The mysterious death of the teenager who posed as a Russian billionaire

0:00Zac Brettler:This is The Guardian.

0:09Zac Brettler:Today, the teenager who pretended to be a Russian billionaire and was found dead in the River Thames.

0:30Zac Brettler:were just part of it. Ugh. But real-time cash flow? Wow. Invoices that chase themselves? Even better. Books that automate? That's a big one. And I can keep track from my phone while I get the job done. No spreadsheet in sight. What a life. Do right by yourself and your business and search XERO for your free trial. Conditions apply.

1:00Zac Brettler:For decades, London has been a magnet for global wealth, a flashy playground for the super-rich. To one teenage boy, it contained an elite scene he desperately wanted to be part of, the oligarch class. Not just rich, but powerfully connected billionaires who amassed such huge fortunes with so few questions asked, they helped turn London into what was called the dirty money capital of the world. Zach Brettler began posing as the son of one. Within months, he was found dead on the riverbank in central London. He was 19 years old.

1:46Zac Brettler:In his explosive new book, author and New Yorker journalist Patrick Radden-Keefe has tried to uncover what the Metropolitan Police failed to. What really happened to Zach? How did he become ensnared in one of London's most dangerous circles? And who is responsible for his death? From The Guardian, I'm Lashin Iqbal. Today in Focus, Patrick Radden-Keefe on a fatal fall into London's dark underworld.

2:24Zac Brettler:Patrick Radden-Keefe, welcome to Today in Focus.

2:27Patrick Radden Keefe:It's lovely to be with you.

2:28Zac Brettler:Now, you're a New Yorker writer, staff writer, and author of some of the best non-fiction narrative books of the last decade. And your new one, London Falling, is about the life and mysterious death of Zach Brettler. It's about a lot more, but it's mostly about Zach. How did you come upon this story?

2:48Patrick Radden Keefe:It came to me in the strangest way. I was living in London in the summer of 2023. I was producing a television drama based on my book, Say Nothing. And I was just sort of sitting on a chair between shots. And a guy plopped down next to me, a stranger who was visiting the set that day. So I just started chatting with the guy. And he said, I might have a story for you. and he said I know this family I'm very close with them they lost a son in mysterious circumstances in 2019 and after he died they learned that he'd been pretending to be the son of a Russian oligarch when I heard that what I said to this guy was listen if this family will talk to me then I'm in but I went back I remember going back to my apartment that night and googling Zach Brettler death, Thames, and not finding anything.

3:43Patrick Radden Keefe:They had kept his death very quiet. There was no mention whatsoever in the press on the internet that he was even dead. And so the family wasn't sure that they wanted to talk. And I think that they had been feeling very isolated for years in trying to figure out what had happened to their son. And we then had this kind of delicate process where I really wanted them to go on the record with me, but I also didn't want them to feel as though I was kind of twisting their arms or I didn't want them to kind of say yes on the day and then later come to regret it.

4:17Zac Brettler:So who was Zach Brettler? Can you tell me what you learned about him?

4:22Patrick Radden Keefe:He was the second child of this couple, Matthew and Rochelle. There was an older brother named Joe. And Zach, who was born in the year 2000, was a kind of fun, zingy, unpredictable little boy, you know, a boy who did voices and told jokes and could do impersonations and accents. You know, not everything he said was completely reliable, even from a very early age. He sometimes was putting a little spin on the truth to entertain people. As he got older, he ended up going to a school called Mill Hill on the outskirts of London. He came from a very particular kind of family. He had two grandfathers who were Holocaust survivors.

5:06Patrick Radden Keefe:One of them had become a very famous rabbi in London. And he grew up, I would say, upper middle class. His father worked in finance. His mother was a freelance journalist. A very comfortable family, but also a family that was quite modest in terms of their approach to money and wealth and conspicuous consumption. and he got to this school, Mill Hill, at 13 and found himself surrounded by the children of oligarchs, the children of very wealthy foreigners in many cases who had come to London and wanted to send their kids to good English schools. And these kids were everything his parents weren't.

5:46Patrick Radden Keefe:They were kind of blingy and a little bit ostentatious with their wealth and also just supremely wealthy in a way that even to somebody as well off as Zach, seemed just kind of unimaginably rich. And he was in, I think, a way that maybe isn't totally unusual for an adolescent boy. He was kind of taken in by that. He was very seduced by the swagger of these kids.

6:13Zac Brettler:And it wasn't just that he was impressed by it. I mean, he got seduced to the point where he began living a second life. I mean, you've told us about this upper middle class Jewish kid lived in northwest London, has this urge though, partly fueled by the environment that he's in, I guess partly fueled by social media. Can you tell me about who he became?

6:34Patrick Radden Keefe:Yeah, I mean, I should say, first of all, that his parents were not aware of any of this. His parents knew that he was having a difficult adolescence, but it was really only much later that they became aware that he had been lying. He'd been at first telling lies in school to kids saying that the family was much wealthier than they were. He claimed that his father was an arms dealer, which Matthew very much is not. He said they lived in a mansion in St. John's Wood and that the parents drove two Range Rovers and those kinds of lies. And then eventually he graduated to the bigger lie, which was he invented a whole alter ego and started telling people that his name was Zach Ismailov and that he was the son of a Russian oligarch living in London and that his father was a billionaire and that he was his father's right-hand man and that he had hundreds of millions of pounds to invest.

7:37Zac Brettler:Patrick, in the book, obviously, you're telling us about the life of Zach Brettler, but also you're documenting the change that's happening in London during his lifetime. And you look back to London's history as a former port city, a former manufacturing base, that then underwent this remarkable shift in identity as Thatcher introduced the deregulation of the financial markets in 1986, the Big Bang. And, you know, all those industrial warehouses along the river just all shutting down. What happened next?

8:09Patrick Radden Keefe:Well, I think there was this kind of strange moment, and you've identified it. It's really this kind of 25-year period between the mid-1950s and then about 1980, when London just dramatically transforms, and the city that had existed for hundreds of years kind of ceases to exist because all of the docks shut down, and the manufacturing sector during that period in London, 80 % of the jobs disappear. in about a two-decade period.

8:40Zac Brettler:Talking about the closure of the upper docks when we went to see them, I think they realized the gravity of what they were proposing, not only in terms of the closure of their dock, and they were clearly worried about their own balance sheets and so on, but its overall effect on the borough.

8:53Patrick Radden Keefe:And so the city has to kind of decide, well, who are we going to be now? You know, what is London if it's not a port city? And the answer, which really comes with deregulation and the Big Bang, is it will 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 the long-awaited big bang finally went off in the city today city stock brokers were up early to get to grips with a revolution in the way they work out go many of

9:25Zac Brettler:the old methods the slow old ways of concluding each share deal and above all out goes the complete reliance on face-to-face dealing and income many new players with heavy foreign competition for a market that's not big enough for everyone. And I should say, I mean, the story that I tell in the

9:41Patrick Radden Keefe: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 city of London and they come in and they want nice apartments and they want, they drive up the real estate prices and 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 kind of markers of consumption that characterize London today.

10:22Zac Brettler:The fundamental key reason why they came to London was because the British state wanted wealth to come to London. You know, there was this big attempt to get money into London. So the British government, they bent all the rules, you know, they bent the tax rules, they turned a blind eye to the providence of the wealth of the Russians.

10:42Patrick Radden Keefe:And then you have this 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. The president of the new Russian Federation, Boris Yeltsin, started privatizing companies that had been under communist state control. 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.

11:28Patrick Radden Keefe:And those guys, it's astonishing. And those guys arrive.

11:33Zac Brettler:The Americans coming in and sort of softening up London, as you say, is one thing. But the influx of oligarch money, I mean, if you're going to make that much money, you need to move it to keep it, right? So central London properties being bought up, left empty by foreign investors, affluent neighborhoods where all the lights are off. What other influence would you chart of the Russian oligarchy on the sort of culture and the way that London life was in the last two decades?

12:02Patrick Radden Keefe: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 lay 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 meets these kids who dressed in designer clothes.

12:45Patrick Radden Keefe:And I tell a story in the book about how 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 walk to class on cold mornings, they'll get Ubers, you know, that kind of, that type of behavior. Yeah. So there's, there's that, but then there's, 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.

13:23Patrick Radden Keefe: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. Often people who are connected to the Russians in one way or another. And there is a tendency, a really pronounced tendency by the police and the authorities in England to kind of look the other way, to sort of say, oh, looks like a suicide, looks like an accident. A sort of a sense of, you know, we don't want to antagonize powerful Russian forces that may actually be sending hitmen to England to murder people.

14:09Zac Brettler:One of the reasons to ask you the question about how London has visibly changed is because you did live here at the turn of the millennium and you seem to visit most years. So you can track the changes, right? And in Zach Brettler's lifetime, you've written about how his parents, who've lived here most of their lives, you know, one works in finance, the other freelances for the Financial Times' magazine, How to Spend It, which in some ways is addressing the oligarchy.

14:37Patrick Radden Keefe:It's ironic by itself, yeah.

14:38Zac Brettler:But they had no idea, really, that this other world existed in London, this underbelly. And I wonder if you can tell me more about that.

14:50Patrick Radden Keefe:Yeah, I think that really the main characters in this book are Rochelle and Matthew Brettler, Zach's parents, who after his death in 2019 are trying to figure out what happened to him. And, you know, in the first instance, I think they placed their faith in the Metropolitan Police, who kind of botched the investigation. then the bretlers have to sort of, in a way, follow their son's footsteps, retrace his footsteps in life, figure out who was he really, who was he hanging out with, what was he up to. And that's a journey that takes them into a side of London that they had not known existed. And so suddenly they find themselves really kind of going out and seeking out gangsters and dodgy businessmen and getting a real sense of this kind of slightly sleazy but omnipresent milieu in which their son had been moving.

15:48Zac Brettler:So without fully going into the ins and outs of your investigation, what does become clear is that Zak got caught up with some very powerful people and that by pretending to be the son of a Russian oligarch, he made himself vulnerable to gangsters. he was wheeling and dealing. At one point in the book, you say he was trying to import rare minerals from Kazakhstan. It just must have been so disorientating for the Brettlers to make sense of all that.

16:17Patrick Radden Keefe:Yeah. And I think the part of what was so strange for them is that they had been living with a sort of, you know, maybe a kind of bourgeois, slightly naive sense that everything's okay here on this side of the tracks, that we live in this kind of nice, functional, kind of sparkling London. I think that they were astonished to realize how intermingled these two worlds are in ways that they had just had no inkling of. It was really only after Zach's death, as they tried to kind of see what he'd been getting up to, that it was like they developed a kind of x-ray vision and they could see a dimension of London that had eluded them before.

17:03Zac Brettler:So the Bretlers learn about this alter ego, Zach Conjured, after he's gone. Patrick, what are the basic facts of what happened to Zach in the early morning hours of November 29th, 2019?

17:17Patrick Radden Keefe:So in that particular evening, Zach was in a building called Riverwalk, the sort of development that would be familiar to people who've spent time in London in recent years, a super luxury apartment building overlooking the Thames right on the river. So if you know where MI6 headquarters is, just opposite MI6 headquarters. Zach was in an apartment with two men, one a guy named Akbar Shamji and then another named Virinder Sharma. And these were two older men who he had become quite close friends with in the preceding months. And at a certain point, Akbar Shamji had left the apartment, so it was just for Indra Sharma and Zach.

18:00Patrick Radden Keefe:And Zach goes out onto the balcony and goes off the balcony. I mean, you write this moment in the book with two quite stark, devastating sentences right early on

18:13Zac Brettler:in the opening where you say, he made his way to the corner of the balcony and seemed to peer over the ledge before crossing to the other corner and briefly pausing there. Then, returning to the center of the balcony, he jumped.

18:29Patrick Radden Keefe:There was actually video captured from MI6 headquarters. There's a CCTV camera. The attack was alone on the balcony, so he jumped, he wasn't pushed. But the charmer was in the apartment and in fact even more intriguingly that video captures after zach goes off the balcony the lights go out in the apartment so what exactly transpired is a big and mysterious question and one that i kind of get into at great length in the book so the next morning there is somebody discovers a body on the on the foreshore of the thames they're right in front of that building right where he fell. But the authorities aren't able to identify this body.