London Falling has many of the elements that wouldn’t look out of place in a thriller. Russian oligarchs, vicious hit men, shady “businessmen”‘ and a body tumbling over a balcony within sight of the UK’s national security agency.
Except Keefe’s book isn’t fiction. This is a detailed work of journalistic investigation centred on the death of 19-year-old Londoner Zac Brettler in November 2019.
When Zac’s body was recovered from a muddy stretch of the Thames, police deemed that this was a clear case of suicide. CCTV footage from MI6 headquarters on the opposite bank showed the exact moment the boy jumped from the balcony of a luxury apartment building. He was alone so couldn’t have been pushed to his death.
But Zac’s parents were not convinced. There were too many questions unanswered, and many many gaps in the Metropolitan police investigation. As Rachelle and Matthew Brettler were to discover there was nothing about their son’s death — or indeed his life — that was clear cut.
They knew their son loved to move in circles very different from his comfortable middle class upbringing. He frequently regaled the Brellters with tales about fancy restaurants in Mayfair, blackjack sessions in a casino and encounters with Russian millionaires at Annabel’s night club. The boy assured them he could afford this lifestyle because he was involved in big investment deals — at one point he showed Matthew his bank statement with a £850,000 balance.
Increasingly Zac’s talk was of the deals he was making through two oldr men he called his friends: a “rubber tycoon” called Verinder Sharma, and Akbar Shamji, a Ugandan Asian cryptocurrency and property dealer.
What the Brettlers never suspected was that all along, Zac had been leading a double life. His new acquaintances knew him not as Zac Brettler from Maida Vale, but as Zac Ismailov, the son and heir of a Russian oligarch. He concinced them his father was dead, he had inherited a fortune but his mother, who lived in Dubai, was blocking access to the estate.
In London Calling ,Keefe reveals that Zac was not alone in his ability to dissemble.
Akbar Shamji wasn’t a successful businessman — previous ventures into record production and films had collapsed and he was saddled with a string of unpaid debts. Verinder Sharma wasn’t a rubber tycoon but a drug dealer, hustler and violent gangland enforcer known as “Indian Dave”. He was an expert at ‘finding ways to insinuate himself into the lives of people who had money, cultivating a queasy friendship, before turning on them, ferociously, with demands’.
Did these men turn on Zac when they discovered he was not the money bags he’d led them to believe? Was his leap from the bridge a desperate attempt to save himself? Keefe suggests Zac never intended suicide, instead he dived into the river to get away only to misjudge the angle of his dive.
London Falling is a masterful piece of investigative fiction. It’s based on extensive interviews with the Brettler family and people who knew Zac at different points in his life. Keefe flags multiple instances of how the justice system failed this boy.
Though it’s the story of one boy and one family, Keefe places this in the context of geo-political shifts over five decades. He makes connections to the London stock market deregulation; Idi Amin’s expulsion of Asian families and the growth of London as an investment haven for Russian oligarchs in the post-Soviet years.
At times, Keefe’s research threatens to derail his main point but there is no denying his ability to pull back the curtains on a world where a young man becomes trapped by the allure of power and wealth.