This story is little more than a brutal anecdote, which Patrick Radden Keefe has chosen to tell at excessive length. It has the kind of fact-checked gravity that indicates a star American journalist bent on perpetrating an entire book. (‘Built in 1923 and originally known as the Empire Stadium, Wembley was the most iconic sporting ground in Britain.’) But it occurred to me more than once as I read it that it has the hallmarks of a particularly black London comedy by Dickens or Ben Jonson or Joe Orton.

A violent knave, his activities previously limited to cheating the police, murdering his equally appalling criminal rivals, doing underhand deals and ripping off the rich, acquires an associate. The associate’s family have a history of spending other people’s money, buying massive mansions on the never-never. The associate knows a Russian teenager, the son of an oligarch, not very bright, eager to please and dazzled by glamorous toys – cars, watches and riverside apartments. The boy announces that he is about to come into £205 million, but that he has no idea what to do with the money or whom to trust. The knave goes into action, lighting up with the prospect of a nine-figure payday.

The Act Two revelation is that there is another practitioner of deceit in this scenario: the teenager. He isn’t Russian and his father isn’t an oligarch. He can’t speak a word of Russian. He has grown up in a flat in Maida Vale and his entire worldly estate is the £18,000 he came into on his 18th birthday – the product of various birthday gifts and ISAs that doting relations gave the less academically promising family member over the years. That has been quickly spent keeping up the appearances of the scion of oligarchy.

When, in Act Three, the furious knave, suspecting that something’s afoot, yells his demand for 50 per cent of what the teen-ager’s got, that amounts to 50 per cent of £4. It could be extremely funny, except for one thing. The 19-year-old ends by being tossed, or throwing himself, off the fifth-floor balcony of a riverside block in November 2019. He hits the embankment wall, shatters his hip, falls into the river and drowns. His jaw may have been broken some time earlier. The inquiry into his death reached an open verdict.

The boy’s name was Zac Brettler. His family were respectable and comfortably off. His maternal grandfather was Hugo Gryn, a celebrated media rabbi and Holocaust survivor. Brettler was a familiar London type. Not bright enough to get into........

© The Spectator