Patrick Radden Keefe on “London Falling,” His Book About a Teen-Ager’s Mysterious Life and Death

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2:29This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Ramnick. Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker. And his last book bore this subtitle, True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels, and Crooks. And without a doubt, Patrick writes some of the great page-turners in nonfiction today. But these stories are not simple entertainment. They connect crime and shady dealings to the biggest issues out there. Say Nothing is about political violence under the IRA. Empire of Pain was about the Sackler family and their role in the opioid epidemic. Two years ago, Patrick wrote in The New Yorker about the death of a teenage boy in London in very mysterious circumstances.

3:11And when he began to explore the story, he found the boy's life as mysterious as his death. That story has now been published in Patrick Raddenkief's best-selling book, London Falling. Now, Patrick, the book tells a pretty terrifying story about this kid, Zach Brettler, in a particular environment that's developed in London in the last, I don't know, 20 years or so, the influx of huge amounts of foreign capital into London. How did you find this story? How did you find London Falling? Well, so this one came to me in exactly this way, in conversation. I was in the summer of 2023. I was living in London.

3:53I moved my family over there because we were producing a TV drama based on my book, Say Nothing, which actually started as a piece in The New Yorker in 2015. There was a guy who was a guest of the director that day. This guy said, there's a family here in London who I'm very close with, and they've had this tragedy. They lost a child, a 19-year-old boy named Zach. He died in 2019 in very mysterious circumstances. He went off the balcony of a luxury building overlooking the Thames River, and he died in the river. And after he died, his parents, whose names are Matthew and Rochelle, started trying to figure out what happened to him.

4:31And they made this astonishing discovery, which is that he had had a secret life they hadn't known about. Their teenage son had a secret alter ego, and he had been moving around London pretending that he was the son of a Russian oligarch. I went back to our apartment, and I Googled Zach Brettler, you know, boy dies in the Thames, kid posing as a Russian oligarch. Nothing came up. Nothing in the British papers. It hadn't been written about at all. There was no actually no kind of findable record of Zach being dead. so I said to this guy Andrew I'd love to talk with them the parents yeah I I'd love to tell this story but I also understand they haven't spoken publicly about it and it would be a big decision to do so so why don't we meet and I won't even bring a notebook totally off the record no commitment in either direction we'll just talk really it was they did most of the talking they I just kind of sat there and listened and they talked for two hours straight as if they were waiting for you to walk through the door Part of the reason they hadn't gone public about their son's death is that they had, like a lot of us probably would in a big contemporary city, placed their faith in the authorities.

5:44And so there had been a long period of time when they thought, well, Scotland Yard is looking into this. We're going to get answers from the police. And the whole official process had just kind of run its course without providing any answers just before they met me. You do a brilliant thing in the beginning of the book. One of the favorite openings of any book I've ever read is Bleak House, the way it sets the tone of London and the mud and the coal smoke. And you do a kind of mirroring thing. I don't know if you had Bleak House in mind, but there we are. We have modern, gleaming London, a London that's been absolutely transformed in the last 20 years.

6:24And this book is about many things. One of them is about the transformation of London itself. Part of the story I was interested in telling was about how the London of Dickens, the London of the British Empire, was a port city, first of all. It was one of the most important ports in the world, and it was also a manufacturing city. And then what happened is in about a 20-year period, 20, 25-year period, really between the 50s and the late 70s, the factories all close and the docks all close. And so Margaret Thatcher comes in and the city has an identity crisis. What are we going to be? And there's a decision to deregulate the banking industry and become basically a destination for capital and people who have it.

7:14Well, capital of a very particular kind in geography that transforms the city. How would you describe that? Because this is the milieu into which our tragic hero enters. Yeah, you get a lot of foreign money that comes in. I mean, I'm sort of at pains to say, really, first, the Americans actually are a big part of the vanguard of this. And then you get the dissolution of the Soviet Union. And what happens in the early 1990s is that you have these massive wealth transfers in which you have formerly state-owned assets that basically fall into private hands in a pretty messy, pretty untransparent, I think we could say pretty corrupt manner.

7:53And so you get these billionaires who are minted overnight. But if you want to hold on to that money, you probably don't want to keep it in Russia at that time. So you have all these fortunes made, and then immediately this first generation of oligarchs is looking for a safe harbor. And they find it in London. You know, the property market just goes through the roof. The complexion of the private schools, the elite private schools, is totally transformed by the introduction of all these children of oligarchs. And so my story about Zach Bratler is about this teenage kid who ends up at one of these private schools at 13.

8:26This book gets into the heads of and provides dialogue and so on. Technically speaking, how are you able to tell the story with such deep insight when your main character, arguably, is not there to help you? There are these people I don't have access to. But then on the other side, there are the bretlers who were incredibly open. And I spent hundreds of hours talking with them. And in fact, they had done this. I've never had an experience like this. They did this unusual thing, which is that before they even knew Zach was dead, when he was just missing, they were trying to figure out what had happened to him, and they would talk to people, and Matthew would record the conversations on his iPhone.

9:12You know, he was looking for these sort of strong figures to be part of a life different from ours. You know, we're a very happy, kind of middle class way, cultured life, but it's not glamorous. We're not ultra wealthy, and I think that's the thing I was saying to Akbar earlier, that he got turned on to this when he went to Mill Hill, he was a boarder at Mill Hill, and he got exposed to these former Soviet Union guys. Yes, exactly. That's where it comes from. And so it wasn't just their memories of these days that I had access to. It was actually the original real-time recordings of the conversations they were having.

10:04Rochelle and Matthew, the parents in this book, who really are the main characters in the story who we follow as they try and sort of figure out what happened to their son. Part of what they realized is that there's a fantasy, right, for any of us, which is that we can kind of mold our kids like clay. Yeah, good luck. And in fact, they... It doesn't work like that. It doesn't work that way. In adolescence, they become something else and sometimes something unrecognizable. He's entertaining. He's charming. He also knows straight away how to play people from a young kid. You know, talk about if you like cars, he'd straight away know the banter, Even as a 12-year-old, well, you should try getting this Toyota, or have you looked at that one, or this Mercedes.

10:47He's got currency. He knows what people want. Yeah, for sure. And that's... Yeah, he knew quite a lot about a lot of subjects. He's speaking as he speaks Russian. Russian's not bad. He was holding conversations. Are you sure? But this is such an extreme example. He has an entirely second life, and he carries it off with, I have to say, amazing skill. That's the thing about Zach. In some respects, he's such a creature of our time in that he's a fake it till you make it kind of kid, and we live in a fake it till you make it kind of culture. You know, Zach's favorite movie was The Wolf of Wall Street.

11:31You can be somebody who lies compulsively and is constantly hustling and looking for an advantage and kind of transforming yourself in an ultimately really ruthlessly situationalist manner and get twice elected president of the United States. I've heard that. The sky's the limit, right? That can happen. Yeah. I'm speaking with Patrick Radden Keefe about London falling. His new book about the death of a teenager in London will continue in a moment.

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15:49He gets embroiled with two guys named Akbar Shamji and Dave Sharma. Who are they, and what was Zach's ties to them? So Zach, his parents did not know until after his death. At a certain point in his teens, starts pretending in certain environments that he is not Zach Brettler, upper middle class Jewish kid from Medavail, but Zach Ismailov, billionaire son of a Russian oligarch. He had this kind of magpie quality with his lies, and it turns out there was a woman that he had gotten to know whose name was Zemira Ismailova, and this was classic Zach. He kind of plucks her last name and repurposes it as his own.

16:34He's got skills. He's got skills. He started to present himself this way to people, including the people who you really would want to be careful about carrying off this. Like, you know, a guy who works for Roman Abramovich, the biggest oligarch in London, is one of the first people that Zach pulls this ruse on. And he meets these two guys, Akbar Shamji and then Dave Sharma. And Akbar Shamji is this very glamorous, kind of elegant, handsome businessman who lives in Mayfair, a particularly posh district of London. And when I was working on the New Yorker piece, he and I exchanged many emails. He wouldn't meet with me.

17:12He wouldn't talk with me on the phone. He wouldn't tell me where in the world he is. This is quite a slippery guy. But he would email. And we emailed a lot. And then the New Yorker piece came out and he hasn't connected with me since. What does he want with a teenager? Well, what does he want with a teenager who he thinks is poised to inherit billions and to invest his family's fortune? What Akbar wants is a young protege with money to spend. He meets Akbar. Akbar has a real estate development that he's trying to get off the ground in Lisbon. They're introduced, and Akbar thinks that Zach is going to invest some of his oligarch billions in this development.

17:53But Zach keeps not coming through with the money. And before Akbar can start to suspect that something's going on, Zach says, I have terrible news. My dear father, the oligarch, has died. and he says that he's gotten into a fight with his mother. His mother lives in Dubai and she shut him out of the family home. He claimed that he lived in One Hyde Park, which is the most expensive real estate development in London. And so the story kind of pivots and now he's clashing with his mother and he doesn't have a place to stay. And at this point Akbar says, well, I have this friend named Dave Sharma and he's got this luxury apartment overlooking the Thames.

18:31You could go stay with him. and Zach ends up becoming fast friends with this guy Dave Sharma who it emerges is better known around London as a gangster and his nickname is Indian Dave. So at first it seemed like Zach had jumped off his balcony and committed suicide. He was in over his head in his real life slash fictionalized life. At what point did it appear like there was much more going on here in terms of how he died? I think that the parents started to figure it out pretty quickly, in part because they had an intuition that their son probably hadn't committed suicide. I mean, a kid goes off a balcony, and it turns out that there's CCTV footage showing that he jumps off the balcony.

19:26He's not pushed. And across my career, I've often written about denial of one sort or another. I'm very attuned to denial, especially familial denial. I don't think this is a situation in which Zack killed himself and was in denial. I think that his parents really said, this doesn't add up. It doesn't look like a suicide. Then they meet with Akbar Shamji and they talk to Dave Sharma. And those guys say, oh, we didn't know your son as Zack Bretler at all. We knew him as Zack Ismailov. And so that's a second big revelation for them. All of this is coming quite quickly. And if it's not a kind of classic murder where you see somebody pushing him off the balcony and it's not a suicide, then maybe it's some third more exotic thing.

20:11I was going around telling this story a lot. All the money. He's kind of this orphan guy with all this money. He's delivering that in dangerous circles. Anywhere in London can be a bit dangerous if you're killing lots of money. There's this interesting process where initially the Brattlers really placed a lot of faith in the authorities. This was one of those cases where the cops just weren't up to it. And I don't think they had the imagination for it. And there was also a kind of interesting thing where there was the whiff of Russia about all of this. And there is a history which our New Yorker colleague Heidi Blake has written brilliantly about.

20:51People tend to go off balconies. In which people, yeah, people go off balconies, they go in front of tube trains again and again and again. I mean, it's happened many times in London, and there has been a tendency historically for the British police to say, looks like a suicide to us. So why would the, as it were, organized crime want to get rid of Zach? He had gotten involved with some pretty dangerous people. And Dave Sharma, this pretty ruthless, murderous gangster, this guy who, you know, at first glance, the parents thought he was harmless. They actually thought he was a rubber executive, that he worked for Pirelli Rubber.

21:32They learned by degrees that actually he wasn't at all, that he was an extortionist and a gangster. and that their son had stayed with this guy, had lived in his apartment, and that the day that Zack died was right around the time when this gangster was beginning to realize that maybe Zack wasn't who he had pretended that he was, that these were the wrong people to be pulling this kind of high-stakes imposter routine with. Let me ask you this. After 20 years of doing these stories, do you start to see in your own mind what the shape of your writing career and its obsessions are? What's at the root of it?

22:17In retrospect, yeah, I can tell you I'm drawn to stories about family. I'm drawn to stories about moral compromise of one sort or another. it's not crime per se that interests me but the intermingling of the licit and illicit worlds and the ways in which people deviate from a kind of conventional morality by degrees and then the stories that they tell themselves about doing that with this one I was really intrigued by the fact that you have this boy who dies in 2019 and you have three people in the apartment that night and as I delved into their lives even as I was working on the piece I learned that their family histories were really rich and interesting and I was interested in these questions of reinvention how did London reinvent itself how did Zach reinvent himself and then it emerges that each of those three guys in the apartment that night comes from a family where somebody came from a foreign land and they arrive in London And what is a big global city, if not a stage for reinvention?

23:31And they each have to kind of reinvent themselves. And so Zach had these two grandfathers who had both survived the Holocaust as teenagers, lost their whole families, virtually their whole families, and arrive in London as teenagers and have to decide, who am I going to be? and I thought that there might be a way by strangely by delving into the backstories of these people and kind of seeing what brought them to the balcony that night to say something about a city that I really love and about these ideas of identity and invention and the kind of masks we put on and how we sometimes make a quite conscious decision to go from you know being the person we were born to something else altogether.

24:18Patrick Raddenkief, it's an extraordinary, extraordinary book. It's a wonderful book. Thanks so much. Thank you, David.

24:28London Falling is the title of Patrick Raddenkief's new book, and it will be adapted into a TV series by A24 UK. It all began with a story by Patrick in The New Yorker, and you can read that piece at newyorker.com. You can also subscribe to the magazine there as well, newyorker.com. I'm David Remnick. That's our program for today. Thank you for listening. See you next time.

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