In the early hours of the morning of 28 November 2019, Zac Brettler, a 19-year-old from Maida Vale, fell to his death from a balcony of the Riverwalk building, which has views of the headquarters of MI6 on the other side of the Thames. Some of the events that led to his death remain a mystery. Indeed, the case was not publicly reported at all until the publication of a 14,300-word article in the New Yorker, which came out in February 2024.
Brettler, an upper-middle-class Jewish boy, was the son of a journalist and a financier, and a pupil at the £33,000-per-year Mill Hill School in north London. Perhaps gauzily fascinated by the Patek Philippe lifestyle enjoyed by some of his far wealthier Russian classmates, he had begun to weave an alternate reality.
Most notable was the pretence, carefully maintained over an extended period of time, that he was the son of an oligarch who happened to be living at Candy and Candy’s One Hyde Park in Knightsbridge. Over time, the fib gathered momentum. The belief that Brettler had access to – or at least influence over – significant sums of capital led to his enmeshment with a cast of increasingly shady characters, mostly many years his senior. Among them were Akbar Shamji, a slick Cambridge graduate with a catwalk model son and a famous fraudster for a father, and ‘Indian Dave’ (real name: Verinder Sharma) – a gangster fingered for the murder of Dave ‘Muscles’ King, who was executed with an AK-47 assault rifle in Hertfordshire in 2005. Both Sharma and Shamji were with Brettler on the night of his death.
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The whole story – by superstar narrative non-fiction writer Patrick Radden Keefe – is what one internet wag called ‘London noir’, which writer Clive Martin defines as the ‘interzone, a shadowland where villainy collides with ambition, eroticism, slime and glamour’. It’s where old-school London crime meets funny foreign money, the real-life stories that inspired The Long Good Friday, Sexy Beast and Guy Ritchie’s entire career. In the real-life tale of Zac Brettler, there’s also an element of the bourgeois-bohème London that is usually cordoned off from the seediness and neon-tinged glamour of the city’s underbelly.
It is a world with which I am familiar. When I was the age at which Zac died, I would go to parties in Cascade Court by Chelsea Bridge held by a petrochemical heir of indeterminate nationality called Angus. The crowd would be a sketchy mélange of locals from the council estate in Battersea, teenage boys and girls my own age and porky Arab men in their forties and fifties.
After I graduated from university, I joined the foppish ranks of tutors servicing the needs of the international super-rich in search of an English education. Unlike Zac Brettler, I didn’t pretend to be an oligarch – I merely just worked for two of them, in Antibes and here in London, in one of those gorgeous cream stucco Nash terraces on Regent’s Park (both my former bosses are on the UK sanctions list, and one of them is alleged to be the ‘master of Putin’s shadow fleet’).
Everyone seemed to be at it, to some degree – English people don’t like to work as waiters in a literal sense, but they’re only too happy to fawn over the rich. Many of us are, or have been, what author Oliver Bullough describes as ‘butlers to the world’, happy to introduce and induct outsiders into the mannered sureties of the English system – for the right fee.
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Latterly, the magazine I edit, The Fence, has also covered this crepuscular world with no little brio (if I do say so myself), and it was for this reason that a mutual friend suggested to Keefe that we talk. He had decided to extend his New Yorker article into a full-length book, carrying out further reporting and investigation in the process.
PRK, as he is known among the community of enthusiasts who still actually read long-form magazine journalism, has become something of a cult figure. His previous work includes Empire of Pain, a history of the Sackler family and the multi-billion-dollar OxyContin fortune extracted from Purdue Pharma. It was the definitive book on the topic, instrumental in the family’s reputational downfall. Say Nothing – which investigated the murder of Jean McConville, who was ‘disappeared’ by the IRA in the winter of 1972 – was adapted into a series by Disney. More recently, Keefe had a cameo in the coda of the latest season of HBO-BBC drama Industry, appearing as himself while interviewing one of the protagonists on a private jet.
After a few chats on the phone, we met up a couple of times and I’m pleased to report that, while many American journalists cultivate an infuriating faux-donnish persona, Keefe is simply just a great hang, avuncular, funny and thoughtful.
When I received a PDF of the unreleased London Falling last December, only after signing documentation that I would not spill any of its secrets, I read it in one sitting – on my iPhone, with its charger plugged into the socket next to my sofa, my mind blinking with delight. How an American writer has managed to capture the nuances of London, its mores and class structure, is extraordinarily impressive. I didn’t spot a single slip-up or even so much as a tonal inconsistency.
As ever with Keefe, the narratives are spliced masterfully, history is condensed tightly and characters are introduced (and then reintroduced) with an almost cinematic flourish. But unlike his earlier doorstoppers, which are primed with big, bow-wow revelations, London Falling has a novelistic intimacy. At its heart, it is a book about parenthood, and the perils and pleasures of that station. The story documents how Matthew and Rachelle Brettler spent thousands of hours trying to score some degree of justice for their son, battling official ineptitude at every corner, and overcoming the most appalling behaviour from various mercenary individuals.
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Matthew and Rachelle’s respective families escaped the horrors of the Holocaust – just – to give their children the chance to forge a successful upper-middle-class life in London. Zac grew up in a bookish, liberal home, and in some ways the book could be read as a cautionary tale that every parent’s worst nightmare could come gothically true: even if your child is funny and clever, they could die in an agonising, public way.
There’s also a handful of substantial revelations, which have been closely guarded ahead of publication. Readers with any connection to the education sector, media or property will find some top-tier gossip to pick over. The way in which Keefe came to the story – which has been a topic of much conjecture – is also disclosed here, and there are fascinating passages about the way the case was reported in the UK press (after the New Yorker piece was published) that contain details which both shame and honour Fleet Street.
The book also has a bearing on the world covered by Spear’s – of the confluence of money and power, yes, but also of their occasional proximity to dishonesty and criminal activity. Some readers may come away feeling that this tale strikes rather closer to home than they would have previously cared to admit.
London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth, Patrick Radden Keefe (Pan Macmillan, £22) is on sale now in the UK.
This article first appeared in Spear’s Magazine Issue 99. Click here to subscribe
