Patrick Radden Keefe investigates Russian money in London through a teenager’s suspicious death
- Written by Matthew Ricketson, Professor of Communication, Deakin University
New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe has become one of a small number of narrative non-fiction writers whose latest book is keenly anticipated. He has become such a byword for a certain kind of investigative reporting, he even cameoed as himself in the final scene of HBO hit series, Industry, this year. His fifth book, London Falling, has been eagerly awaited, largely thanks to the impact of his last two books, which minted his sterling reputation.
His 2018 book on the Troubles in Northern Ireland, Say Nothing, won the Orwell Prize and was adapted for a 2024 streaming series. His 2021 book about the opioid epidemic and the culpability of the Sackler family, Empire of Pain, was also adapted for streaming (as Painkiller) in 2023. (He has also published a collection of his magazine articles, Rogues. And his first book, Chatter, was published in 2005.)
Review: London Falling, by Patrick Radden Keefe (Picador)
The shortest gap between Keefe’s books is three years; the longest is nine, which is some wait for his fans. Unlike those crime novelists who produce annually, he deals in actual events and people, which are not so easily wrangled.
More of that later, as it intrinsic to Keefe’s methods and his success. Last month, London Falling, was published to intense interest and early acclaim.
London Falling begins with the death of a 19-year-old man, who fell from a luxury high-rise apartment in London in the early hours of November 29 2019, and gradually radiates outward.
Zac Brettler was an edgy, funny, ambitious young man from a comfortable, middle-class family who was fascinated by, then drawn to, wealth and power. He loved The Wolf of Wall Street, a film that revelled in rampant capitalism, and admired Vladimir Putin, telling a cousin democracy was overrated. He liked to tell tales so tall, even his friends called him out as a bullshit artist.
Then he moved out of home. Unknown to his parents, he invented a false identity as the son of a Russian oligarch. Worse, he fell in with shady business people and violent criminals. His apparent suicide shocked his parents, who spent a lot of time and emotional energy struggling to come to terms with their son’s death and the lies he had been telling them.
As his mother, Rachelle, commented, it felt like “trying to piece together a jigsaw in the dark”.
Zac’s teen years coincided with the rise of social media, intensifying whatever issues he was facing, as Keefe notes.
Zac might not have been delusional in a clinical sense, but he did inhabit a world in which social media was beginning to blur the boundary between reality and fantasy. Increasingly, any sense of a shared conscious existence was starting to give way to a more individualised, algorithmically bespoke form of virtual reality, in which our most personal and idiosyncratic anxieties and aspirations are reflected back to us, and magnified, by our smartphones.
Keefe follows every twist and turn in Matthew and Rachelle Brettler’s efforts to solve the mystery of their son’s death. Did he have a psychological breakdown that led him to take his own life? Was he so scared of the criminal he was associating with – Verinder Sharma, also known as Indian Dave – that he jumped to his death in the Thames? After all, he had told Sharma his fictitious Russian oligarch father was worth hundreds of millions of pounds.
A Google search will quickly tell you what happened once the deeply private Brettlers agreed to be interviewed by Keefe for a New Yorker article published in 2024. But given the extent to which Keefe has structured the book as a true crime mystery, complete with cliffhanger chapter endings, I would rather let you learn from the book what Radden Keefe concludes about the circumstances of Zac’s death, and whether the Brettlers have come to terms with it.
What can and should be discussed here is what Keefe describes as the “maddening incuriosity” of the police investigation. This means evidence is not gathered before the apartment where Zac was staying is cleaned.
The book details how Zac had been introduced to Verinder Sharma by Akbar Shamji, an endlessly charming but deeply dodgy businessperson he had been associating with. Shamji was in Sharma’s apartment with Zac on the night of Zac’s death, but Keefe shows how GPS data indicating Shamji’s exact movements immediately before and after Zac’s death went unexamined. And the police questioning about the holes and inconsistencies in Shamji’s account of events has all the punch of overcooked pasta.
The police are part of a wider weakening of institutions following the flood of dirty money into London after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, writes Keefe.
The UK introduced a new visa program in 2008, whereby foreign nationals willing to invest millions of pounds could “effectively buy status as permanent legal residents”. One in four of the 3,000 people who took advantage of this program over the next seven years were Russian. Boris Johnson, then lord mayor and later prime minister, boasted: “London is to the billionaire as the jungles of Sumatra are to the orangutan.”
The arriving Russian oligarchs needed lawyers and bankers, tax agents and security consultants, real estate agents and spin doctors. “A generation of smart, eager, morally elastic young British professionals enthusiastically signed on to serve as fixers of every stripe”, writes Keefe; they performed the “paperwork jujitsu of moving funds out of Russia, then hiding or laundering the cash as necessary”.
Moral elasticity is not cost-free. Over time, an alarming number of Russians living in England and their associates began dying, whether by poison or by being thrown out of high-rise apartments. Keefe cites a 2017 Buzzfeed investigation listing 14 suspicious deaths among those who had made powerful enemies in Russia.
The authorities’ apparent complacency in the face of such violence stemmed partly from budget cuts to the police force – half the police stations in England had been closed since 2010, Keefe tells us – but also to the country becoming overly reliant on Russian oligarchs’ largesse.
As he comments: “Decisions had been made at a high level not to persecute London’s new mafia class, and to instead extend to them the courtesy of being able to kill their enemies in England with impunity.”
Keefe notes that in the same year Zac Brettler died, Buzzfeed global investigations editor Heidi Blake published From Russia with Blood, which described how citizens in Russia had become acculturated to a certain “dissonance” in everyday life. They no longer trusted that a suicide or an overdose or a fall was not a euphemism for murder.
Corrupted institutions and a weak press erased any reliable line separating fact from conspiracy, resulting in what Blake called a “fog of ambiguity”. Keefe underlines how the deeper Matthew and Rachelle Brettler dug into the circumstances of their son’s death, the more they felt the same “eerie dissonance” that afflicts Russian society.
A demon for research
Keefe has been as a staff writer for The New Yorker since 2012. Most of the stories he works on for the magazine start and end there. Only a few, he told a narrative non-fiction conference in Boston in March, become books: “There have been four times in 20 years where I’ve gotten to the end of a piece and thought, ‘I’m not ready to move on’”. Say Nothing, Empire of Pain and London Falling all began as pieces for The New Yorker.
Patrick Radden Keefe.
Philip Montgomery/Pan Macmillan
Keefe is a demon for research, as is clear from his extensive endnotes (in London Falling, 28 two-columned pages). Not to mention casual asides in the text, such as when he mentions tracking down dozens of former Scotland Yard detectives to see if Verinder Sharma, a man with “a murderous past and a thuggish present” who died the year after Zac, might have become a police informer.
He takes seriously his obligations to the people he writes about, and always keeps in mind his obligation to the people he is writing for – his readers. This requires delicate balancing and difficult choices. Zac Brettler’s parents provided extraordinary access to themselves and their extensive, almost obsessive documenting of their fight for justice for Zac.
As Keefe notes in his acknowledgements, they entrusted him by laying bare “such a private and often painful history”. The Brettlers, to their great credit, he writes, “recognised that the only way to tell a story of compounding deceptions was with an honesty that was bracing, unblinking and complete”. He hopes his book “feels commensurate with the magnitude of that gesture”.
There is little doubt of that. The extraordinary level of access granted to Keefe does mean, however, that London Falling primarily concerns the one case, of Zac Brettler. It does not have quite the same resonance as his masterpieces, Say Nothing and Empire of Pain.
Say Nothing helps you understand the troubles in Northern Ireland between the late 1960s and the signing of the Good Friday peace agreement in 1998 in a way few books do. It is thoroughly researched and clearly written, but what stands out and what stays with you is his deeply compassionate portraits of both IRA fighters and their victims.
It takes you deep into the complexities of why people choose terror as a political weapon. And it shows why it takes such a personal toll on some (IRA soldiers and the Price sisters, especially Delours, who took part in the 1973 bombing of the Old Bailey and endured 200-plus day hunger strikes), but not on others (Gerry Adams, who has always denied he was an IRA commander).
It has a shocking, heart-stopping opening in West Belfast in 1972. Jean McConville grew up Protestant, but converted to Catholicism after marrying Arthur McConville. He died from cancer earlier in the year, leaving her to raise their ten children. Accused, quite possibly wrongly, of being an informer to the British Army, Jean was kidnapped by eight or more balaclava-clad IRA men and women in front of her children.
Here’s the moment when Archie, 16 and the oldest child at home, tries to help.
He kept close to his mother, shuffling along, and she clung to him, not wanting to let go. But at the bottom of the stairs, a larger group was waiting, as many as twenty people […] A blue Volkswagen sat idling at the kerb, and now suddenly one of the men wheeled on Archie, the dull glint of a pistol arcing through the darkness, and pressed the tip of the barrel into his cheek, hissing “Fuck off.” Archie froze. He could feel the cold metal pressing into his skin. He was desperate to protect his mother, but what could he do? He was a boy, outnumbered and unarmed. Reluctantly, he turned and ascended the stairs.
It was the last he and his family saw of their mother, who was shot in the back of the head and buried across the border, about 80 kilometres from her home.
A further rich sub-theme in the book explores the disastrous unravelling of an academic oral history project to conduct interviews with former IRA soldiers such as the Prices and Brendan Hughes.
Empire of Pain is a searing condemnation of the Sackler family, whose company Purdue Pharma pioneered the advertising of pharmaceuticals directly to doctors. In the 1990s, Pharma campaigned to challenge doctors’ longstanding fears about the addictive nature of opioid drugs. They persuaded the American medical establishment of the benefits of widespread prescription of their drug Oxycodone.
The result has been the opioid epidemic, which has been responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths since.
Keefe’s impeccably researched book pierced the Sackler family’s carefully laundered reputation as premier philanthropists in the US, including, to name just a few, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim, the American Museum of Natural History, the Smithsonian, Harvard and Yale universities.
The list of important cultural institutions boasting a Sackler wing/room/pavilion in the United Kingdom is just as long. It includes the British Museum, the National Theatre and Shakespeare’s Globe theatre.
Following Empire of Pain and campaigns by people such as photographer Nan Goldin, who had been addicted to oxycodone, many of these institutions have removed the Sackler name. For years, the Sackler family has fought numerous lawsuits attempting to find justice for victims before finally agreeing on 1 May to a settlement of US$7.4 billion, with attorneys-general representing states across America.
A tonic for chaotic, cruel times
Say Nothing covers events that bloodily convulsed an entire country for decades. Empire of Pain charted a company’s destructiveness and determination to avoid accountability. London Falling could have achieved a similar resonance if it explored more cases pointing to the Russian oligarchs’ corrupting influence of London.
That said, London Falling is definitely worth reading. It has the characteristics that have seen Keefe win the Baillie Gifford prize for non-fiction and the Orwell prize: a rare capacity to blend springwater-clear storytelling about complex issues with vivid portraits of people that are by turns searchingly honest and compassionate.
He’s by no means a showy writer, but is not above the odd literary pirouette. At one point, Keefe is discussing property tycoon Scot Young, one of the “morally elastic” advisers to wealthy Russians, who began fearing for his life as his associates met with grisly ends. After a bitter divorce, Young takes up with a former model, Noelle Reno, who had landed the lead role in Ladies of London, which Keefe casually describes as a reality TV show chronicling “the triumphs and travails of a loose coterie of craven social climbers”.
For those new to Keefe’s work, I would suggest reading Say Nothing and Empire of Pain first, or his collection of articles, Rogues, which among other gems, includes the story of Mark Burnett, the television producer who catapulted Donald Trump to national fame through his reality program, The Apprentice.
In the chaotic, cruel times we are living in, anyone who diagnoses such complicated events and consequential people provides a tonic to be thankful for.
If this article has raised issues for you, or if you’re concerned about someone you know, call Lifeline on 13 11 14.
Authors: Matthew Ricketson, Professor of Communication, Deakin University 
