Money, lies and death: London's criminal underworld with Patrick Radden Keefe

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0:32Patrick Radden Keefe:This is a Global Player original podcast. These two guys, one of them extremely dangerous, this guy Indian Dave, and also Akbar Shamji, these guys realize that they've kind of been had, they've been conned. And the CCTV footage shows Zach in a state of frenzy. The police, in my view, really botched the investigation. And then we don't see what happens, but we know that he never leaves and his body is found a few days later. akbar on that last evening is texting another guy he says i'm heating up knives and clearing up blood i first met patrick radden key for a couple of years ago he'd begun work on a book which at that point had no name he was writing a story of which there was almost no record it involved a young man zach bretler who in 2019 had fallen to his death off the balcony of a luxury London apartment.

1:30The more Patrick studied this death, the more mysterious it became. Zach was a much-loved, middle-class kid from North London who at a certain stage in his adolescence had begun to pass himself off as a Russian oligarch's son, moneyed, abandoned, orphaned, a million miles away from the child he really was. He began associating with high-powered businessmen and with dangerous criminals, men who believed in his story and in his wealth. What was it about London that allowed that lie to flourish? What was it about the flow of Russian money, the failures of our police and the callousness of those who befriended Zach that meant his parents never got answers to their son's death?

2:17So this is Patrick's book, London Falling, written with the extraordinary detective work of the Brettler family. And this is Zach's story. Welcome to The News Agents.

2:35The News Agents. Well, the man who's just walked into The News Agents studio is Patrick Radden Keefe, probably the leading investigative storyteller alive today. And his latest book, London Falling, has gone straight to the top of the bestseller lists. and for full disclosure, I should probably say I blurbed it because I loved it. Many of you will know and have read his Empire of Pain book, which exposed the Sackler family, their involvement in the opioid crisis, and they are still paying reparations today. The shadows of it are long. And his book, Say Nothing, focused on the IRA murder of Gene McConville.

3:18And Patrick, I think you were talking to us about the adaptation on this podcast when that came out. But London Falling is a very different sort of book. At its centre is a 19-year-old who mysteriously falls to his death and his family's determination to find out what happened. So that's where we're going to start. Patrick, thanks for coming in on this London leg of your whistle-stop tour.

3:45Patrick Radden Keefe:Yeah, in person. That's great. One thing that strikes me, I guess, is the difference between how this started and where we are. It was a very, very private death, this. It was something that the family didn't want to talk about, didn't want the press to pick up on. Zach Brettler fell off a balcony to his death. And for a long time, that was something that they kept quite hidden from the press. And now their story is everywhere. Their son is everywhere. The book is everywhere. what made them go so public it's interesting we met in the summer of 2023 and zaka died in the fall of 2019 and we met totally by happenstance i happened to get to talking with a guy who turned out to be a friend of the family a close friend of the family And he told me the story.

4:45And I remember him telling me, I know this family and they've lost a son in mysterious circumstances. And after his death, they learned that he had been pretending that he was the son of a Russian oligarch. And I went back that night to my apartment and I googled Zach Brettler death balcony and there was nothing. There was no record, even of him actually being dead at all on the Internet. There were sort of traces of Zach Brettler, but no indication that he was dead because they had kept it very quiet. I think it was a private family. I think they were mystified by his death. And they're all so sophisticated enough that I think they intuited that if the tabloids got a hold of the story, it could be very unpleasant for them in terms of the way it was covered.

5:34And so it was kept out of the press, essentially. They never spoke to anyone about it. And I think the thing that changed is that there had been an official process for trying to get to the bottom of Zach's death and initially a police investigation and then an inquest. And that whole process had kind of run its course with results that the family felt were less than satisfactory just prior to us happening to meet. And so I think they were kind of thinking, is there anything else we can do to explore this further? And it was at that point that we were introduced. Because I guess his parents were trying to find out not just how he died, but also how he lived.

6:22Because he was becoming a very different son to the one that they'd thought they'd raised. You talk about the fact that he sort of misrepresented himself. He sort of created this identity as the son of a Russian oligarch. He was bewildered and bewitched by wealth, by foreign money. And they were coming to terms or not coming to terms. They were discovering all this. Right. And and they then become sleuths in a way in in that whole investigation. They are at the heart of the work that they have to do. Right.

6:57Patrick Radden Keefe:Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, you put it eloquently. I think that there's a sense in which initially they kind of placed their faith in the Metropolitan Police. And the police, in my view, really botched the investigation. And there were lots of questions that they didn't ask and people that they didn't talk to, doors they didn't knock on. And so the family then was left with no choice but to investigate on their own. And you're quite right that it's this kind of dual investigation where, on the one hand, they're trying to figure out how did Zach die? Who might have been responsible? What went on? How did he come off that balcony that night?

7:31On the other hand, there's a kind of deeper sense in which they're wondering who was our son at all. And I should say that, you know, as a parent of adolescent boys myself, I think any parent, anybody who's been an adolescent would be familiar with the idea that, you know, as a teenager, people change. They start to change. They start to define themselves in ways that their parents aren't necessarily able to dictate or even understand. And some of that, Zach's parents, I think, were quite aware of at the time, in the moment. they felt as though they had a bit of a crisis on their hands in terms of who he was becoming but then after his death they realized that they hadn't known the half of it there were dimensions of this thing that they didn't see at all and so the whole revelation that he had been moving around adult London meeting with people some of them quite unsavory dangerous people and pretending to be this wealthy scion of an oligarch family.

8:36They had no inkling of that when he was alive. I mean, I love the word unsavory, because actually what you describe is him sort of stumbling into the criminal underworld, essentially by mistake. I mean, this is where he's taken, and that's where he loses his life, right, essentially.

8:56Patrick Radden Keefe:Yeah, I mean, the only way I would quibble with that is the by mistake part. in the sense that Zack and his parents knew this as a teenager, and he's 19 when he dies. But by the time he's, say, 17, he has a fascination with a certain kind of cultural archetype, which would be the kind of the gangster capitalist. You know, he loved the movie The Wolf of Wall Street. He really venerated real Russian oligarchs, Vladimir Putin. He had a sense of kind of wealth and swagger and kind of blingy, conspicuous consumption and was really taken in by that. And I think a lot of this was very kind of macho, male coded as well.

9:43Patrick Radden Keefe:And so the interesting thing is that on the one hand, it is kind of a story of this innocent who suddenly finds himself surrounded by wolves, in part because they believed that he had hundreds of millions of pounds to spend and perhaps give them or invest in their projects or what have you. But in fairness, you have to acknowledge that Zack had an attraction to that underworld. So what I want to explore a bit is, I mean, you've called the book London Falling. It's about the city of London and its corruption and its underbelly and its kind of guilted attraction to foreign money as well. I guess the question that you raise is how much was this, you know, a personal journey for Zach?

10:31As you say, adolescence change, people invent things, you know, we understand in a kind of digital Instagram age, we're kind of looking to reshape ourselves. And how much is it about how London changed? Because his birth coincides with the beginning of the 21st century, right? And he dies in 2019. And along the way, big changes are happening to this city. And also, I would argue, to our sense of truth and what we rely on as being fact. And, you know, we've had the 2016 election in the US, we've had the Brexit vote here, we've had ruptures, which have kind of reshaped this country and London and the way that we and the way that we sort of actually live and respond to outside influences, right?

11:24Yeah, I think all of that is true. I mean, I, you know, the book is not a polemic. And I think that there, you know, I wouldn't sort of ascribe any of this in a monocausal way to any one thing or another. Zach was a very distinctive kid and, you know, turned out to be a great fabulist. But he also, as you say, was growing up in a particular environment, right? He's born in the year 2000. He sees London changing around him. the wallpaper of the city around him has changed right it's much more of a kind of glass and steel kind of mega city with all these gleaming surfaces and these supercars and a lot of very

12:12Patrick Radden Keefe:kind of showy displays of wealth and he's very taken in by all of that but i actually think that the fabulous thing is interesting too because on the one hand yeah zach was kind of an exceptional kid who was making things up and telling lies from quite an early age. On the other hand, I feel as though he was a kind of pure creature of the 21st century. And this would be true here in London, but just as true in the US, right? That he was kind of faking it till he made it. There was a sense that everything is kind of all or nothing. You put all your chips on the table. there's there's no sense whatsoever in kind of getting a job and making a modest living and sort of slowly squirreling away money over the years it's the world of reality tv where you basically find your your life hacks to absolutely yeah you want it you want to find the shortcut but also you you can lie along the way if you need to you know betray people along the way i just feel as though the um you know zach is he's a teenager when donald trump is elected right how is it to the degree that what he was doing was looking around at the world and thinking what does it take to succeed what am i if the answer was well you first the first thing you do is you pretend to be something you're not you know if you're a failure you pretend to be a success and if you just keep pretending and you kind of ride your own bluster.

13:42You can ride all the way to the top. I don't know that that was an unrealistic thing for a teenager to be thinking in this day and age, looking around. The story that you tell us, fascinatingly, goes back into Zach's own family and to his mother's father. And you sort of join these horseshoe ends to some degree, which is that we discover that Zach's grandfather, very well-known, beloved rabbi of the West London Synagogue, Hugo Grin, and a Holocaust survivor, which clearly explains so much of the lies he told for self-preservation. But he also invents a different life. He also invents a Cambridge education that he didn't have.

14:29He also has another family that we learn about in the book for the first time. I mean I'm wondering whether you know the age that adheres to truth might be ours, the one stuck in the middle the sort of filing cabinet age, you know that we are the pre-digital age could lie or had to lie because nobody checked and the sort of Instagram age thinks that this is the way you succeed and we're the anomaly, we're just stuck here in the middle kind of going, it's written down

15:02Patrick Radden Keefe:you know there's the bureaucracy yeah i wonder you know it's one of the wonderful things about um the experience of writing a book and then putting it out in the world is that when it gets out there people see things in it that you didn't see yourself so the book came out about three weeks ago and um i was in nashville it had only been out for about three or four days and i was in nashville on book tour and after an event i did a woman came up and she'd already finished reading it. And she said something which, and the whole time I was working on the book, it hadn't occurred to me. And she said, you know, the really interesting thing about this story is Zach from an early age is telling all these lies about himself.

15:42Patrick Radden Keefe:And she said, all the kids in this story see through the lies, and all the grownups believe them. And it's true. I hadn't thought about it. And as I pondered that afterwards, the fact that the people I interviewed who went to high school with Zach immediately saw through the bluster. I wonder if it's not that kids were born in 2000. It's not just that they're digital natives, it's that they're social media natives. It's that they grow up with a sense that everybody's putting on a mask, everybody's putting a filter on the photo, everybody's sort of putting a little spin on self-presentation. But then strangely, if you take that for granted, it leaves you kind of naturally skeptical of the self-presentation of people around you removed the filter yeah in a way in a way that that for certainly for somebody of my age right that there's not necessarily that so we're naive we're then but but to your point that we may be the kind of the truth generation right that the um that we would be kind of more guileless in our sort of tendency to to take at face value what people present to us so i want to take you into the story a little bit more um because you've talked about the unsavoury characters that Zach meets and you really tell us their backstory I mean that's quite important to you that the businessman that Zach meets is the son of a refugee from Uganda his father gets kicked out under Idi Amin you're sort of you're very nice even to your baddies in the sense that you give them quite a lot of the backstory of the sort of the tragedies in their own lives before we meet them.

17:27But through this strange set of circumstances, and I don't know how you do the spoilers on this. I mean, we know, obviously, it's all centered around the death of Zach. So I guess that is at the center of this. But through this guy, Akbar Shamji, he then gets introduced to a man who he goes to live with. Yeah. Right? And that man is known in the underworld as Indian Dave. And you can't find anything about him when you Google him. He doesn't exist.

18:00Patrick Radden Keefe:What does that tell you? Well, he was very studious about, I think, keeping himself out of the public and out of the press. And when I first got started on this, There was very, very little about him at all out there. But when I started interviewing people in London, it turned out that this guy whose name was Virinder Sharma, but better known by his kind of nom de guerre Indian Dave, was a really feared extortionist and a kind of gangland enforcer and a debt collector. He was the guy who would dangle you off of buildings if you owed money. And when you start calling around in the right corners in London, this is somebody who people are very familiar with, even if he didn't have much of a track record that you could Google.

18:52And it's interesting, too, because it's sort of you saying that brings to mind another thing, which is that one of my big questions for Akbar Shamji, who I he wouldn't meet with me, he wouldn't talk with me, but he did agree to email quite a bit with me when I was working on this initially. This is the first businessman. Yeah, the first businessman who Zach connects with. We think they're going to do business or a deal of some kind. And that was the intention, I think, was that you had this, at the time, 18-year-old boy claiming that he was the son of a Russian oligarch, claiming that his family had hundreds of millions of pounds to invest.

19:26That he lived in One Hyde Park, the Candy Brothers, you know, the center of Knightsbridge.

19:30Patrick Radden Keefe:And, I mean, sort of astonishingly, Akbar would go, Akbar, who's in his 40s and kind of a sort of jet-setting Mayfair businessman, would go to pick, Zach would say, pick me up at my place at One Hyde Park. And Zach was always waiting out front. You know, Akbar never saw him walk out of the building. And I asked Akbar, did you Google him? How is it that you could have had a prospective business partner, somebody you thought was going to invest in a real estate deal that Akbar was trying to get off the ground in Lisbon and just take what he said at face value and not even look him up? And Akbar had this interesting response, which is that he said, you know, he said people who are really wealthy and powerful.

20:15Patrick Radden Keefe:Don't exist online. They don't exist online. That the real badge that you're somebody is that you're nobody. Yeah, yeah. But he has to play around with the Russian accent, which is curious, right? I mean, I kept on sort of having to check. Zach puts on a Russian accent for some people, but not for others. But not others, yeah. Yeah, he's very careful about these things. I mean, it's two thoughts. I mean, one is that when I interviewed many of his family members and friends who'd known him, he could do accents from an early age. You know, he was a cut. I mean, what we in the States would call a cut up as a kid.

20:50Patrick Radden Keefe:He was kind of a just a sort of fun, zingy, entertaining person. Fun to have a conversation with. You didn't always believe everything he said, but he was consistently entertaining. I think of him almost like a stand up comic kind of. you're living your life but then you're always sort of rearranging the things in your life as a story and you have a very high degree of emotional intelligence you're kind of reading the face of the person you're talking to seeing what they believe seeing what they're amused by and he had that quality and um he would he would do that and uh you know i think ultimately it it gets him into trouble um but he had a he had a kind of a knack for that

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22:39So I'm going to fast forward, I guess, to the night of his death, because so much of the book is trying to work out what actually happened there. And the reason that you're trying to work it out and the Bretlers are trying to work it out is because, as you say, the police never did. And the CCTV footage that we have from the night shows Zach in a state of frenzy moving from one side of the balcony to another. And then we don't see what happens, but we know that he never leaves the building through the door, through the front door. And his body is found a few days later. and you then find absolutely harrowing texts between Varendra Sharma and Akbar Shamji, which make you think he leapt to his death in fear.

23:36He was trying to escape. He was literally trying to get out of the building.

23:40Patrick Radden Keefe:Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, some of what was happening here was I was coming in and sort of following. There's a sort of an interesting thing happening where I come in as a journalist in the summer of 2023 and start looking into this. And I'm investigating. But I'm really following the footsteps of Matthew and Rochelle, who had been investigating. And they were following the footsteps of their dead son. They were sort of trying to figure out, okay, well, where was Zach? Who was he talking to? What was going on? Who was he communicating with? And you realize a few things. One is that these two guys, one of them extremely dangerous, this guy, Indian Dave, and also Akbar Shamji, were just starting to realize that Zack wasn't who he had been pretending that he was.

24:29That it's right around the time of his death. And he had no money as a result. Yeah, that these guys realized that they've kind of been had. They've been conned. And this kid who they thought was going to be supplying some large amount of money isn't going to be supplying anything at all. and that's happening really in the hours and days prior to his death and then you have these quite alarming text messages both between um indian dave and akbar but then also akbar on that last evening is texting another guy another friend of his and at a certain point says this is hours before zach dies he says i'm heating up knives and clearing up blood

25:16Patrick Radden Keefe:and it's fascinating you know the metropolitan police uh when asked you know about what that text could have meant and did they ever track down the person who akbar was texting to try and figure out what that was all about what they said was well you know there were there were no signs on zach's body when he was found of burn marks or or knife wounds and so therefore this was just a red herring, the idea that that text message about knives and blood was sent. And they said, when really there's nothing to see here, you see, because when the corpse was examined, there was no indication that somebody had used a knife to hurt Zach.

25:58Patrick Radden Keefe:And so there was a kind of, a sort of, to me, a kind of perplexing, just lack of curiosity, honestly, on the part of the police when it came to this. Do you think it was incompetence or do you think, I mean, is it too far-fetched to say that there was a criminal gang they were going after and that Zach's death somehow got in the middle of that? I mean, do you think there was an ulterior sort of investigation that the police were pursuing? I think there are a few different things going on here. I mean, there are some indications that Virindha Sharma had been a police informant. Do you believe that?

26:40I think that it's, you know, I always try to be very careful not to get out over my skis when I do this kind of work. I think there are some strong indications that he was, but I don't know for sure. And I can't claim to know. I don't know that I believe there was a grand conspiracy. I think there was some incompetence here.

27:01Patrick Radden Keefe:I think that there's a kind of simple thing that happens in policing, which is that it's almost a kind of pattern recognition where if you have a resource strapped big police department in a city with a lot of people, there's a tendency to say, okay, well, is it a murder? Is it a suicide? Is there some box I can put this in? you know if it's a murder is this a prosecutable offense and if it fits neatly into the box then you go ahead and and you pursue and if it doesn't then you kind of don't you're a bit flummoxed you don't know what to do great line that you say where the police officer the detective at one point goes well we're not sherlock holmes our job isn't to solve mysteries right it's to it's to affect the law yeah to affect the law and but i will say that i think there's another thing going on here.

27:47Patrick Radden Keefe:And it goes back to your question about London changing, which is there's a kind of subplot here, which I get into in the book about how not long after the arrival, really in the early aughts of a lot of these extremely wealthy Russians, who, you know, who in part were coming here because they were attracted by a golden visa program. I mean, this was a situation in which they were almost recruited to come to London. And you suddenly start having all these people dying in mysterious circumstances. People going off of buildings, people going in front of tube trains, people falling out of windows.