Special Preview: "London Falling" by Patrick Radden Keefe

0:00Hey, it's Patrick Radden Keefe, host of Wind of Change. It's been a while, but I wanted to drop in here and let you know some exciting news, which is that I've got a new book coming out, April 7th. It's called London Falling, A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth. It's a true story about this 19-year-old kid named Zach Brettler, who died in 2019 under very mysterious circumstances. He went off the balcony of a luxury apartment tower overlooking the Thames River in London. And after he died, his parents, Matthew and Rochelle, were trying to figure out what had happened to their son when they made this startling discovery.

0:47which is that unbeknownst to them, Zach had been leading a double life. He had a secret alter ego and he'd been moving around London pretending that he was the son of a Russian oligarch. So the book is a mystery story about the sudden inexplicable death of this teenager in which these two grieving parents sort of have to become detectives and figure out what happened to their son. It's a journey that pulls them into London's underworld, a part of the city behind all those glittering facades that turns out to be quite dangerous. On a deeper level, the book is about a pretty universal question, which is, how well do any of us really know the people we love most?

1:38There is an audiobook, Naturally, from Penguin Random House Audio, and I narrate the book myself, and we've got a treat for you today, which is a free sample chapter. London Falling is coming out April 7th. It's available to pre-order now, wherever books are sold. And if you stick around, we'll play you the prologue of the book, setting up the whole story and the world in which it unfolds, this glamorous, elegant, cosmopolitan city of London and the danger lurking just beneath its surface.

2:16Patrick Radden Keefe:The headquarters of Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, MI6, occupies an imposing edifice of concrete and green glass on the south bank of the River Thames in London. It was erected in the early 1990s alongside Vauxhall Bridge under circumstances of such secrecy that when the architect was commissioned to design the building, he did not know who he was designing it for. The Thames is a tidal river, its powerful currents ebbing and surging twice each day with salt water from the North Sea. Occasionally, a bottlenose whale will veer off course, separated from its pod, and wander downriver, dangerously far from the ocean.

3:04Patrick Radden Keefe:When the tide recedes, the Thames shrinks, its level plummeting by as much as 20 feet, exposing a muddy shoreline. Urban beachcombers, mudlarks, as they're known, have unearthed artifacts of previous civilizations from the silt along the riverbanks, Bronze Age daggers, and Iron Age coins. It was the Thames that first drew the Romans 2 ,000 years ago to establish a walled entrepot, which they gave the name Londinium. By the heyday of the British Empire, London had colonized a quarter of the globe. In 1860, half of all exports from Asia, Africa, and Latin America were sent there. The Thames was the busiest port in the world.

3:51Hundreds of ships arrived each week, and towering cranes unloaded tobacco, ivory, spices, wool, rice, tea, and other treasures. The river was teeming, thrumming with commerce, jostling with all manner of vessels and tradesmen and stevedores and mariners from strange lands, hinting at the existence of other civilizations over the horizon. But the riverbank could be a frightening place as well. In the Victorian era, the waterfront was rife with crime. People had an alarming tendency to die in the Thames, whether voluntarily in a moment of despair or because somebody pushed them. If you misstepped on a slick cobble after a night out drinking, the black water could suck you under in an instant.

4:40In the work of Charles Dickens, the river was often depicted as a malignant force, grimy and malodorous, lapping at piles and posts and iron rings, hiding strange things in its mud, running away with suicides and accidentally drowned bodies. This was the paradox of the Thames. It was the pulsing artery of London's industrial boom, with vast factories and warehouses swarming with laborers and belching smoke along its banks. But at the same time, Dickens saw in the river an image of death, a ribbon of danger coiling through the midst of the great city's life. The design of the MI6 building was meant to evoke Britain's industrial era, echoing the monolithic power stations like Battersea and Bankside, which stood nearby.

5:34Patrick Radden Keefe:But by 1994, when Queen Elizabeth II presided over the opening of the new spy headquarters, the power stations had long since been decommissioned and now seemed like artifacts themselves, relics of London's vanished past as a factory town. The city had shuttered most of its factories. Between 1960 and 1990, jobs in the manufacturing sector declined by 80%. Shipping, too, had disappeared. In 1955, an American trucking executive from North Carolina invented the modern stackable shipping container. The standardization of these 20 - and 40-foot steel boxes during the 1960s sparked a revolution in global commerce, enabling a more integrated transportation infrastructure in which containers could be transferred fluidly from truck to ship to train.

6:31Suddenly, big waterfront warehouses for the storage of goods were obsolete, and a new class of gigantic container ships could accommodate ever larger loads. These vessels were so big that they could no longer navigate the narrow docks lining the Thames. So between 1960 and 1980, nearly all of London's docks shut down, and a whole commercial sector that had sustained the region virtually disappeared. For hundreds of years, London had been a port city. Then, quite abruptly, it wasn't. At least the air was clear.

7:08Patrick Radden Keefe:The word smog had been invented in London to describe the smoke from coal fires and factories mingled with English fog that often enshrouded the city. But new regulations on such fires, combined with the closure of so many factories, meant that suddenly London had clean air. By the time MI6 headquarters opened, the old Dickensian industrial city had been supplanted by a glistening new metropolis. London might not be a center of shipping or manufacturing anymore, but it was reinventing itself as a financial capital. The waterfront was experiencing an astonishing revitalization. In 1988, a group of young British art students had converted a derelict warehouse in the Surrey Docks into a temporary gallery for an exhibition called Freeze.

7:59Patrick Radden Keefe:Cool restaurants soon followed, and eventually new housing and high-tech trading floors. Having shed any trace of its old grit or menace, London's waterfront had become a sanitized playground for tourists and young professionals. In 2000, Bankside Power Station reopened as the Tate Modern Museum. Battersea power station would eventually find new life as a shopping mall. To many, this new London was hugely exciting. The city had been reimagined as a preferred destination for money and people who had it. Suddenly, there were good restaurants for what felt like the first time in history, and world-class shopping, and deluxe hotels with chauffeured Bentleys idling out front.

8:46Once again, cranes dominated London's skyline. But now they were not unloading cotton or nutmeg, but throwing up glass and steel skyscrapers and glossy residential complexes with staggering prices.

9:00Patrick Radden Keefe:In fact, a lot of Londoners found themselves priced out of this new version of their city, forced to relocate and commute from distant suburbs. Much of the real estate speculation was driven by foreign buyers who regarded property in London as an investment rather than a place to live. So the buildings were full of amenities, but curiously devoid of residents, because the international owners were mostly out of town. Clocks in lobbies displayed the times in Moscow, Hong Kong, and Abu Dhabi. You have people with five, ten apartments all around the world, a staffer at one new luxury tower remarked.

9:40Patrick Radden Keefe:They come and go. London was an attractive second home for potentates, monarchs, chiefs, sultans, and diplomats. Trevor Abramson, a veteran real estate agent with a billionaire clientele, observed. But many of these foreign-owned properties remained unoccupied for much of the year. A former deputy mayor of London, Nicky Gavron, complained that overseas investors want to buy a luxury flat in a skyscraper to treat as a safety deposit box. In fact, there is a statistical correlation between the value of a property and the likelihood that it will be occupied. The higher the price, the greater the chance it is empty.

10:23Patrick Radden Keefe:As a consequence, parts of London that had once thronged with local people now often seemed eerily depopulated. The effect was unsettling. In fashionable neighborhoods after sundown, the windows of the multimillion-dollar dwellings were all dark. The press gave a nickname to these vacant palaces, ghost mansions. In 2016, one of these luxury buildings was constructed on the north bank of the Thames, directly across from MI6, on a site that had once housed a 19th century prison. It was a residential complex called Riverwalk, and consisted of a pair of sleek towers, one tall and one short, connected by a low-slung lobby and fronted by a cascade of curved balconies.

11:11Patrick Radden Keefe:Riverwalk had been conceived by a buccaneering property impresario, Sir Gerald Ronson, who was convicted in 1990 on charges of conspiracy, false accounting, and theft in connection with a stock fraud case. did a stint in prison, and then in 2012, was made a commander of the British Empire for his philanthropic work. Imagine the parties you could throw here, Ronson told an interviewer when construction was complete. From the 25 million pound penthouse, you could see as far away as Wembley Stadium. The building's wealthy residents were rumored to include Tom Jones, the Welsh crooner who was famous for songs like It's Not Unusual and Help Yourself.

11:55Patrick Radden Keefe:But it was hard to say for sure, because people who purchased units at Riverwalk tended to register them through offshore trusts and shell companies to preserve their anonymity. And anyway, much of the time the place seemed empty. In the early hours of November 29, 2019, a surveillance camera on MI6 headquarters registered movement on the fifth floor of the taller tower at Riverwalk, just across the water. The night was cold. The Thames was running high, and the reflected illumination of the lamps lining voxel bridge danced on the surface of the water. Riverwalk was almost entirely dark, but one apartment blazed with light, Unit 504.

12:40Patrick Radden Keefe:At 2.23 a.m., the MI6 camera captured a dark figure walking out of the apartment and onto the narrow balcony overlooking the Thames. It was a slender silhouette against the brightly lit windows. A young man. He made his way to one corner of the balcony and seemed to peer over the ledge before crossing to the other corner and briefly pausing there. Then, returning to the center of the balcony, he jumped.

13:13I hope you enjoyed that first look at my new book, London Falling. You can pre-order the book or the audiobook, read by me, wherever books are sold. I'll be doing a big tour for this one in the U.S. and also internationally. So if I'm in your neck of the woods, come say hi. You can find all the tour dates on my website, patrickraddenkeef.com. Thanks so much for listening.