking to them than I would have from Burnett himself.

In the case of El Chapo, the drug lord was locked up in a Mexican prison by the time I started my piece, and not giving interviews, so I had taken it for granted that he wouldnt be sitting down with me. Nor did I ever entertain the notion that when the article came out, he might read it. Despite running a multibillion-dollar narco-conglomerate, he was said to be practically illiterate. Even if he could read, he did not strike me as a New Yorker subscriber. But when my article was published, it contained a series of revelations that were subsequently picked up in the Mexican press. So somehow, it must have come to his attention.

I waited a while before calling the lawyer back. I figured that he would probably raise objections to some detail or other in the piece (and worried that it might be the passage in which I revealed that El Chapo was a prodigious consumer of Viagra). I spoke to a source of mine who made some discreet inquiries and was able to confirm that this attorney really did work for the Guzmn family. Just call him up, Im sure its no big deal, my source said. Then he added, But use your work phone, and never, under any circumstances, give them your home address.

Summoning my nerve, I called the lawyer back. He spoke with an accent, in a starchy, formal idiom, and when I told him, as casually as possible, that it was Patrick Keefe from The New Yorker, he announced, with an almost theatrical seriousness, We have read your article.

Oh, I said, bracing.

It wasdramatic pausevery interesting.

Oh! I blurted. Thank you. Ill take interesting. Could be worse.

El Seor, he began, before lapsing into another pregnant pause. Is ready Seconds ticking by. I clutched the phone, my heart hammering. To write his memoirs.

In advance of the phone call, I had gamed out the conversation like a high school debater: If he says this, Ill say that. I had prepared for every contingency, every direction the discussion might take. But not this one.

Well, I stammered, floundering for something remotely coherent to say. Thats a book I would love to read.

But sir, the lawyer interjected. Is it a book you would like to write?

I confess that when the opportunity to ghostwrite El Chapos memoir was first presented, I did give it a moment of serious consideration. During his years on the run, he had become an almost mythical figure, and, as a journalist, the idea that I might get to hear his story in his own words was genuinely tantalizing. But before getting off the phone that day I had already declined the offer. Guzmn was responsible, directly and indirectly, for thousands of murders, maybe tens of thousands. There would be no way to accurately write his story that did not explore that side of thingsand the lives of his many victimsin great detail. But it seemed unlikely that this was the sort of book El Seor was envisioning. The whole scenario felt a bit like Act I of a thriller in which the hapless magazine writer, blinded by his desire for a scoop, does not necessarily survive Act III.

Even under the best of circumstances, I pointed out to the lawyer, trying to be as tactful as possible, the relationship between ghost writer and subject can occasionallyfray.

The lawyer was very courteous about the whole thing. After another brief phone call a week later (in which he said, As you continue to consider our offer, and I said, No, Ive considered! Ive considered!) I never heard from him again. What had started as a genuinely frightening experience became an amusing dinner party anecdote. But the encounter also seemed emblematic of the adventure of magazine writing: the uncanny intimacy that a reporter can feel with a subject he has never met, the strangeness of putting a story out into the world for anyone to read and watching it assume a life of its own.

I was in junior high school when I first fell for magazines. This was the late 1980s, and magazinesthe physical thing, these bright bundles of stapled paperwere ubiquitous and felt as if they would be around forever. In our school library there was a periodicals room, where one wall was festooned with the latest issues of Time,Rolling Stone,Spin,U.S. News & World Report. And, of course, The New Yorker.

Nobody used the adjective long-form back then; that would come later, to distinguish the sprawling stories more typical of magazines from snappier pieces on the web. But even as a student I came to think that at least where nonfiction was concerned, a big magazine article might be the most glorious form. Substantial enough to completely immerse yourself in but short enough to finish in a sitting, these features had their own fine-hewn structure. There was an economy in the storytelling that felt, in contrast to the nonfiction books I was reading, both attentive to the readers attention and respectful of her time.

So I grew up reading The New Yorker and nurturing a secret fantasy that I might someday write for the magazine myself. For a long time this was just a fantasy; it took many years of false starts and strange detours (law school is not a route I would recommend to aspiring journalists) before the magazine published my first freelance piece in 2006.