He makes friends easily - who didn’t want to be friends with Tony Bourdain? - and leaves them behind just as easily.Īll of the essays in this stellar collection have end notes catching us up with what’s happened to their subjects since Keefe published his stories: arrests made, prison terms served, dollars defrauded. Keefe describes both the glamour and the loneliness of Bourdain’s life and notes the disintegration of his second marriage. “I’m in the business of finding great places, and then we f-k them up.” “It’s a gloriously doomed enterprise,” he tells Keefe.

He also frets over the impact of his show, as he seeks out little-known gems and broadcasts them to the world. Keefe discovers that behind Bourdain’s swashbuckling punk-rock persona is a control freak who frets over every detail of his television series: “He is Apollo in drag as Dionysus.”

Keefe follows Bourdain’s globetrotting footsteps for several interviews and is on the spot during Bourdain’s famed dinner in Hanoi, Vietnam, with then-President Barack Obama, a meal that was featured in an episode of Bourdain’s CNN series “Parts Unknown.” The final profile, “Journeyman,” is a perceptive and ultimately heartbreaking portrait of TV personality and chef Anthony Bourdain. Others are about criminals who operate entirely outside the law, such as “The Hunt for El Chapo,” the notorious drug lord, and “The Prince of Marbella,” about a powerful and elusive international arms broker. Several of the chapters in “Rogues” are about corporate crooks, traders and bankers and mining moguls - Keefe has a gift for clearly explaining deliberately arcane financial transactions. His interviews with her family and with Bishop herself go far beyond the usual mass-shooter headlines. Keefe finds that when she was 21, Bishop had shot her brother to death in what was deemed an accident - a judgment that might have been tragically wrong. In “A Loaded Gun,” Keefe looks into the case of Amy Bishop, a neurobiology professor at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, who in 2010 came to a faculty meeting and shot six of her colleagues, three of them fatally. The story expands to retell the legal battles that followed and to offer a fascinating glimpse inside the world of wine counterfeiting. Some of the stories would make entertaining caper movies, like the first, “The Jefferson Bottles.” It recounts how a wealthy wine dealer with a sketchy past, Hardy Rodenstock, scammed a much wealthier wine collector - Bill Koch, one of the billionaire Koch brothers - out of large amounts of money with some dusty old bottles of French wine that allegedly had belonged to Thomas Jefferson.

Patrick radden keefe rogues