11.8.26
Dear Partners in Thought,
I would like to tell you about a recent non-fiction book that could be a great fiction novel but also an amazing sociological and historical piece: “London Falling”, a new opus from Patrick Radden Keefe, who had started covering the story for the New Yorker. It is a sad narrative about Zac Brettler, a nineteen-year-old Londoner, who fell to his death in the Thames in November 2019 following a very strange story of having mingled with extremely wealthy and shady local businessmen as well as potentially dealt with agents of foreign influence. “London Falling”, while gradually covering an amazingly tragic tale built by such a young man, also provides us with a detailed coverage of a unique city that many of us have much enjoyed in our lives and careers.
Zac was born into a well-off middle class Jewish family with strong historical ties to the Holocaust, who had found Britain as a new country to start anew. While his parents lived in Maida Vale, he went to a private school in the London area in the 2010s when about 20 per cent of their students were Russian and often from very wealthy oligarchic backgrounds. The UK had initially developed a very attractive immigration legal set-up to accept wealthy Russian families (and others) that wanted to invest in the great country to protect their assets and educate while sheltering their children at an uncertain time for a transitioning Russia. Then many came to escape Putin’s Russia starting in the mid-2000s. As such, the right-hand man of Roman Abramovich, the post-Cold War new owner of the world-famous Chelsea Football Club, is also a minor but key part of the story. The Zac experience of dealing with these ultra-privileged Russian children, always chauffeured to school even if living nearby, led to his to getting closer to another system where money was naturally key, making him start building an unusual future. He gradually started to lie about literally everything, including who he was, to everybody but his parents when at home. At some point, he decided to craft an entrepreneurial image à la Mark Zuckerberg in his late teens while approaching very wealthy and powerful, even if debt-ridden, Londoners of South Asian extraction while, it then turned out later, presenting himself as the son of a Russian oligarch with potential co-investment opportunities for the apparently wealthy gentlemen he was approaching. As Zac was a very nice and seemingly caring individual, those potential partners in their forties or fifties, all with a shady low key gangland debt collecting, drug trafficking and crypto-currency trading profile, were also impressed by his unusual acumen for his age and genuinely got close to him. At some point, he artfully said that his would be oligarch father had just died and his pseudo Dubai-born mother, with whom he always had a bad relationship, had told him he could not stay in any of their many residences in upper-crust London, leading one of them to welcome him to stay at his flat in Riverwalk House at a very exclusive London Mayfair address. Having tactically succeeded in stressing he was worth GBP 6bn in appealing inheritance (strangely not checked out by the kind of people who usually should), Zac’s bank account following his diving death only showed four Pounds, showing his story-telling acumen. As the police seemed unable or unwilling to find out what really happened, Zac’s parents then took the investigative lead. I would not want to disclose more of the plot around Zac and his untimely death that could be seen initially as a suicide, even if his face had been hit badly, to let you gradually discover and enjoy a great multi-faceted and dark read.
While the story is clearly about a rarely seen account of such a tragedy and its long and arduous investigation, “London Falling” is also about London itself and how it evolved in the 20th and early 21stcentury. For those like me who lived in London for ten years while working with London firms for twenty-four, the book was very telling. Some parts brought in Margaret Thatcher and her impact on Britain as well as the City of London with her “Big Bang” that changed a leading financial centre that became more global at the cost of many great banking names, like eventually my old SG Warburg, that sadly disappeared. Other parts linked to a key Zac “new old friend and protector” recount the then well-known (also for his name) 1972 Ugandan leader Idi Amin Dada who had suddenly expelled and expropriated all the Ugandan citizens of South Asian origin that had been living there for generations since the heights of the British Empire, many of them thriving, hence the backlash. While the Ugandan economy went down, many of these residents naturally flew to Britain then creating a new career for Enoch Powell, the Nigel Farage of the day, immigration becoming a real political and vote grabbing issue that never died as many future governments (to be fair, across Europe) proved poorly equipped to manage it fairly and efficiently, if it could ever be. We also learn about Spain having become in 1978 and for a few years a haven for British criminals of all sorts, making the Costa del Sol the “Costa del Crime”, following Spain’s ending of its extradition agreement with Britain. A few forgotten dark features of the British banking sector such as the demise of the too shady client flexible Johnson Matthey, that finally collapsed in 1984, are also remembered. London is also portrayed as the theatre of many suicides or likely assassinations of Russian dissidents, not always of the highest quality, by the Kremlin, this following the well-known Litvinenko murder in London in 2006. This new London geopolitical feature of the 2010s with the demise of Berezovsky and others, which we learn was never deeply investigated by the police apparently due to the key focus on energy deals with Russia, also became a rising feature of the Zac investigation given its links to his former Russian schoolmates and hidden dark network. Quite aside from its core story, the book is full of great descriptions of London at many different levels, locations and times from its drastically changing nature as a business hub over the ages to its many key locations including well-known and apparently strongly Russian-frequented Mayfair’s Annabel nightclub. “London Falling” is indeed a rare book that offers a non-fiction that looks like a thriller while providing us with a great coverage of London society and history in its background.
I wish you a great read of this multi-faceted tragedy while being sure that you will still like the great London that enjoys many other beautiful features, as we all know.
Warmest regards,
Serge
Desperate Measures 