An award-winning staff writer for The New Yorker, Patrick Radden Keefe is reaching an elevated status unusual for an investigative journalist. He’s been a guest on Seth Meyers’ late-night show and Dua Lipa’s books podcast. He had a cameo in Industry and appeared in a J Crew ad sporting a beige trench coat and carrying a bodega coffee cup. What’s next, a notebook-toting Keefe doll?
Luckily, there’s no lack of substance beneath the style. Keefe’s long-form pieces have covered topics ranging from drug cartels to mass shootings. His first book, Chatter (2005), examined how US security agencies eavesdrop on suspected terrorists. It was followed in the US by The Snakehead (2009), about a woman running a human-trafficking ring from a Chinatown noodle shop (released in the UK and Ireland in 2023). One of The New York Times’ 20 best books of the century, Say Nothing (2018) was about the Price sisters and the disappearance of Jean McConville. The Baillie Gifford Prize-winning Empire of Pain (2021) is a jaw-dropping account of the Sackler family’s responsibility for the opioid crisis.
While on set of the television adaptation of Say Nothing, Keefe was introduced to a friend of Rachelle and Matthew Brettler, who were grieving the loss of their 19-year-old son, Zac. He had died in mysterious circumstances in November 2019, when he fell from the balcony of a luxury building on the Thames. At first, “the Brettlers had placed their trust in the authorities”, writes Keefe. But having exhausted all official channels, they were frustrated by the inconclusive police investigation and public inquest. While understandably private in the wake of Zac’s death, having feared tabloid attention, the Brettlers agreed to give Keefe access in the hope of getting some answers. London Falling expands on the ensuing New Yorker piece, which ran in February 2024.
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Riverwalk, the building from which Zac jumped, was across the river from the headquarters of MI6. At 2.24am, one of their surveillance cameras had captured him walking on to the balcony of the fifth-floor flat, peering over one side, walking to the other, and then jumping from the centre. The man living in the flat was a 55-year-old named Verinder (“Dave”) Sharma, with whom Zac had stayed the previous summer.
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Though Zac had told his parents Sharma was a rubber tycoon, he was, in fact, a gangster known for extorting money from wealthy businessmen. He died a year later in the same flat of a drug overdose, rendering the investigation more difficult. While the police treated Sharma’s death as not suspicious, Matthew had his suspicions. Despite having “enjoyed a long career of prodigious criminality”, Sharma had mostly evaded prison, leading Matthew to wonder whether he’d been a police informant.
The benign view was that an underfunded Scotland Yard ‘greeted any hint of international intrigue by simply declaring themselves outmatched’, Keefe writes
The only other witness was Akbar Shamji, “a dilettante posing as an accomplished entrepreneur”. Stonewalling throughout questioning, Shamji lied to the police about having returned to the scene of the crime. As CCTV footage showed him outside the building when Zac jumped, however, he was deemed not guilty. The Crown Prosecution Service decided not to pursue Shamji for perverting the course of justice since – as the MI6 video showed Zac jumping – “it would be impossible to make the case the case that he was murdered”.
The Brettlers were adamant that Zac wasn’t suicidal and that even if he hadn’t been physically pushed, something had pushed him to “take his chances on a swan dive”. While Sharma claimed to have been sleeping at the time of Zac’s death, a figure could be seen moving in the flat on the surveillance footage. Zac’s iPad revealed searches for “witness protection uk” and “what to do with skin burns”. Sharma had messaged Shamji, “I’m thinking fuck this little kid” on the morning of Zac’s final day, followed by “he’s not allowed to run away now” later that day. “I am not fucking playing, I have just been heating knives and clearing up blood” Shamji texted a friend he’d been hoping to procure prescription pills from that evening. “…Shit’s about to go wrong. Wrong!”
London Falling delves into the mystery of Zac’s death, but also his life: how a privately educated boy from west London came to be mixed up with such “unsavoury” types. After he died, the Brettlers learned that Zac, who had what Keefe calls a “Walter Mitty quality”, had been posing as the son of a Russian oligarch, introducing himself as Zac Ismailov. He claimed that his billionaire father had recently died, his Swiss model mother lived in Dubai with his siblings, and that his family owned a penthouse in One Hyde Park, a luxury complex in Knightsbridge favoured by oligarchs. Keefe cites Otto Frank, Anne Frank’s father, who, upon reading her diary, remarked that “most parents don’t know, really, their children”.
Character-rich, Keefe’s books don’t start out with big ideas or concepts, but “ground level stories about people who I find captivating or intriguing for one reason or another”, as he told Dua Lipa. But just as Say Nothing addressed the Troubles without aspiring to be a comprehensive history, in London Falling, the Brettlers’ private story points to a larger one of a city changed by money. “One consequence of London’s new identity as a twenty-four-hour laundromat for dirty money is that the city is full of crooks with pretensions to legitimacy and businessmen who seem a little crooked,” Keefe writes.
The arrival of Russian money in London was not coincidental, but a deliberate political decision. Until it was scrapped after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, a golden visa introduced in 2008 offered fast-track residency for foreign nationals and their families in exchange for investments in the UK economy, starting at £2 million. “In 1994, Russians made up only 3 per cent of the foreign students in British private schools; within five years that number had jumped to 20 per cent,” Keefe notes, making a case that an entourage of the children of oligarchs contributed to Zac’s aspirations for wealth.
The Brettlers pin a shift in his personality to his move to Mill Hill, a private secondary school on the northern outskirts of London with a lot of new money. Zac once paid for a chauffeured limousine to pick himself up from school. “I wanted to see what it would feel like,” he told his parents.
Keefe references a 2017 BuzzFeed investigation identifying 14 men who “died suspiciously on British soil after making powerful enemies in Russia”. According to the report, “US intelligence possessed evidence suggesting that numerous deaths that had been characterised by the London police as suicides had actually been murders”.
The benign view was that an underfunded Scotland Yard “greeted any hint of international intrigue by simply declaring themselves outmatched”, Keefe writes. A “much darker possibility”, however, was that “Britain had become so reliant on the largesse of Russia’s oligarchs that decisions had been made at a high level not to persecute London’s new mafia class”. Since Zac had posed as an oligarch’s son and had been introduced to Shamji by Mark Foley, a real estate investor who was working for Roman Abramovich at Chelsea FC, Keefe raises the question of whether “he might have crossed the Russians, with fatal consequences”.
London Falling is written with great respect not only for the Brettler family but also for the form – honouring the rhythm of a book-length exposé, rather than with an eye towards adaptation
London Falling chronicles the oversights by Scotland Yard in Zac’s case in meticulous detail, including detectives not searching the apartment for nearly a week; photographing but not sending for forensic testing “dark splatters that looked very much like blood” on one of the bedroom walls; and not looking at the location tracking of the Mercedes that Shamji had rented on the week of Zac’s death. The coroner’s public inquest and police response to Sharma’s death are also rendered as protecting the guilty. Were these lapses a result of budget cuts at the Met and pandemic delays, or something more sinister?
Keefe is intrigued by the dark side – his 2022 collection of New Yorker pieces, Rogues, was subtitled True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks. There is “something both thrilling and unsettling about close encounters with people who do the worst things imaginable”, he has written. It’s not only the shady pasts of Sharma and Shamji he uncovers, but family secrets around the more wholesome figure of Rachelle’s father, Hugo Gryn, a respected rabbi and Holocaust survivor, suggesting that human beings are not black and white.
London Falling is written with great respect not only for the family but also for the form – honouring the rhythm of a book-length exposé, rather than with an eye towards adaptation. Credit is also due to the Brettlers for sharing their story with “unblinking honesty” in the face of “compounding deceptions”. While Keefe clearly earned the family’s trust, a few editorial choices did strike me as questionable: the title – a play on the song by The Clash, to convey Zac’s falling, with an implication of the decline of London in recent years – niggled, as did the decision to include the details of Zac’s porn search history.
Nonetheless, like all of Keefe’s work, the book makes for propulsive reading. If his J Crew trenchcoat is much sharper than Columbo’s rumpled version, his drive to get to the truth is the same – an impetus to ask “just one more thing”. And while the outcome is less conclusive than Say Nothing, Keefe’s mastery of timing reveals makes it a page-turner – a skill he credits to his experience writing screenplays. “Addicted to detective stories” since childhood, we are fortunate to have him pounding the pavement to expose real-life darkness.
Further reading
Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession by Rachel Monroe (Scribner, 2019)
Combining cultural analysis, personal essay and reportage, Monroe uses four cases of women involved in various ways with true crime – from forensic analysis to falling for a wrongly convicted man on death row – to explore the enduring appeal of the genre.
About a Son: A Murder and A Father’s Search for Truth by David Whitehouse (Orion, 2022)
A poignant story of a father’s search for justice, based on the diaries of Colin Hehir after the fatal stabbing of his 20-year-old son by a repeat offender. Like Keefe’s work, it also addresses broader issues of knife crime.
Butler to the World by Oliver Bullough (Profile Books, 2022)
One of the authors cited by Keefe in his sources, Bullough makes a compelling case that following its fall as an imperial power, for the past 70 years, Britain has fashioned itself as a “butler” to the rich, facilitating kleptocratic money laundering.
