Patrick Radden Keefe’s Portrait of a Crisis-Ridden Country
On November 21, 1974, the Provisional Irish Republican Army detonated bombs in two pubs in Birmingham, England, as part of its campaign to get the British out of Ireland. Twenty-one people were killed, and nearly 200 were injured. It was at the time the deadliest attack in England since the days of V-2 rockets. The police immediately sprang into action, arrested six completely innocent Irishmen, and coerced confessions from them. When the men challenged their convictions, the leading judge of his generation, Lord Denning, threw out their appeal, despite substantial evidence of police misconduct and actual innocence.
If the six men win, it will mean that the police were guilty of perjury, that they were guilty of violence and threats, that the confessions were involuntary and were improperly admitted in evidence and that the convictions were erroneous.... This is such an appalling vista that every sensible person in the land would say: It cannot be right that these actions should go any further.
An appeal might expose holes in the British justice system, and therefore it was not allowed to happen. Not until 1991 were the men finally freed.
The way policing in Britain functions is a colonial legacy. Until the 1970s, most heads of the Metropolitan Police in England were former military officials with colonial service behind them, and in many ways the Met polices London like a colonial outpost—corruptly engaged with favored powerful locals, ignoring the crimes of the ruling class, and concerned above all with social order. The closest American analogue is the LAPD, which is also a corrupt force that uses methods of colonial control. But imagine if there were no FBI to occasionally investigate the most flagrant abuses or the big cases the local police neglect, and if the LAPD was also the counterterrorism police nationwide and the police force for both New York and Washington, D.C.
There has been an enormous effort to forget that Britain was an imperial state and the role empire played in shaping domestic British life and institutions. Historian David Kynaston’s bestselling tetralogy of doorstopper histories of Britain from 1945 to 1965 is kaleidoscopic yet barely mentions Britain had an empire, despite its central role in everything from government finance to culture; for decades, British schoolchildren studied the Tudors and the ancient Romans at length but learned little about the British Raj. Imperial superprofits enabled the creation of the famed British welfare state, a widely shared source of pride in a country hastily revising its identity. When the decline of superprofits collided with the global crises of the 1970s, the result was Thatcherism, which began the hollowing out of the welfare state and the industrial base that had supported the British working class. Dean Acheson famously said in 1962 that “Britain had lost an empire and had not found a role,” but by the 1990s it found one: as a one-stop-shop for laundering, storing, and spending wealth looted from the former Soviet Union, providing jobs for costly lawyers, bankers, private schools, and other assorted servants of high net worth. As someone says of one of these bankers in John le Carré’s incisive 1999 novel about this transformation, Single & Single: he has been “bankrolling them, laundering their profits and making their beds for them. Not to mention what he’s been coining himself.” From the welfare state to the welfare of oligarchs in one generation.
After the global financial crisis, the Tories (in coalition with the neoliberal Liberal Democrats) took power and set about finishing Thatcher’s work. Austerity led to at least 190,000 excess deaths and gutted public services across the board—including drastic cuts both to the numbers of police officers and to overall funding for police. Half the police stations in the entire country were closed, and 20,000 officers were let go. In 2019, The New York Times reported on the effects of all this on the children who grew up with it:
Alex McIntyre was raised on budget cuts. The youth center where he went after school was shuttered when he was 10. When he was 11, his mother’s housing benefit was shaved away, a casualty of the Welfare Reform Act.... “Austerity, that’s what I know, that’s my life,” said Mr. McIntyre. “I’ve never known an England that was a different way.”
In 2008, the United States and the U.K. were at near equal purchasing power parity for the first time since the Victorian era. Now Britain can’t afford to keep streetlights on all night.
Patrick Radden Keefe’s London Falling is about the life of a boy who grew up in this new horizonless London and how he ended up being murdered by gangsters. He was born to a prosperous London Jewish family but reinvented himself as the son of a Kazakh oligarch fighting for his £200 million inheritance. When his trail of lies caught up with him, he jumped to his death from the balcony of a luxury apartment building rather than face torture at the hands of men to whom he had promised 5 percent of his fake fortune. It is a tale of uncontrolled capital and what happens when the shrinkage of the social state leaves the only dream available that of being super-wealthy. Many boys around the world tell lies to fit in, but the specific lies he told and how they led to his death are a specifically British tale, of the legacy of imperialism, Thatcherism, and austerity.
Zac Brettler was born in 2000 in London. His father, Matthew, was a successful financial professional earning a large but not one percent salary, while his mother, Rachelle, freelanced for outlets like the Financial Times’ weekly How to Spend It magazine. On both sides of his family, Zac was descended from Holocaust survivors, but he took no interest in Judaism or his heritage. He had a brother, Joe, one year older. As a child, Zac was always the light in the room, entertaining adults and other children alike. The defining trauma of his life, until his death, was that the brighter Joe was accepted into one of London’s elite schools, University College School, while later Zac was not and was forced to go to Mill Hill, a much less prestigious school.
By that time, 20 percent of the students at British fee-paying schools were Russian, and at Mill Hill the number may have been even higher. Zac complained about this at first to his mother: “All the girls are orange.” But soon being surrounded by the children of oligarchs gave him an obsession that would last the rest of his short life: money. And because his family didn’t have billions, he started making up stories in which they did. He cycled through various lies with various people, telling his parents for example that he had started a successful business. But his main lie became that his name was Zac Ismailov, that he was the son of a Kazakh (sometimes he said Russian) oligarch who had died tragically, and he was in a legal battle to secure his £200 million share of the estate. This led him to fall in with a charming man named Akbar Shamji, who presented to the world as very rich but actually lived off his wife’s money and various frauds of his own. Shamji became a second father figure to Zac, and he really could not have picked a worse one. Shamji introduced him to a quiet man named Verinder Sharma, whose alternate identity was as a violent kingpin of the London underground nicknamed “Indian Dave.” Both these men took Zac in, letting him stay in their expensive apartments and socialize with their families, on the promise they would get a share of his massive inheritance. On Zac’s final night, “Zac was by no means the only impostor in the apartment,” Keefe observes. “Verinder Sharma was a leg-breaker posing as a benevolent mentor. Akbar Shamji was a dilettante posing as an accomplished entrepreneur. And Zac was just a London teenager posing as the son of an oligarch … each was caught up in the glitzy, mercenary aspirational culture of modern London.”
Eventually Indian Dave became fed up with the delay. On the night of November 28, 2019, he prepared to torture Zac with “hot knives,” a favorite tactic of his that often scared the subject into handing over his money without the knives needing to be used. As best Keefe can put together, to escape this torture Zac decided jumping into the Thames from the riverside flat was the better option. Unfortunately for him, his hip hit the embankment on the way down, and he died. He was 19 years old. It must have been a completely terrifying final few moments on Earth.
For months after Zac’s death, the Brettlers patiently awaited the results of a police investigation. But to their amazement, very little happened at all. From the start, the police seemed determined to treat the death as a suicide and move on. Akbar Shamji had left the flat shortly before the death and could not be charged, and within a few months, Verinder Sharma turned up dead himself, with hundreds of enemies left behind. Other witnesses—the man who found the body; the mysterious messenger who showed up at the Brettlers’ apartment to tell them their son was in trouble—were barely questioned. The Brettlers got no closure and no justice. They felt “alienated in their own city, [starting] to see the whole metropolis in a more sinister light.... ‘It’s been eye-opening,’ Rachelle remarked. ‘This whole world we did not know about, this underworld that exists on our doorstep.’” The justice system they believed would work through all of this simply did not materialize. The law-abiding middle-class London they lived in was, it turned out, the fakest London out of all the Londons that existed.
One thing that stands out in Zac Brettler’s brief life moving through all these various Londons is how much of his reality was mediated through fictions. He was obsessed with The Wolf of Wall Street, Martin Scorsese’s film about the Wall Street fraudster Jordan Belfort, and War Dogs, another ripped-from-the-headlines film, with Jonah Hill playing a con man arms trafficker named Efraim Diveroli. One school friend told Keefe that, while they all got a thrill from watching these movies, Zac “wanted to be like Efraim.” As London increasingly became a city economically organized around laundering the proceeds of crime, is it any surprise that an ambitious and fragile teenager saw con artists as heroes?
Ironically, London Falling has its origins in the film industry, too. Keefe, a justly fêted writer widely rumored to be on the short list to succeed David Remnick as editor of The New Yorker, first heard the story of Zac on the set of Say Nothing, a miniseries adapted from his book of the same title about the sectarian violence in Northern Ireland. Say Nothing and London Falling form something of a duology on what happens when the British state is both pared back and paired with corruption. Say Nothing investigates the IRA’s disappearance of a Protestant woman in Belfast, and at the same time traces the brutality of the British police and army as the colonial occupying force to which the IRA was reacting. The book oddly excludes coverage of Protestant Loyalist paramilitaries, which weakens it and has the effect of making the IRA seem much more needlessly violent than it actually was. But Keefe’s interest in the weird venality of the British security state serves him better in London Falling, a story in which he does not have to tangle with potential justifications for terrorism.
It’s also a story that many British outlets had neglected to cover at all. This book follows in the fine tradition of bringing a gimlet foreign eye to the problems with Britain no one with institutional power there wants to confront. In 2003, David Kelly, a British government expert on biological warfare, probably killed himself after it was revealed he had told the media that false claims about Iraq’s ability to attack Britain had been inserted into the British government’s justification for the Iraq War at the insistence of Tony Blair’s spin chief Alastair Campbell. Later the same year, The New Yorker published a long piece by John Cassidy digging into this; no British outlet was able or willing to invest the resources to produce such a report. Since then, a number of British controversies have been exposed by American reporters, particularly at The New York Times. After a Times podcast revealed that a supposed case of Islamist infiltration of British schools was nothing more than hysteria, former Education Secretary Michael Gove called the Times “useful idiots” for Islamists, something that would surprise anyone who has read their coverage of Gaza. British journalists and political figures, particularly those on the left, regularly tweet if only some American journalists would look into this or that problem ignored by the British press.
Like the press, with whom it has had a cozy relationship, the Metropolitan Police has a specialty in not investigating cases. Prince Andrew and Virginia Giuffre, despite the photos and her testimony? No investigation needed. In the mid-2000s, the Met prosecuted two people for hacking into the voicemail inboxes of members of the royal family for Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World. They insisted there was no evidence of any further hacking. When The Guardian reported that there was, the Met conducted a “scoping exercise” led by Assistant Commissioner John Yates in 2009 that determined there was no evidence. It was not until The New York Times got onto the story in 2010 that it was revealed the police had all along been in possession of 11,000 pages of documents showing 4,000 people had been hacked. The police had simply not wanted to know what the powerful Murdoch press was up to until forced by the Times. Yates left the Met and went to work for the brutally repressive police in Bahrain, a former British protectorate. As the Bahrainis suppress pro-Iran sentiment at this very moment, we can only imagine what lessons they may have learned from Yates of the Yard.
At the beginning of the investigation into their son’s death, the middle-class Brettlers had total faith that Scotland Yard would solve the case. As time went on, it became clear that many relevant witnesses had never been interviewed, and the police had no intention of bringing any prosecutions. “We were too obedient,” Rachelle told Keefe about trusting the police inquiry. They had relied on an institution that does not want to solve crimes that are inconvenient, and Zac’s death was very inconvenient.
This is largely where Keefe’s book lands: It’s a powerful indictment of the British justice system, shocking in the details and extent of neglect and high-handedness it reveals. Keefe first explored Zac’s death in a 2024 New Yorker article, “A Teen’s Fatal Plunge Into the London Underworld.” The first half of the book is adapted and expanded from the article; the second half of the book is richer, runs at the pace of a thriller, and has fewer incorrect statements. (It is not true to say that London “was reinventing itself as a financial capital” in the 1980s: it has been a financial capital since the 1690s.) While the book adds more on the corrosive effects of foreign money in London, it doesn’t set out to connect the corruption to the structure of British society itself.
London Falling is a book about a particularly British story by an American author, who has lived in England only briefly for graduate school and to film Say Nothing. The degree to which he has mastered the ins and outs of England and its idiosyncrasies is impressive. Only occasionally do infelicities infringe. The exact nuances of the British class system for instance sometimes evade Keefe: It is absurd to say that the Brettlers did not spend on “status markers,” when they were paying £50,000 a year for elite private educations for their children. (This indicates a certain blindness to the reality of class not just in Britain but perhaps in the United States, too, from a Milton Academy, Columbia, Cambridge, and Yale graduate.)
Paying attention to the legacies of class and race in Britain also reveals much about the two men who led Zac Brettler to his death: Their training came from the British Empire. Verinder Sharma’s parents had grown up in India and then immigrated to Loughborough to work in the textile industry. When he turned to crime as a teenager, perhaps the enormous state violence Britain had repeatedly exercised in his family’s past helped ease his way into that life. As “Indian Dave” or “ID,” he had been known to demand large sums of money from wealthy nightclub owners and patrons, with a machete at the other end if they did not comply. How different, after all, was this from how the British had extracted their wealth from India?
As for the more genteel Akbar Shamji, who connected Zac with Sharma, his story is quintessentially one of the British Empire. His family were Gujaratis who were brought to Uganda, where they thrived as merchants before being expelled by Idi Amin in the 1970s. (Keefe quotes extensively from the work of Mahmood Mamdani to explain the Ugandan background, simply describing him as a “Ugandan Asian scholar”—the political world moves faster than the book one.) Shamji’s father, one of Uganda’s wealthiest men, made it out with a cool one million in Swiss bank accounts, but to re-create in the U.K. the level of success to which he had been accustomed, he turned to fraudulent shell companies and bribes, a tradition in which he raised his son. And why should he not defraud white British people? Had not his family been repeatedly defrauded as the British Empire retreated, and had its legacy not dragged his family across three continents? In so many ways this is the story of the British Empire coming home, of blowback landing on one unfortunate delusional teenager made to stand scapegoat for centuries of brutal imperialism.
The Met certainly had no interest in catching either of these men, despite Sharma’s prolific acts of violence and Shamji’s scams. Keefe unearths quite a bit of evidence to suggest that Sharma was a snitch to the Met on other criminals, earning him extra leniency. Not that this sort of blind eye was unusual for the Met. Keefe has an excellent look at the blind eye that authorities turned as the Putin regime murdered opponent after opponent who had taken refuge in Britain: Investigating might disrupt all the money that was being made providing banking and legal services to the Russians. A million other scandals unfolded the same way: The police simply refused to look at the evidence.
Having lost its empire, but kept all the traditions of imperial rule, Britain had turned its remaining territory into a colony: itself. Zac Brettler died what is recognizable as a colonial death, inside a colony ruled by a British political elite cut off even from a respectable middle-class child like himself.