I previously read this author’s EMPIRE OF PAIN, an excellent and depressing overview of the corruption in medicine and law that drove the opiod epidemic. Here we’re on corruption again, this time in London.
It starts with an apparent suicide. A 19 year old man is captured on CCTV jumping off a 5th floor balcony into the Thames. He’s from a fairly wealthy English family, and as his horrified parents look into what happened to him, they discover that he has LOTS OF SPOILER COMING being pretending to be a Russian oligarch’s son. He’d been to school with lots of wealthy Russians, (this being right off the fall of the USSR), spent too much time on Instagram, and I guess gotten the idea that he needed to get rich fast. He was a pretty successful conman, sucking in some wealthy businessmen, with the only problem being they were themselves conmen. They were, unfortunatley for him, in reality gangsters looking to wring some protection money out of an oligarch’s son.
I was surprised to learn how much gangster activity there is in London. But that was only by-the-by. What was really surprising, and depressing, was to learn how deep Russian corruption ran in London. Or possibly still runs. I knew London was laundering Russian money, but I did not realize the huge number of ‘suicides’ and ‘accidents’ that came with that. And that they largely went (or go?) almost totally unexamined by the British police. This poor young man was caught up in that. The Met interviews almost no one. The Met doesn’t bother to visit the building for a week after the body is found. The Met accepts that that the gangster ‘doesn’t know’ what he meant by texting an associate that he HEATING UP THE KNIVES right before the young man jumps. (This despite in other court cases it was entered into the record that this particular gangster was well known to torture people with heated kitchen knives). Anyway, I can’t get into it all. I’ll give it this tribute: it did change the way this Londoner thinks about London