transcript

Speaker 1:
[00:00] WNYC Studios is supported by Odoo. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out Odoo at odoo.com. That's odoo.com.

Speaker 2:
[00:33] This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Speaker 3:
[00:44] This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm 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. And without a doubt, Patrick writes some of the great page turners in nonfiction today. But 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. And 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 Radden 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. How did you find this story? How did you find London Falling?

Speaker 4:
[02:00] 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. 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. And after he died, his parents, whose names are Matthew and Rochelle, started trying to figure out what happened to him, and 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 a Russian oligarch, nothing came up.

Speaker 3:
[03:13] Nothing in the British papers.

Speaker 4:
[03:14] It hadn't been written about at all. There was no actually, no kind of findable record of Zac being dead. So I said to this guy, Andrew, I'd love to talk with them.

Speaker 3:
[03:25] The parents.

Speaker 4:
[03:25] Yeah. 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? I won't even bring a notebook. Totally off the record, no commitment in either direction, we'll just talk. Really, they did most of the talking. I just sat there and listened, and they talked for two hours straight.

Speaker 3:
[03:47] As if they were waiting for you to walk through the door.

Speaker 4:
[03:50] 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. 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.

Speaker 3:
[04:13] 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. And this book is about many things. One of them is about the transformation of London itself.

Speaker 4:
[04:47] 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 closed and the docks all closed. 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 come basically a destination for capital and people who have it.

Speaker 3:
[05:29] Well, 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.

Speaker 4:
[05:41] 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. And 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 safe harbour. 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. And so my story about Zac Brettler is about this teenage kid who ends up at one of these private schools at 13.

Speaker 3:
[06:42] This book gets into the heads of and provides dialogue and so on. But 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?

Speaker 4:
[07:01] 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. 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 Zac 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.

Speaker 5:
[07:28] You 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, we're kind of middle class, very cultured life. But it's not the glamorous.

Speaker 6:
[07:45] We're not ultra wealthy and 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. He was a boarder at Mill Hill and he got exposed to these, former Soviet Union guys. Yes, yes, exactly. That's where it comes from.

Speaker 4:
[08:10] 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. Rochelle 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.

Speaker 3:
[08:38] Yeah, good luck.

Speaker 4:
[08:39] And in fact, they...

Speaker 3:
[08:40] It doesn't work like that.

Speaker 4:
[08:41] It doesn't work that way. In adolescence, they become something else, and sometimes something unrecognizable.

Speaker 5:
[08:46] 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, you know, 12-year-old. Well, you should try getting this, uh, Toyota, or have you looked at that one, or this Mercedes. And he's got currency. He knows what people want.

Speaker 2:
[09:05] Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 5:
[09:07] And that's... Yeah, he knew quite a lot about a lot of subjects. And he's taking us into what's Russian. If Russian's not bad, he's holding conversations.

Speaker 3:
[09:21] 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.

Speaker 4:
[09:33] 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 kind of kid, and we live in a fake it till you make it kind of 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 kind of transforming yourself in an ultimately really ruthlessly situationalist manner, and get twice elected president of the United States.

Speaker 3:
[10:02] I've heard that.

Speaker 4:
[10:03] The sky's the limit, right?

Speaker 3:
[10:04] That can happen.

Speaker 4:
[10:05] Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[10:06] I'm speaking with Patrick Radden Keefe about London Falling, his new book about the death of a teenager in London. We'll continue in a moment.

Speaker 1:
[10:21] WNYC Studios is supported by Pulitzer on the Road, the official podcast of the Pulitzer Prizes, back with its third season. Each spring, 23 prizes are awarded for distinguished journalism, books, drama, and music. Pulitzer on the Road brings conversations with prize winners to you. You'll hear from The New Yorker's David Remnick and Carlos Lozada of The New York Times, authors Natasha Trethewey and Lucy Sante, and journalists Nari Manalmufti and Tolu Olorunipa. Listen to Pulitzer on the Road wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 7:
[10:54] The headlines never stop and it's harder than ever to tell what's real, what matters, and what's just noise. That's where Pod Save America comes in. I'm Tommy Vitor and every week I'm joined by fellow former Obama aides John Favreau, John Lovett, and Dan Pfeiffer to break down the biggest stories, unpack what they mean for the future of our democracy, and add just enough humor to stay sane along the way. You'll also hear honest, in-depth conversations with big voices in politics, media and culture like Rachel Maddow, Gavin Newsom, and Mark Cuban that you won't find anywhere else. New episodes drop every Tuesday and Friday, with deep dives every other weekend. Listen wherever you get your podcasts, watch on YouTube, or subscribe on Apple Podcasts for ad-free episodes.

Speaker 3:
[11:34] He gets embroiled with two guys named Akbar Shamji and Dave Sharma. Who are they, and what was Zac's ties to them?

Speaker 4:
[11:45] So 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, an upper-middle-class Jewish kid from Maida Vale, but Zac 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 Zac. He kind of plucks her last name and repurposes it as his own. He's got skills. 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. And we emailed a lot, and then the New Yorker piece came out and he hasn't connected with me since.

Speaker 3:
[13:11] What does he want with a teenager?

Speaker 4:
[13:13] 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 protégé 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, and before Akbar can start to suspect that something's going on, Zac 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. You could go stay with him. And 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.

Speaker 3:
[14:32] So at first, it seemed like Zac 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?

Speaker 4:
[14:52] 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. He'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 Zac killed himself and was in denial. I think that his parents really said, this doesn't add up, 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 is Zac Brettler at all. We knew him as Zacis Myloff. 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.

Speaker 6:
[15:55] Zac's going around telling this story a lot. All the money, and he's kind of this orphan guy with all this money.

Speaker 4:
[16:02] He's delivering that in dangerous service.

Speaker 6:
[16:05] Anywhere in London can be a bit dangerous if you're killing lots of money.

Speaker 4:
[16:09] 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, 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.

Speaker 3:
[16:36] People tend to go off balconies.

Speaker 4:
[16:39] 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.

Speaker 3:
[16:53] So why would the, as it were, organized crime want to get rid of Zac?

Speaker 4:
[16:59] He had gotten involved with some pretty dangerous people, and Dave Sharma, this pretty ruthless, murderous guy, this gangster, this guy who, you know, at first glance, the parents thought he was harmless. They thought, 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 kind of high-stakes imposter routine with.

Speaker 3:
[17:50] 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?

Speaker 4:
[18:02] In 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 illicit 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 Zac 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? And they each have to kind of reinvent themselves. And so 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? 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 being the person we were born to something else altogether.

Speaker 3:
[20:03] Patrick Radden Keefe, it's an extraordinary book, a wonderful book. Thanks so much.

Speaker 4:
[20:08] Thank you, David.

Speaker 3:
[20:13] London Falling is the title of Patrick Radden Keefe's new book and it will be adapted into a TV series by A24 UK. It all began with a story by Patrick and the New Yorker. 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.

Speaker 2:
[20:39] The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and the New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Meryl Garbus of Tune Yards with additional music by Louis Mitchell. This episode was produced by Max Balton, Adam Howard, David Krasnow, Jeffrey Masters, Louis Mitchell, Jared Paul and Ursula Sommer. With guidance from Emily Boutin and assistance from Michael May, David Gable, Alex Barish, Victor Guan and Alejandra Decken. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Chirina Endowment Fund.

Speaker 1:
[21:19] WNYC Studios is supported by Odoo. When you buy business software from lots of vendors, the costs add up and it gets complicated and confusing. Odoo solves this. It's a single company that sells a suite of enterprise apps that handles everything from accounting to inventory to sales. Odoo is all connected on a single platform in a simple and affordable way. You can save money without missing out on the features you need. Check out Odoo at odoo.com. That's odoo.com.

Speaker 3:
[21:50] Did you know that The New Yorker Radio Hour is on YouTube? Well, you can listen to the show on any podcast platform, and now you can also watch our biggest interviews on The New Yorker's YouTube page.