Who’s Scarier: Gangsters, Billionaires or Investigative Journalists?

June 16, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

Who’s Scarier: Gangsters, Billionaires or Investigative Journalists?

Patrick Radden Keefe, a New Yorker staff writer and author of Empire of Pain, Say Nothing, and his latest London Falling, has spent two decades writing about people who behave badly — drug lords, opioid billionaires, con artists, and the occasional rebel. When asked who actually threatens him, his answer is counterintuitive: “It’s only the rich people who ever threaten me. It’s not the gangsters.” A cartel lawyer once called to propose that Keefe ghostwrite El Chapo’s memoirs. A British gangster shook his hand, smiled, and asked after Keefe’s wife and children by name — just to let him know he could. But the lawsuits and legal threats come from the wealthy.

The Drift Into Grift

Keefe’s subjects share a pattern: they don’t become bad people overnight. They get there by degrees, through “little incremental deviations from the conventional moral path.” He points to Arthur Sackler, the patriarch of the family behind OxyContin. Sackler was a child of immigrants, a self-made man who pioneered pharmaceutical advertising — and then devised the deceptive marketing strategy that would fuel the opioid crisis. “He never gets there overnight,” Keefe says. “It’s these little incremental deviations.”

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What you'll learn

1 (00:00) **Introduction & Guest Welcome** - Host Nama Raza introduces Patrick Radden Keefe, New Yorker staff writer and author of *Empire of Pain*, *Say Nothing*, and his latest *London Falling*.
2 (04:38) **The Drift to Grift: The Sackler Family Case Study** - Keefe uses the Sackler family to illustrate how ambition and idealism can gradually slide into deception and harm.
3 (06:52) **On Narrative Journalism: Scene vs. Invention** - The host asks if Keefe “Hollywoodizes” moments; Keefe defends his approach as factually rigorous but arranged as a compelling story.
4 (09:14) **Warning Signs: Self-Delusion and the Yes-Man Problem** - Keefe discusses how powerful people delude themselves, using David Sackler’s congressional testimony as a key example.
5 (12:09) **Is the Era of “Fraud Porn” New?** - The host asks whether our cultural obsession with grifters (Elizabeth Holmes, Anna Delvey) is a new phenomenon.
6 (14:10) **The Vicky Mendoza Diagonal of Elite Grift** - The host compares the “hot/crazy” matrix from *How I Met Your Mother* to a power/bad-behavior axis, using Harvey Weinstein as a counterexample.
7 (16:14) **The “Write Around” Technique** - Keefe explains his method of reporting on subjects who won’t give interviews, using the Sacklers and Mark Burnett as examples.

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Show Notes

Nobody understands GRIFT quite like New Yorker Journalist Patrick Radden Keefe. Nayeema sits down with the legendary New Yorker staff writer and bestselling author of Empire of Pain, Say Nothing, Rogues, and his latest book London Falling to ask: why are we so obsessed with people behaving badly? Is grift just … ambition? And when does “fake it till you make it” become “fake it until everything collapses”?

Also on the agenda: Sacklers, El Chapo’s midlife crisis, Anna Delvey in the audience, Larry Gagosian parties, Mark Burnett making Trump, whether rich people are scarier than gangsters, and the tragic story at the center of London Falling — a teenage boy in London who invented an oligarch father and conned the adults who wanted access to him.

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