In new book London Falling, Patrick Radden Keefe tells his most intimate true story yet

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The most memorable people in human history are often criminals. That may explain American journalist Patrick Radden Keefe’s obsession with scoundrels and secrets and crimes.

Rogues, a 2022 collection of his New Yorker profiles, covers the psychosocial waterfront, from chef Anthony Bourdain (who killed himself in 2018) through predatory art dealer Larry Gagosian, to El Chapo, the head of the murderous Sinaloa drug cartel, among others. His book The Snakehead (2009) picked apart human trafficking in the Chinese underworld. Say Nothing, a 2019 immersion in Northern Ireland’s Troubles (later transformed into a widely watched FX television series) features (among many others) Gerry Adams, who headed the deadly IRA while denying he belonged to it. Empire of Pain, Keefe’s gulpable 2021 bestseller, laid out the relentless methods by which the billionaire Sackler family addicted millions to often deadly oxycontin. Patrick Radden Keefe is obsessed with bad actors.

But in London Falling, his new investigation of the death of Zac Brettler, a 19-year-old British teenager who, on November 29, 2019, mysteriously fell to his death in the Thames River from a luxury fifth-floor apartment balcony in London’s ritzy Docklands district, Keefe has written his most intimate true story.

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The book is at once an investigation into a troubling demise and a sweeping criminal history of London since the city’s morally elastic embrace of freshly wealthy Russian oligarchs. Step by suspenseful step, the book uncovers links between entities as varied as the secret inner life of a talented but unhappy teenager, Holocaust-surviving rabbis and Micky McAvoy, the mastermind behind the infamous 1983 Brink’s-Mat heist at Heathrow Airport that saw three tonnes of gold bullion laundered into, among other ventures, fancy Docklands real estate. All of which is written with Keefe’s customary and compelling flair (he grew up on mysteries, from Sherlock Holmes to Graham Greene and Scott Turow). He is that rarest of reporter birds, a deeply thorough investigative journalist who can actually write and tell a gripping human story. Anyone who starts London Falling will finish it quickly.

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Keefe, 49, stumbled onto the mostly untold tragedy of Zac Brettler in 2023, four years after the boy’s death, via a string of lucky coincidences that can only be described as Keefean – that is, the luck is made by the breadth of his research.

In the course of talking to a stranger he met at a film shoot in London in July, 2023, Keefe mentioned that a family friend, Julia Neuberger, was the rabbi at London’s West End Synagogue. A round of Jewish geography ensued. The stranger happened to be a friend of Matthew and Rachelle Brettler, Zac’s parents. Rachelle was the daughter of Hugo Gryn, the West End Synagogue’s best-known rabbi. “I may have a story for you,” the stranger told Keefe. It’s a measure of the transcendental connections in London Falling that almost all these characters become central to the story.

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The Brettlers had devoted four years to finding out how and why their son died, especially after they met Akbar Shamji and Verinder Sharma, both of whom were in the apartment from which Zac jumped, on the night he died. Shamji, a wealthy man-about-town in his 40s married to the designer Daniela Karnuts, initially told Rachelle and Matthew Brettler that Zac was still alive (a lie), that he used drugs (possibly a lie) and that he had been passing himself off as the son of a wealthy oligarch. That, at least, was believable: Zac had gone to school with the children of Russian oligarchs, “coming of age,” Keefe writes, “not just in a city that was drunk on foreign lucre but in an era of social media.” Zac was so intrigued by his new schoolmates – by their swagger as much as their money – that he started pretending to be the heir of a dead oligarch worth hundreds of millions of pounds.

Gradually, the Brettlers began to suspect that Shamji and the fiftysomething Sharma – a bankrupt and extortionist, respectively, who were keen to get their hands on Zac’s alleged fortune – were not on the up-and-up.

Given the unexpected reluctance of the London Metropolitan Police to investigate Zac’s death – yet another thread in the book’s rich narrative cloth – the Brettlers embraced Keefe’s interest in the case. But the bottom of the mystery was a long way down, deep in the moral quagmire of the muddy Thames and the ancient, secretive city it twists through. In London Falling, every lead leads everywhere.

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To an investigative journalist like Keefe, who describes his job as “phoning people and having them hang up on me,” the rich access the Brettlers offered was unnerving.

They proffered their own notes and diaries, Zac’s text chains, police reports, personal belongings, and two years and hundreds of hours of often daily conversation and interviews. “I’m so used to writing about people who are dead or in prison or who don’t want to talk to me or who are threatening to sue me and are hostile to the whole project,” Keefe says, “that I almost got a bit of vertigo when the Brettlers said ‘Come on in. We’ll tell you our story.’ I’m not used to that level of access.” His concern was that “you can get captured by your sources.”

Half of Keefe’s stories for the New Yorker (London Falling started out as one, two years ago) are “write-arounds,” in which he never gets to interview his main subject. The list of people who wouldn’t talk to Keefe for London Falling includes the London police and Akbar Shamji. (Keefe and his New Yorker fact-checker sent Shamji 250-odd factual queries, offering him the chance to correct or deny them. Shamji never replied.) But “that doesn’t mean they get to shut this thing down,” Keefe says.

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In an era when the internet has undermined traditional journalism and allowed celebrities, corporations and politicians to control who knows what about their behaviour, Keefe is a decidedly old-school reporter. “I don’t have a beat,” he says, “so I sort of move freely from one world to another. And I’m always shocked. When I wrote about the art world I was shocked by how passive and kind of suck-uppy the art press is. When I write about Hollywood, I’m shocked by how passive and accommodating the Hollywood press corps is.” The fact that Netflix can pay a celebrity to produce a “documentary” about him or herself – and then be nominated for an Emmy in documentary-making! – galls him. “I feel as though we’ve lost our sense of how to write in a fair and accurate and rigorous manner.”

Many journalists abandon stories if their sources dry up. Not Keefe. “One of the things that I love about reporting,” he admits, “is that it’s very humbling. You always start at the bottom of the mountain. In an almost religious sense, I feel as though it’s sort of good for your character to keep having that experience.” He has a Puritan bent that way.

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Keefe studied history at Columbia, and followed that with an MA from Cambridge in international relations and another from the London School of Economics in data technology, all of which he topped off with a law degree from Yale. (He wanted a career backup in case writing didn’t work out, given that he pitched ideas to The New Yorker for years and had two children before the magazine hired him on staff.)

“I was a good student in college, a good boy who did his homework and liked to show the teacher that I knew what I was talking about. And when I started as a journalist, I foolishly walked into most of my engagements with people wanting to show them how smart I was, how much homework I’d done. And as a journalist, this is the dumbest thing you can ever do.” Which is to say, “it’s an advantage to me if people think I’m an idiot.” Keefe prefers that his subject explain things to him as if they were talking – and here he quotes Jeremy Irons in the movie Margin Call – “to a golden retriever.” He refers to movies a lot in conversation.

The connections Keefe makes in London Falling in the course of reporting Zac’s death are uncanny. The connections are factual; their implications are more speculative.

This technique – and his mastery of the cliffhanger and suspenseful storytelling – is what gives his non-fiction books their novelistic feel. A Keefe digression – a history of the Thames, say, or an account of how London’s criminal action switched from robbery to drugs in the early 1990s, with the adoption of security cameras and the appearance of MDMA – can go on for pages. The wider his reporting roams, the more universal the story feels. “Those are my favourite kinds of things,” he admits. “I think a lot about the uses of digression in writing.”

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For instance: Zac, the kid who pretends to be richer than he is, had a grandfather, Hugo Gryn, who lied about his education (he said he had studied mathematics at Cambridge) in the hope it would ease his entry into Britain’s class-ridden society. Akbar Shamji, who was introduced to Zac by associates of Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch, is the son of Abdul Shamji, a wealthy Ismaili businessman whose defaulted loans helped bring down the Johnson-Matthey Bank empire, which owned the Brink’s-Mat gold bullion Micky McAvoy stole and that later helped build the Docklands where Zac died.

Keefe points out that certain subplots of London Falling resemble the 1980 movie The Long Good Friday, in which Bob Hoskins plays a criminal who wants to develop the Docklands. The motor yacht in that film was owned by Abdul Shamji. All of these links emerged organically from Keefe’s reporting.

“What was interesting to me, in the way that it would be interesting to a novelist,” Keefe says, “was the prevalence of these weird echoes, the rhymes that happen again and again. The kind of writing that I like to do, there’s no thesis statement. I don’t have to tell you this happened because that happened; I sort of spell it out for you and you can decide yourself how load-bearing this is, how much weight you want to put on it.”

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Needless to say, revealing the habits of criminals presents risks to the enquiring reporter. While he was writing Empire of Pain, strange cars lurked for hours on end at the foot of Keefe’s driveway. “I live in the suburbs of New York City on a road where people don’t sit in SUVs randomly all day staring at your house,” Keefe points out, “so there absolutely was somebody doing that, on more than one occasion.”

London Falling offered more direct opportunities for intimidation. The first time Keefe interviewed Andy Baker, an enforcer partner of Verinder Sharma reputed to have castrated a man while he was still alive, Baker had just been released from prison. “He shook my hand and smiled and asked after my wife and children by name,” Keefe remembers. “I hadn’t told him their names. That was unsettling.”

Baker is now back in prison. But he called Keefe from jail recently to ask if he’d give a reading to Baker’s prison book club. “I think I might go,” Keefe says. “He’s got all the guys in the prison reading my books. Which is funny too, because if you know Andy, I don’t know how much they all really want to read the books and how much Andy Baker told them, ‘Now you’re going to read Patrick Radden Keefe.’ So we’ll see what kind of welcome I get in prison with these poor guys who’ve gotten this homework from Andy Baker.”

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Keefe insists he takes precautions. “For instance, I don’t write about organized crime in New York City, where I live.” Stuff happens anyway. His younger son, Felix, was still a child when, playing with his father’s phone, he accidentally made a video call to one of the top operatives in the Sinaloa cartel, about whom Keefe had recently written. Keefe killed the call and later texted the outlaw, explaining what had happened. “Cute kid,” the drug dealer replied.

Keefe tells these stories with a laugh. But under his insouciance is a hard-headed – some might even say brash – calculation of risk, a line he has drawn between the safety of his family, on the one hand, and his sharp hunger for a story. “I have one North Star,” he says, a phrase he frequently employs when talking to journalists about his books. “And it’s the truth.”

One could be forgiven for thinking everything else comes second. Patrick Radden Keefe has two teenaged boys of his own, now roughly the same age Zac Brettler was when he began to slip beyond his parents’ ken. “How could I not think about my own life as a parent of adolescent boys, writing the book? It’s the most universal thing I’ve ever written, in the sense that it’s about the experience of watching your own child become somebody you don’t quite recognize.” The role of family is a recurring theme in Keefe’s writing: He reportedly still reads a rough draft of his stories out loud to his father and mother, a city planner turned political adviser and a philosopher of psychiatry, respectively, before publishing

Part of the problem, of course, is the smartphone: It isn’t just what kids see on the screen, but how they see it. “There’s a weird cultural slippage that is happening,” Keefe believes, “in which the image becomes more important than reality, the appearance of success becomes a kind a proxy for success. I know adults who don’t cope with that slippage well. Imagine what it would be like to be 16, where you’re much less moored in reality. And you’re being fed these very seductive images.”

But the cellphone is only a symptom of the bigger affliction that ailed Zac Brettler. Under Patrick Radden Keefe’s relentless drive to get to the bottom of the story lies a deeper and darker distaste for the excesses of capitalism. That theme underscores almost everything he has written – and it definitely drives the compulsive energy of London Falling, a tale of what happens when money becomes more important than human beings. It isn’t just criminals who indulge that destructive hunger, but the people who enable the criminals.

“I think that we live in a money culture,” Keefe says, as our interview winds down. “In a culture of glitz, a kind of hustler culture in which there’s a sense that the most important thing is to get out there and get yours. And it doesn’t really matter if it’s illegal, if you’re a fraud, if you lie. Obviously we have a total fraud and hustler and liar who is the president of the United States, twice elected. His family and his circle have all enriched themselves. And if I’m honest, I think a lot of people, maybe especially young people, look at that self-enrichment, and they’re not appalled. Because they think, well, this is the coin of the realm these days. You go out there and you get yours. It’s hard for me not to look at late capitalism and the ways in which it has infected life at every level. Don’t get me wrong, I haven’t made a vow of poverty, I’m talking to you in part because I hope to sell a lot of books. I am part of this matrix along with everybody else. But in a purely diagnostic sense, I just don’t know that there’s another explanation. I look around and I see so much moral compromise happening.”

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In Keefe’s previous book, Empire of Pain, the first character the reader meets is Mary Jo White, a revered lawyer and advocate for the Sackler family. “I started with her for a reason,” Keefe says. “The Sacklers are the villains of the story. But the really interesting people to me are the people who should know better, who have all kinds of other options and don’t need to do this for a living, but do.”

Like the lawyers who threaten Keefe with lawsuits for exposing the truth. Like the ultraflexible business class that enabled London’s larcenous oligarchs (many of the enablers met with mysterious deaths for their troubles). Like Akbar Shamji and Verinder Sharma and the other parasites who thought it was acceptable to prey on a confused kid. Like the enablers of Jeffrey Epstein, like the technocrats who push technology they don’t fully understand onto a world that doesn’t know how to handle it; like the citizens who elect corrupt sociopaths. It’s a dark world. Legions of us help make it darker.

The surprise, of course, is that spending so much time poking around in that moral murk has not darkened Patrick Radden Keefe. He talks about his own motivations, his personal psychology, only reluctantly. “For whatever reason,” he will admit, “I gravitate often to these very dark subjects. And I don’t know why. But I think people who know me from my writing and then meet me are sometimes taken aback that I’m not all doom and gloom.” He credits his father, who used to sing him an old Ira Gershwin ditty: Life can be delish with a sunny disposish. “Those are kind of words to live by that I grew up with.”

Maybe. The more obvious cause of his optimism, even beyond his commercial success as a bestseller, is his work as a stylish muck-raking journalist and writer – the adventurer who gets to dig up and then dig into our most revealing stories and obsessions. “It’s just that I really love the work,” he says. “I think a lot of journalists do. I always felt as though I’d won the lottery: this is the best thing that somebody could conceivably do.” You dive into it and write it down, and then you do it again. You may not ever fully dispel the human shadows, but at least that way no one can say you didn’t try.

Editor’s note: An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Patrick Radden Keefe’s son Lucian accidentally made a video call to a cartel operative about whom Keefe had recently written. His son Felix made the call.