David Remnick: 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. Without a doubt, Patrick writes some of the great page turners in nonfiction today. These stories are not simple entertainments. 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. 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 Raden Keefe's best selling book, London Falling. Now, Patrick, the book tells a pretty terrifying story about this kid, Zac 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.
Patrick Radden Keefe: Yes.
David Remnick: How did you find this story? How did you find London Falling?
Patrick Radden Keefe: This one came to me in exactly this way, in conversation. I was in the summer of 2023, I was living in London. I 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 Zac. 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. After he died, his parents, whose names are Matthew and Rachelle, started trying to figure out what happened to him.
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 Zac Brettler. Boy dies in the Thames, kid posing as Russian oligarch. Nothing came up.
David Remnick: Nothing in the British papers.
Patrick Radden Keefe: It hadn't been written about at all. There was no, actually no findable record of Zac being dead. I said to this guy, Andrew, "I'd love to talk with them."
David Remnick: The parents?
Patrick Radden Keefe: Yes. 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. Why don't we meet? 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. I just sat there and listened and they talked for two hours straight.
David Remnick: As if they were waiting for you to walk through the door?
Patrick Radden Keefe: Part of the reason they hadn't gone public about their son's death is that they had, a lot of us probably would, in a big contemporary city, place their faith in the authorities. 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." The whole official process had just run its course without providing any answers just before they met me.
David Remnick: 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. You do a 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. This book is about many things. One of them is about the transformation of London itself.
Patrick Radden Keefe: 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. 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. Margaret Thatcher comes in and the city has an identity crisis. What are we going to be? There's a decision to deregulate the banking industry and become basically a destination for capital and people who have it.
David Remnick: Capital of a very particular geography that transforms the city. How would you describe that? Because this is the milieu into which our tragic hero enters.
Patrick Radden Keefe: Yes, you get a lot of foreign money that comes in. I'm at pains to say, really first, the Americans actually are a big part of the vanguard of this. Then you get the dissolution of the Soviet Union. 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. You get these billionaires who are minted overnight. If you want to hold onto that money, you probably don't want to keep it in Russia at that time. You have all these fortunes made and then immediately this first generation of oligarchs is looking for safe harbor and they find it in London. 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. My story about Zac Brettler is about this teenage kid who ends up at one of these private schools at 13.
David Remnick: This 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?
Patrick Radden Keefe: There are these people I don't have access to, but then on the other side, there are the Brettlers who were incredibly open and I spent hundreds of hours talking with them. 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 Zac was dead, when he was just missing, they were trying to figure out what had happened to him. They would talk to people, and Matthew would record the conversations on his iPhone.
Rachelle Brettler: He was looking for these strong figures to be part of a life different from ours. We're very happy, middle class, very cultured life, but it's not the glamorous-
Matthew: The ultra wealthy. I think he wants that. That's the thing I was saying to Akbar earlier that he got turned on to this when he went to Mill Hill Boarding. He was a border of Mill Hill and he got exposed to these former Soviet Union guys. Yes, exactly. That's where it comes from.
Patrick Radden Keefe: 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. Rachelle and Matthew, the parents in this book, who really are the main characters in the story, who we follow as they try and figure out what happened to their son. Part of what they realized is that there's a fantasy for any of us, which is that we can mold our kids like clay.
David Remnick: Yes. Good luck.
Patrick Radden Keefe: In fact, they-
David Remnick: It doesn't work like that.
Patrick Radden Keefe: It doesn't work that way. In adolescence, they become something else and sometimes something unrecognizable.
Rachelle Brettler: He's entertaining, he's charming. He also knows straight away how to play people. From a young kid, talk about if you like cars, he'd straight away know the banter. Even as a 12 year old. You should try getting this Toyota, if you looked at that one, or this Mercedes and he's got currency. He knows what people want.
Matthew: Yes, for sure. He knew quite a lot about a lot of subjects.
Rachelle Brettler: He talks Russian.
Matthew: Russian's not bad. He was holding conversations, be sure.
David Remnick: This is such an extreme example. He has an entirely second life and he carries it off with, I have to say, amazing skill.
Patrick Radden Keefe: That's the thing about Zac. In some respects, he's such a creature of our time in that, he's a fake it till you make it kid. We live in a fake it till you make it culture. Zac's favorite movie was the Wolf of Wall Street. You can be somebody who lies compulsively and is constantly hustling and looking for an advantage and transforming yourself in an ultimately really ruthlessly situationalist manner and get twice elected President of the United States.
David Remnick: I've heard that.
Patrick Radden Keefe: The sky's the limit, right?
David Remnick: That can happen.
Patrick Radden Keefe: Yes.
David Remnick: He gets embroiled with two guys named Akbar Shamji and Dave Sharma. Who are they and what was Zac's ties to them?
Patrick Radden Keefe: Zac, 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 Zac Brettler, upper middle class Jewish kid from Maida Vale, but Zac Ismailov, billionaire son of a Russian oligarch. He had this magpie quality with his lies and it turns out there was a woman that he had gotten to know whose name was Zamira Ismailova and this was classic Zac. He plucks her last name and repurposes it as his own.
David Remnick: He's got skills.
Patrick Radden Keefe: He's got skills. He started to present himself this way to people, including to people who you really would want to be careful about carrying off this. A guy who works for Roman Abramovich, the biggest oligarch in London, is one of the first people that Zac pulls this ruse on, and he meets these two guys, Akbar Shamji and then Dave Sharma. Akbar Shamji is this very glamorous, elegant, handsome businessman who lives in Mayfair, a particularly posh district of London. When I was working on The New Yorker piece, he and I exchanged many emails.
He wouldn't meet with me, he 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. We emailed a lot, and then the New Yorker piece came out and he hasn't connected with me since.
David Remnick: What does he want with a teenager?
Patrick Radden Keefe: 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 Zac is going to invest some of his oligarch billions in this development, but Zac keeps not coming through with the money. Before Akbar can start to suspect that something's going on, Zac says, "I have terrible news. My dear father, the oligarch, has died."
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. The story pivots, and now he's clashing with his mother and he doesn't have a place to stay. At this point, Akbar says, "Well, I have this friend named Dave Sharma, and he's got this luxury apartment overlooking the Thames. You could go stay with him." Zac 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.
David Remnick: At first, it seemed Zac had jumped off his balcony and committed suicide. He was in over his head. In his real life/fictionalized life. At what point did it appear there was much more going on here in terms of how he died?
Patrick Radden Keefe: 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. A kid goes off a balcony and it turns out that there's CCTV footage showing that he jumps off the balcony. He's not pushed. 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 Zac killed himself and was in denial. I think that his parents really said, this doesn't add up. It doesn't look 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 Zac Brettler at all. We knew him as Zac Ismailov. That's a second big revelation for them. All of this is coming quite quickly. If it's not a 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.
Matthew: Zac's going around telling this story a lot, all the money and he's 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 killed with lots of money.
Patrick Radden Keefe: There's this interesting process where initially the Brettlers really placed a lot of faith in the authorities. This was one of those cases where the cops just weren't up to it. I don't think they had the imagination for it. 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.
David Remnick: People tend to go off balconies.
Patrick Radden Keefe: In which people go off balconies. They go in front of tube trains again and again and again. It's happened many times in London and there has been a tendency historically for the British police to say, "Looks a suicide to us."
David Remnick: Why would the, as it were organized crime want to get rid of Zac?
Patrick Radden Keefe: He had gotten involved with some pretty dangerous people and Dave Sharma, this pretty ruthless, murderous gangster, this guy who, at first glance the parents thought he was harmless. They actually thought he was a rubber executive, that he worked for Pirelli Rubber. They 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 Zac died was right around the time when this gangster was beginning to realize that maybe Zac wasn't who he had pretended that he was. That these were the wrong people to be pulling this high stakes imposter routine with.
David Remnick: 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?
Patrick Radden Keefe: In retrospect, yes, 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 conventional morality by degrees. 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. 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. I was interested in these questions of reinvention. How did London reinvent itself? How did Zac reinvent himself?
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? They each have to reinvent themselves. Zac 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? I thought that there might be a way by strangely, by delving into the backstories of these people and 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. How we sometimes make a quite conscious decision to go from being the person we were born to something else altogether.
David Remnick: Patrick Radden Keefe, it's an extraordinary, extraordinary book. Wonderful book. Thanks so much.
Patrick Radden Keefe: Thank you, David.
David Remnick: London Falling is the title of Patrick Raden Keefe'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.
 
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