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Episode 141—Evan Ratliff on Garbage-ing, Legwork in Pitching, and ‘The Mastermind’
160 Plays7 years ago
"My system is, it's okay not to have a system," says Evan Ratliff, @ev_rat on Twitter.
This week I spoke to Evan Ratliff, who puts the bad in badass. Yes, that means I put the ass in badass. Neither here nor there.
Evan came on the show to talk about his career as a freelance journalist and, most recently, his epic new book titled The Mastermind: Drugs. Empire. Murder. Betrayal. It’s a book that combines all the tools of the trade a master reporter needs to tell the globetrotting story
That’s right, this is The Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show were I talk to badass writers, filmmakers, and producers about the art and craft of telling true stories. I try and unpack their origins and how they go about the work so you can apply those tools of mastery to your own work. I’m your host, Brendan O’Meara.
So before we get to Evan, you’ll want to find a way to subscribe to this show. I make it easy, man. Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher. I think that’s enough. If you find the show entertaining or informative, share it across your platform with your pals. You are the social network. Rage against the algorithm, rrrrage. If you’re feeling generous of course you can leave a review on iTunes, but I’m jsut as happy with you sharing it or even emailing the show creative nonfiction podcast at gmail dot com.
Head over to brendanomeara.com for show notes and to sign up for my monthly newsletter. The latest one went out today. You’ll find book recommendations and maybe a link to a story written about me in the Register-Guard here in Eugene, OR. I always wanted to be a writer worth writing about. But I guess, for the time, I’m a podcaster worth writing about. It’s pretty cool. Check it out. Newsletter, once a month. No spam. Can’t beat it.
Okay, so Evan Ratliff, @ev_rat on Twitter, came by the show. His latest book The Mastermind is a masterpiece of true crime writing. Evan is also the founder of The Atavist Magazine, a co-host of the Longform Podcast, and a long-time freelance writer. This was fun. He came to play ball, which not every guest does so I’m thrilled that he took the time to jam with me.
Here’s my conversation with Evan Ratliff. Let’s kick it!
What else? Oh, yes, keep the conversation going on Twitter by pinging me @BrendanOMeara and @CNFPod. Wanna barf? The show has an Instagram page now: @cnfpod. And, as always, you can like the show on Facebook. You have no excuse for not seeing the show out there in the world.
Thanks to Goucher College's Masters in Nonfiction for sponsoring the show!
Recommended
Transcript
00:00:00
Speaker
Yo,
Introduction and Episode Overview
00:00:00
Speaker
what's shakin', CNF-ers? This week I spoke to Evan Ratliff, who puts the bad in badass. Yes, that means I put the ass in badass, neither here nor there. Evan came on the show to talk about his career as a freelance journalist and, most recently,
00:00:18
Speaker
his epic new book titled The Mastermind, Drugs, Empire, Murder, Betrayal. It's a book that combines all the tools of the trade a master reporter needs to tell a globe-trotting story.
00:00:34
Speaker
This kind of stuff you're saying anonymously, it reads one way, and with your name behind it, it reads completely differently.
Goucher MFA Program Highlights
00:00:52
Speaker
The Goucher MFA is a two-year low-residency program. Online classes let you learn from anywhere while on-campus residencies allow you to hone your craft with accomplished mentors who have Pulitzer Prizes and best-selling books to their names. The program boasts a nationwide network of students, like me,
00:01:12
Speaker
faculty and alumni. Well, that's it. That's me. I'm alumni. I'm not a student anymore. Graduated in 08, which has published 140 books and counting. You'll get opportunities to meet literary agents and learn the ins and outs of the publishing journey. Visit goucher.edu slash nonfiction to start your journey now. Take your writing to the next level and go from hopeful to published in Goucher's MFA program for creative nonfiction.
00:01:41
Speaker
Okay. You ready? You're really ready? RIFF. I like the sound of that. That's right. This
Podcast's Focus on Storytelling
00:01:52
Speaker
is the Creative Nonfiction Podcast, the show, where I talk to badass writers, filmmakers, and producers about the art and craft of telling true stories. I try and unpack their origins and how they go about the work so you can apply those tools of mastery to your own work. I'm your host, Brendan O'Mara. How's it going, guys?
00:02:13
Speaker
Yeah, so, before we get to Evan, you'll want to find a way to subscribe to the show if you don't already. I make it easy, man. Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, I think that's enough. That should cover 99.5% of you. If you find the show entertaining or informative, share it across your platform. Any of your social platforms, Facebook or Twitter, anywhere. You are the social network.
00:02:39
Speaker
Rage against the algorithm, man. Rage against the algorithm. If you're feeling generous, of course you can leave a review on iTunes. But
Promotions and Newsletter
00:02:49
Speaker
I'm just as happy with you sharing it with your network, with your people.
00:02:54
Speaker
and even emailing the show, creativenonfictionpodcastatgmail.com. I'd love to hear it and might just read it on the air. Head over to brendanomare.com, of course, for show notes and to sign up for my monthly newsletter. Latest one went out today. You'll find book recommendations and maybe a link to a story written about me and the register guard here in Eugene, Oregon.
00:03:17
Speaker
I always wanted to be a writer worth writing about. There's my ego. But I guess for the time, I'm a podcaster worth writing about. So that's pretty cool. Check it out. Newsletter once a month. No spam. Can't beat it.
00:03:31
Speaker
Book update? Ah, you know, just chipping away at that 20 minutes a day practice that I'm doing.
Writing Practice and Challenges
00:03:38
Speaker
Nothing new to report, but I should be done with this round in a few weeks and moving on to the next phase. Of course, I'll keep you posted, but I say this to let you know that I'm not just asking the questions of these people, I'm in this mess. I am in the mud doing the work as well.
00:03:56
Speaker
And it, you know, it's fun. We get to do this. Sometimes it sucks, but ultimately we get to do this. And it's a grind. And that's what we love to talk about on the show. So speaking
Evan Ratliff's Career and 'The Mastermind'
00:04:08
Speaker
of that, Evan Ratliff, at ev underscore rat on Twitter, came by the show. His latest book, like I said before, The Mastermind is a masterpiece of true crime reporting and true crime writing.
00:04:21
Speaker
Evan is also the founder of the Adivis magazine, a co-host of The Long Form podcast, and a long time freelance writer. This was fun. He came to play ball, which not every guest does, so I'm thrilled that he took the time to jam with me. Here's my conversation, episode 141 with Evan Ratliff. Let's kick it.
00:04:48
Speaker
I love charting that path. So where did you grow up and how did you first start getting into and get the story bug, so to speak? So I got my start. Well, I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia.
00:04:59
Speaker
And I went to college at Duke. And then after college, I actually worked as a software consultant for a year. Didn't really take to that. And I got my start at Wired magazine. So I was an intern there, the basic like editorial intern where I literally opened the mail back when there was like more snail mail in the mix and open the email. And I hadn't really had any journalism training. I'd worked on a college newspaper.
00:05:29
Speaker
but mostly as a photographer and I'd done a tiny bit of writing. So pretty much everything I learned about reporting, writing, editing, everything I actually learned on staff at Wired or through those internships that I eventually went on staff as a fact checker.
Evan's Early Career and Influences
00:05:44
Speaker
So a lot of my kind of experience as a reporter comes from being a fact checker. What made you want to intern at Wired?
00:05:52
Speaker
I did like the magazine, and I read the magazine. The main thing that made me want to intern at Wire is that they offered me the internship. I actually didn't even get a response from almost every place I tried to get a job or an internship at, and rightly so. I didn't have the experience that probably even most interns would have, or the clips or anything to present.
00:06:15
Speaker
But at Wired, I happened to look into a time period, I think, where they had just been bought by Conde Nast, the big magazine conglomerate company, and they had not filled the internship. So I managed to get on the phone this guy named Bill Goggins, who was the articles editor at the time, and he was sort of nominally responsible.
00:06:34
Speaker
for the internships and he kind of said, well, if you're in San Francisco, we'll get a drink. And I happened to be coming to San Francisco for work and we did get a drink and then he offered me the internship. And it was basically some kind of like lucky circumstances with like a tiny bit of persistence on my part. As a matter of fact, my book is actually dedicated to Bill Goggins. So he later ended up being a kind of mentor for me and a very close friend. And when you were in high school, what kind of crew did you run with?
00:07:04
Speaker
I was on the debate team. I did policy debate. So that was a big part of my high school life. And I also played a lot of soccer. So I kind of had a mix of friends, like a lot of smart people, a lot of my friends are now either
00:07:21
Speaker
diplomats or pretty high powered lawyers or doctor. One of my closest friends is a cancer researcher slash clinical doctor at Johns Hopkins. So they're still some of my closest friends. So I was fortunate to have a lot of very smart people around me, I would say, but not
00:07:41
Speaker
I mean, in terms of my future career, it wasn't like any of us had any idea what we were doing. I definitely was not a person who thought, I'll be a writer someday in my life, and I don't think anyone else had any idea what they were going to get up to either. Yeah. Were there any particular novels that you were reading at the time that really sunk their teeth into you? Even nonfiction stuff, but usually it's novels that kind of give people the bug early.
00:08:07
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, when I was younger, I didn't really even read much nonfiction. I certainly not like narrative nonfiction of the type that I later fell in love with. I wasn't even really familiar with that. I, you know, it was kind of like the ordinary, you know, English class school stuff. Like I loved the great Gatsby and I still love the great Gatsby like, you know, sort of American classics that I
00:08:30
Speaker
got into it wasn't until really until i was already working at wired that i started reading new journalism and narrative journalism so i didn't really have that much familiarity with what even a sort of like non-fiction book outside of a textbook or maybe a history book would look like but i i at the time i was very into you know american novels and i thought that i was gonna study that in college although i didn't even end up doing that
00:08:55
Speaker
didn't when you when you realize what could be done with non-fiction and usually as Tom Wolfe would say like those tools of the novelist to tell a verifiably true story didn't it kind of taint fiction in a way for you I know it did for me and I wonder how it it affected the way you viewed a non-fiction or I mean fiction and maybe your capacity to to write it because it it didn't happen but with the non-fiction it's like well that happened and that's part of the allure to it
00:09:26
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, I would say that it tainted it, but it definitely changed it. I mean, in terms of writing, I was never good at writing fiction. I took some stabs at it in college, like many, many people do, and in classes, and did not get a particularly favorable response from anyone who counted it. I agree. I think it's much, much harder.
00:09:48
Speaker
And then I took a class at Duke where I went. There was a Center for Documentary Studies. And that's the first place where I was exposed to some nonfiction. We read, There Are No Children Here, Alex Kotlowitz' book. And I feel like that book really struck me and stuck with me. It wasn't a thing that made me think I could do it, partly because it just seemed, what he did seemed so hard to me. It seemed so outside of something that I could possibly do that I didn't sort of immediately say, aha,
00:10:18
Speaker
I want to be Alex Kotlitz. I just thought like, wow, that's interesting. And then when I really started reading sort of new journalism or, you know, Joan Didion and all the things you eventually kind of fall into, I felt like that's when I started feeling maybe I could do this.
Balancing Reporting and Writing
00:10:34
Speaker
I mean, in particular, Hell's Angels, the Hunter Thompson, the first Hunter Thompson book. Like I thought, oh, I see. Like this is something embedding in this subculture and then writing something that feels a bit novelistic.
00:10:46
Speaker
Maybe I could take a I could take a stab at that but I think ever since then it is true that I don't read as many novels as I should like I always favor nonfiction like I love a narrative nonfiction book more than anything.
00:11:00
Speaker
some of that stuff, the later Hunter Thompson stuff, and not just using tools of the novel, but fictionalization. I'm not as into that. I'm a little bit more of a purist when it comes to trying to establish facts as best as possible. But I still love that. I love reading that stuff.
00:11:17
Speaker
Yeah, and I find I still love to read fiction in a great novel and specifically Great Gatsby. I read that book every year. I think because ultimately when you're really – when you're just squaring up the ball on the bat, so to speak, with nonfiction, it's because it tends to –
00:11:36
Speaker
It has that novelistic feel to it. So if you're reading good fiction and you're a non-fiction writer, you can be asking yourself, okay, like, how can I embed myself in the right situations that I can elicit this kind of scene or ask the kind of questions of my sources to elicit that kind of mood? And you can kind of get that from fiction and then try to – how can you hack into the system and do it in a verifiably true way? And is that kind of – do you kind of get that from fiction these days?
00:12:06
Speaker
I do, yeah, I get, I mean, you can get sort of that, even sort of, scenically, like, could I build a scene like this? Is it possible to gather the information I could build a scene like this? I think when I read fiction now, I
00:12:18
Speaker
fiction writers are sort of unashamedly and rightfully pursuing something about the human experience. And I feel like when you're writing a piece of nonfiction, especially reported journalism, there's a tendency to either not pursue that at all. You're just trying to establish facts and tell a story as it happened, the best as you can establish, or to like totally overdo it and overwrite it with these sort of florid descriptions. And I feel like I'm,
00:12:45
Speaker
I would like to try to find the middle space where you are illuminating the same types of experiences and emotions and interiority of people as a novel but you're not kind of doing it through this sort of like
00:13:00
Speaker
a very overdramatic writing. You're doing it by sort of trying to paint these portraits of people up close. So I definitely aspire to that. I don't know if I'm achieving that in my writing, but when I read fiction, like that's a thing that I want to take away from it. And then just purely like structure. Like I read this book. I don't read a lot of mysteries, but I read this book. Demetrios is the coffin for Demetrios. I think it's called Eric Ambler. It's like an old mystery. And I saw it referenced somewhere. It's from the, I don't know, 1930s or something.
00:13:27
Speaker
probably even getting that wrong but there was something about the structure of it that really intrigued me where it's taking a story and looking at it from these different angles and you understand it one way at one point then you understand it another way at another point and i i didn't actually like borrow that structure but like the ideas of it i like taking those ideas and then trying to play with them to figure out how to structure you know a piece of non-fiction that's a little bit complicated
Developing Skills in Journalism
00:13:51
Speaker
So as you're at Wired, when do you start wanting to do longer, or just reported features, and how do you start developing those skills given that you didn't necessarily come from that J school background? I started, I mean I definitely wanted to write from the moment I got there. I was doing product reviews, I was doing whatever they would give me, I wanted to do it. Partly because that seemed like
00:14:21
Speaker
the most fun aspect of it and the most creative aspect of it. I mean, I love a great editor, but I never felt that pulled to be an editor. I felt like, oh, I see what's most interesting to me here. So partly I learned from, there was a great set of editors at Wired at that time. I mean, Katrina Herron was the editor-in-chief and she had come from The New Yorker and from The New York Times Magazine. She brought Alex Hurd, who came from The New York Times Magazine and
00:14:45
Speaker
outside is now the has been the executive editor outside for a long time so they were there were these editors there who were both like very patient with a younger person and just very knowledgeable about how to structure stories so you could throw anything at them and they would say okay I see what I see what you have here and what you should be doing is these are five sections and here's what your five sections look like so there were enough people like that there who were willing to
00:15:12
Speaker
To be patient with someone who knew absolutely nothing about how to do this sort of work That I could learn that way and then this sort of secondary way was through through fact-checking I mean you may have heard this before from other people who started as fact checkers But it's just this incredible training where you see all aspects of how a story got made you're taking it apart and putting it back together in some sense and
00:15:37
Speaker
And you can kind of see where mistakes get made and you can see where, you know, very clever moves are made by the writer and how they took a certain amount of reporting and shaped it. And so I learned a lot just from fact-checking stories for a couple of years and kind of seeing
00:15:53
Speaker
Oh, I see. This one, it actually started out like this, and it's going to end up like this. So you get to see what comes in, and it kind of can give you confidence too, because you can see that some of the stories when they come in, they're not very good. And so it's okay that a story comes in and it's not perfect. Oftentimes, they're very, very rough. They're the roughest of rough drafts. So I feel like knowing that started to give me a feeling like, oh, I can
00:16:20
Speaker
I can probably do this too. I can do it as well as this person. Maybe not as well as this person on the far end of the best Wired writers that were working, but I know I can start over here at the other end and do what they're doing.
00:16:31
Speaker
Yeah, it's a great way of deconstructing the story and kind of almost like working backwards from the recipe to see what the ingredients were. And then when you realize that it does have component parts that are very achievable with rigor and curiosity and attention to detail, it's like, oh yes, like if I do these and assemble these things, yes, I can build my own, I can cook my own or bake my own great cake here.
00:16:56
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And a lot of that is having having editors, you know, real editors who are spending the time and there's a real luxury of time at a monthly magazine in terms of how long you can spend on a story and how long editors are spending and the care that they're taking with the story. And that's something that's like, you know, I was very lucky to get that from a pretty early point where someone's even saying, okay, I
00:17:22
Speaker
I, what you have here is fine, but what you're missing in the reporting is A, B and C and you need to go get it. So then the next time you do it, you know about A, B and C and you know that you can get it from the beginning and then you kind of build that way. So it's really, really hard to just figure that out on your own. You can read great stuff and that that's helpful. But being able to, as you say, like take apart the process and say, okay, how does this get
00:17:48
Speaker
How does a story like this get built? That was incredibly invaluable. I don't know how else I would have figured it out.
00:17:56
Speaker
Yeah, I think this is a great point to underscore, because I think there's a lot of people who have some chops and talent and aren't getting necessarily the traction they want. And maybe they are missing, they're doing certain things very well, but they're kind of like, well, you were just saying, you're missing E, F, and G here. You've got ABC, but you're missing this.
00:18:20
Speaker
In your experience, when you were first starting, what were those little things that you were missing that you were then starting to add to your toolbox to build your repertoire of skills so you could successfully pitch a story at that point that had all the component parts so that you could go forward and write it?
00:18:40
Speaker
Well, in terms of pitching, you know, I learned a lot from just being in pitch meetings over and over again and, and plus my own pitches getting rejected. But I mean, in pitching, the main thing was just not having done any legwork. Like that, that, that's where a lot of pitches fell down was, you know, it's one thing to see something somewhere and say, wow, that would be a good story. And, uh, that would be great Wired magazine story or great New Yorker story or what have you.
00:19:07
Speaker
But that's editor's job. The editor's job is to then hand that to a writer and say, go check this out and see if there's something there. The writer, if you're going to pitch something, you need to have taken a couple steps down that road, usually, unless you have a very close relationship with your editor where you can just throw things against the wall and get them approved. But that's pretty rare. And so that's a thing that I learned pretty early on.
00:19:33
Speaker
you're
The Art of Storytelling in Reporting
00:19:33
Speaker
going to end up wasting a lot of effort looking into stories that never pan out. But if you don't put in that effort getting a feature assignment where someone's going to send you to do a story for thousands of words, it's just not worth it to pitch something. It looks bad to pitch something where then they come back and say, OK, have you got access? You say, no, I'm going to go get access like that. That's just not a good look. So for that part of it, I think that was the main the main thing. And then in terms of like the A, B and C of reporting that I was missing,
00:20:02
Speaker
God, it was everything at the beginning. I mean, scenes, like, I think I had some maybe notion of, you know, what kind of stories I like to read and how I would do a story, but the idea of like, you need to orient your reporting around collecting certain scenes, because that is what's going to make your story entertaining to read. So it's one thing to gather the information, and it's another thing to try to make sure that whatever access you have and wherever it is you're going,
00:20:32
Speaker
that you're kind of pushing things in a direction that you will have some scene to reconstruct or that involves you or whatever it is that you can build several into the story. Because if you don't have scenes, you're writing essentially an expository story, which is fine. There are stories like that. But that wasn't what I wanted to do. And that's, like, narratively, it's very difficult if you don't have scenes. So that was part of it. And then there were other aspects of just kind of basic reporting, like,
00:20:59
Speaker
I mean, I remember a classic thing was I came back with an early story and I had this great editor, Jeff O'Brien, and I had quoted all these marketing people. It was a profile, basically, of a company and I had quoted all these marketing people. He was like, look, this is fine, but you need to go get quotes from real people. Nothing gets marketing people, but the marketing people for the thing that you're profiling, that's not who you want to quote. They should not be in your story. They might be there like,
00:21:28
Speaker
in the shadows, connecting you with people or even trying to horn in on interviews like PR people or what have you, but these are not the people that are going to make the story up. You need to get to the real people doing the stuff.
00:21:41
Speaker
It seems obvious. Once someone has said that to you, you say, oh, OK, yeah. But I just thought, I'm getting great quotes from these people. Look, they're so enthusiastic. They're saying exactly what I want them to say. And I didn't realize, you're kind of getting rolled if you're using those people. So just really basic stuff like that about how you challenge people, how you push back, how you sort of don't tell the story that's sitting out there that's very obvious, and you actually try to find something
00:22:09
Speaker
a layer deeper. I'll give you one more, which is that one of the first scam story I did, which was about this guy who was running this big scam that he was supposedly sending the internet over power lines to rural areas. That was his idea. He'd raised all this money, all these famous people involved. He had been profiled in the Wall Street Journal. And I pitched it as a straight up profile for Wired magazine. And I went to interview him as I was going to tell the story of this company.
00:22:37
Speaker
And I came back and I was talking to Alex Hurd, who was the executive editor at Wired at the time. I was like, it's just very weird. There's lots of this weird stuff. He wouldn't show me this and he wouldn't show me that. And he was the person who said, are you sure this isn't a scam? What you're describing to me are several hallmarks of a con artist. And I was like, oh, yeah, maybe so. And he's like, let's go back.
00:23:02
Speaker
and let's re-report it and let's think about it that way. And so I actually went back and confronted the guy and it ended up being this really, really fun and weird scam story. I mean, he went to jail. And so that kind of lesson, I've carried that with me everywhere, just that skepticism and that way in which you go into interviews, not assuming, not assuming that everyone's a con artist, obviously, but not assuming that the story you're gonna hear the first time is the story that is, you should,
00:23:32
Speaker
be a stenographer and write down.
Reporting vs. Writing
00:23:34
Speaker
Again, it sounds very basic from a reporting standpoint, but if you're coming in knowing nothing about reporting, it's a big, big lesson. Yeah. As you were starting and then as you started to get that experience, what appealed to you more, the reporting and research phase of things or the writing and rewriting phase of things? Definitely the reporting. I think like a lot of long-form journalists, I feel that
00:24:00
Speaker
When I'm in the reporting process, especially the early discovery and you're making connections and you're finding new people, that is the most exciting part. When you get out somewhere in the field and you're really hearing the stuff that you were hoping you would hear, those are magical moments. That's the juice. Yeah. I have a tendency to overdo it because I like that part so much and it's putting off the writing.
00:24:29
Speaker
Part which you know sitting with a blank page and typing words into it is not a thing that I necessarily enjoy doing like many people there are some people to do but Yeah, that part is always a struggle where it's sort of like I even like organizing information and coming up with the structure because that almost feels like Procrastination from the writing, you know, I don't really outline that much but sort of like I do do structures and kind of play with ideas and so I really enjoy that part and then
00:24:58
Speaker
And then it's just like getting something down. And once I have something down, I marginally enjoy the rewriting process depending how bad what I've put down actually is. Most of the time, it's not as bad as you think.
00:25:12
Speaker
you know, if you're kind of, if you get into that sort of low self-esteem mode as I do when you're writing, you know, fresh on a blank page and just sort of think like, wow, this is terrible. I'll never work again. Then when you look at it again the next day, you think, okay, well, it's not as bad as I thought. And if I start cleaning it up and writing through, then I can get there. So now I have this
00:25:33
Speaker
John Muallum, who's a good friend of mine and a really, really, really talented writer, he and I have come up with this kind of like little system, which is called garbaging, where you're just like filling pages with stuff that can be quotes or anything, and you're just like trying to form it in the most garbage way into something. And then the next step is like writing, but garbaging is like your initial step. It's just like getting stuff in there.
00:25:58
Speaker
I like that. And with that, recently you just said, when you get into that lowest self-esteem mode, which is something I deal with constantly and I'm sure countless thousands of other writers and reporters do,
00:26:14
Speaker
feel the same way. What's a way that you use to battle through that and in battle that negative self-talk so you can get the work done and realize like oh man like Evan I've done that you've done this before like you can you can do this again. I would say I don't have a consistent system like I'm always seeing people with
00:26:37
Speaker
like creativity systems or writing systems that sort of attack that problem in certain ways. The most common one is sort of like, you know, get up in the morning and write 500 words a day. And I've tried all that kind of stuff. And I think it's just so variable, but partly I've used several strategies. So one of them which works sometimes is just to be like, this is the easiest job in the world. Sometimes I just say that like,
00:27:07
Speaker
I'll just be like, look, all I have to do is type words in this document, you know, like, I can do this. I've done it before. It seems like I've stayed employed. I'm 43 years old. So this is not a hard job. And I should treat it like it's not a hard job. It's a fun job. Now that works a few times.
00:27:28
Speaker
But it's kind of like, you know, whenever you're in a bad situation, you're like someone's worse off than me. Like there's harder jobs than this. Like that has a limited efficacy because eventually you're like, no, this is hard. This is hard. And now I feel bad because I can't even do this easy job. So I use that sometimes. But it's all like a version of like forgiving yourself, I think. So sometimes I just I'm not like opposite of the like 500 words a day person. Sometimes I'll just be like, you know what? I'm not going to get anything done today. Like I'm stuck in this like, you know,
00:27:59
Speaker
self-loathing about where I'm at and I'm just going to either go do some reporting and just not even worry about writing anything or not do anything. Whatever, I'm a freelancer. I can take a day and just not do anything or a morning or an afternoon and just be like, I'm going to take advantage of the fact that I work at home and I'm going to go do something else.
00:28:20
Speaker
just like forgiving yourself so you don't get caught in the worst is when you get caught in some spiral where you're just sort of like you can't work because the work is not good enough and then then you can't work even more and you just you're just really stuck. So I feel like that's part of it. And then
00:28:37
Speaker
I mean, it's like I'm throwing out every possible strategy because this is literally what I do. Then some days it's like, it really is like the grind. Like, no, no, no. I'm going to write 1500 words a day. Like I'll write like 2000 or 2500 words in a day if I really get going. So I'll just be like, no, this is, I'm now that I'm on a roll. Like I'm not going to stop, you know, just plow through every meal and everything else. So stuff like that. Um, but if someone's looking for a system, I would say my system is like, it's okay not to have system to get out of that problem.
00:29:07
Speaker
You once said, too, I come from a perspective of being a freelance writer for a decade for magazines, this interview from a little while ago, and knowing a lot of freelance writers. And I think it would be a mistake to assume that nonfiction magazine writers or big list book writers are just killing it financially. It's a hustle. It will always be a hustle.
00:29:26
Speaker
And I love that. And I wonder if you could speak to the nature of your hustle and how you've been able to craft a freelance career around writing long form narrative magazine stories and some other things thrown in the mix.
Freelance Journalism Hustle
00:29:42
Speaker
But how did you what was the nature of your hustle to make that happen?
00:29:47
Speaker
So mine has evolved because I've been, I've been doing it for a while now. Um, you know, when I started out, it was, I did freelance research. I mean, I had research gigs, you know, fact checking gigs that paid pretty well. And so that was kind of my anchor in term financially, that was my anchor. And I feel like that's a thing that people don't always talk about as like, a lot of people have some financial anchor, whether it's, you know, money from their parents or,
00:30:16
Speaker
Or, you know, whatever an inheritance they got or its job that they don't really want to talk about. But I think when you're starting as a freelancer, starting from absolute zero and then chasing checks from magazines and other publications, online publications, it's like.
00:30:30
Speaker
That's a nightmare because you have to have some basis to build upon. Otherwise, you also end up doing a million things and scattered and you can't do the things that you actually wanted to freelance to do in the first place. So at the beginning for me, it was freelance fact checking. And then I got enough momentum going that I did have money coming in from assignments. So even though a check might take
00:30:54
Speaker
a long time after the thing even ran i had the last one that ran six months before it's a you start to develop a kind of schedule that you're working with and then. You get big ones and little ones and like some of them paid really well and then i would just fill in with you know.
00:31:12
Speaker
like there was one year I randomly because of a story I had done like there was a lot of speaking interest like so I would go do speaking gigs and they paid really well and then like as the year went on they like kind of dried up and then they were gone and then I was on to something else so it was always a matter of kind of like
00:31:30
Speaker
trying to supplement with things that didn't require me to sort of like take a job. My goal was always like, I just want to hang on and like not take a job. Because once you take a job, it's just really, really difficult to sort of freelance on the side. Then I started my own magazine, Atavist, and then I did have a job. So my freelancing kind of really dried up as it does because I was running this magazine. I wrote for the magazine, I wrote
00:31:55
Speaker
two stories for Adivis and then I wrote the original Mastermind series because those are things that were easily navigable around working there. It made sense to tell people, oh, I'm going to report a story for us. But I turned down a bunch of assignments because it was very, very awkward to say, hey, all of your working on Adivis magazine is awesome. I'm going to go write a story for the New York Times Magazine or The New Yorker. That did not seem like the right thing to do. Then I had a salary and I had benefits.
00:32:23
Speaker
I was a normal working employee there for a while and then just last year we sold the magazine and I had actually given up my salary a year before but then I sort of formally left and returned but at that point I had a book contract so I was working off the portion of the book advance that I was getting paid over time and so now the book is done so now I'm back to fully freelancing and returning to sort of like
00:32:50
Speaker
Pitching stories and getting assignments and seeing when the checks come in so I've kind of like gone the full gamut and now I'm back to where I was in like 2003 What was that experience like selling out of us you know your your baby this thing you helped This thing you found it and then handing it over was what was that like for you? I mean in one sense it was hard because
00:33:15
Speaker
I think there were different reasons why we ended up selling it. But one of the reasons was that we could keep it as a break even sort of enterprise, making a little bit of money. But it was required a lot of effort and frankly, like a lot of sacrifice on the part of myself and my business partner to do that. And we had sort of like, almost broken out and become a bigger thing.
00:33:43
Speaker
with the software side of the business and then that hadn't really worked. And so then we'd had to scale back and that was a really terrible experience. And, but then we had this sort of steady state, very small publication, but the, the Adamus magazine was still doing exactly what it had always done. Like we'd never cut back editorial, uh, in all of that process. So it felt like we were accomplishing what we'd want to accomplish, but we just didn't have like a platform to make it any bigger or to make it sort of feel like
00:34:12
Speaker
it was permanently sustainable. So that was the reason why we wanted to sell it. And then it was a matter of could we find someone who would, we were sure, we can never be sure, but we were confident would keep doing what we wanted it to do. So when we found automatic and we started talking to them and we discovered that they were interested in actually like keeping the editorial going and the software side too, then it was a good fit. And so, you know, we, there were other possibilities of ways to
00:34:43
Speaker
you know, go in other directions. But I think that was the one where we really felt, and it's proven true so far, like they really cared about what it was, what the publication was doing, and they wanted to do more of it. And so it felt like that was, that was a comfortable way to end it. And I, it's not a secret among people that know me that like, I didn't really like being in charge of a thing at all.
00:35:04
Speaker
I didn't enjoy that experience and I didn't really feel like it was me at my best. I don't think I was like a horrible boss or anything. It was maybe sort of the opposite but like a little bit too much of a people pleaser in that scenario and you need to be a little bit different when you're managing people. I don't know.
00:35:25
Speaker
Mostly, I had always wanted to return to writing, and I missed reporting and writing. And so I was kind of excited to get back to that full time. Yeah, there's something to be said for going back to your soccer days of being on the pitch versus on the sidelines as a coach, right? You just kind of want to be in the thick of things, in the action.
00:35:46
Speaker
Yeah. And even, I mean, it, it also evolved where at the beginning of Adam's magazine, I was editing the stories. And so I really felt like I was putting to use a lot of what I had learned over the years. And I was helping other writers and, you know, really digging in and I could feel like I could help stories get better, help reporting get better. Um, but then it, I was hiring after that we had,
00:36:12
Speaker
wonderful editors who were editing the stories and I was just top editing the stories and then it felt even more like I was just sort of managing people and doing business strategy and partnerships and going to horrible meetings with horrible people to talk about money basically all the time.
00:36:27
Speaker
All the time so that was that was being way off the field like that was being like the like the person in like the Skybox although that's a little bit highfalutin for the owner basically who's like the business of the of the team as opposed to actually digging into any any part of the editorial so I definitely I missed that and also I
00:36:52
Speaker
I
Tools and Preparation for Reporting
00:36:52
Speaker
missed being on the end of it where I'm gathering the information, where I'm able to shape a story, I'm able to do the initial creative part of it. I really did feel like I was alienated from the job, the career that I had actually chosen for myself.
00:37:09
Speaker
And so say you're going on a reporting trip, and let's say you're going to Manila. What's in your backpack? What are your reporting tools so you can gather all the information that you can to make the most of a trip, especially if it takes you halfway across the world? Well, in terms of literal tools, it's pretty simple. I don't have any special things that I've discovered. I got my digital tape recorder. I got my laptop. I've got my phone.
00:37:39
Speaker
And that's pretty much it, a bunch of notebooks. While in an ideal world, you'd like to tape record everything, particularly for this book, a lot of the reporting I was doing, you get people who just don't want to be taped, even if they're on the record, they don't want to be taped. And you could argue with them and say,
00:38:01
Speaker
as I do and say no no it's just so I quote you accurately and they're just they're sort of like no I don't want my voice on tape saying this stuff so you know I ended up taking a lot of notes like I filled I can see the pile of notebooks from my desk that I that I filled up old school like you know writing as fast as I can for many many of these interviews obviously I did a lot of taped ones too so
00:38:24
Speaker
You know, that's basically what I'm working with when I go on a trip like that is walking in somewhere with a notebook, asking if I can tape, if I can tape, I will, and then otherwise just sort of following people around and scribbling as fast as possible.
00:38:40
Speaker
How's your penmanship? Do you lose a lot of notes sometimes because you're like, shit, I can't remember what I wrote down. This is terrible. I know there's something good here, but I can't read it. I can read my writing. I don't write shorthand. So I do a fast talker. I have a lot of trouble.
00:39:03
Speaker
you know, getting full big quotes. So I mean, there are even some people in the book that my editor Andy Ward, you know, would say like,
00:39:12
Speaker
With this guy, it feels like you have kind of newspaper quotes. And usually the reason for that was that I was writing. They were not taped. I was writing. Because I also try to be very careful as anyone who has taken notes and also taped has the experience of discovering that your notes are often not very good. And sometimes you write things down incorrectly, obviously. So my notes, I do have a whole coding system with symbols of what is a quote and what's not. And I'm very careful in the moment.
00:39:41
Speaker
To like focus on if i have a quote and it's marked as a quote i am getting it down even if it's kind of short and then everything else is just marked as a note where it's just informational it's not a quote so you know the biggest on that is.
00:39:56
Speaker
for a book, for a magazine store, you really want to get rich quotes. You really want to hear someone talking as much as you can. So that becomes difficult because I just, not knowing shorthand, like I just can't write fast enough to get huge, huge amounts of spoken word stuff down. But I think I'm a decent note taker. I mean, I'm pretty careful at least.
00:40:16
Speaker
And so would you say that it was your background in tech that was maybe a lead domino several years ago that ultimately leads you to Paul LaRue?
00:40:30
Speaker
That was certainly part of it. I mean, that's, that's what sort of got me into journalism in the first place in terms of the reason I got that internship at Wired was just that I, I did understand technology. Like I had worked as basically a computer programmer in some sense. So like I could program in an old language called Pascal. And so like, I knew how computers worked. And at that time that was very valuable knowledge. It was sort of the beginning of digital technology taking over our lives. So definitely for years I was writing very tech
00:40:58
Speaker
oriented stories and always trying to push more towards, push not away from technology, but towards more narrative stories, towards, I always wanted to, you know, be writing about people, not about, you know, the newest discoveries or the companies in Silicon Valley doing X, Y, and Z, like really finding the characters, for lack of a better word, who, you know, would make a story feel like a short story or piece of fiction in some sense. So that was kind of what was driving me. And then,
00:41:28
Speaker
I started doing crime stories partly because I'm fascinated by scammers and con artists and I feel like everyone is and so you sort of endlessly write about these people even though in some sense a lot of them are the same that how they pull off their their scam is always a little bit different and a little bit fascinating and also it was a good way for me to kind of combine my skills so like
00:41:50
Speaker
getting into crime reporting but also things that had a tech orientation like that was a place where there weren't a ton of people working and so I felt like now there are I mean now you talk about any politics is wrapped up
LaRue's Criminal Enterprise
00:42:02
Speaker
in that so like now it's a much different situation but I felt like oh that's my way to kind of like edge edge a little bit away from the pure
00:42:10
Speaker
more pure technology writing. So Paul LaRue, he kind of is exactly at the intersection of those things, like things that I'm interested in, online identity, crime,
00:42:23
Speaker
how you use technology in the service of various illicit endeavors, and also this kind of like underworld startup. So it was kind of this mirror image of the startup world that I sometimes covered out of San Francisco that now had been constructed at the same time in this sort of underworld arena, and that kind of fascinated me. So that's what sort of grabbed me about him. I mean, the way I literally found out about him was
00:42:50
Speaker
Is not that exciting. It's like one of his henchmen was arrested Joseph Hunter and that was like clearly gonna be a magazine story like there was something there that was so strange and So it's just so full of international intrigue that there was no way that there wasn't gonna be a story there but the question was like what's behind it and I spent a long time trying to figure out what was behind it and I felt like I
00:43:13
Speaker
I knew there was an entity there and I couldn't figure out what it was. And then the name Paul LaRue Allen Foyer at the New York Times like got the name Paul LaRue. And so I'm not even responsible for like exposing Paul through to the world. I just when that happened, I thought, oh, that makes sense. This is the piece that I've been looking for. And then I just thought, well, is there still enough here? And it turned out there was there was like an incredible amount that had not been told.
00:43:41
Speaker
So as you were getting deeper and deeper into this story, what were you thinking as you were gathering this information and then realizing how tangled this international web that Paul LaRue basically made out of his own makeshift office? What was that like for you just to see this thing unfold? It was a constant.
00:44:05
Speaker
feeling of being stunned. I mean, it's the best feeling you can have in reporting, I think.
00:44:12
Speaker
where you're just, you think this story is one thing and you start digging into it and then, you know, every few days I would uncover something and just say, I cannot believe this. To the extent that in, at Atavist, because I was originally writing this series for Atavist, our editor at the time, Katya Batshko, we were using Slack, you know, the chat service for the whole company. And so I would Slack her, if I was on a reporting trip or just uncovering something and it would be like,
00:44:41
Speaker
this is crazy like holy shit i cannot believe this and then she just made like a channel on the slack thing that was called holy shit and she was just like put put all that stuff there so i would just fill it with like crazy details and it was sort of assumed so she didn't have to literally say like holy shit every time um but it was like that it was like
00:45:00
Speaker
just uncovering that he was behind this encryption software and his connection to a piece of software that became one of the most used pieces of encryption software that he had written the basis for in the late 90s and early 2000s.
00:45:17
Speaker
That was a huge thing and then it was sort of like all these mercenaries that he was connected to and what they were being used for and then sort of gold trading and Africa gold buying in Africa and all this black market timber and it just it just kept growing and growing and growing.
00:45:32
Speaker
to where it actually became difficult to determine, to separate myth from reality sometimes because some of the things that were happening were so insane and verifiable that then you'd hear another crazy story and you think, well, that can't be possible. But then this other thing was possible. So kind of like, I say this in the book, like it kind of like throws off your radar for bullshit because it was so extraordinary that then there's a temptation to kind of believe anything about this guy because he's clearly capable of that. But
00:46:00
Speaker
from a reporting perspective, I've never had an experience like that that was that good, where it just kept coming. You know, you just scratch somewhere and they were just more and more. Yeah, and this was, as I was reading it, I got this impression and then it was kind of echoed when I listened to you in a PJ talk on Reply All, that what he created was so much, to me it felt like a programmer programming this,
00:46:30
Speaker
this thing. He's just like, I can create anything from whole cloth. And it felt like a video game, like he was playing a game. And, and in so many ways, whatever he said, he was able to manifest. So what struck you is about about that very thing, when you were researching this guy and how he was able to quite literally, orchestrate and manipulate this thing as a computer programmer.
00:46:57
Speaker
Yeah, I feel like the two original questions that were animating my reporting were, how did he do it and why did he do it? Those were the big things. The more it became clear that this was a huge international operation that no one really had heard about in terms of the public, except in these tiny ways where it surfaced,
00:47:20
Speaker
you know, it was sort of like, how is, how is this even possible? And in some ways, like the how and the why kind of came together in that the way it was possible was because he treated it that way, like because he looked at the world as, you know, maybe not literally as a video game, like he's sitting there saying like, I'm playing level four in Somalia, like, but but there was some element of that where like, the world is a place where from your if you're smart enough, and you have
00:47:49
Speaker
creative ideas and you have the ability to get into all parts of the world, whether it's because he was starting to earn a fortune on his online pharmaceutical business, then you can actually build new worlds of your own.
00:48:04
Speaker
and you can make things happen just by virtue of kind of extending your virtual hand into some arena. And so there was some mix of like him discovering over time that he could do that and that also kind of being the motivation that drove him to do more. Like the fact that he could do it is what made him think like, oh, I did this. I got into cocaine trafficking. Why not get into buying things out of North Korea? Let's buy some meth out of North Korea. You know, let's set up a,
00:48:32
Speaker
a militia and set up a base there and we'll do all kinds of operations out of there like he just started coming up with these ideas. Partly driven by the fact that he could make things work he had made insane things work already and so that sort of uniqueness in terms of even his ambition.
00:48:51
Speaker
Was different than you know, a traditional drug cartel which is sort of built up around Growing processing drugs or being the middle Trans shipper for drugs to enter a country and then you find the you know consuming Customer there and you sell a bunch and you make a bunch of money This was sort of more of a conglomerate idea like I'm building something and I can build out in all these directions I can diversify and that was one of the things that was just like continuously extraordinary about about this guy and
00:49:21
Speaker
And I know you don't want to psychoanalyze the guy, of course, but did you get a sense that given that he was adopted and he didn't take that particularly well, and the fact that his original encryption software, the source code of which he left open,
00:49:41
Speaker
Was later used by someone else to make you know a huge business and so did you get a sense that maybe like part of this guy's empire Was maybe revenge based the way a bullied kid might lash out. I think that that may have been part of it and you know, I had the experience of talking to a lot of people who knew him and I
00:50:06
Speaker
Some of them, that was their explanation for everything. Their explanation was he's this nerd kid who nobody liked, and so now he's taking revenge on the world. There may have been some of that in there, although I'd never heard any specifics about him being actually bullied. That may or may not be true in his life. You could see it being true, but he never cited that. He did cite the family stuff a lot. He felt
00:50:31
Speaker
betrayed in terms of his family, clearly, because he would tell even random employees sometimes, you know, things that were not exactly true, like being abandoned as a child. And, you know, he actually, I think had fairly loving parents, his adoptive parents, but clearly discovering that he had been adopted was a big deal for him.
00:50:49
Speaker
And that was a substantial thing that was in his sort of psychological cauldron that was driving him. And then writing a piece of software that was very highly regarded and not making any money on it, and then seeing other people making a bunch of money on the same thing.
00:51:07
Speaker
That was also a motivation so i think those these things all sort of came together into a person who also like happen to come up with a brilliant scheme for selling online pharmaceuticals that would make him rich maybe chosen something else he thought about getting into online gambling.
00:51:26
Speaker
Maybe he was so smart that he would have succeeded in online gambling, but it's a different kind of business and he might not have found the same kind of disruptive business model and he might have ended up a totally different person. So I think the circumstances and his intellect sort of merged with this mix of motivations. At the absolute root of it, you know, there are people who will say he's a total sociopath in terms of the way he later was ordering murders and things like that.
00:51:52
Speaker
I kind of, as you say, I leave that to people to speculate because I don't know that anyone's really had the kind of intimate conversations with him, whether they would know that or not know that.
00:52:02
Speaker
In the book, you also wrote that as I mapped LaRue's sprawling network physically on my bedroom wall and a collection of multicolored Post-it notes like some demented corporate ideas meeting, lines began to intersect. Because this is such a tangled web, so many different characters spanning the globe
00:52:23
Speaker
How did you get your head around this and organize your notes so that you could, you know, put this a maniacally posted wall in your office so you could, you know, figure it out, get your head around it so you could attack it?
00:52:39
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, part of it was trying to actually see it visually. So I mean, I was trying to avoid doing the movie cliche thing with the pins and the pictures of the mug shots or whatever. It wasn't really that. Most of the things that were on the Post-its on my wall were companies, were names of companies. So they were people and they were companies. And it was partly like being able to capture
00:53:03
Speaker
something that I had found and like someone that I knew was associated with it and then if I came across it again being able to like look up and say okay have I come across this before and if I had that I could add another
00:53:18
Speaker
attached, posted to that that said, okay, this company is also associated with Hong Kong. This company is also registered in London. I've also found it connected to the Somali operation. So I see what this one was used for. So that was sort of the point of visualizing it was that I couldn't keep it all in my head. Like I couldn't remember
00:53:37
Speaker
even the names of all the companies. Even today, I can't remember the names of all the companies. There's dozens and dozens and dozens of shell companies and different operations that it was connected to. The other side of it eventually was it was too much for putting an item on my walls, not big enough for that. I actually have the craziest Evernote that you've ever seen. It has thousands of notes.
00:54:03
Speaker
and hundreds of thousands of pages worth of documents and they're all tagged in multiple ways and stored in multiple ways so that i can search across them so then it was a matter of like. You know something would come up and literally search for it and find everything that was also associated with it and then tag and then attach it to these different ways and that was kind of how i ended up eventually organizing the research.
00:54:26
Speaker
because it was impossible to even remember where things were. By the end of the book, I feel like I have this corpus of knowledge that now is not really useful anymore because the book is done where I really can find stuff. If you ask me, where's something about what Ballaroo said about this? I'll say, oh, I know that's on page 500 of this thing. But as I was going, it was impossible to keep up with without some sort of database
00:54:56
Speaker
approach. And there's a great little passage you wrote too where you say, but now after some of my reporting was public, I was experiencing a journalistic analog of what in quantum physics is called the observer effect, the inability of a researcher to study a phenomenon without themselves altering the phenomenon they are studying.
00:55:19
Speaker
And
Observer Effect in Reporting
00:55:19
Speaker
give us a sense of what that was like for you in the midst of this as you felt yourself maybe getting pulled into the orbit of the story instead of being as detached as maybe you wanted to be. Yeah, it was a little bit surreal. I mean, I experienced it from fairly early on because when I, for instance, went to the Philippines,
00:55:42
Speaker
Paul LaRue was in custody already, but no one knew where he was. He was being kept in complete secrecy. So there were some people, even in the U.S., who thought they might have let him out, or they might be using him as an informant. He might be out of prison but being used as an informant. No one really knew. And the whole court case was sealed, connected to him.
00:56:03
Speaker
In a place like the Philippines, the rumors were just rampant. He's coming back. He could be here. I don't know that anyone thought he was actually literally there at the time, but they thought he's out there somewhere in the world. I believed he was actually in custody, and I had pretty good information that that was true. That was the first time where people were asking me, where is he? What do you know about him?
00:56:24
Speaker
you know what are they gonna do with him and i found myself doing interviews where half of it was me asking them about their experience and half of it was them asking me like what did i learn and what could i tell them even about the business they were involved in because it was very compartmentalized people didn't know about the other side of the business.
00:56:43
Speaker
even when they were working for the rue. Some of them didn't even know the rue's name when they were working for it. All they knew were pseudonyms. So they were kind of learning all this stuff from me. Even cops who had investigated some small part of it but didn't actually know what it was all about because their investigation got shut down or whatever it was. So that's the first place I experienced that. And then when I published the stories, it got crazier because
00:57:08
Speaker
they were being cited in court documents after that, of lawyers who would say, essentially, we can't find out anything about this guy, so we're just going to cite these articles in terms of proving X, Y, or Z about why my client should be sentenced to something. Sometimes it would surface in, this guy was a terrible, threatening guy, and that's why my client should get less time because, essentially, he was doing it under duress, and no one had succeeded at that point in their
00:57:36
Speaker
and actually offering that as defense for guilt or innocence, they had all pleaded to being guilty of various things. But for their sentencing, I would see my articles popping up or people signing it in court, or even it was in some congressional testimony. So that was a strange experience because I felt like, and not that I was fully influencing it, that I was so important to the process, but just
00:58:05
Speaker
I was seeing the results of the other side of my reporting. And then I was also hearing from now many, many more people who are reading it and saying, oh, you didn't find me, but now I've found you. And now I want to tell you what happened to me. So that's like the really fortunate aspect of publishing a little bit of it is that people come to you that you weren't able to find. So that's like the easiest reporting in the world.
00:58:33
Speaker
With so much paranoia swirling around the people involved in the story, how were you able to garner trust with these people, given the paranoia swirling around this guy? Well, the publishing the stories helped with that, too. So initially it was very, very hard. I mean, I had a lot of people who either, you know, straight up hung up on me or were sort of like, how did you find me and then hung up on me? And then I had
00:59:02
Speaker
people who were very concerned about how dangerous it would be to talk to me, what would happen to them, either that they would expose themselves to law enforcement or that LaRue would know that they had talked. And that would somehow put them on his hit list, even if he was still in custody. So that was a matter of, I granted a lot of anonymity, more anonymity than I wanted to grant for sure in the initial stories, just because
00:59:29
Speaker
there was just no way to even get the information, in many cases, from people who were genuinely and legitimately afraid that someone was going to kill them. And in fact, oftentimes, I later discovered that they were on the hit list for Paul LaRue. Like, there was a journalist named Mar Subnad, who was very, very generous with me in the Philippines. And he kind of said, like, I think I'm on the hit list. Like, a cop told me that I was on the hit list. And so he'd sort of told me this story about, you know,
00:59:58
Speaker
cop sort of letting him you know, look at the police file or something and like discovering that he was actually on the hit list Paulers hit list and Not that I didn't believe it But it was sort of early in my reporting and I was like that's insane like I can't and then later it Pauler who fully confirmed it too, so You know things like that and then and then of course when the stories came out it had like that a same a version of the other effect which is a
01:00:27
Speaker
people now were more willing to talk because they could see what it was that I was trying to do. And they could see also that a lot of other people had talked. So, you know, when you were just approached by some reporter, you've been involved in this violent organization, either perpetuating the violence or being afraid of it or just learning about it. And the reporter is saying, oh, trust me, like, it'll all be fine.
01:00:51
Speaker
You know, it's very, very difficult to believe that. But if you can see, oh, here's what he's doing with the information and all these other people I didn't know were talking or clearly talking, then I had people who were willing to go on the record who had not been willing to go on the record before. There were still lots of people who wouldn't. And so there are some anonymous people in the book, but I was able to fill out much more on the record material. And also at that point, people were a little more confident that LaRue was, you know,
01:01:18
Speaker
going to be put away for some amount of time, even if it's not that long a time potentially, and so they were a little more comfortable as time went on. Was this always going to be a book for you, or did you find that you were content with doing magazine pieces, but then those magazine pieces, like you said, people just started coming to you once they were published, and then it probably became much more book worthy at that point. Was that the game plan?
01:01:48
Speaker
It was always going to be a book, actually. In fact, I sold the book before the first article ever came out. And I will say I'm not the most prescient person about many things, but that was one thing I did feel like I could predict, which was that if we did the series,
01:02:07
Speaker
It would open up so much more reporting like I felt like I had enough to do a series that would be really interesting but that there were just many many things that I could not get to that if you gave me another two years and I had the calling card of the series itself.
Evan's Future Projects
01:02:24
Speaker
So the whole premise of the book proposal even was I'm going to do the series. It's going to be pretty big. It's going to have a lot of stuff in it. But there's a there's a kind of layer to this thing that I it's just not possible for me to get to right now, but I will be able to get to after it comes out. So that's kind of what I was selling in terms of the book. Unfortunately, that did turn out to be true. And then the challenge of writing the book was
01:02:51
Speaker
Because of that's the way I'd set it up, I very much did not want to have the book be a padded expansion of the stories. So there are bits of the book that are taken straight from the stories, like you can find them if you've read them both, but I did tear it all apart and sort of start again in terms of wanting to structure and write it and have it be a completely different type of narrative than what you got in those sort of weekly installments.
01:03:16
Speaker
And you write in the book, too, about these attribution agreements that you would have with people. And what were those conversations like as you tried to lobby them to be not just on the record anonymously, but on the record with their name attached to what they said? It was often a struggle. I mean, the whole thing around attribution is a struggle. And I always find that people have
01:03:48
Speaker
what they believe to be clear black and white view of anonymous sources and not for attribution sources that generally comes from looking at a certain type of reporting in newspapers and the New York Times and the Washington Post about how what you should use anonymous sources for and when you can use them and people have all these ideas that they're so sure about. But if you go report something in which people are afraid
01:04:08
Speaker
particular reporters have this very
01:04:17
Speaker
either for their lives or their livelihoods for really good reasons, but you still think it's important to get the information. You encounter all kinds of weird gray areas and ethical questions to which no one has clear answers. Like a classic one is, you know, there's off the record on background, not for attribution. There are these terms that get interpreted different ways. And the best thing to do is to be very clear about what you mean in any of them when you're talking to someone.
01:04:46
Speaker
I'm talking to a mercenary who has never talked to a reporter before, who is worried about another mercenary coming to kill them. I would explain this stuff and they would say to me, look, I don't care about your terms. I don't care about these words. Don't burn me. Don't burn me.
01:05:07
Speaker
It leaves you with all these dilemmas like, what if that person, so then I would say, okay, what I'm going to do is I'm going to do it not for attribution. So your name will not be in there. You'll be called an ex South African soldier or whatever. But then the question is, if that person tells you something that will reveal their identity. Do you hold that back on their behalf?
01:05:26
Speaker
even though they haven't told you, you should hold it back because you know that that might expose them. Like there's all these questions and you can go over them with people and then I would go back to them and say, look, you understand that if I describe you in certain ways, you will be recognizable to people who are in your world. And sometimes they would say, Oh yeah, I totally, that's fine. I don't care. I only care about my name not being Google-able associated with this. And then other times they would, that would freak them out. So,
01:05:54
Speaker
It's a very, that part is a very complicated process. And then trying to get them on the record is a, that's a cleaner discussion at least where you're saying, Hey, look, this, whatever reason you're talking to me, usually the conversation is sort of like, you obviously want to share this information with me. Whatever reason you're talking to me, it's going to be so much more powerful if your name is behind it. Like.
01:06:16
Speaker
this kind of stuff you're saying anonymously, it reads one way, and with your name behind it, it reads completely differently. And that's where, you know, people like Paul LaRue's cousin, who had originally not let me use his name, then read the series and sort of understood what I was trying to do, he sort of, he had a reason why he wanted this information to come out about his cousin. And so he eventually said, you know what? He still said, like, don't burn me. But he said,
01:06:46
Speaker
Yeah, you can put my name, you can put my name to it.
01:06:49
Speaker
And with the writing of the book too, and maybe this was unique to my experience, but to me it felt, it had this film noir kind of feel to it. The reporters in there doing the work, you're in there in a very sort of tasteful way and not this way that says, hey look at me, I love your presence in this book. And the way you weave the other elements together, it did have this almost detective film noire feel to it.
01:07:19
Speaker
Was that something you were cognizant of or was that just kind of maybe my reader experience? I would say the film noir part is probably not. I probably didn't do that intentionally. That's probably unintentional. I think my intention with including myself in the story was sort of twofold. One was that it is a complicated story and it's hard to follow and I knew I was going to put a lot of characters in it and I also knew that
01:07:48
Speaker
I was maybe going to jump around in time a little bit. It was not going to be strictly chronological because it just wasn't possible. And so those combination of elements made me think on the advice of some like really good editors, including on the original out of a series, Joel Lovell and Katya Bachko, that you needed a kind of guide. Like you just needed someone to pop in once in a while and say, almost like, here's what you're, here's what you're learning about. Or like, here's where we're looking. Or here's how we found this out. And that was the second part of it too, where
01:08:19
Speaker
this type of reporting, oftentimes there would be people who were in scenarios where it was them and one other person and that person is dead.
01:08:29
Speaker
you could talk about getting two sources for information as much as you want. But if there were only two people there and one of them's dead and you've got the other one, you have the only source, but you also have a source who can potentially tell you a gilded version of what happened and there's nothing you can do about it. So I wanted to also show that that's what was happening because I did want to use reporting that was sort of, I could triangulate around it, but not fully check it.
01:08:58
Speaker
because it just wasn't possible to check it. But I wanted to explain that that was sort of what was happening. So that was the other thing is I wanted to give people a sense of like, this is how this is reported. And I, this is how like serendipitous some of it was. And this is how calculated some of the reporting was. And this is how it all came together. Like, I'm fascinated with that part of the process. And I was trying to like, imbue the book with some of that fascination with like how you try to do this.
01:09:21
Speaker
I think it also gives the reader a chance to kind of breathe a bit from the larger story at hand. When your chapters would come in, it kind of lets you recalibrate and reset before we really dive back into this nefarious web of stuff going on. Is that kind of an intent as well?
01:09:45
Speaker
Yeah, I'm glad you said that because that was that was also definitely intentional to kind of give you a space. And even there's literally one point where I kind of describe, like, I can't remember exactly what I write, but like something about how confusing it is to almost give you license to be like, Oh, yeah, I'm having trouble following this, too. Like, I'm not I'm not going to deny that, like, it's hard to keep up with who everyone is. So I wanted to kind of like create this
01:10:11
Speaker
this narrative stream or maybe it's like a narrative pond where you can just relax for a minute and be like, wow, that's some crazy shit. And here's how it came about and here's another guy I talked to and we'll just do a little bit of this and then we'll dive back into what happened. So yeah, that was definitely a hope.
01:10:31
Speaker
And something I always love talking about too with respect to book writing and certainly long magazine pieces fall into this category as well. It's how you deal with sort of the ugly middle or the messy middle of a draft. It's something I like to say that you're kind of too far away from the shore to swim back but the lighthouse is still like miles and miles away and you have no choice but to keep on swimming.
01:10:57
Speaker
With this book, with so much material and so much reporting and research, how did you navigate the middle of this draft to get to the end? Well, for me, part of the struggle of that part of the process was trying to maintain a belief that I could successfully keep all these characters in it. Because I did have a lot of doubts, and I had this voice in my head that sort of was like,
01:11:26
Speaker
Thinking that I would hear from my editor whenever at whatever point I finally turn in the manuscript Like you've just got to cut three of these people out of this like this is just too much to keep track of so I think in that portion where I was I was already I was definitely like very far from shore because I had written the first third and
01:11:46
Speaker
to set up each of those characters. So I was trying to like establish them in your mind and the first third, and then you wouldn't actually really meet many new people for the rest of the book, even though you had met a lot of them already.
Balancing Career and Family
01:11:59
Speaker
And so it was kind of like literally in the middle third of the book, where I just kind of thought like, what is the balance of providing details in each one of these narratives, chapter by chapter, without making it seem like
01:12:15
Speaker
this person should really be the book. It was almost like fighting a battle with a pretend editor.
01:12:22
Speaker
where I thought, I don't want my editor to look at this and say, this book is actually just about Felix Glossen. You should go back and just trim all these other people out and just make it a book about him. I was really devoted to this multiple perspectives and trying to understand different people and why they got into it. And so that's really what I was wrangling with. And then the struggle through the whole thing is I had so much detail. I could have written an 800 page book.
01:12:52
Speaker
like the book's 375 pages the actual text but like easily double I could have written that so like where to cut back
01:12:59
Speaker
you know, where to like, hold back even incredible, incredible details that I've, you know, feel like they should be in the book. And if I don't put them in the book, they're lost forever. That was, that was a big part of that middle process is being like, okay, I mean, I cut my like, extra text file is like 60,000 words, probably. It's an insane amount of stuff I just wrote and threw in the garbage.
01:13:24
Speaker
And given that you've got a young family too, how does that maybe change your approach to pursuing stories of this nature going forward in this sort of next phase of your, or current phase of your career? I'm glad you asked me that because no one ever asked that. I was just talking to Taffy Brodesser-Hackner and she was pointing out that men never get asked that question and women get asked that question every single time.
01:13:52
Speaker
you know, someone like her who has a family, like she gets asked that question every time she does a public thing, you know, and I never get asked that question. But I actually spend a lot of time thinking about that question, especially now because I'm kind of getting back into freelancing also when I started.
01:14:07
Speaker
when I started reporting this book, I didn't have any kids at all. Like that's how long this book took. And now I have two. So, and they're little. So it is a big challenge. I mean, I think the biggest part of it is, is traveling, traveling for reporting. And, you know, I had already gotten into in the book, you know, trying to do really maximally targeted reporting trips, where a ton of planning is done in advance, where I might even,
01:14:36
Speaker
pay more for fixers than I would otherwise to just like set things up that I might otherwise just say like oh when I get there I can find this or that person because I just didn't want any empty space unnecessary empty space in the reporting because I want the trips to be as efficient as possible and not be going for longer than I need to go. On the other hand
01:15:00
Speaker
You can't have a reporting trip for a piece of narrative nonfiction that doesn't have some space in it for serendipity and doesn't have some space in it for, you know, tacking on a day. If you find the person you never thought you were going to find, but they're only available the next day. So it's really like a complex balance with my wife also has like a big important job more important than mine.
01:15:23
Speaker
And so there's a real swirl of responsibilities. And the great thing is if you're a freelance writer who works at home, you can spend a lot of time taking care of kids. You can spend a lot of time being the person that picks them up from school or daycare and gets dinner ready. And so I do a lot of that when I'm not out reporting. And so
01:15:46
Speaker
There's it's not it's not like a literal like time trade-off where it's like I did this and you do that It's just like our balance is around what I'm able to do when I'm home and I mean even when I was running still running out of it It's like you could not reach me between like five and eight like you cannot there's there's nothing that I will take between five and eight p.m. Because that's like when I'm taking care of the kids, so I
01:16:10
Speaker
stuff like that where you can kind of see the upside of it and take advantage of the upside of it so that when that trip comes, it doesn't hit as hard. And then it also factors in whether you have family. We happen to have my wife's family in New York, and that's incredibly important. That's why we would not move somewhere else, probably, because if I go away, someone can come help.
01:16:36
Speaker
And it's still a process of figuring that out and deciding what stories to do. And there was a time when I would take stories specifically so I could go away for the longest period of time possible. And I would look for stories in places I wanted to go. And now it's much more like I want to find the stories that I want to do and I still want to do the reporting that hopefully will make them the best they could possibly be. But I'm not out there looking for the story that requires me to be somewhere for a month.
01:17:05
Speaker
And LaRouze, when is he going to be sentenced? When's that coming up? I don't currently know. I mean, they had a date scheduled for March, and I don't think it's going to hold. But a lot of the stuff is still, it's not sealed, but it's sort of like they're very cagey about it. So they're currently awaiting, he's awaiting sentencing. So, you know, that date will probably change.
01:17:31
Speaker
It won't change so much that it won't be in the first half of this year, I would assume. But his lawyer is also negotiating with the Philippine government to try to figure out what might happen if he ended up getting deported there eventually. So I feel like that clouds it too. I would be really surprised if it didn't happen before the end of the summer, even with all potentially more delays. But there have been so many delays in these cases that I shouldn't really predict anything.
01:17:58
Speaker
Is this story done and is it done for you?
LaRue's Open-Ended Story
01:18:05
Speaker
It's certainly not done in terms of his sentence. His sentence is a big factor in how done it is. If he actually gets a kind of moderate sentence, if he gets 15 years and he's already served seven almost, he will serve this year, then
01:18:24
Speaker
I don't think there's anyone who's been connected to any part of this who doesn't believe that he won't restart some sort of similar business when he gets out or some sort of gray area to fully criminal business somewhere in the world. And he has a lot of money stashed away, most people believe. So in that sense, if he were to get out in some reasonable amount of time, the story just sort of starts again.
01:18:50
Speaker
But the second part of your question is, would I be the person who would cover that story? And I don't actually know the answer. I feel like in some sense, why throw away all that expertise if there is more, more about the route to be told. But on the other hand, I mean, I'm getting contacted now by even more people who refuse to talk to me during the original book, you know, mercenaries who say,
01:19:14
Speaker
Oh, I didn't realize what this was all about when you were sending me messages on Facebook and now you should write a book about me. And that stuff just is a little bit tiresome. It's like people trying to settle scores against each other and they don't like that someone else was portrayed a certain way or they were portrayed a certain way. And I don't want to be the person who's sort of like endlessly stringing out
01:19:33
Speaker
you know, LaRue-related information for the next period of time. If something new happens, then I might be the person who was qualified to go cover it. But I feel like that's some years away, no matter what.
01:19:46
Speaker
Well, this book is a masterpiece.
Conclusion and Listener Engagement
01:19:50
Speaker
You've done an amazing bit of writing and reporting here. It was a pleasure to read and I wish you continued success with it, Evan. For people who might not be familiar with you or your work, I find it hard to believe, but in the event that they are not, where can people find you online?
01:20:10
Speaker
They can find me at my website, which is they can just go to evanratliff.com. It's actually kazart.net. C-A-Z-A-R-T dot net is my actual website, but evanratliff.com will get you there. I'm on Twitter, ev underscore rat, and they can go by the book and any of their retailers or audiobook retailers or wherever they want to find that book, currently they can find it.
01:20:34
Speaker
And of course, you're one of the co-hosts of the brilliant long-form podcast as well. Yes. Yeah. Fantastic. Well, Evan, thanks again for the time. This was a ton of fun to get to talk to you, get to know you a little bit more, get to dig into your process about your work and especially this wonderful book. So continued success and we'll be in touch, all right? Thank you. Thanks for doing it. Yeah, of course. Absolutely. And take good care. You too. All right. Later. Bye.
01:21:05
Speaker
You see? I told you. I told you that was good, right? I think so. I think it was. Thanks to Sir Evan Ratliff. I have that kind of power on the show. I can knight anybody. He's at ev underscore rat on the Twitterverse. Be sure to hit him up. Let him know how much you love the book. Go buy that book.
01:21:28
Speaker
You know what, because there's a dwindling amount of readers out there, it's incumbent upon us as readers, people who still love books. And this is my little soapbox moment, not even scripted. I usually have a script here, and this is unscripted. It just came to my mind. As readers and lovers of books, I think we need to not only buy the books that we want to read, I think when we come across a book we want to read,
01:21:52
Speaker
we should buy that and buy one or two more to give away you know i mean these things have to spread that way because books like evans need to be in the hands of other other people and sometimes it's not gonna not gonna get there unless the real passionate readers out there are capable of sharing so that's uh... that's a little moment that is a moment in the outro as they say be sure to head over to brennidomare.com that's me
01:22:20
Speaker
four show notes to 140 plus episodes of this morass, this show, and a sign up for that monthly reading newsletter once a month. No spam. Can't beat it. I have tried. You can't beat it. Unsubscribe anytime but know that I take it super personally. What else?
01:22:39
Speaker
Oh yes. Keep the conversation going on Twitter, man. You can ping me at Brendan O'Mara and at cnfpod. And you want to barf? The show has an Instagram page now. At cnfpod. It's got two followers. Me and the wife. I can't believe she followed it, but she did.
01:22:55
Speaker
Doesn't listen to the show, but she followed the Instagram page. She loves Insta. And as always, you can like the show on Facebook, our favorite. You have no excuse for not seeing the show out there in the world, man. No excuse. Hey, what are you gonna do, BO? I guess that's it, friend. No sense in prolonging this shit show any longer if you can't do interview. See ya!