Patrick Radden Keefe

And the answer, which really comes with deregulation and the Big Bang, is we'll be a money town, a destination for money and people who have it and a sort of preferred second home for plutocrats from around the world.

And I should say, I mean, the story that I tell in the book is very much a story about the Russians who arrive in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union.

But in fairness, as an American, I feel as though I should acknowledge, you know, the first wave is actually the Americans who come in in the late 80s.

And they come in with a much different kind of lifestyle.

All these bankers who come in to work in the now deregulated countries.

City of London and they come in and they want nice apartments and they want they drive up the real estate prices and they they want BMWs and they want fancy wine bars and a lot of the kind of What we would sort of think of as the the kind of markers of consumption that characterize London today Fundamental key reason why they came to London was because the British state wanted

generation of Russian oligarchs who are these kind of free market bandits who, in the collapse of the USSR, see opportunities to essentially take into their own possession these huge assets that had previously, in theory, belonged to the whole Soviet public.

And, you know, there's a quote I have in the book from Boris Berezovsky saying that there was, you know, at one point in the 1990s, he and six other men controlled half of the wealth in all of the former Soviet Union.

And those guys, it's astonishing.

And those guys arrive.

I think some of it is, again, that there's a sort of mode of new money ostentation that would be a bit foreign, I think, to England historically.

And I wouldn't weigh it all entirely on the Russians.

I mean, I think there's a whole bunch of different things that go on.

I think you have the rise of luxury consumer goods.

social media, all the rest of it.

But for somebody like Zach, you know, Zach grew up in this world of kind of supercars, for instance, the prevalence of these sports cars that, you know, cost hundreds of thousands of pounds and very loud engines and

a kind of general blinginess and when zach gets to school he he meets these kids who dressed in designer clothes and they i tell a story in the book about how there's a there are dormitories on campus and it's a seven or eight minute walk to class and these sons of oligarchs rather than do the the walk to class on cold mornings they'll get ubers you know that kind of um that type of behavior yeah

So there's that, but then there's also a more sinister side to this, which I think does lead to a kind of subtle change in the way in which people relate to law enforcement and accountability in the state, which is that not long after these oligarchs start arriving...

People start dying in England in mysterious circumstances.

You have people falling off of buildings and people falling out of windows and people falling in front of tube trains and dying of kind of suspicious looking heart attacks and so forth.