People of Interest
London Falling
A new investigation takes Patrick Radden Keefe's forensic eye to a forgotten London corruption case — the kind where everyone knew what was happening, nobody did anything, and the money went somewhere implausible.
Patrick Radden Keefe has made a career out of finding the stories that institutions would prefer to remain theoretical — things that everyone roughly knows happened but that nobody has sat down and actually documented in the full, uncomfortable, granular detail that makes them impossible to wave away. Say Nothing did it for the Troubles. Empire of Pain did it for the Sackler family and the opioid catastrophe. Rogues collected a decade of the same forensic attention trained on arms dealers, art forgers, and other professional deceivers. The formula, if you can call it that, is patience: Keefe reads everything, talks to everyone, and writes in a register that makes you feel, page by page, that you are discovering something rather than being told it.
London Falling turns that patience on the Zac Brettler case — a story of financial corruption in the City and its periphery that managed, with remarkable efficiency, to implicate several layers of British professional life while simultaneously producing no meaningful consequences for anyone involved. [Note: specific details of the Brettler case sourced from source PDF; verify against original before publication.] The details, as Keefe assembles them, have the quality of a magician's trick performed in slow motion: you can see exactly how it was done, which makes it, if anything, more astonishing that the audience kept applauding.
The broad shape of the story will be familiar to anyone who has watched the City of London operate at its more exuberant end. Money moved. It moved through structures designed to be opaque, tended by professionals whose job was to maintain the opacity and who were, in the ordinary course of their work, entirely brilliant at it. Regulators were aware of certain elements of what was happening and chose — and this, Keefe makes clear, was a choice — to treat it as someone else's problem. Lawyers wrote letters. Accountants signed documents. A great deal of money ended up somewhere considerably more pleasant than where it started.
The great achievement of British financial corruption is that it requires so few villains. The whole system pitches in. — Patrick Lake
What makes London Falling more than a financial scandal book — a genre with a tendency to reward the very patient and tax everyone else — is Keefe's eye for the human detail that sits beneath the corporate architecture. There are moments here that would feel almost novelistic if they were not meticulously sourced: a meeting in a club in St James's where the agreement reached was, legally speaking, spectacularly inadvisable; a regulator's internal email in which the author notes that whoever wrote it "had clearly read it back once, decided it was fine, and then had an extremely long lunch." The grubby human comedy of institutional failure is Keefe's natural territory, and he works it with the relish of someone who has spent long enough in the archives to have earned the right to enjoy himself.
The question that London Falling eventually circles is one that Keefe has orbited throughout his career: why do some catastrophes produce accountability and others do not? The opioid crisis produced legal action, settlements, and at least the performance of consequence. The Troubles produced a peace process and decades of contested truth recovery. The Brettler case produced, as far as anyone can establish, a great deal of paperwork and the quiet relocation of a number of individuals to more agreeable jurisdictions.
Part of the answer, Keefe suggests, is narrative. Opioids killed people in numbers that were impossible to abstract. Financial corruption kills people — it impoverishes communities, corrupts institutions, degrades the quality of public life — but the causal chain is long enough that it is always possible to insert an element of doubt, to find a plausible reason why each step was, technically, within the rules as written. The rules as written, of course, having been drafted by many of the same people who were operating within them.
The Brettler case also has the misfortune of being, from a certain angle, a story about money rather than a story about people. Keefe is too good a writer to let it stay that way for long — the people emerge, vivid and sometimes extraordinary — but the investigative challenge is real. Financial paper trails have a tendency to lead to other financial paper trails, and then to more paper trails, until you are deep in the archive reading documents whose relationship to any human action has been extensively laundered. Keefe navigates this with his usual combination of obsessive preparation and judicious deployment of the telling anecdote, but there are stretches of London Falling where you feel the story pushing back.
This is a minor caveat about a major piece of investigative writing. Keefe's books have a quality that is rare in non-fiction: they make you angry in the specific, rather than the general. By the time you finish, you are not angry about corruption in the abstract — you are angry about this particular meeting, this particular letter, this particular decision made by this particular person on this particular Wednesday afternoon, and the chain of consequences that followed. That precision is its own form of accountability, even when the legal system declines to provide another.