Some have blood on their hands. Lots of blood. Others are just white-collar con artists pulling cute. Many are in jail, although there are those who have escaped from the clutches of justice. But in all of them the evil part of him has prevailed. They are contemporary criminals. The journalist Patrick Radden Keefe has delved into their behavior, their motivations, what led them to kill, steal, swindle or deceive, and has compiled his stories in Maleantes (Reservoir Books / Periscopi).
Keefe always wanted to work for The New Yorker. He ran from a very young age and for years. He finally managed to place himself in the magazine as a collaborator. She is now his star journalist: “It can take anywhere from three months to a year to complete and publish my reports. To write some stories I need to contact fifty sources and travel a lot. The magazine assumes the expenses and pays my salary because now I am on the staff, ”he explains in an interview with La Vanguardia by zoom from his home in New York.
He chooses the topics that call his attention from “what I read in the press” and then moves to contact the informants. Thus he has been able to complete various stories of wicked people.
Joaquín Guzmán Lorca, known as El Chapo is the leader of the Sinaloa cartel and responsible for “half of the illegal drugs that cross the border every year.” He is a “master of escape” and the architect of the construction of “some ninety tunnels” that are used to transport drugs from Mexico to the United States. Chapo himself, who is now serving a sentence in a Colorado prison, estimates that he “has killed between two and three thousand people.” Among them many journalists, despite which Keefe acknowledges that “I have never feared for my life, it is the Mexican chroniclers who are in real danger.”
Amy Bishop had been denied promotion to be a full professor of biology at the University of Alabama. One afternoon she met with her companions, at the end of the meeting she “took out a gun and started shooting, six people were shot, three of them died.” She was arrested and, then, someone remembered that many years before “Bishop had allegedly accidentally shot her brother to death.” Keefe talked a lot with Bishop and her parents. The journalist assures that “I have not come to feel affection for the protagonists of my stories, but I do try to put myself in their place and somehow understand what has led them to slip down the path of evil.”
Hervé Falciani worked for the Swiss bank HSBC. In 2008, the police arrested him. That night, Falciani escaped to France with his family. He “he had stolen bank details, names, numbers and account balances, sixty thousand client files from almost all countries, which hid at least twenty-one billion dollars from the tax authorities.” Falciani stated that he stole the data “because I wanted a different world for my daughter.” After learning his story in depth and interviewing him in Spain, Keefe thinks that Falciani was not a Robin Hood at all, as some have shown him, but that he took the famous list from him to earn some money.
Millionaire Bill Koch bought four bottles of wine in 1988 that supposedly had belonged to Thomas Jefferson. He soon began to suspect that they were false and since money was not lacking, he hired a former FBI agent to investigate the case. Suspicion fell on a German collector, Hardy Rodenstock. “There are two types of wine counterfeiters: those who don’t alter the contents of the bottle and those who do.” Koch and Rodenstock had a lengthy lawsuit in court. But the millionaire ended up giving up and the alleged wine counterfeiter got off scot-free despite the many indications against him.
Astrid, Wim and Sonja Holleeder’s father worked at Heineken. She also drank all the beer from the brewery that she could. In addition, he mistreated his children and his wife. In 1983, Freddy Heineken, the owner of the factory that employed Mr. Holleeder, was kidnapped. The brewer’s family paid the ransom. Thus began the criminal career of Wim Holleeder, the Dutch godfather, who dragged his entire family into his shady business. His sister Astrid became the lawyer for Wim’s evil empire. But Astrid and Sonja ended up ratting out her brother, who is now in jail. Even so, its tentacles are very long and the two women live in hiding.
Monzer al-Kassar was born in Syria in 1945 and grew up on the outskirts of Damascus. But when he had built an empire thanks to drug and arms trafficking, he settled in Marbella where he lived so richly, because “in the early 80s, the town became a paradise for smugglers where the Spanish authorities were simply not present for this type of crime.” Al-Kassar repeatedly evaded justice, but in the end the DEA caught him thanks to Carlos and Luis, two Guatemalan agents who posed as arms buyers for the FARC. Former commissioner José Manuel Villarejo has a role in this story.
