Preet Bharara:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

I think each of us, when we wake up in the morning, we kind of tell ourselves a story about the life we’re living. And you look at yourself in the mirror and you try to count for the decisions that you’ve made. And I think we all lie to ourselves to greater and lesser degrees.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Patrick Radden Keefe. He’s a staff writer at The New Yorker, who has become known for his works of narrative nonfiction, which are often about criminals and con artists. In recent years, he’s written multiple New York Times best sellers, Say Nothing, about the troubles in Ireland, and Empire of Pain, about the Sackler family, whose company created Oxycontin. Keefe has just published an essay collection that features some of his most acclaimed New Yorker pieces. It’s called Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks. I spoke with Keefe about the moral questions that guide his work. What causes people to do bad things? And what are the limits of empathy? That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

QUESTION & ANSWER:

Preet Bharara:

This question comes in a tweet from David Dillard, who asks, why was DOJ surprised by Hutchinson’s testimony? Does it mean they weren’t really investigating the conspiracy part of the insurrection? Well, that’s a great question. Obviously, David is referring to Cassidy Hutchinson, a young 25-year-old white house staffer, who testified in something of a surprise hearing during congressional recess, which is not something you see all the time. Now on the one hand, it seems that the January 6th committee was itself surprised by Hutchinson’s testimony. That might suggest why it was the case. That all of a sudden, after not planning a hearing for recess week, they hastily gathered everyone together, brought them back from their home districts and conducted the hearing in which Cassidy Hutchinson told a lot of things about Donald Trump’s state of mind, about the things that he was advised about, about some of the things that he said.

Preet Bharara:

And then there was this controversy over what happened in the presidential vehicle. When Donald Trump wanted to go onto the capital and his secret service detail wouldn’t permit him to go forward, there’s been some disputing about that. But I think in the end, there’s lots of confirmation of her testimony. So, in some ways it was surprising to the committee itself. They maybe hadn’t appreciated the potency and robustness of the testimony, which is why they brought her in suddenly. But your question is well put, and it’s a question that I can’t answer. The reporting is that there are people at the Department of Justice who had not heard this testimony before, who were unfamiliar with it and who were surprised by it, as you say in your question. And your query really goes to something central that lots and lots of legal experts who are not inside the justice department have been debating.

Preet Bharara:

And that is, what exactly are investigators at the department, assistant US attorneys, and FBI agents doing with respect to an inquiry about the January 6th insurrection? How high up are they going? There are some evidence that they’re obviously investigating. There are hundreds and hundreds of people who have been arrested, many of whom have been convicted. But the question persists. What’s going on with the people at the top, up to and including the former president of the United States?

Preet Bharara:

Now, as I and others have said in the podcast and elsewhere, ordinarily, if there’s a basis to investigate the Department of Justice along with the FBI, which is a part of the Department of Justice, conduct interviews so people who have relevant information. It is really clear to me that they have not conducted a lot of interviews. They certainly haven’t conducted the thousand or so that the committee has.

Preet Bharara:

And that’s brought into sharp relief when you’re talking about this particular witness, Cassidy Hutchinson, who had a lot of important things to relate. And much of her testimony goes directly to the question of what was Donald Trump’s intent. What did he want to have happen? Both with respect to testimony about things that he did and also things he didn’t do, notably in my mind, things like saying, “get rid of the magnetometers.” They’re not here to hurt me. When told about Mike Pence and the chants about hanging Mike Pence, he said maybe Mike Pence deserves it. And an assortment of other tidbits of testimony as well.

Preet Bharara:

So, you can see I’m a little bit avoiding your question. It is not clear to me why the department is waiting or has waited to interview some of these important percipient witnesses. They have asked, as we know, formally, for transcripts of all the depositions and other testimony taken by the January 6th committee. But I’ll repeat here what I’ve said before. That is not a substitute for their own inquiry, for their own investigation, for their own interviewing, because they have a different purpose. The Department of Justice is not sitting around figuring out how to write a comprehensive report. They’re supposed to be thinking about how to meet the elements of particular statutes to charge a crime or satisfy themselves that a crime has not been committed. And that’s an important component of their obligation as well. So, I guess we’ll just have to stay tuned.

Preet Bharara:

This question comes in a tweet from Mac5605. And it’s a question that I and others get all the time. And it’s something that is a little bit hard to grasp, even if you’ve been to law school. But certainly, if you have not been to law school. And the question is a very basic one, but it’s central to all of this debate we have about the insurrection and the blame worthiness of Donald Trump.

Preet Bharara:

And the question is, why is intent so important in bringing charges against Trump? So maybe, the most basic answer is the particular statutes that might be implicated by his conduct require intent in the mind of the person who’s being charged with the crime. And some of those statutes that people have been speculating about include obstruction of an official proceeding, conspiracy to defraud the United States, incitement insurrection. And then some people think also perhaps seditious conspiracy. Although I think that’s much tougher in a much longer shot.

Preet Bharara:

Each of those statutes require proof of intent on the part of the person that you’re charging, but that’s not necessarily the best answer because it doesn’t explain necessarily why intent is important. You can think about it another way. For the most part, our criminal laws require, and this is certainly true in almost every instance of federal criminal law violation, that people are not sent to prison.

Preet Bharara:

People are not charged with crimes or convicted of crimes because they’ve committed an accident or a mistake or some other form of negligence. We require that someone intended to do the bad thing. They may be ignorant of what the law is, but they intended to do the thing. And often it’s the case that they need to have intended to do something that they knew was wrong. Now, with respect to a whole category of crimes like violent crime, that’s very easy to show. If someone shoots someone in the head and there’s no obvious self-defense, principle to stand behind, then you pretty much understand that the person intended to take the life of another person. However, even that proposition is not always true.

Preet Bharara:

Take, for example, the case of Alec Baldwin. On the set of a movie, were unbeknownst to him, according to him and according to the investigation, I believe. He was given a live weapon when he thought it was a prop gun and fired and killed someone. He has not been charged with a crime. Don’t believe it would be appropriate to charge him with a crime based on what I know. Why? Because he didn’t have the intent to commit the homicide. Intent is important in virtually every crime, including violent crimes.

Preet Bharara:

Now, it gets more complicated when you talk about other kinds of things and acts that are not in themselves unlawful. So, for example, some things that a politician does, like setting a meeting or giving a talk or giving a speech or voting a certain way, those things are not inherently unlawful. So, to prove that they’re part and parcel of a crime, the violation of a federal statute, you have to show what the intent was behind doing those things.

Preet Bharara:

The example I often give from my days as US attorney is insider trading. It is not inherently unlawful to trade stock. In fact, that’s the business of a trader. That’s the business of a hedge fund. So, you have to show what was in the mind of the person. Did they have an intent to use material non-public information to trade on a stock in an unlawful manner? Intent is vitally important to bringing that case. And the same is true here. Donald Trump gave a speech on January 6th. Donald Trump had meetings. Donald Trump made phone calls. None of those things are inherently unlawful. You have to show what his intent was. And it’s difficult and it’s frustrating, but that’s how our system works.

Preet Bharara:

And that’s why going back to the first question about Cassidy Hutchinson. Her testimony was so powerful. The defense for Donald Trump is going to be and has been and will be that he didn’t have the intent. He believed in good faith that the election was stolen. And he was doing things and acting in a good faith manner to try to undo what he thought was unlawful.

Preet Bharara:

But as we now know from a lot of people’s testimony and in particular, most recently, Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony, that defense becomes more and more implausible. He knew people were violent. He knew law enforcement had been overrun. He talked about getting rid of the magnetometers. People on his staff, that the White House and the Justice Department made clear, that certain activities would be unlawful. If you act in a certain way in the face of all that evidence and all those communications, it’s hard to say he didn’t have intent.

THE INTERVIEW:

Preet Bharara:

We’ll be right back with my conversation with Patrick Radden Keefe. Anthony Bourdain, El Chapo, Mark Burnett, what do these names have in common? They’ve all been profiled by my guest this week, the New Yorker writer, Patrick Radden Keefe. Patrick Radden Keefe, welcome to the show.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

It’s great to be with you.

Preet Bharara:

So, I’m excited to talk to you. I’ve been excited for a while. You’ve written a lot of great things. And many of the great things you’ve written are now in a book called Rogues, true stories of grifters, killers, rebels, and crooks. So, my first question here is about the title, Rogues. Rogues sounds kind of almost charming and harmless. Did you think also about perhaps rapscallion and rascal? Why that R word?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Yeah, we A/B tested it. And this is what we came out with.

Preet Bharara:

Really? Tell me about some of that testing.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Yeah. I mean, I liked it because one sort of through line, this is pieces from about a dozen years at the New Yorker. It’s 12 pieces. And when you’re writing the pieces, you don’t necessarily — I sort of like the dilettantism of the job. I get to flip from thing to thing. And it never feels as though there’s a continuous through line, but in retrospect there often is. And I am drawn to these big personalities who bend the rules or break them. And so, I do think…

Preet Bharara:

Or obliterate them.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Or obliterate them, yeah. Or often, manage to raise the speed limit so that they won’t get busted for speeding. I think the idea of the kind of force of personality, sometimes with charm, sometimes with none at all, is implicit. Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

In your own words, you talk about your abiding preoccupation with crime and corruption, secrets, and lies, the permeable membrane separating illicit and illicit worlds, the bonds of family, the power of denial. Why is that so interesting to you?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

I don’t know to be honest with you. I mean, it’s one of these things where it was not the plan.

Preet Bharara:

I mean, you have not written books called profiles and courage, right? So, I’m curious what’s different about-

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Exactly.

Preet Bharara:

Because there are people who write those books, right?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

There are.

Preet Bharara:

You write about the Rogues.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

What is different about you that draws you to those stories?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

I am Mr. Glass half empty. Yeah. Occasionally, there are a few pieces in this collection. I wrote a big story about Anthony Bourdain before he died. Where I-

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, yeah. That’s true.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

… traveled with him for a year. And he was somebody who I admired in a pretty unequivocal way. There’s a story about this woman, Judy Clarke. Who’s one of the leading death penalty lawyers. On the one hand, I think what she’s doing has great virtue. On the other hand, I do have complicated feelings about her. Because I think when you push into it, she’s somebody who, in a world in which you have a lot of innocent people on death row, and she’s one of the best federal death penalty attorneys. She chooses to represent the worst of the worst in the words of the Supreme court. The people you know are guilty and they’ve done atrocious things.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

And I could see how from a kind of utilitarian ethical point of view, maybe that’s not the best way to devote your skills to fighting the death penalty. So, there are some of these people I have complicated feelings about. But yeah, generally, when I do a kind of an admiring profile, that’s usually the exception to the rule.

Preet Bharara:

And when you’re covering people who are in the category of Rogue, do you find yourself deliberately suspending judgment? Or is that your natural state of being? Or is that sometimes difficult?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

That’s such a great question. So, I’ve thought about this a lot because I think there are two phases to the process. So, when I write a piece and I should say, I mean, it’s a privilege to be able to do this stuff at the New Yorker where I get four, five, six months, sometimes a year, to work on a piece. And so, it’s over quite a sustained period of time. And in the reporting, when I’m going out and meeting people and interviewing them and gathering the facts, I think it is important to suspend judgment and just be led by curiosity and try and meet people where they live and where they are. And sometimes, they’re criminals. Sometimes, they’re people who’ve done awful things. But I try and go in with an open mind and just hear everybody’s story. At the point where I sit down to write, I’m not suspending judgment anymore. I think it’s important, at least in the kind of writing that I do, to have a point of view.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

And when you’re dealing with, often, these ethically fraught situations, I’m making all kinds of judgements on the page. But I do think that when you go out, if there’s a mass shooter – Amy Bishop, who shot a bunch of her colleagues at the University of Alabama in 2010, pretty unusual. She was this Harvard educated woman, quite unusual to have a woman who’s a mass shooter. And it turned out that in the eighties, she had shot and killed her little brother with a shotgun, which at the time was treated as an accident. So, when I talked to her, it’s not going to do anyone any good for me to just kind of stand in contempt, sort of squint at her in judgment. Much better for me to elicit what I can from her.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Are there stories you think that are black and white, or is everything gray?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

It’s funny. I wrote a book a couple of years ago about the troubles in Northern Ireland called Say Nothing, which was very much a study in moral ambiguity. That was a situation where, I think, to the degree that people engaged with the troubles as an issue, they tended to see it in pretty black and white terms. Different people would assign blame and virtue in different ways, but people saw it in a kind of monochromatic way. And for me, everything was more ambiguous. I thought you got to look closely at this.

Preet Bharara:

So, everything is gray.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Everything was gray.

Preet Bharara:

And the reason I asked the question…

Patrick Radden Keefe:

What I was going to say is the next book I did was on the Sackler family. And that’s all moral clarity. I think that’s a pretty straightforward story.

Preet Bharara:

Right. Well, that’s interesting. Because the reason I was asking was not to understand necessarily your ethical worldview, but rather your journalistic instinct. If a story is black and white, is it less interesting to you and maybe not?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Yeah. I mean, I would say so. From a narrative point of view, literally just talking about myself and what would I read on a Saturday afternoon if you gave me an hour, I want something that’s going to take some surprising twists and turns.

Preet Bharara:

Complexity. You like complexity.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

I like complexity and surprise. And so, if you have a story in which you meet a character and they’re totally virtuous on page one and totally virtuous an hour later, it’s [inaudible 00:17:22].

Preet Bharara:

You’re going to sleep. You’re yawning.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Yeah, to be sure. There are people out there like that. And those stories should get written, but I may not be the guy to do it.

Preet Bharara:

I want to ask you a question. And then we’ll get into some of the particular stories because they’re fascinating. And you mentioned a couple. There’s a question that I get a lot and I’m sure you get it as well, given what you write about. Why do people do bad things? And I can give you some context. I get asked that because of the job I used to do. And I answer in some measure that obviously, there are people do bad things for different reasons. And there’s some who do it for greed. There’s some who do it because of love. There’s some who do it because they make a mistake and they double down. And there’s some who are just, I think, rotten to the core. How do you answer that question?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

I think there’s a tiny minority that are rotten to the core.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. I agree with that.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

But I think…

Preet Bharara:

But you think there is a category of rotten to the core?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

I do though. I would say to go back to that woman, Judy Clarke, the death penalty lawyer I mentioned. I mean, her, a very fundamental premise of the work she does is that nobody is born evil, is that something happens.

Preet Bharara:

And that gives them some innocence?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Well, I mean, I think the idea is that they start with innocence and then things happen to them. So, in any death penalty case, this is kind of where the defense comes in. Often, if they’re not in a position to deny that the person’s done what they’ve done, what they say is there’s more than one victim in this story, that the perpetrator is himself a victim.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

And listen, I mean, sometimes you can take that argument too far. I think there are people that do evil things. But what’s most interesting to me is not people who are kind of innately evil. What I’ve found is that, I think, each of us, when we wake up in the morning, we kind of tell ourselves a story about the life we’re living. And you look at yourself in the mirror, and you try to count for the decisions that you’ve made. And I think we all lie to ourselves to greater and lesser degrees. And for most of us, the little infractions are small.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Look, I mean there’s data to back that up. We’ve had such people on the show, Daniel Kahneman and others. People in polls are much more confident when asked questions about their future likelihood of doing good things versus bad things. And they get it wrong all the time. Right?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Yeah. I think that’s right. I mean, one of the big subjects I’m most interested in is self-delusion and the stories that people tell themselves to justify the things they’re doing. There’s a line I often think about, which is actually, it’s a sort of an adage among screenwriters in Hollywood, that if it’s a decent movie, the villain in the movie doesn’t actually think that he’s the villain in the movie. Now, he thinks he’s the hero of the movie. He’s watching a whole other movie than the one you are.

Preet Bharara:

Right. If he’s played straight.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Absolutely. And I think that’s true with the people that I write about. I mean, I think that’s true for the Sackler family. I think it’s true for Chapo Guzman, that these people have a story to tell.

Preet Bharara:

Because you mention it, is it also true for the Joker in the Batman movies?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Well, no. I mean, he’s a fictional and literally a cartoonish character, right, but who is sort of emblematic of pure evil. It’s funny. What I think of is Hannibal Lecter. And how in the initial books and films, he’s this inexplicable evil. It’s never explained. And then the great mistake that they made was, in the later installments, you find out about his terrible childhood, right. And as a fictional device, I think it’s much more entertaining and fun to have him just be pure evil. But I do think that in real life, it’s often the case when you scratch the surface of somebody who seems that way, that there is some story that got them there.

Preet Bharara:

But that’s so interesting. Because a moment ago, I thought we were saying that straight up evil people are less interesting because there’s less complexity. But in the case of movies, maybe generally, or specifically, Hannibal Lecter, it’s more campion fun if he’s pure evil.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Well, so for me, it would be the difference between … yeah, I completely agree. But the distinction would be between fiction and non-fiction, right? That I’m writing non-fiction. And I mean, I’ll give you a concrete example. So, there’s this story about that woman, Amy Bishop, the mass shooter. And when my editor initially brought it to me, I said I have no interest in writing that piece because the psychology of a mass shooter is in the end of the day, just not that interesting to me. I don’t care about people’s manifestos. I don’t really care about the bad things that may have happened in their past, whatever would drive somebody to pull out a gun and kill a bunch of people. I don’t know that I want to dignify it with a 12,000-word New Yorker piece. And he said, no, no, no. That’s not the story.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

The story is that in the 1980s, Amy’s mother, Judy Bishop comes home to their house in Braintree, Mass one day, Massachusetts. And she’s got two kids, Amy and her younger brother, Seth. And Judy is the only witness to Amy taking a shotgun and shooting Seth, killing him right there in their kitchen. And when the cops come, Judy says, “I saw the whole thing. It was an accident.” And what my editor said was that is the story, because Amy is always going to be a cipher. But a parent who has two kids and witnesses one kill the other, and then as soon as the cops come, says it was an accident. There’s no need to investigate anything here, is a decision that anybody who’s a parent would have to kind of pause and think about what would you do. You’ve just lost one kid. You’re about to lose the other. And so, that was the heart of that story.

Preet Bharara:

And what do you think the truth is?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Well, I mean, that story gets into all these different kind of versions of the truth. And I think part of the problem is I went and interviewed Judy Bishop and her husband. But I also think they’ve been living with a great deal of denial for years. I do think that there was an impulse, in that case, not just on the part of the family, but actually of the local authorities, the cops in this town, Braintree, to see that there had been this terrible tragedy that happened and to want to look the other way, to say, it would be cruel to thrust this situation into the harsh light of the criminal justice system. Let’s let the family grieve and heal on their own. And of course, the downside there is you have somebody who it turns out is quite psychologically unstable. And years later, there’s this terrible cost when she shoots a bunch of other people in Alabama.

Preet Bharara:

And kills three.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Yes.

Preet Bharara:

Why do people like Amy Bishop’s mother and others speak to you?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Well, they don’t always.

Preet Bharara:

Right. I guess part of the question is how do you go about convincing them to do so?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Yeah. So, there’s a couple of things. I mean, one is that, I think that access – I personally think that access is wildly overrated in journalism. I think that access often becomes transactional in ways that compromise the story. And so, from pretty early on, from my first pieces at the New Yorker, I always made it clear that I’m going to write the story whether you talk to me or not. The train is leaving the station. You can be on it or not, but you not getting on is not going to stop the train. And sometimes, that clarifies things in people’s minds. I actually think it mostly does make sense to talk.

Preet Bharara:

Can we pause on that for a moment?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

I have been a public figure myself and dealt with the press.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

A public figure who wouldn’t talk to me at times.

Preet Bharara:

So, we’ll come to that. We’ll talk about our history in a moment because we have a case to discuss, my friend. And I’ve worked for public figures and we’ve gotten that phone call, right? Reporter X is doing a story or doing a profile. And it’s being written no matter what. Would you talk to me? And I’ve seen other people make decisions depending on who they think the trustworthiness of the author is or any biases that the author has.

Preet Bharara:

Do you think it’s a general matter, further to what you said a second ago? Give some advice to the comms people, the communications professionals of America. Generally good for the principal to talk when the story is going to be written anyway or not?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Yeah, I do. I mean, I would say, if we’re talking about comms people, and there’s a whole other conversation to have about the way in which repeat players and powerful people and the wealthy and the elite and the kinds of people who have lawyers and comms people to help them with this, the way they deal with it and journalists deal with them and the way the rest of the world does. Because some of the time, I’m dealing with these repeat players. I’m writing about a billionaire and I’ve got some corporate PR person on the phone. Other times, I’m the first journalist somebody’s ever talked to in their life. And I try and be somewhat sensitive to that. But, yes. I think it’s funny.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

There’s a guy that I met, an old school journalist, who told me a story that he had heard from an old school journalist when he was starting out. And the guy said that what he would tell sources is, first one in writes the Bible. The idea being, I’m here with my notebook and my pen. And I don’t know a lot about this story. And all I want to do is talk to everybody who knows anything. And of course, I’m going to tell the story as I see it. But you’d be crazy not to realize that if you can talk with me, you may bring me around to your point of view. You may not, but particularly in a situation where you can often set ground rules about where the conversation goes. Yeah. I always think it’s a little strange when people don’t play ball at all.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

And I mean, there’s any number of examples, right? But it’s like, I have a big story in the collection about Mark Burnett, who was the reality TV producer who really put Trump on the map. And Burnett wouldn’t talk to me, but he had these two ex-wives who did.

Preet Bharara:

I want to go back to Amy Bishop for a moment, the mass shooter. Because I was reading this story over the last few days. And we’re recording this, I should say on Friday, June 24th. So, it may not drop for a little bit. But one thing that’s been on everyone’s mind is the horrific shooting in Uvalde. And we had that shooting in Buffalo a few weeks ago. And there were discussions about a bill. It has just passed the Senate, the first advance, modest as it might be in many, many decades. And there has been a trend which I tend to support in sort of daily journalism and TV journalism, not to say the name of, not to glorify the name of, re-publicize the name of the shooter. Much less, try to understand and get inside that person’s head and empathize in any way, shape, or form.

Preet Bharara:

And I wonder having written that story some years ago and seeing the events of recent weeks and months. If you have a thought about that – and you said obviously, that your initial reaction was, you didn’t want to write that story. But given recent events, do you have another perspective on that?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

So, my bias, as a journalist, tends to be toward openness and coverage. And so, I don’t, I would be loath to get behind any blanket prohibition on covering any one particular type of story. I think it’s much more about how responsibly or exploitative you do it. So, I do think that there are probably scenarios in which it’s useful and edifying to write about these people.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

I think if we, as a society, are going to – I don’t mean to kind of pass the buck to mental illness to be sure, big advocate for greater gun control. But I also think that if we’re going to understand how this is happening with such a frequency, obviously, a big part of it is that we have more than 300 million guns in the country. But some of it also has to be about the psychology of these people. I think it’s a tricky call because you don’t want copycat stuff. We know for a fact that they read each other’s manifestos and they follow each other on the internet. But the very existence of the internet, I think, also begs some questions, right? If the New York Times doesn’t write about a shooter or name a shooter, that’s not going to stop the information from being out there online for anybody who wants to find it.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. I guess the part of the point is – there are many points, but one of them is to the extent people want to engage in copycat behavior because the prior person who engaged in a mass shooting became something of an evil icon and became famous and became a household name. To the extent, that’s a motivation. You can help take that away by not giving that person that kind of exposure. Does that make any sense?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

It does. I agree with the principle. I guess what I’m saying is I think that we are now at a point where mainstream outlets are not necessarily where people are going to be going for that information anyway. The information will spread in other ways.

Preet Bharara:

Somebody in a review of your book, Rogues, in writing about your account of Amy Bishop, said the need to make sense of Bishop’s unraveling becomes a moral imperative for Keefe. And I read that, I wondered if that was actually true. Is there a moral imperative in this work for you? Or are you merely curious? And is that better or worse?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Well, my first caveat would be that if there’s anything I hate, it’s when journalists talk in grand self-congratulatory terms about the work that they do.

Preet Bharara:

Right. Well, this was not you. This was somebody who wrote about your book in The Guardian.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

I know. So, I don’t know that I would describe it as a moral imperative. But I would say I’m very interested in moral issues. I’m interested in how people come to do bad things and how we, as a society, deal with those people when they do. And I do think that there is something. I think when you do the work and you do it well, I think there is a morality in it. I think it’s a unifying and important thing to do. So, it’s not mere curiosity. I mean, mind you, I like a good story. And that’s before I spent six months working on something. I have to know that there are big interesting characters and compelling twists and turns. So, certainly, curiosity is a part of it. But I think there’s a real value to this kind of work as well, a moral value.

Preet Bharara:

You mentioned another person that you wrote about in the book, Judy Clarke, who among other people represented one of the Tsarnaev brothers in the bombing at the Boston marathon. And there’s something interesting that she says and you write about. And it maybe goes to this question that we’ve been exploring for the last number of minutes, that she’s interested in figuring out and being able to convey the key that turns the lock. What does she mean by that?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

So, Judy Clarke takes these cases in which there’s rarely any doubt about guilt, right? She’s often taking on clients where she’s ready to stipulate that they’ve done everything that the state or the federal government alleges they’ve done. The question is just what should become of them. And I was interested in her because she takes on these just really appalling characters. People who have done awful, awful things. She represented the Unabomber. She represented Zacarias Moussaoui. And I was there covering the Boston Marathon bombing trial as she represented Tsarnaev.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

And her theory, I think, is that what she’s trying to do is just humanize her client in front of the jury and let them realize that there is more to the client than the worst thing they did in their lives. And part of the reason I wanted to write that story is that she’d been incredibly successful in making those kinds of arguments and sparing the lives of people throughout her career. But it looked as though it was going to be tough to do that in the Boston case. I don’t mean to sound glib. But I had thought of it as almost like a story about an undefeated athlete, and you’re going to watch them lose for the first time. And that’s what happened with that piece.

Preet Bharara:

You mentioned Donald Trump and Mark Burnett, who was the producer of the apprentice. And you say that he resurrected Trump. What do you mean by that?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

So, at the point where Burnett finds Trump and puts him in the apprentice, really builds the apprentice around him. Trump is kind of washed up. He was sort of a joke in New York. He’d written the art of the deal and that had been a success. But otherwise, he’d been humbled. I think, I mean, it’s hard to imagine now, right? But he was kind of a carnival barker. He was sort of a punchline on page six.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

And Burnett wants to build this show around a mogul. Initially, he was going to have a different host each season or a different kind of person sitting in the board chair each season, finds Trump. A lot of people were involved in the show claim that that first season was a little tongue in cheek. They say, in retrospect, we all knew that Trump was kind of the court jester but we were going to dress him up as the king. I don’t know if I see that rewatching those episodes.

Preet Bharara:

Right. I mean, you say that. I found that fascinating that it’s supposed to be the case among smart and sophisticated people of intelligence, that this was all done with a wink. And you didn’t see it. And I guess one question is, now, having seen the Trump presidency, how do you relate those two phenomena?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Well, this was what was so fascinating, was talking to all these veterans of the apprentice. And they would talk about how Trump was unprepared. He would kind of come in and have to make these big decisions at the end of each week in the boardroom and pick the person who was going to be the winner that week. And the person who was going to be the loser. But he had never really been keeping track during the course of the week.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

And so, what would happen is he would come in and he would make an impulsive decision, just kind of shoot from the hip. And often, what he would be doing is he would reward the person who had objectively performed the worst and penalize the person who was the best. And then the editors would have to take the hundreds of hours of footage they had shot and retroactively construct some artificial narrative in which Trump’s decision making made sense.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

And it was this whole notion of kind of reality TV as the artificial manipulation of reality. And then, talking to these people who said, it’s our sense that in the white house, it kind of works the same way. Like that’s what the national security council is doing now, is that Trump makes some shoot-from-the-hip dumb decision.

Preet Bharara:

And they have to recast it in some way.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

And they have to recast it and including rewrite history in order to come up with some framework where it makes sense.

Preet Bharara:

When you’re talking about the NSA.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Right.

Preet Bharara:

Do you think that without the apprentice, Trump could have become president?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

I don’t.

Preet Bharara:

And do you think a little bit of the reason for that is not just the fame he got and the respect and the rehabilitation he got, as you say. But part of it is in the same way that people thought that his role and his character in the apprentice was a little bit of an act. That they also thought that his doings and musings and outrageous behavior on the campaign trail was also an act. And that some subset of people thought, well, he’ll be more normal and mainstream and not as wacko when he becomes president. And that is due and owing a little bit to the character of the apprentice. Does that make any sense?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

I do, yeah. And I think on a deeper level, there is a sense in which… I mean, Mark Burnett, the kind of smiley, but in my view, totally nefarious genius behind that show and behind survivor, before that. I think he has this kind of callow philosophy that everything becomes entertainment. And so, I think was a sense in which business becomes entertainment and then politics becomes entertainment. And on some level, I mean, I’m in the news business, right? I feel as though the many of us were implicated by this. But the Trump years were pretty entertaining. Politics had never been so mesmerizing and-

Preet Bharara:

We’re now reaping the fruits of that period.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Absolutely.

Preet Bharara:

And I should also mention, separately, we’ll record something that we’re recording this about an hour or two after the Supreme Court decided to overturn Roe v. Wade, which is a direct consequence of the Trump presidency. There were real consequences of that presidency as opposed to the turn on the apprentice.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Yeah. And I think that the… I remember there was, it was during one of the democratic primary debates in 2020. Trump had threatened to live-tweet during this, before he was kicked off Twitter. He had threatened a live tweet during the debate. And you had all these different democratic candidates on stage and everybody’s talking about their platforms. And it was exactly the way a presidential debate had always looked in this country. People talking about kind of chopping it up on different policy issues and the differences between their platforms. And Trump only tweeted one thing, he tweeted “Boring.” And I thought that really captured it. I mean, I think this is in some ways, if you look at the road decision today or so many other things that have come in recent years, I feel as though this is… You treat this stuff like it’s just entertainment, like that’s all it boils down to and you’re stuck with the consequences.

Preet Bharara:

Look, this is the main theme of the Republicans and Trump with respect to the hearings that have been going on publicly by the one sixth committee. Some of it is, oh, it’s a witch hunt or it’s cherry picking, but what a lot of the theme is? What you just said, boring yawn, it’s not interesting. As if that’s the main-

Patrick Radden Keefe:

That’s the metric.

Preet Bharara:

Bad thing about something that’s important for the public to know about. Whether it’s interesting and riveting or not. I mean, happy to think that it was, but that’s a consequence of Trump. Do you think before Trump, that notable elected Republicans would’ve used that as the main criticism of these hearings? Boring?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Probably not in the sense that he’s kind of, his vocabulary has become the vocabulary of the Republican party. But I also don’t think that he was… I think there are antecedents. I mean, I think Sarah Palin plays a role in this story.

Preet Bharara:

The direct line, I think. The direct line, yeah. We’ll be right back with more of my conversation with Patrick Radden Keefe, after this. Do you think that Trump is putting on an act? And I ask that because it actually goes to the heart, not just of how our democracy has changed, but it goes to the heart of the potential legal case against Donald Trump, right? The idea being, he kept perpetuating this idea that the election was rigged and there was all this voter fraud. And the members of the committee and other people, and maybe the Department of Justice also keeps trying to make the case that there was no reasonable way to believe that there was fraud. Because you lost all these cases, because the people you yourself hand-picked are the Republicans elected into office found no fraud, no fraud, no fraud, no fraud. But is it possible that Trump is not acting and he believes it, or is his act so good that we can’t tell the difference?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

So I think there’s a couple things going on here. And obviously this issue of what he believed, I assume will get to the question of intent, which becomes really meaningful. I mean, I think he’s the ultimate kind of situational guy, right? Who’s going to believe what he needs to believe in a given moment. It seems very hard for me to believe that he… I mean, the thing is he had all these people around him. He had his advisors telling him that-

Preet Bharara:

His people. They’re his people telling. There were not people imposed upon him by the Democrats.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Telling him there’s no there, there. It’s funny, I had this thought when I was doing my book on the Sackler family. There’s a moment late in the book where a couple of members of the Sackler family are hauled before Congress. And they’re questioned by these very angry members of Congress. And they seem just comically out of touch. They essentially say, “We’ve never done anything wrong. This is all just a misunderstanding.”

Patrick Radden Keefe:

And I sort of had the same feeling about Trump, where I feel as though the… From the outside, you would think that somebody who’s a billionaire or somebody who’s very successful, somebody who’s president of the United States, that they can avail themselves of just state-of-the-art advice all the time. But it’s often the opposite, I think that they get these yes men. And I think with somebody like Trump, it becomes a kind of learned, it’s like a learned behavior, after decades of nobody telling him the bad news. I could kind of see a scenario in which when he hears the bad news, he doesn’t really hear it.

Preet Bharara:

Well, he’s also, in some ways, the counterpoint to a belief that I’ve always advanced and I write about in my book. And that is the credibility and persuasive ability depends in part on a thoughtful and intelligence person’s ability to sometimes concede things and to admit mistakes. And I think at least in the narrow world of legal argument, I still think that that’s true. That the thoughtful lawyer who knows that there’s a particular argument, that’s not great, or it’s not as strong as your first two arguments, you might concede that.

Preet Bharara:

And you might say, “Well, Your Honor, I know that there’s a mix of authority on this. We think we’re still on the better side of the question.” But I’ve always thought, and that’s how I try to conduct myself also. Thinking of some amount of concession, and reasonableness, and apology for mistake makes you a more attractive persuader at least in a court of law. But I also have often thought that that’s true in politics and other places. The counterargument is the conduct and behavior of Trump. And in your view, the Sacklers. What do you make of that debate?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

I mean, I think it’s one thing to make an argument in front of a judge. I think Trump’s malign genius, his one great skill was realizing that when you’re communicating to a mass audience, particularly via social media, everything gets flattened. Nobody wants to hear your caveats. If you can see at anything, you’re just going to seem weak. There’s this sort of almost kind of Simian dominance ritual thing that Trump has always done, that really works when you’re communicating with tens of millions of people. Which is I’m right 100% of the time and everybody else is a softie or a liar.

Preet Bharara:

Well, it’s that approach on steroids, right? Because it’d be one thing if you’re a reasonable, good faith person, whether a lawyer in court or a politician and you just happen to be conservative. And you promote your ideas about taxes and about reproductive rights or whatever the case may be, and you don’t concede something. But you’re arguing sort of in good faith and sincerely. But if you’ve transmogrified into a person who is advancing bad faith arguments and lies and provable lies, and then you don’t concede, it’s an order of magnitude worse.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Yeah, I think that’s absolutely right. But I think there’s another dynamic here. And it’s funny, it’s something I think about all the time, particularly writing about criminal justice issues in a magazine. But you’ve I’m sure thought about much more deeply over the years, thinking about making a case to a jury. Which is that there is a kind of irreducible complexity to modern life. And sometimes the stakes are really high. But there’s also just a degree of complexity that requires people to really sit down and think, or absorb complicated information before making a judgment of some sort.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

And I think that part of the appeal if you’re… It’s funny, I just wrote about a case in The New Yorker, a criminal case in the Southern district in which there was a hung jury. And I think part of the problem was it was a very technically complicated case. And it was just tough to tell the story to a bunch of jurors about what happened in a way that felt legible and where they could be comfortable sending somebody to prison for a long time. I think the great appeal of Trump is he always says, his message is always the same, he says, no, it’s simple. It’s not complicated.

Preet Bharara:

Well, he’s right about that. And I used to give the training lecture and opening statements when I was the US attorney, and actually before that also on occasion. And I would say among the various principles, if I ever hear you say, this is a complicated case, or it’s a difficult case, you’re fired. Everything is simple and it’s your job to reduce it. Not in the way that Trump does it, and not in the way that belies complexity. But at the end of the day, you have to find some way of saying that the case is about lying, or cheating, or stealing, or about greed, or whatever the case may be. But if you tell the jury, it’s complicated, you’re in big trouble.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

I agree. I mean, I think that’s right. And listen, it’s the same thing that I do in a different context is how can I take a very complicated set of facts and turn them into a story that feels explicable, and persuasive, and credible. But I guess what I’m saying is the fact that what the jury doesn’t want to hear is, it’s complicated, is I think Trump’s secret weapon, right?

Preet Bharara:

Well, it’s an understanding he has about audiences and the jury is just some particularly specialized audience.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Speaking of which, before I let you go, we have to talk about the case that you alluded to, one that I oversaw. And that you wrote about some years ago involving insider trading on the part of a man named Matthew Martoma, who at the time worked at S.A.C. Capital, whose principal was Stephen Cohen. And the Southern district of New York went to a grand jury and procured an indictment with the respect to Martoma’s Thomas trading. That resulted in, as you point out and as we alleged, a $275 million profit, because he had advanced information about the fate of a particular drug that would treat Alzheimer’s. And S.A.C. Capital, on the advice of Matthew Martoma, made the decision to short the stock with advanced knowledge about a clinical trial. And they actually were able to make $275 million, which is one of the greatest single profitable days for insider trading in the history of the country. What drew you to that story?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Am I finally going to get my interview, Preet?

Preet Bharara:

Here I am. Didn’t I talk to you a little bit, or I didn’t?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

I think you didn’t. I think we-

Preet Bharara:

Was the case ongoing at the time? Because I-

Patrick Radden Keefe:

No, you know what? No, you did. You did. I think, you did in a very careful way. Yeah, because you’re quoted in there.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. So now, as a private citizen, I’m not so careful. But back then, I had guardrails.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

And there’s another story in the collection about the Monzo Roc case, which was also on your watch. But in the case of Martoma, I’ll tell you what was interesting to me. And I would love to hear anything you might want to contribute to this. It was pretty clear that there was a huge amount of insider trading that had been going on at S.A.C. Capital. You had a series of guilty pleas and indictments. It was very, very clear that the focus of the investigation that your office and the FBI was doing that the target was Steve Cohen. I was able to establish that much in my reporting. So you have this guy who’s sitting at top this organization that is just a wash in insider trading. And a person who’s… The whole place, in some ways is kind of marked by his personality. He’s controlling a lot.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

All the information flows to him. So he would seem like a logical target in an investigation. And then you get this guy, Matthew Martoma, who’s young, he’s got kids, he’s got a whole life ahead of him. He gets caught pretty much red-handed. I was very fascinated by the background, which is that there was this older doctor, there was kind of a platonic seduction really of this old doctor who had the insider information and gave it to Martoma. So Martoma was busted.

Preet Bharara:

Over the course of years, right?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Yes.

Preet Bharara:

It was a deliberate seduction. That’s a good way of putting it. I don’t know if we’d said it that way at trial. But he really got the doctor to trust, and respect, and love him.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

He did. And the kind of tragic backdrop for that is that Martoma had always been a sort of apt pupil. He had cultivated mentors throughout his life, he was good at that. And Gilman, the old doctor had had a son who committed suicide. And Martoma reminded him of that son. And so that was interesting to me. But I think what everybody expected was Martoma would finally be the one to roll on Steve Cohen. And in fact, on the morning that he gets back from Michigan with the inside information, but before the trading starts happening on it, he has this phone call. I think it was like an 18-minute phone call with Cohen. And I think everybody’s expectation was, here’s the guy who will deliver Cohen, and he didn’t. And that was what drew me into the story was why wouldn’t he flip?

Preet Bharara:

So yes. Look, I’ve been thinking about that particular case for a long time. I mentioned in passing, in my book, and I get asked this question all the time. And particularly in legal commentary, people are always wanting to know is the Trump organization’s CFO going to flip? Is the former Trump person lawyer going to flip? Is now Roger Stone going to flip? And there are complicated psychological things that go on in different human beings’ brains. And you can’t know, you can’t know. But after doing it for some period of time, you understand what some of the calculus is. And some of the calculus is in the white-collar situation, unlike in some of the more violent crime situations, depending on someone’s adverseness to going to prison for a long period of time, often they flip. And a lot of people in these various insider trading cases did flip. That’s how we made as many cases as we made.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Right.

Preet Bharara:

And this gentleman, Matthew Martoma, given the size of the profit that was made $275 million was facing a very, very long sentence. As you say, family, young kids, all of that generally enters into the calculus, and he didn’t flip. And you have a couple of theories. What were your theories?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

So I-

Preet Bharara:

I mean, I should say for fairness before. One theory is, if you want to believe it, is that he wasn’t in any position to say anything that would incriminate or substantially assist an investigation into Steve Cohen because everything was kosher and on the up and up. So I’ll allow, just for the record, I want to say that is among the list of menu options, not one I necessarily buy.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Yeah. I mean, that certainly would be one explanation, not one that I find particularly persuasive either. There’s another one, which is the kind of arch conspiracy theory that you often hear in this context, which is that there’s some number to count somewhere that Cohen was going to take care of him. And I would be interested to know your thoughts on that. I never found that credible if only because it seemed to me that however careful Cohen might be in setting up that kind of arrangement, that’s when you’re really exposed. Then all of a sudden, there’s a whole raft of things he could be charged with. And Martoma, say he puts 10 million bucks in an account for Martoma. He’s also giving him ammunition to blackmail going for the rest of his life. It-

Preet Bharara:

I don’t know. Obviously, that theory comes to mind because Cohen has a lot of wherewithal, but there’s no evidence of it. If there was evidence of it, I believe our office would’ve figured out a way to bring that out transparently. But there’s the other theory that I think you mentioned, that there are some people who just don’t want to admit their own guilt to their family, to the public. I’ve had people in different contexts who wouldn’t plead guilty because they didn’t want to get deported and they wanted to take their shot at trial. Or they just had a certain code even within the mafia. Some people won’t flip, even if they can save themselves jail time and save their families a lot of heartache and grief.

Preet Bharara:

And there have been a couple of other insider trading defendants who maintain their innocence because there’s some value in that to them. A couple of I’ve written books. You should not read them because they’re bunk. But years later, some of these guys are still… They’re crapping on me and the FBI agents and everyone else. And even though they had a full and fair trial, they had the best lawyer’s money can buy. Their motions for new trial were rejected. Their appeals were rejected. Their habeas corpus petitions were rejected. And the industries that they were part of all rejected them on the strength of the evidence. There was some value for them after years in prison to proclaim their innocence, say the system is corrupt, and that we were on a witch hunt.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

And listen, this goes back to what I said at the outset. Which is it all comes back to what’s the story you tell yourself when you look in the mirror about the life you’re living. What’s the story you tell your wife and your kids and your parents. And in the case of Martoma, I didn’t end up interviewing him per se. I had this very strange arrangement where I went in to meet with him, but his wife ended up talking with me. So he was in the next room and I interviewed her for hours. And she would periodically leave and confer with him and come back. But also his family and her family had been right there in the front row every day of the trial, when I covered the trial.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

And they were all very convinced that he was getting railroaded, that he was totally innocent. And so, the conclusion that I came to was that it was, the only way he could flip was to plead guilty. And that it was worth going to prison for eight years, for much of the childhood of his kids. It was worth it for him if he could maintain the illusion, both in his nuclear family and also with his parents and his in-laws with whom he was very close, that he was an honorable man.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Look, I think that’s very plausible. Matthew Martoma was not born with that name. And the story about why he gave himself a different name is arguably relevant to his character. Is it not?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

It is. I mean, this was part of what was so fascinating for me about this story is that it turns out, so he grew up in Florida in an Indian family, Indian Christian family, part of this particular Indian Christian sect. And his parents put a great deal of pressure on him to succeed. They really wanted him to go to Harvard and he was, I think, valedictorian.

Preet Bharara:

By the way, same.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. I’m also from an Indian American family with a lot of pressure.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Oh, yes.

Preet Bharara:

To do well, and in particular to go to Harvard.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Harvard in particular. Yeah. Well, let me ask you this, Preet.

Preet Bharara:

But I did not cheat at school.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Can you relate to this moment which Martoma had. Which is that when he didn’t get into Harvard and only got into Duke, his father made a plaque and gave it to him for his birthday and it said, “Son who shattered his father’s dreams.”

Preet Bharara:

No, my parents listen and they would’ve been proud of me no matter where I went. But they had high aspirations.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

And I would not have gotten such a plaque.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

But you can see how… So then he goes to duke. He does well at duke. He ends up going to Harvard for law school. His father is very proud.

Preet Bharara:

Does he withdraw the plaque?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

I wonder. I wonder what happened to the plaque. But his father’s definitely proud. He drives him all the way from Florida up to Cambridge when Martoma starts. And what ends up happening is that it emerges, when he is at Harvard law school, that he had faked his transcript. He doctored his transcript when he sent it off for federal clerkships. I thought this was so amazing too. I mean, it takes a certain… Steve Cohen, when he interviewed people to come work at S.A.C. Capital, he would say to them, “What’s the riskiest thing you’ve ever done?” Because he liked people who took risks. And I thought, pretty risky to send off a doctor at Harvard law school transcript to 24 federal judges.

Preet Bharara:

To federal judges.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

So he was caught. And then there’s this kind of amazing sequence when he’s trying to prove. He said he had withdrawn from the clerkships and he sent the email at such and such an hour. But it looked like he might have back dated the email. And he brings in a computer forensics company to do a report, to show that he actually had sent the email before he found out that he’d been caught. So it turns out the computer forensics company was his own company. It was a business he had started. So the fraud kind of compounds. And he ends up changing his name and going to Stanford business school.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. Because people don’t check.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

They don’t. And I was not able to get a straight answer. Stanford subsequently stripped him of his degree. But I wasn’t able to get a straight answer from them about what the story he was telling was when he applied. Whether there was like a year at Harvard law school and then he left or whether he just completely erased it from his transcript.

Preet Bharara:

So what do you make of the guy?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

To be honest with you, so many of these stories, I think the Sackler story is somewhat this way too. I think the American dream is a seductive and occasionally quite dangerous thing. I think that you get certain kinds of people who have a whole family depending on them to make their mark, to chase whatever the brass ring in question is, to accumulate great wealth. And I think for some people that pressures too much. I think sometimes people just don’t really have enough of a kind of core ethical decision-making apparatus that they can see the left right parameters that the rest of us try most of the time to live between. And I think that’s what happened with Martoma. And the interesting thing is, he’s out of prison now. And I don’t know what his life is like now. I don’t know what he’s going to do.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Maybe he’ll change his name again. But I’ll bet that within his family… There’s a story that his wife told me, which is that her, I may get the detail wrong. It’s in the book. I believe it was her grandfather, had worked alongside Gandhi and he had sort of been kind of… I mean, I don’t think he actually died, but he got very sick. In the family mythology, he had been martyred in the cause of Indian independence. And they talked about Matthew the same way. There was this sense of Matthew as this guy who did the right thing. All he ever wanted to do was do the right thing and take care of his family and never broke the law and never lied to anybody. And that the State just crucified him. And it wouldn’t surprise me if that’s still the story today.

Preet Bharara:

Look, and if that’s true and he suffered his time without too much anguish, that answers maybe the question of why he made that decision some years ago. If he was in possession of helpful information, incriminating information, he can look back and say, I kept my family believing in me, notwithstanding all this other stuff.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Yeah. In terms of what I find interesting about these stories and the unexpected turns they take, I think people from the outside said, why isn’t this guy flipping? Why is he protecting Steve Cohen? And I think the much more likely scenario is that it had nothing to do with Steve Cohen. He was protecting his family.

Preet Bharara:

Look, there’s another example that I give in my book. And I think you make reference to it, perhaps in the insider trading investigations we did, where there was somebody who had been in a hedge fund. And he literally sees the FBI agent coming to approach him in the parking lot. And he basically flips on the spot and agrees to wear a wire. And not just a wire to record anyone, he wears a wire on his best friend.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Immediately. So that’s the other end of the spectrum.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

This is Noah Freeman.

Preet Bharara:

Yes. It’s Noah Freeman.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

My high school classmate, Noah Freeman.

Preet Bharara:

Oh, I did not know that.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Yeah. He wouldn’t talk to me for the piece.

Preet Bharara:

So it’s very complicated. It’s very complicated and people have different motivations. And he said, I believe at the time, I think either he just had a child or was about to have a child, and the thought of going to prison for him was too much to bear.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Right.

Preet Bharara:

And any way he could reduce that possibility, he embraced immediately.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Yeah. The way it was described to me by people who worked for you at the time, and others in the FBI, and people who worked on these cases, is that in building those kinds of cases, it was a great advantage that these, that these guys were such soft targets. And in Martoma’s case, I mean, it was almost kind of a comical thing in my piece. But in Martin’s case, when the FBI shows up down in Florida, the first thing they say to him is we know what did at Harvard. He thinks they’re coming after him for the insider trading. And they say, “We know what you did at Harvard.” And he fainted. And Michael Steinberg, another S.A.C. guy also fainted in court. I mean, I think it’s-

Preet Bharara:

Well, I used to say when people would talk about the difficulty of making certain kinds of cases, the logic is that in white-collar cases, people are more likely to flip because for one of a better word they’re softer. So I guarantee you, no Crip, or blood, or Gambino family member upon being approached by law enforcement fainted.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Right.

Preet Bharara:

They didn’t.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Yeah. I mean, listen, from a larger systemic point of view, I think this is a huge problem in our country. But the notion that prison is not a place for those kinds of people, is I think that’s a pretty poisonous idea. But I think it’s one that animates the kind of lives they live. And often the choices that the criminal justice system makes about how it pursues these cases.

Preet Bharara:

We’ve gone long, but there’s one question I have to ask you that I’ve asked other people. And I think you’re in some position to offer a theory. So we’re talking about all the things that people do that are bad and get them in trouble, whether they’re criminal or immoral, or otherwise terrible. What is the characteristic or personality trait that you think that people who possess it cause them to be less likely to stray and break the law or break the rules? I’ll offer one of the more interesting answers I’ve gotten to that question. I was interviewing Michael Lewis some years ago, and he excavates some of these same issues of people going astray. And he said, “People who are self-possessed, who draw their self-worth from within rather than from without.”

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Yeah.

Preet Bharara:

Does that sound right to you?

Patrick Radden Keefe:

It does. And it’s funny because what I was going to offer fits with that probably to some extent. Which is I think people who are honest with themselves.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Again and again, I see these situations where I think-

Preet Bharara:

Self-awareness.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

It’s self-awareness, but it’s the sort of little incremental lies that people tell themselves about the small transgressions, that those can snowball. And by the time I’m writing about you, it’s really snowballed. It it’s gotten really bad. But I think for a lot of people, there are these little deviations and I think just a kind of a… I mean, I think about this, I’m sure in any family, this would be true. But I have family members who are more prone to denial, who don’t want to hear about it. They’d rather kind of stick their heads in the sand. And then other family members who are bracingly honest about themselves and others in a way that is uncomfortable sometimes. But I think if what you’re trying to do is navigate a somewhat righteous path through life, that’s a useful attribute.

Preet Bharara:

I believe that’s true. Patrick Radden Keefe, thank you for coming on the show. The book is Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks. Please check it out. Thanks again.

Patrick Radden Keefe:

Thank you.

BUTTON:

Preet Bharara:

I’m going to end the show this week by remarking on a couple of anniversaries. One, is a personal one and the other one, a national anniversary. So ten days ago, June 27th, marked the 52nd anniversary of my family, the Bharara family coming to the United States of America from India via the UK. I was only a year old, as I’ve mentioned before we settled in Buffalo, New York, a place that was much colder to what my parents were used to.

Preet Bharara:

And we came for all the reasons that immigrants came then and come still. We came for a better life. We came for opportunity. We came to improve our futures. And live in a country that has been a beacon of freedom for everyone all around the world. It was a very different time. Nixon was president. The Watergate break in was two years away. Roe hadn’t yet been decided, it was three years away.

Preet Bharara:

The world trade center was not yet complete. That also was three years away. The Vietnam war was raging. There was unrest all over the United States. Springsteen had not yet recorded either Born to Run or Thunder Road, which is my favorite song. It was a crazy time and a difficult time, although I was too young to appreciate it in the moment. Things seem very different now.

Preet Bharara:

And that brings me to the national anniversary. This past Monday was Independence Day, the 4th of July. And it did not seem as happy as it has in past years. Part of the reason was the horrific shooting in Highland Park that took seven lives and counting. Part of it also is, of course, the creeping feeling that America, the land that my parents came to brought me to is becoming less free. That the Supreme Court has been hijacked. That democracy itself is in peril.

Preet Bharara:

And I’ve seen many of your comments on social media and elsewhere, saying that you weren’t celebrating Independence Day. That you didn’t feel like celebrating, that there was nothing to celebrate. I get that. I get sad and depressed too. In fact, I earn part of my living by reading these decisions and following the news, and trying to explain it to other people. I can’t even escape it, even if I wanted to. It’s part of my job. And I talk to my parents about what’s happened to the country and they feel it’s not the country that they came to or it’s at risk of becoming not the country they came to. But then we think to ourselves, we didn’t come all this way, go through so much to give up, or quit, or abandon our hope. The moment you start to feel that way, that’s when America needs you the most.

Preet Bharara:

That’s when your country most needs your love, and attention, and patience, and energy, and fighting spirit. There was a great and moving piece in the New York Times a few days ago, it was written by Margaret Renkl. And she talks about this feeling about the flag and about the country and about what it feels like with the Supreme court deciding things the way it has that go against the will of the people. And she says this, “It should not be so unbearably hard for justice to prevail and justice finally gained should never again be at risk, but this is the country we live in. The fight for freedom will never be over. And God help me, I will not be one who gives up. This is my country too. And I will not surrender it to a vocal minority of undemocratic tyrants.” Neither will I, and neither should you. God bless America.

Preet Bharara:

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Patrick Radden Keefe. If you like what we do rate and review the show on Apple podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me at Preet Bharara with the hashtag ask Preet. Or you can call and leave me a message at 6692477338 that’s 66924 Preet. Or you can send an email to letters@cafe.com.

Preet Bharara:

Stay Tuned is presented by CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The senior producers are Adam Waller and Matthew Billy. The CAFE team is David Kurlander, Sam Ozer-Staton, Noah Azulai, Nat Weiner, Jake, Kaplan, Sean Walsh, Namita Shah, and Claudia Hernandez. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara, stay tuned.