SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
2:24 a.m. November 29, 2019, a young man paced back and forth on a high balcony of the Riverwalk apartment tower in London. Cameras at MI6 headquarters recorded the scene as the young man leaped into the Thames River and died. Zac Brettler was 19. His parents were shocked and bereaved, and then they were staggered to learn that their son had adopted a false identity, Zac Ismailov, the son and heir of a Russian oligarch. "London Falling" is the new book that tries to unravel the other lives and questions about Zac Brettler and the London underworld. Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at the New Yorker and author of previous books, including "Say Nothing" and "Empire Of Pain." He joins us from our studios in New York. Thanks so much for being with us.
PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE: It's great to be with you.
SIMON: The police ruled his death a suicide. What drove his parents, Rachelle and Matthew Brettler, to think something more might be involved and investigate?
KEEFE: Well, the police didn't actually rule the death a suicide in any conclusive sense. What they did know from that camera on MI6 was that Zac was alone on the balcony, so he jumped. He wasn't pushed. But there was enough going on in this story to make initially the police, and then more enduringly, the Brettler family suspicious. So they learned that he had lived this secret life that they hadn't known about as a teenager, moving through London, pretending that he was the son of a Russian oligarch, and that he had gotten mixed up with some pretty dicey older men, both of whom were in the apartment on the night that he died.
SIMON: Why did Zac Brettler try to assume other identities? And he was pretty convincing, good at accents, I guess, right?
KEEFE: Yeah. I mean, Zac was an interesting kid. You know, he had grown up from when he was very young, having a gift for repartee. He could do accents. He could do voices. And from a fairly early age, he started to embroider his stories. And he was an upper-middle-class kid who lived in Maida Vale in west London, grandson of a rabbi, went to a nice private school in London. But when he arrived there at 13, he met the children of oligarchs, this new generation of wealthy foreigners, many from the former Soviet Union who had arrived in London with their great fortunes and built huge properties or bought huge properties, and sent their kids to fancy schools. And in that environment, Zac was exposed to some of these kids, and he was very taken in.
SIMON: Taken in? Was there some sort of hollowness in his life, or it's hard to say?
KEEFE: That's part of what's interesting about this story is this is not about a kid who really wanted for much. He had parents who loved him. He really could have done anything. But there was a kind of corrosive anxiety, I think, about not having more. And, you know, in some ways, this is a very specific story about one boy who was a fabulist and who died too young. In other ways, I feel as though there are elements of this story that many of us would recognize. And so Zac Brettler was born in 2000, and he grew up with a phone, with social media. He grew up in a culture that was a very kind of hustle culture, a culture that really worshipped wealth. And so even though by any objective measurement, this was a kid who had a lot, he wanted more.
SIMON: He fell into company with Akbar Shamji, a businessman in his 40s. How did they wind up using each other, in a sense?
KEEFE: I think I found what I think of as kind of patient zero with Zac's imposture, that there was a guy who he met at an opening one night, and Zac was 18 at the time, at this art opening, and he introduced himself as the son of a Russian oligarch. And this guy who he met was an older man, a London man, who worked for Chelsea football club, actually, a famous soccer team owned by, at the time, a Russian oligarch, Roman Abramovich. So a pretty gutsy person to try this lie on. But it worked. And the guy introduced him to Akbar Shamji. So Akbar Shamji was this kind of glamorous, handsome guy. He said, I have this business deal. I have this real estate deal in Portugal, and we're looking for investors. And Zac said, oh, I might be interested. And so the two of them kind of became friends. And what I reveal in the book is that Akbar Shamji was not who he appeared to be, either. Unbeknownst to Zac, Akbar had recently declared bankruptcy. And so you have this kind of interesting situation in which you get these two guys who develop a quite close friendship, but they're both kind of conning one another.
SIMON: He would walk his dog (laughter), Alpha Nero. How did Zac's concocted identity fit into a part of London?
KEEFE: I lived in London. In 2000, 2001, I was there for grad school, and I've gone back a lot since. I still have dear friends there. And I've seen the city change. It has become a very hospitable place for foreign money, I think, often quite dodgy foreign money. They've really sort of rolled out the red carpet for a certain type of unsavory, unscrupulous foreign businessperson. And along with that comes a whole sort of parasitic culture of hustlers. And so you go to these areas, this neighborhood, Mayfair, where these guys spend a lot of time. It's a lot of big supercars and, you know, very blingy people and luxury goods and casinos and private nightclubs. And Zac sort of entered into that swirl, but he also realized, you know, if I'm just Zac Brettler, this 18-year-old, nobody's going to have much interest in me. But if I come in and I'm this exotic, young scion, people will really want to get me past the velvet rope and into the room. And he was not wrong. I mean, it worked spectacularly well until it didn't.
SIMON: And we should note his relationship with his parents grew harder to handle, didn't it? There were instances of violence.
KEEFE: Part of what I wanted to capture in the book was this challenge for his parents who see their son start becoming a person that they don't really recognize. They feel as though he starts to kind of worship some false gods. And at a certain point, he turns 18, he starts spending more time out of the house. He's talking about all these business things he's doing. There's a notion that he'll just skip college altogether and go right into business. And he has these older, wealthy friends. And so there's this kind of tricky thing where they want to hold him as close to them as they can. But they're worried that if they hold him too tightly, he'll run away. And there is a moment of violence with his mother, Rachelle, and it's terrifying.
SIMON: The Brettlers are parents. Did they somehow feel responsible for what happened to their son?
KEEFE: I think they did. When I initially met them, they had not told their story publicly. They'd actually deliberately kept it quite quiet, but they decided to go public. And I spent a great deal of time talking to this family. And one of the things that they will be quick to acknowledge is a sense of responsibility, a sense that there must have been things that we could have done or shouldn't have done. There must have been off-ramps we didn't see. And I have to say, having spent a great deal of time looking into this and also being somebody who's - I'm pretty attuned to familial denial as a phenomenon. I'm not sure that's true. I think that the scarier, the more disquieting idea is that you can do all the right things for your child, and still, there may be some sense in which they become something you can't control and they court a fate that you can't protect them from.
SIMON: Patrick Radden Keefe - his new book, "London Falling." Thank you so much for being with us.
KEEFE: Thank you for having me. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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