Alison: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. Coming up on tomorrow's show, singer, songwriter, and composer Natalia Lafourcade joins us to talk about her latest album. She's been nominated for 24 Latin Grammys during her career, and she's won 20. Her manager tells us we are her only New York media interview, so we're really excited. We'll also talk to the executive chef and co-owner of Tavern On The Green. He joined us to talk about its new cookbook. That's in the future. Now, let's keep this book day going with London Falling.

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Alison: On November 29th, 2019, in that period between late night and early morning, a young man named Zac Brettler jumped to his death from the balcony of a London high-rise. Though Zac's death initially appeared to be a suicide, it became clear that Zac had become involved with dangerous forces within London's underworld. Journalist Patrick Radden Keefe decided to investigate what happened to Zac in his book London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for the Truth.

Through his reporting, Keefe learns that Zac had been lying, claiming to be the son of a very wealthy Russian oligarch, when really he was born and raised in London, the son of Rachelle and Matthew Brettler. Those lies, they got Zac in over his head, ensnared with dangerous criminals who wouldn't hesitate to resort to violence to get what they want, which was money. Did Zac jump to end his life, or did he jump to escape a murderer? London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe is out today. Patrick will be speaking tonight at the 92nd Street Y with Sarah Jessica Parker, but first, he joins me in studio. It is nice to meet you in person.

Patrick Radden Keefe: It's great to be with you.

Alison: You heard about the story through a friend. How was it described to you?

Patrick Radden Keefe: I was living in London in the summer of 2023, working on a TV series based on my book, Say Nothing. I was producing the show, and I was on set one day, and I got to chatting with a stranger guy. I didn't know he was a visitor to the set, but I have a tendency to talk to strangers. I'm always striking up conversations with people I don't know because you never know where a good story will come from. When he found out that I write for The New Yorker and I write investigative stories, he said, "I might have a story for you."

He said, "I know this family. I'm very close with them. They had this terrible tragedy. They lost their teenage son, Zac. After he died, his parents, Matthew and Rachelle, made this incredible discovery, which is that he had been living a secret life unbeknownst to them as a teenager, moving around London, pretending that he was the son of a Russian oligarch." He had said about that much, and I knew if these people will talk to me, I got to write this story.

Alison: That's so interesting because it's a personal story, this family's tragedy and a boy's death. Beyond a family's tragedy, why did you know it was a bigger story than that?

Patrick Radden Keefe: I had been really interested as I had actually written an essay for The New Yorker after Russia's invasion of Ukraine about something that I had noticed, which is that London, the city that I really love for decades, has been a really kind of hospitable place for dirty foreign money and particularly for Russian oligarchs, people with billions of dollars who are linked closely with Putin and with the Kremlin. London really rolled out the red carpet for these people.

They came, they bought expensive properties, they sent their kids to fancy schools. In the case of this guy, Roman Abramovich, he bought Chelsea Football Club, one of the most famous English soccer teams. I'd written an essay about that for The New Yorker. That was an issue I was interested in, the awkward situation that London found itself in after the invasion of Ukraine.

When I do the longer pieces for The New Yorker and certainly the books, I don't tend to want to tell a story from 30,000 feet. I want to tell it from the ground level as a drama about real people, about human beings. I need characters. This felt like a way into these larger issues about the way in which money can corrupt a city, but through the lens of the very intimate story of this one family.

Alison: I was going to ask you about your approach because you're obviously a journalist, but you're a father as well. This is an emotional story about parents losing a child. I can't think of anything more emotional than that. What was your approach to the Brettlers? Am I saying their name right?

Patrick Radden Keefe: Yes, you are.

Alison: What was your approach to the Brettlers, these grieving parents who are also important sources for your book?

Patrick Radden Keefe: I've been doing this 20 years now, and one thing that I am getting better at and I've been learning over the years is it's really important as a journalist to be incredibly transparent with people right from the get. In this case, what that meant is I told the Brettlers through their friend, I said, "I'd love to tell the story, but initially I'm not even going to bring a notebook. We'll just sit down at a coffee shop, tell me your story and I'll tell you about me, and you guys have to think about whether you want to go on the record. It would be a big decision for you to do this," because it had been a very private tragedy up to that point.

In fact, when I first heard the story, I Googled Zac Brettler. Did he die in the Thames, in the river in London? Couldn't find anything. They had kept it very quiet deliberately. We met a few times in London and I think they kind of got the cut of my job. They got a sense of the way in which I would approach a story like this, and eventually they said, "All right, we're ready. We'll tell the story. We want to go public." That was the beginning of a pretty intense relationship in which we talked for hundreds of hours over the course of several years, leading up to today. We're launching the book tonight at the 92nd Street Y, and they have actually flown from London to be here in New York, and they're going to be there tonight.

Alison: In this book, you write, "There is also a book about parental love. While working on it, I often thought about my own adolescent sons, how fiercely I love them, how desperately I want to protect them from this world and prepare them for it." How did your role as a father play into the process of reporting the story?

Patrick Radden Keefe: This is a story where, in the opening pages, you see this 19-year-old kid go off of a balcony. He does a swan dive into the Thames and he dies. There are no spoilers here. You know from the opening pages that this boy dies. Then what happens is you're very intimately following the Brettlers, these parents, as they make this discovery, and then they have to become detectives. They want to figure out how did our son die? Why did he die? Who was he with on the night that he died? What had he gotten mixed up in?

Also, in a strange way, they have to try to understand him better in death than they ever did when he was alive. On the one hand, this is a very specific story in the sense that Zac Brettler was a remarkable kid. He was a fabulous teen, he had all these sort of inventions, and it's a very specific story about London. On the other hand, there were elements of this that I related to as a parent.

Alison: You would have done the same thing?

Patrick Radden Keefe: I think that adolescence is a tricky thing. I think that as a parent of a young child, you feel like they're clay and you can mold them and you can turn them into whoever you want them to be, and then adolescence comes along.

Alison: We were talking before this started about our kids.

Patrick Radden Keefe: Yes. You start getting surprised, and you start wondering, "God, where did that come from?" You realize that there are all these sorts of stimuli that you can't control. Then on top of that, if the kid has a phone, it's a completely different thing where they're sitting there on the couch right across from you. You think you got your eye on them, but actually they're miles away and they're with people that you don't know.

This book, it's not a moral panic book about phones and social media, but Zac Brettler was born in the year 2000. It would be impossible to tell the story of his life and not think about the role that social media had for a kid who had a little trouble drawing the line between reality and fantasy. If you're on Instagram all day, it doesn't help.

Alison: My guest is journalist Patrick Radden Keefe. His new book is titled London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family Search for the Truth. How did members of Zac's family describe what he was like?

Patrick Radden Keefe: As a young child, starting really young, he was quirky, he was exuberant, he was unpredictable. He had a way with repartee. There's a funny story that a cousin told me about being at some family party when Zac was about five years old. There was some older girl, and she had some piece of reading material and she passed it to him and she said, "Zac, can you read this?" Without skipping a beat, he said, "No, I don't have my glasses." The thing is, he didn't wear glasses and he couldn't read.

He had that kind of jokey, improvisational, almost jazzy approach to conversation, which made him really fun to be around, but also meant that people at times would grow skeptical. They would wonder what they could trust in terms of what he said. I think in a way that his parents and his family, his big brother Joe, didn't appreciate, really, until after his death. I learned that he was telling lies from a really early age. Like he showed up at this new school when he was 13 and would tell people that his mother had died.

I think the reason for that, when you think about it, you can probably relate to it. You're a kid at a new school. I think what he realized is if you tell people that your mother's died, they will open their hearts to you. It's a shortcut to affection and intimacy, but I think he became a pretty versatile liar from an early age. Eventually, this blossoms into the big lie, which is he assumes this false identity as not Zac Brettler, upper middle class, nice Jewish boy from West London who goes to private school, but Zac Ismailov, son of a Russian oligarch.

Alison: It's interesting because people lie to protect themselves. It's the reason we learn to lie when we're babies. People lie to get money. They lie for a lot of different reasons. Zac was lying to very powerful people, pretending to be the son of a Russian oligarch. What lessons did Zac learn about fake it till you make it?

Patrick Radden Keefe: You have to remember the backdrop in which this is happening. He's doing this in an environment, and I think this is as true here in New York as it is in London, in which fake it till you make it culture is on the rise. Zac's favorite movie was The Wolf of Wall Street. He loved stories about hustlers on the make. He loved the idea of the get-rich-quick scheme, people who want it all, and they want it now.

I have to say, it's not totally crazy to think that as a child of this century and one of these big global capitals, he thought this is the way to get ahead. There are all kinds of role models or people you could look at who've achieved great success in this country and that one through basically lying and being con artists. They actually make it work for them.

Alison: When did his parents realize that perhaps something was going on with Zac?

Patrick Radden Keefe: They knew that there were issues by the time he was 16, 17 years old. Like I said, this was a comfortable family. His father worked in finance. Mother's a freelance journalist. They lived in a nice big apartment in a very well off part of London. He went to private school. He didn't want for much. It was a loving family. He had every conceivable opportunity, but he felt like it wasn't enough.

He was surrounded by the kind of glitz of the new London, and so he wanted to know, why don't we drive a nicer car? Why don't we live in a bigger house? He had that kind of anxiety. Initially, they noticed that, but they really didn't know the half of it. After he dies, there's this kind of crazy moment where Rachelle, his mother, is home alone. She doesn't know he's dead. He's just been gone for a night. A guy knocks on the door and asks where Zac is. She says, "He's not here." The guy says, "Who are you?" She says, "I'm his mother."

The guy's got another guy on the phone on speakerphone, and she hears the person say, "That can't be his mother. His mother's in Dubai." Now, Rachelle had never been to Dubai. She had no idea what this guy was talking about. With that, the guy gets into a car and drives off. That's what starts this kind of astonishing process of discovery that these parents have, where they learn just how far off track Zac had gotten.

Alison: We're talking with journalist Patrick Radden Keefe. His new book is titled London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family Search for the Truth. A big part of the story involves the intricacies of London: the politics, the culture, the economics. There's a good bit of history in this book. I like history. Some people's eyes glaze over. I love it. How do you keep history from being boring as a writer?

Patrick Radden Keefe: In this case, what I wanted to do was not have a situation in which you have the Zac story, which is kind of compelling and intimate, and then you turn the page and suddenly you get 20 pages of history. When I'm doing that kind of thing, ideally, I want to slip it into the text so that you hardly even notice, so that it's all threaded. The weave is pretty tight. The history is kind of fascinating, I have to say.

If you look at London in 1950, it basically looks roughly the way it has for a century, in the sense that it's a big port city and it's also a big manufacturing town. There's a similar story you could tell in New York. We walk around and you can see the ghosts of these old piers from when lower Manhattan was a big shipping center, and now all of that's gone. London, basically in the '60s, '70s, '80s, has to reinvent itself when the shipping all goes away and the factories all close down, and it reinvents itself as a destination for wealthy people from around the world and for their money. That's part of the story that I wanted to tell. I don't think it's possible to understand Zac's life and death unless you understand that backdrop.

Then the even more interesting thing is it turns out Zac had these two grandfathers who were Holocaust survivors, both of whom fled the Holocaust when they were in their teens, had lost virtually their whole families. They arrive in England alone in their teens and have to reinvent themselves. It becomes this kind of story of these echoing reinventions, Zac Brettler reinventing himself as the son of a Russian oligarch, London reinventing itself as a financial capital, Zac's grandfathers reinventing themselves in the 1940s as these young Englishmen who've managed to escape the Holocaust, but in the process have lost their whole families.

Alison: A lot of your writing deals with how money can corrupt people, Empire of Pain, this book. Why do you think the influence of money and wealth is something that you're interested in?

Patrick Radden Keefe: I just think it's so much a part of the air we breathe now in this country. I was born in 1976. I'm about to turn 50, and I feel as though it has accelerated over the last couple of decades. To some extent, there's always been a strain like this in American life. There's a moment I always think about my younger son when he was about six years old, came home from school and he said something about Elon Musk. I just had this moment where I thought, "You're six. How do you know who that is? You shouldn't know who that is."

Alison: You should not know who that is.

Patrick Radden Keefe: "I don't want you to know who that is." If you had talked to me when I was six in 1982, I couldn't have told you who the richest people in the country were. I just think it is part of our culture now, and so I'm interested in that just anthropologically. I'm interested in the things that it drives people to do.

Alison: We'll have more with Patrick Radden Keefe after a quick break. This is All Of It.

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Alison: You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest is journalist Patrick Radden Keefe. His new book is titled London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth. It is out today. He'll be at the 92nd Street Y tonight with Sarah Jessica Parker. All right. Zac, he has fallen or jumped or some other thing from this building. This building is important to the story where this apartment was. Explain why this building is important.

Patrick Radden Keefe: When you start getting all of this money coming into London in a really significant way, starting in the 1990s with these Russian oligarchs coming in and a golden visa program. It's funny, now the Trump administration is introducing a golden visa program here. London did that decades ago, and this is part of how we get here. All these people come in, they want to buy real estate in London. You get these kind of glossy buildings that go up alongside the Thames.

One of the bizarre things is that a lot of these foreigners who buy these places don't then live in them. You have this strange thing in London where, in these really nice neighborhoods after dark, all of the buildings are dark because nobody's actually staying there. This is one of those buildings. It's a building that goes up in 2016. It's called Riverwalk. It's a kind of luxury apartment tower overlooking the river. It's directly opposite MI6.

Zac Brettler ends up befriending a guy. What his parents knew about this guy was that his name was Verinder Sharma. They believed that he was a rubber tycoon. Zac said, "Oh, he works at Pirelli Rubber, and he lives in this luxury apartment," and he went to stay there with him for a couple of months over one summer. That building becomes really significant because it is from that balcony that Zac ends up dying. In fact, that guy, Verinder Sharma, was in the apartment along with another guy with him on the night that he died.

Alison: Verinder Sharma turned out to be a fairly dangerous man.

Patrick Radden Keefe: He wasn't a rubber tycoon, it turns out. After Zac's death, Matthew and Rachelle end up talking to Verinder Sharma. Initially, he kind of held himself out as this mentor figure. He said they didn't know he was dead at that point. He just said Zac had come and stayed with me, and then he went missing. He must have left in the night. They didn't know he'd gone off the balcony.

He said, "We're going to try and get him." They thought, "Oh, what a nice guy, trying to help out." Then gradually, as they delved into it, what they learned is that he was no rubber tycoon. He actually was a fairly notorious gangster and extortionist who had a gangland nickname in London. He was better known not by the name Verinder Sharma, but as Indian Dave.

Alison: Then there's another man. We don't give away too much, but there's a man who goes by the name Akbar Shamji. How did he present himself to Zac?

Patrick Radden Keefe: Actually, the way Zac met Verinder Sharma was through Akbar Shamji. The first guy that he meets is this guy, Akbar Shamji, who was this kind of glamorous-- He was an older guy. He's in his 40s. He had gone to Cambridge University. He'd grown up in a wealthy family. He lived in Mayfair, which is a very posh area in London. In fact, he lived on Mount Street, which is like the Rodeo Drive of Mayfair. It's just extremely, almost ridiculously fancy place to live.

He kind of seemed like an international playboy businessman. He and Zac became friends because he believed that Zac was the son of a Russian oligarch who was about to inherit hundreds of millions of dollars and wanted to maybe invest in his project. This is an interesting story in the sense that Zac is a fabulist. He's pretending to be something he's not, but so are these two other guys. Akbar Shamji turns out not to be who he seemed, and Verinder Sharma is the same.

Alison: I went on LinkedIn yesterday to look up Akbar Shamji. He's still there.

Patrick Radden Keefe: Is he as of this conversation?

Alison: [laughs] As of this conversation, as of your book coming out. You originally wrote this as a story for The New Yorker. Have you heard from him?

Patrick Radden Keefe: I communicated quite a lot with him as I was working on The New Yorker story. He wouldn't meet with me. He wouldn't talk to me on the phone. He wouldn't even tell me what country he was in. He's a very evasive guy, but we did email a lot when I was working on that story. Then he hired a lawyer towards the end of the magazine article process. Then after the piece came out, never spoke to me again, wouldn't talk to me, wouldn't respond to fact-checking queries. I don't know where in the world he is. We did give him really ample opportunity to respond to everything that's in the book, and he chose not to.

Alison: When you're investigating a story like this, is it difficult to get people to talk to you?

Patrick Radden Keefe: Yes. That's a pretty standard feature of the work I've done over the years. Often I'm writing about, in some cases, people who are dead, or people who aren't able to talk to me for one reason or another. Sometimes people who are in prison, sometimes people who could talk to me but really don't want to, or as with the Sackler family, who were threatening to sue me.

The fact that Akbar Shamji wouldn't talk to me didn't mean I wasn't going to write the book. I was going to keep going. Obviously, I always give people the opportunity. I'd love to talk to anybody who will talk with me. What I tell people is the train is leaving the station. You can get on it if you want to, but if you don't get on it, the train is still going to leave.

Alison: Were you ever concerned about your own safety when you were writing this book?

Patrick Radden Keefe: There were some moments along the way. Verinder Sharma, Indian Dave, this gangster guy, I wasn't able to talk with him for reasons that, if you read the book, will become clear, but I tracked down some of his associates. One of them was a very dangerous guy by the name of Andy Baker, a longtime English gangster who had just gotten out of prison. I went to meet with him. He's actually now back in prison. He became a really important source. He knew Indian Dave really well.

I met with him twice, and you would be naive if you knew about Andy Baker's history not to take precautions when you go and see somebody like that. In that case, I also knew that when I was going to see him, somebody was going to pick me up and I was going to get in the car. When you're a journalist, you know enough about bad things that happen to journalists. It's often the case that after the fact, people say, "Geez, you shouldn't have gotten in the car."

For me, that meant that I take precautions. There was somebody who had a pin on my phone. There were people who knew that if they didn't hear from me by a certain time, there were steps that they should take. It turned out to be fine. I saw Andy Baker twice. He called me from prison today to congratulate me on the book. We are still in touch.

Alison: Wow. We're talking about the book, London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family Search for the Truth. My guest is Patrick Radden Keefe. In general, it seemed that Scotland Yard was not as effective as they could have been. What did Rachelle and Matthew find most frustrating about the way their son's case was handled?

Patrick Radden Keefe: I think not as effective as they could have been is the understatement of the day. When Zac originally went missing, they didn't even know he was dead. They reported it to the police, and then his body was found. Rachelle and Matthew, in a way that I think probably a lot of people would relate to, they felt like, "What happens when you're in trouble is you call the cops and they're going to come in and hopefully help us out."

I should say these people are white, they're upper-middle-class, they were well educated, they're well connected. I think they would be quick to acknowledge that there were a set of assumptions that they had, in part based on how they were situated in that society, where they thought, in a benign way, "oh, the cops will look after us." It didn't happen that way. The police really didn't make a lot of pretty elementary investigative moves that they should have and just botched the whole investigation.

Of course, that begs the question, if you're Matthew and Rachelle, geez, if this is the way we get it, what if we were an immigrant family? What if we were a homeless family? How would that work for us? It's interesting because Scotland Yard, I think, still has really good branding, but when you look into it, when you get under the hood, it's not a pretty picture what's actually happening in terms of policing in the UK.

Alison: What questions are still lingering for you? Even though you've reported this book, you've written this book, you've talked about this book, what is still lingering in your mind about this story?

Patrick Radden Keefe: There are a bunch of kind of smaller mysteries about what happened that night that I wasn't able to resolve. I feel as though there's a big question, which is how did Zac end up on that balcony and how did he end up going off it? I think I have answered that question to my satisfaction and to the satisfaction of the Brettler family. I think I got a lot further than the police did in terms of understanding what happened that night.

Do I have the answer to every question? I do not, and I think that's fine. I actually think that from a literary point of view, you want a book to snap closed with a finality and every question answered. The truth is, I write nonfiction. I'm not a novelist, and you have to capture some of those ambiguities. I wish we could have Akbar Shamji with us right now. That guy knows a lot more than he told me and than he told the cops. It would be great if he could spill the beans. I think that's unlikely to happen now or ever.

There will be small mysteries that we'll never understand. I think in the broad strokes, I don't think that Zac Brettler was murdered in a traditional sense. I'm very certain he didn't commit suicide. I think he jumped off that balcony to escape. I think he thought, "If I stay in this apartment, something really bad is going to happen to me," and so he tried his luck in the river, and his luck ran out.

Alison: What did you learn about London by writing this book?

Patrick Radden Keefe: Oh, man, I saw a whole dimension of the city that I hadn't seen before. I should say I love London. I lived there as a grad student 25 years ago. I have a lot of dear friends there. It's interesting, you go to some of those neighborhoods in London where they have those beautiful white homes, all matching in these kind of wedding cake shades of ivory and cream, and it all feels to me like a whitewash. I say in the book, the whole design idiom of the city is a bit of a whitewash.

There is a lot of dirty stuff lurking just beneath the surface. Part of what was interesting to me about this story is that you get Matthew and Rachelle, these parents, trying to get to the bottom of what happened to their son, and it's like they follow him into the underworld. Suddenly, they have a kind of X-ray vision, and they can see all the stuff that's going on beneath the surface.

Alison: It was announced that this was optioned by A24 for a possible TV series. What are your hopes for the adaptation? What do you hope it can accomplish?

Patrick Radden Keefe: I've had this unusual experience of we made this FX and Hulu limited series based on Say Nothing that came together so well. I was so pleased. I was the rare author who's completely psyched about the way something came together. I was very involved with that as a producer. It's a good thing it came together well because I'd have no deniability if it was terrible. I'm going to be very involved in this.

It's important to me also that the Brettler family be involved. In this case, we met with multiple different companies to see who would be right, and actually, the Brettlers were in all those meetings. This is something I'm doing in consultation with them, and my hope is that we can honor the story of what has happened to them while telling a story that also, just as a story, is really compelling.

Alison: Okay. There was an article about you in The New York Times. It said, "Can a journalist be a celebrity anymore?" What did you think of that headline?

Patrick Radden Keefe: Listen, I thought the article came together really well. It was really a very kind and generous article, and the reporter, this guy, Jonah Bromwich, is a real reporter's reporter. He talked to lots of people I know, and I think he did capture me in a way that I recognize and people in my life recognize. The headline, listen, maybe it gets people to click. I think celebrity journalist is probably, I would say, maybe a contradiction in terms and should maybe stay that way.

Alison: What's next for you? Are you working on another story?

Patrick Radden Keefe: It's funny you should ask. Last night, because the book comes out today, so last night, I closed a huge New Yorker piece that's going to come out on Monday about something totally different. It's a banana story set in New Orleans. That'll be coming Monday.

Alison: We'll have to wait until Monday to read that. Until then, you can pick up his new book, London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth. Patrick Radden Keefe will be speaking with Sarah Jessica Parker tonight at the 92nd Street Y. Thank you for joining us on your pub day.

Patrick Radden Keefe: What a pleasure. Thanks for having me.

 

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