Patrick Radden Keefe

According to the Los Angeles Times, "A new book by Keefe means drop everything and close the blinds; you'll be turning the pages for hours." In this wide-ranging, personal talk, Keefe discusses the importance of storytelling: why we love it, and how to do it well. Humans are hard-wired to process complex information more effectively when it is presented as a narrative—a drama about characters and conflict. With revealing anecdotes about his adventures as an investigative reporter, writing about everyone from the narco baron Chapo Guzman to the mega art dealer Larry Gagosian to the late chef and television host Anthony Bourdain, Keefe makes an impassioned case for the importance of knowing how to tell a good story, whatever industry you might be in. He describes how he sorts through years of research, hundreds of pages of interview notes, and thousands of court files in search of the narrative threads to spin all that material into a great yarn. The fundamental questions at the heart of this kind of writing (Where does my story begin and end? How much detail is too much? What are my inflection points and themes?) are the same faced by anyone who has to write a memo, or deliver a presentation, or give a speech at a wedding. Keefe imparts five simple lessons he has learned over a two-decade career about how to structure and sustain an irresistible tale.

Drawing on his definitive work of narrative reporting, Keefe shares the secret history of the Sacklers, a prominent philanthropic dynasty and one of the wealthiest families in the world, whose fortune was built on Valium and whose reputation was destroyed by OxyContin—the highly addictive painkiller that helped precipitate the opioid crisis. In this talk, Keefe tells a sweeping story, tracing three generations of the Sackler family, from immigrant Brooklyn during the Great Depression to the 1990s, when OxyContin started generating billions of dollars a year, to the ultimate downfall, when Purdue Pharma was dissolved in bankruptcy and the Sacklers became pariahs and their name was stripped from the walls of prominent institutions, from Oxford University to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Filled with arresting behind-the-scenes details and enlivened by Keefe's deadpan wit, this talk explores the way in which greed and arrogance caused a family and its company to lose their way, with devastating results.

One night in 1972, a widowed mother of ten named Jean McConville was dragged from her home in Belfast, Northern Ireland, by a gang of masked intruders, and never seen again. In Say Nothing, which FX is adapting as a dramatic limited series for release in 2024, Patrick Radden Keefe uses the mystery of McConville's disappearance to tell a broader story about the history of the long and bitter conflict known as the Troubles. Weaving together intimate stories of both victims and perpetrators, Keefe explores profound questions about the nature of political violence, how young people become radicalized and take up arms, and how trauma and irresolution can linger, long after a conflict ends. In this talk, Keefe tells the story of what happened to Jean McConville and how it continues to haunt Northern Ireland even today, with Brexit reigniting old antagonisms. He makes an eloquent argument about the way in which the past is never really the past, and how history can bedevil the present. He also relates the extraordinary story of how, after four years of investigation, he managed to solve the puzzle of Jean McConville's death, and to identify her killer — someone who is still alive and had never been a suspect in the case.

Patrick Radden Keefe has always been interested in the business models of criminal enterprises; he once wrote a cover story for the New York Times Magazine that was "Harvard Business School Case Study of a Mexican drug cartel." But he has also written extensively about legitimate corporations that commit crimes: a major hedge fund awash in insider trading, a global bank that did business with drug cartels, a pharmaceutical company that lied about the dangers of its blockbuster drug. In this talk, Keefe discusses the surprising affinities between crooks who act like businesspeople and businesspeople who act like crooks. He relates entertaining anecdotes about his experiences interviewing drug barons, whistleblowers, and CEOs, and illustrates the importance of ethical leadership and institutional culture in spotting red flags and keeping companies on the right side of the line. The least dull compliance lecture you will ever attend.

In 2022, Patrick Radden Keefe published Rogues, a New York Times bestselling greatest hits collection covering 15 years of his magazine writing, which has been recognized with a National Magazine Award. In this talk, Keefe reveals that ever since he was a kid, his dream was to write for The New Yorker. He relates the circuitous route he had to take before finally ending up at the magazine, and recounts some of the more bizarre and memorable moments of his career, from the time the drug lord Chapo Guzman asked if Keefe would ghostwrite his memoir, to the trip he took to Vietnam with Anthony Bourdain, to his intense encounters with the parents of the mass shooter Amy Bishop. Moving, suspenseful, and darkly funny, this talk is a reporter opening his notebook and sharing the surprising highlights of a globe-trotting career chasing great stories.