Patrick Radden Keefe: London Falling

crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the unpublished details behind their stories. In twenty nineteen, surveillance cameras at the headquarters of Britain's spy agency in London recorded video of a nineteen year old man. He was pacing back and forth on a high balcony of a luxury tower along the bank of the river at two in the morning. He jumped into the water. Soon his family discovered that he had a secret life that might have

led to his death. Best Selling author Patrick Radden Keef tells me about his book London Falling, a mysterious death in a gilded city and a family search for truth. So tell me how you found the story to begin with. You're at the New Yorker right now, right? Did it come to you through the magazine?

And so in this case, I published a book in twenty nineteen called Say Nothing, which is about a murder during the troubles in Northern Ireland, and that book was optioned by a company in Hollywood before it came out, and there was a long period of time, kind of gestation period, where we were developing what turned out to

be a limited series. In the summer of twenty twenty three, I was living in the UK, because we were making that book into a TV show which ended up coming out on Ooh, so I moved my family over there. I was a producer on the show, so I was pretty involved, and I was on set one day. We were in the Inns of Court in London and there was a sort of an office building that we had made to look like Scotland Yard. We had a scene

at Scotland Yard, which is ironic. If you know what my book ended up being about, a lot of it is Scotland Yard. So I was there on set in this place that's been made up to look like Scotland Yard. And there was a guy who was a guest of

the director that day and we just started chatting. We were sort of sitting in the director's chairs, you know, at the monitors between setups, and he learned that I was a magazine journalist, and I sort of talked to him a little bit about the kinds of stories I'm interested in, and then he said, you know, I think I might have a story for you. And I should say people say that to me all the time, and almost never do they have a story that I actually

want to write. I'm always happy to hear their ideas. But it's because I spend five, six, seven, eight months working on a piece. It's just, you know, it's a big commitment. He said. I know this family in London. They're really good friends of mine. It's just like an upper middle class Jewish family. They live in West London and made a veil which is a nice neighborhood there. And they had a nineteen year old son who died

in twenty ninety and he died in mysterious circumstances. He went off the balcony of a luxury building overlooking the Thames, the river that runs through London. And after he died, his parents were trying to figure out what had happened to him, how this could have happened, and they made this terrible discovery, which is that he had had a

secret life that they hadn't known about. So this boy's name was Zach Brettler, and what his parents were named Matthew and Rachelle learned was that Zach had been going around London kind of living the identity of an alter ego. He had this alter ego, which was zachis mylof a name they'd never heard, and he was telling people that he was Zakis Mylof and he was the son of a Russian oligarch. That his father was a Russian billionaire

living in London. And so, you know, the first shock for the parents is this terrible shock of their kid's death. The second shock is discovering that he'd been living with them and had been carrying on this secret life they

hadn't known about. And so this guy, he basically told me as much as I just told you, and I knew if there's any way I can persuade this family to tell their story, which they hadn't gone public with at that point, this is how I'll spend the next year of my life figuring this out.

early age. I g as teenagers and then they ended up in the UK basically alone in the world. Their whole families have been killed, and so these two young guys, Matthew's father and Rashell's father, as teenagers had to kind of reinvent themselves and like, you know, find a whole new life in England. And when they were in their thirties, Matthew Michelle met and they ended up having two sons.

There's an older brother named Joe and then a little brother named Zach, and Zach was born in the year two thousand, so he's a real kind of child of the millennium. And they grew up, you know, it was a kind of happy, happy life growing up. They were financially comfortable, They lived in a nice apartment in a nice neighborhood, They traveled and they had kind of quite a close knit extended family. And Joe ended up going off to this sort of elite private school in London

called UCS University College School. He did well there and it was all going well, and the parents just sort of assumed that Zach would go there too, And when it came time to take the test, he took the test and he didn't do particularly well, and he had an interview and he kind of flubbed the interview and he didn't get in. And this school had a policy

they wouldn't give favoritism to siblings. The reason I tell you this it all seems a little in the weeds, but I think, you know, you look at the life of any family and sometimes weird things happen in adolescents and you kind of go back and you're trying to find the place where it all went wrong, and for the parents, this is actually sort of where it starts to go wrong. And Zach was really devastated that he couldn't get into the school that his brother was going to.

He reapplied and didn't get in again, and then he ended up going to this other school in London called mill Hill, which was also a sort of fancy private school, expensive but not as hard to get into. And when he got there, a lot of his classmates were the

children of oligarchs. They were the children of very wealthy people from the Soviet Union, the former Soviet Union, who had relocated to London, had a ton of money, and there were these kids who had the money and kind of swagger, and they were these sort of blingy kids. And Zach became really transfixed by these classmates who were living what to him at age, you know, fifteen sixteen years old, seemed like kind of a fantasy existence.

in pretty dramatic fashion. And under the communist Soviet regime, there were these big state owned enterprises, so you'd have you know, whatever it was, like a big oil and gas company or a big utility or what have you, and those were state owned because it was a communist government.

And then what happened was, in a pretty short period of time all that stuff got privatized and there was a huge amount of corruption at the time, and so you had this brief window where a lot of what had been the kind of industrial base of the Soviet

Union suddenly ends up going into private hands. And it happens in kind of a quick and messy fashion, and so you get, you know, you get kind of rigged bids and cronyism, and people who suddenly go from you know, they knew the right person and then suddenly it's like they own fifty percent of a massive oil company or

whatever it is. And so the first generation of oligarchs were people like that, people who got massively wealthy overnight by essentially taking over in these sweetheart deals these formerly stayed on enterprises. You know, is it the same thing as like walking into a bank the gun and robbing it? No? Is it what we would think of as totally kosher.

Probably not. And they accumulated these huge fortunes and then the thing is that Russia was actually not a great place if you it was a great place to make money. It wasn't a great place to hold on to your fortune because there's a lot of political instability, there's a lot of corruption. You didn't know who was going to

come for you. And so this generation of oligarchs, basically in the you know, starting in the kind of late nineteen nineties early two thousands, starts thinking, okay, well, where can I take my money where it's going to be safe, And the answer was London, and they moved in really large numbers to London. The city of London kind of incentivized them, you know, it said like, if you come in and you invest a certain mind in the economy, we'll give you a visa. We'll make it easy for you.

We have great private schools, or you can send your kids. We've got awesome real estate that's you know, palatial and a great investment. And so you had this influx of people from Russia and Kazakhstan and various other former Soviet republics. And yeah, listen, I'm not here to tell you that all these people were crooks, but were there's some crooks

among them. Absolutely were places like these private schools where they screening there's actually a quote in my book, there's a guy who's a consultant to these private schools because they suddenly had all these ex Soviet students, and he said, you know, we don't screen out the mafia, Like, how would you do that? We don't know where the money

came from. And so that's this environment that Zach Butler grows up in, this environment where there's there's a lot of new money and there are these kids who just are living this kind of over the top lifestyle. It's like they would wear really fancy suits to class, and they would party in hotels on weekends and they you know, there's a story I tell in the book about how

they would live in the dorms. They had dorms there and it was like an eight minute walk from your dorm to class in the morning, and on cold mornings, these kids would get ubers. But so that's the sort of environment he grew up surrounded by, and he or he was, you know, in school, surrounded by and his parents start to notice because he's he gets really into fancy cars and he's always wondering like mom and dad, why don't we have a nicer car, Why don't we

have a bigger house. You know, they drove a Mazda, and he was thinking, you know, why don't we drive a range Rover. Why can't we do anything better. There was one day when he the school actually called their home and said, hey, you know, Zach was just picked up and he's coming home. But he was picked up in a Chaufford limousine and the parents didn't know what this is about. And when he got home they asked him, like,

you know, how did this happen. He said, he paid for it himself, and he told them I wanted to see what it would feel like to be picked up in a limousine. So he was a kid who kind of starting to lose his bearings, I think because he was obsessed with conspicuous consumption and wealth.

Soviet Union. But still before we talk a little bit more about Zach, I'm curious about what you think the expectations were for the folks from the Soviet Union who were wealthier of their kids in London. Would it be they go into finance. Would it be that they return home and you know, join with whatever business this is that their parents have gotten so wealthy from so quickly.

own way and distinguishes themselves somehow in life. But generally speaking, it's like, if they stay out of jail and maintain a relationship with you, it probably feels like a win. I just think that the whole I mean this in a kind of weird way. My book is a book about parenting, and when you get to that level of wealth, it's just all the laws of physics are a little

different than they are for the rest of us. And so I think in Zach's case, you know, his parents wanted him to sort of live a decent life, you know, and to be happy and be close with his family, and sure like do well in school and have conventional accomplishments. But they were thinking in a fairly sort of straightforward register. And then Zach's looking at these kids, thinking, you know, I want to take over the world, right like I want to be a master of the universe.

in a way that they really didn't know. They knew that he could sometimes be dishonest, and he sometimes sort of told stories. They didn't know that he was a compulsive liar who was really pretending to all kinds of different people that he was somebody who he wasn't. They didn't know that until after he died, and so I don't think they had a real appreciation for how dangerous his situation was until it was too late to do anything about it.

kids who he told that his mother was dead. It's a really unsettling thing to learn, I think, particularly for Rochelle. His mother. You know, like, what a strange thing for your child to tell people. But I do think that in that case, it was partially that he was a new kid at a new school. He wanted to make friends.

I think he realized that, you know, I think most people are are pretty compassionate, and so I think that if you're a thirteen year old kid and you'd tell somebody that you've lost your mother, their heart opens up to you a little bit more quickly then it might

otherwise if you're just a new kid in school. But there were lies like that, and then he would tell all these lies to his friends, where you know, he would say that he had all these deals going and he was getting into oil and gas deals, and he would say that his father, he told some of them his father was an arms dealer. And some of the friends, the friends who were sort of better friends, started to figure it out, so he Zach was. There were certain

movies that Zach was really obsessed with. There's a movie a lot of people have seen, The Wolf of Wall Street, which was one of his favorite movies. He watched it again and again. And there's another movie called war Dogs, which is a movie that Jonah Hill was in Ironicy Jonah Hill is actually in both movies, and War Dogs is based on true story about these two these two young Florida kids, these buddies, who when they were in

their early twenties went into business's arms dealers. This is sort of back in the days of the Iraq War, and they became these kind of illegal arms dealers. Basically, so he liked stories about young men, true stories about young men who were kind of on the make, were hustlers looking to make a lot of money quickly, willing to cut some corners and maybe lie in order to do so. And he would take little bits of inspiration actually from those movies. Specifically, so Zach, when he was

eighteen years old, started his own business. He incorporated a business. I don't know that it ever actually did anything, really, but he formally incorporated this business and he called it Omega Stratton. And I think that Omega is a reference to the watch, just the watch that James Bond wears.

But Stratton is clearly a reference to Stratton Oakmont, which is the name of the business in the Wolf of Wall Street, the guy when he starts his crooked brokerage firm, it's called Stratton Oakmont, which it's just such an insane thing to contemplate, right that you would you'd like to start a business and name it after the famously illegal business in a Martin Scorsese movie that sent the guy

who ran it to prison. So he started telling these stories, and he would tell his friends that his dad was an arm stealer. And there's kind of a funny story where one of his friends, this guy Andre, played tennis with him. They were they would play doubles and there was a tournament at some point Matthew Zach's dad was going to drive them.

range Rovers. And Matthew shows up in ma he was this kind of gentle, sweet guy who doesn't seem like an arms dealer at all and drives a Mazda, and eventually his friends started to see through some of the last.

stuff that he was saying? And I'm pretty convinced that he wasn't, in part because he was very selective in what lies he told to different people, and so there was all kinds of stuff that he was out there telling people about himself, you know, not just that he you know, eventually he goes he sort of takes it to the next level and starts claiming he's the son

of a Russian oligarch. But he would say that he lived in this luxury building called one Hyde Park, which is this, you know, like the most expensive residential complex anywhere in the world, or that's what it built itself as when it was opened, this place in Knightsbridge, and people would actually come and meet him there, and he would he'd always be like right in front of the building, as if he'd just walked out, like nobody ever saw

him actually walking out. He was very careful about that stuff. But I think if he had been at school with Joe, it would have been harder to get away with some of that stuff because you know, your older brother would be there to sort of fact check you.

it until he doesn't. I think there's a lot of con artists out there, you know, still getting away with it. So I've always been of the view that if Zach had been able to survive his teens, and if he had not, we'll talk about it, but he ends up

getting mixed up with some very dangerous people. If he had not gotten mixed up with the people he got mixed up with, yeah, I tend to think that he probably would have ended up in real estate or something, and he could be, you know, he could be a very wealthy twenty five year old today who had made a killing and you know, told a few lies along

the way. But nobody was in any of the wiser There's a there's a really touching moment that I described in the book where Matthew the dad, was listening to a podcast after Zach died, and on the podcast they were talking about Bob Dylan and they talked about how when Bob Dylan was young, he told all these lies about himself, like when he first showed up on the scene playing music. I mean, even his name, you know, was a lot and he kind of invented a new

name for himself. And he would say that he'd, you know, he'd run off to join the circus at a young age, and that he kind of ran away from home and he was you know, he's part Native American, and that he'd turned tricks in Times Square. There were all these stories that Bob Dylan was telling, and Matthew was really sort of taken by this account because he said, it's

so interesting. You know, Dylan was kind of trying to establish himself on the scene, this really talented young guy, but he didn't really know who he was going to be. Nobody knew who he was, and so he's just kind of trying things out, and you know what Matthew said was eventually, like he settled down. Dylan would probably chuckle about it today if you asked him about it, but eventually, you know, he kind of lived a normal life once his feet hit the ground.

like he was. He would he would get some older friend to buy him a carton of cigarettes and then he would sell Lucy's to to kids in the school, presumably at a markup per cigarette. So he had little hustles like that. But there was nothing that seemed like kind of big time illegality.

this guy. And I should say, just by way of background, Zach was really obsessed with a guy named Romana Bramovic.

And Romano Bromvic is the was the owner. He's a Russian oligarch, someone who had had a He now claims that he's not close with Putin, but somebody who the perception has always been, you know, had a relatively close relationship with Putin, and he had bought the Chelsea Football Club, one of the biggest, most storied soccer teams in the UK, and put a ton of money into it, and so he was kind of a famous oligarch, just like a famously wealthy guy, you know, always being photographed in Saint

Bart's on a huge yacht and you know, bought the biggest mansion here and the biggest mansion there, and a massive art collection and he just spent one hundred million dollars on a painting. He's that kind of guy. I don't think Zach ever met Romano Brovich, but he was very taken with him. He was like a superhero to Zach.

So he shows up at this thing at the Chelsea Arts Club, and you know, we've all had this experience where you show up at something and you're there and kind of trying to mingle, but you don't really know anyone. You didn't come with anyone, and you end up sort of meeting eyes with somebody else who's there by themselves. You know, you're both in the same kind of awkward predicament. And he ends up meeting this guy named Mark Foley and they're introduced, and Mark Foley says that he works

for Chelsea Football Club. So this random guy is there and he says, hey, I basically work for Romano Broovich. I work for the guy that is your idol. And at that point Zach says, oh, well, you know, I come from a Russian family. My father's a wealthy Russian guy here in London and I sort of help him out with business and what have you. And I think that Mark Foley was patient zero. I think Mark Foley is the first person's act told this lie to and

the crazy thing is it works. Mark fully believes him and says, well, listen, we should get together. You know, if you want to make investments, we should talk. And so that's the sort of first run on the ladder, and then through Mark Foley, he ends up meeting a guy who's one of the major characters in the book, this guy ak Barshamji, who's a kind of slippery, dashing London businessman, and ak Barshamji introduces him to a friend of his who's a guy named Vernda Sharma but who's

better known in London by the nickname Indian Dave. And Verrender Sharma was a gangster, a very very violent gangster. And so Zach pretty quickly after meeting Mark Foley, ends up in the orbit of these two guys who are quite different ak Barshamji an Indian Dave, but they are both pretty dodgy in their own ways.

with him. But part of what's so wild about this tale is that in a way that Zach didn't know and actually his parents after he dies, like it takes them the longest time to figure this out, they didn't know this either. Both Akharshamji and Indian Dave were in trouble at this point, so Akhbarshamji had been having all kinds of business problems and actually had just declared bankruptcy. He was still carrying on like a very wealthy guy.

He lived in an apartment that costs ten million pounds and the nicest neighborhood and you know, had an office a fancy block and drove around in his Mercedes and he acted like he didn't have a care in the world, but behind the scenes, he had actually just declared bankruptcy. And Indian Day of the Gangster was facing a dilemma that a lot of gangsters do. I'm mean, I've written about a lot of gangsters over the years, and you know, there's no there's like no pension plan for these guys, right.

So he was a really violent extortionist who had done some pretty awful things in his day, but he was getting old and you know, his daughter had just had a baby, and he was sort of wondering how am I gonna how am I gonna make it in retirement. So you have this kind of interesting turn of events where you get these two guys, both of whom are a little worried about their finances, and then onto the stage walks this eighteen year old kid who says, hey,

my name is Zach. My father is a Russian oligarch worth billions of dollars, and he's entrusted me to make investments for the family, and he seems to want to hang out, and you get into this kind of weird thing where each of these guys had something that the other wanted.

for investors. So when he first meet Zach, the idea is that zak Ishmilov might invest his family's money in this project. And I said to Akmar you know, I'm just a writer, Like, I'm no savvy businessiness man. But if I met someone who was a potential investor and they said, oh, my dad's an oligarch worth billions of dollars, I would google them like I would google the name Zaki Smilov. Yeah, that much due diligence, I think I'd be capable of. And interestingly, there is an oligarch whose

last name is this my love. But I don't know that zach was necessarily claiming that it was him, that that was the dad specifically. But then what Achbar said was he's it was really interesting. He said, you know when you move around London and there's all these people, some of them from the formeran Soviet Union, who have a ton of money, and the really wealthy people have a very low profile on the internet. Okay, he basically said, you know, like you civilians, you normal people, you just

assume you can google someone. But the real badge of class is if you google someone and they don't come up. And so this is what he is. What he said, you know, do I buy it? I don't know. It always seemed to me a little insane that he was so easily tricked by Zach. But you know in walk Zach and he basically he's almost like there's almost a kind of talented mister Ripley thing right, Like he just sort of Zach was very cunning, he could be charming.

He's very kind of quick witted, and he's just able to dupe these people who seem like quite trusting in retrospect.

there aren't going to be those emotional access points. The challenge is that, unlike a novelist, I'm not able to make anything up or speculate or sort of do too much of kind of he would have thought, X, Y and Z. You know, you really have to be pretty disciplined about it. And so what that means is, I am always looking for, first of all, people who knew if somebody is dead and therefore not available to me, or if they're alive and they won't talk to me.

I mean, sometimes I'm writing about people who don't want me to be writing about them. I am trying to find people who knew them well and can recount conversations. I'm trying to find artifacts. And so in Zach's case, what that means is emails, text messages, video that people took. And then you know, there's even situations in which say,

there's somebody who wouldn't talk to me. But when the police started investigating, the police did their own interrogations, and I ended up getting transcripts of the police's interrogations, and so the person says, oh, well, on such and such a day, Zach said this to me, and so it's kind of putting together a collage of all that kind

of material, and it's hugely important to me. I mean, listen, I should say, like, Zach's a pretty enigmatic guy, and I don't know that I'm ever going to truly figure him out. I don't think his parents are ever going to truly figure him out. There's always going to be some degree of mystery with this person. But in terms of getting a sense of how did he carry himself when he walked into a room, how did he talk,

how did he look at you? I just interviewed a ton of his friends and family members and people who dealt with them over the years, and then it was really helpful also to get some of his texts.

nonfiction like you are and like I do. Is you know, You've got Zach's parents, their lens, what they're looking through, You've got all of the friends you've been talking to act about this stuff too, And you know, our job is to pull all of those little tiny pieces together to create this this profile of somebody that none of these people have. Nobody's pulled thatts together in the way

you have. And then you've got this objectivity, you know, as a journalist who doesn't really have any you know, skin in the game with this, and your whole job is to try to get to him so that you're humanizing him, so that we care about what happens to this nineteen year old. So yeah, I think that. I mean,

it's a very difficult job. But I think usually when people know that person and I think it's the end of a book, like with your book, you can kind of walk away and say, Okay, I see all the I see the little pieces in the quilt of this guy's life, and so I think that's great that you did all that due diligence.

furiously paddling like that. Yeah, and I sort of think of I think of a book like that where I want the reading experience to be perfectly fluid, but it does take an enormous amount of work and kind of frantic activity to get all that stuff. And for me, the greatest compliment is when some of Zach's family members have now read the book and when they feel as though it captured him. That means a lot to me.

And sometimes somebody will read something I've written and say, as a good friend of mine who read the manuscript pretty early on, at one point he said something like, oh, Acbar wouldn't do that. I think Achbar would do this, And I just sort of felt as though, yes, okay, job done. I want you to have enough of a sense of who this guy is that I could describe some random situation to you and you could tell me how Akbar would.

I have unspoiled everything I know about this guy? So okay, well this is you know, we're I think we were pretty well established now, I mean where we left things off were was that Zach was saying, I've got all this money and I'm ready to invent my dad's money. And he just said, go for it, whatever you want to do. And then you've got Akmar, who you know, says I've got tell me again, is it business complex or condos or what does he have?

At a certain point, Zach says, I'm homeless. He tells Akbar like, I don't have any place to stay, and I've been kicked out of my family's you know, huge property at one Eyed Park in the fancy building. And at this point Akbar says, you know, I know this guy named Verrinder Sharma who's a good friend of mine. He doesn't, I don't think. He tells Zach right away that Sharma is a gangster and he has a big apartment in this luxury building called River Walk, which is

overlooking the Thames River. It's kind of luxury high rise and he's just there on his own. Maybe you could stay with him. So Akbar introduces Zach to this guy who is known as Indian Dave. People call him Dave. You know, his actual legal name is Rinder Sharma. And Zach goes and stays with him. And Zach is telling all kinds of different people, different stories. So he tells Akbar and Verrinder, I'm the son of Russian oligarch. My father has just died. My mother lives in Dubai. There's

a fight over the estate. She's kicked me out of my luxury of property in London. I have no place to stay, and so I'm just temporarily going to stay with you. He tells his parents. I I met this guy. He says, he's a rubber tycoon, and he has three apartments in this building and he's one of them is vacant, and he's letting me stay in it. Now, it wasn't three apartments, so it was one apartment, was a three bedroom.

And for a few months, Zach goes and stays in this guy's apartment and becomes kind of closer and closer with this guy Sharma, who you know, is someone who I go through his whole criminal history in the book, but it had a long history as a gangster, as an extortionist, was involved in the contract killings. He was

a real leg breaker, a dangerous, dangerous guy. And he and Zach developed this friendship and it all culminates on this one night in November twenty nineteen when Akbar and Sharma and Zach are in that apartment and at about two in the morning, Zach responds to an email from his mom. His mam At emailed them saying, hey, where are you? What's going on? Are you okay? And he writes back all good x And twenty minutes later he walks out on the balcony and he goes off the

balcony into the Thames. And his parents actually initially didn't know who's dead because he wasn't carrying any ID and so when his body was found he was a John Doe. Very weird thing. But in London, it's this vast city, you know, and you have the Scotland Yard is huge, but you have basically a missing person's investigation in one part of the city and a John Doe in the other part of the city, and it takes days for

them to realize that they're actually the same person. And this very weird thing happens, which is the morning after Zach dies. Rochelle doesn't know that he's dead. She's alone in the family apartment and there's a knock on the door. There's a guy there and he says, is Zach here? And she says no. She says who are you? And he says, well, who are you? And she says I'm Zach's mom, and the guy says, you can't be his mom. His mom's in Dubai, and she's totally confused. This means

nothing to her. She doesn't know what could be going on, and the guy drives off, and it's only days later that she learns that Zach had this whole hidden story.

guy I quoted. It was a medical It was a doctor who was a witness in a criminal trial, and he described teenage, teenage brains and he said, you know, a teenage brain, you know, he said it's like a car with a powerful engine and no breaks. And I think that's a little bit what was going on. I don't know that Zach had like a long term plan that he thought out. I think he was going from one little hustle to another. He came into this saying,

I'm really rich. I come from a wealthy family. I'm going to inherit hundreds of millions of dollars and I might be able to invest, we could do business together, so on and so forth. And I think what he was thinking was, these guys are glamorous, they're a little bit dangerous, they're exciting, they're living the kind of life I want to be living. I'm going to tell a few lies in order to see what I can do to kind of get him with them, just to get

in the door, and I'll figure it out. I'll figure it out, you know, it'll kind of work itself out. So that's what he does. And he's a teenager, so he doesn't have a lot of money, and they do they do things like they pick up ubers here and there. You know, they'll pick up a meal here and there.

It's nothing. They're not giving him a ton of money, but he gets a place to stay in this luxury apartment overlooking the Thames, and initially there's always some story, some excuse, some reason why he's not coming through with the money. And I think that what ends up happening that night when he ends up in the apartment with

those guys, something has come to a head. And I think what it is is that they are beginning to figure out that he's not who he claimed that he was, and that he doesn't have billions of dollars lined up, that that money is not going to materialize. I have all these texts, and there's a text where Akbar says, you know, I keep telling Dave that there may not be a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow. And I think that that was part of what Dave

was figuring out. And so you can imagine how incredibly dangerous this is for Zach is that he's with this really murderous, terrifying guy who's just realizing in real time that he's been duped by a kid, and that he actually took the kid into his home. Yeah, and that he's been totally tricked, and that the money he was counting on to see him through his retirement is not coming and that he's been had.

background is important. But like there's a story in the book about Indian Dave and another gangster who actually did spend a lot of time talking with castrating a man like that's the kind of person we're talking about here. There's a story in the book about a guy that they were extorting and they Indian. Dave, you know, pushed a knife into the guy's neck. But then after doing that kind of opening up this wound in the neck, he took two fingers and like jammed them into the wound.

He you know, he was a sadistic guy. So I think Akbar was incredibly responsible, and I mean it ends up being kind of funny, but when you look at his business history, like not actually a great businessman, it turns out, but not violent the way that Dave was. Dave was a really dangerous guy.

And you know, a building that would be familiar to people who've watched the Jams Pond movies because it's the headquarters of I six and six had a camera facing riverwalks building and what they saw on the camera was the building was mostly dark, but the apartment was lit up, and it's the footage is from far across the river, but it's a little grainy, but basically Zach walks out onto the balcony. It's cold and very late at night.

He walks out of the balcony. He walks to sort of one edge of the balcony and he kind of looks over the edge, and then he crosses to the other and looks over and then he comes crosses back to the center and he climbs up and he jumps, so he's not pushed. There's nobody else on the balcony with him, and you might have an inference then where

you say, okay, well this is a suicide. So that's straightforward except that if you keep watching the footage, what you see is that the lights stay on and then there's some movement and somebody's moving around in the apartment after he's gone off, and then eventually the lights go out. So we know that Indian Dave was in the apartment when he dies. We know he's in the apartment afterwards, we know he does not call the police. Zach goes out, goes off the balcony, and actually I get into all

this detail in the book. But Akbar comes back and comes back up to the apartment after he's gone off the balcony, and the two of them are in there, and then Akbar leaves and Indian Dave turns out the light and the risk of spoiling a little moment in the book, there's this incredible turn of events where I mentioned that London has all this CCTV. So what Acbar, in his police interrogation tells the cops is I basically said good night to those guys and then I drove home.

What he doesn't mention is that he actually at a certain point drives back after Zax goon off and then they have the CCTV, and the CCTV shows him going up to the apartment. This is after zaxscon off. He's up there for like twenty minutes. Then he comes back down. He walks aroun round to the other side of the building. He goes over to the river front and he looks into the water at exactly the point where Zach has just gone into it. Then he turns around and goes to his car and drives away.

clean into the water, he just clipped the water. He just clipped the wall and broke his hip.

And I talked to a few people on the fringes of the intelligence community, and they said, m I six is going to have a pretty good sense of what's going on in that building at any given moment in time, because if you think about it, you know, you could have the Chinese, or the Iranians or whoever the Israelis, you know, like any the Russians could set up shop

in an apartment and basically surveil AM I six. And so presumably am I six is looking back into the building, but they were, you know, all we know is that footage, like we haven't. There's nothing has come out in terms of them knowing more about what might have gone on. The really crazy thing is that a year after Zach died, his parents got a call from the police saying, Indian Dave just died in the same apartment.

going to be able to figure out. He tells them all, I got my car and I drove straight home, and then they get the CCTV in it's obvious that he didn't. He's not acting like someone who is totally innocent and Indian. Dave basically just says no comment, no comment, no comment, no comment. He won't answer any questions at all, and I think that arouses the suspicions of the police and

Matthew Michelle. The parents were pushing for a kind of aggressive investigation and that was sort of what they were promised in the weeks after Zach's death. But then this kind of weird thing happens, which is that after promising them in the world, Scotland Yard kind of flubs the investigation. They just don't There's a lot of work that they don't do, really obvious calls that they don't make people, they don't track down questions, they don't ask. I think

there's probably different explanations for that. I think the fact of COVID didn't help. Right that this is all happening in the end of twenty nineteen, so a few months later the pandemic sets in. Some of it is that there's been cutbacks at the Metropolitan Police, like Scotland Yard still has his reputation is a great police force, but in fact it's kind of a shadow of its former

self at this point. But I think there's a kind of more interesting thing going on, which is that I think that cops think about things in categories, and it's all about clearing cases.

was connected to the Russians. And there have been something like two dozen cases over the last twenty years in which people have died in or around London and mysterious circumstances who are connected in some way or the other to the Russians or have acrossed the Russians, you know, people falling out of windows and off of roofs and in front of subway cars. And I think that there was something happening in this case. Where do you find out he'd been pretending he was the son of a

Russian oligarch. And for some of the cops there was a sense of Okay, well, we're not going to look too this all just seems a little above my pay grade. Whatever's going on here?

you that you got to tell the truth. But what they're really hoping is that you lie to them, because then they have you online to the FBI, and once they've got that bit of leverage on you, then you're kind of theirs, you know, then they can make you play ball. And in the UK, under British law, it is not a crime by itself to lie to the cops.

And so part of the challenge is that Achbar came in and he just lied and lied and lied, and they knew it, and they said, you know, we're having a little trouble squaring all the stuff you're telling us with the stuff that we know. They had these very polite ways of telling him that they knew he was lying, but they couldn't then turn around and say, and we're going to send you to prison for lying to us unless you tell us what really happened that night. And

so Achbar just never cooperated. And at a certain point, Indian Dave is sort of out of the picture, and so I think that was other challenge for them.

conclusion yourself. Did they want a new investigation or did they want to take control of the narrative and say, this is you know who our son really was and this is what we went through.

We're going to trust the authorities. And part of the story I tell in the book is about how gradually they realized, oh my god, the police aren't going to really look into this, and there was an inquest process and that was also kind of inconclusive, and so part of what this story is about actually is these two civilians, these parents who are mourning the death of their son,

having to kind of become detectives themselves. They have to do what the authorities wouldn't do, and they go out and start interviewing gangsters and you know, looking into some of the kind of strange subterranean places where Zach was spending his time. And they come out of that with a much richer sense of who their son really was in life. And when they talked to me, I think

there were a few things going on. I mean, I think some of it was that they had kind of come to the end of the road with the authorities, and they wanted some greater degree of accountability, and they wanted to tell their story. And it's funny, you know, I trained as a lawyer before I became a full time writer. And I think a lot about what the burden of proof is in a legal context and then in a reporting context, and the role of justice in

these different kinds of forums. I wrote a big book about the Sackler family, the family that became billionaires through the sale of oxy content and helped give rise to the opioid crisis, and that was kind of a story in which the bad guys get away with it in the end. You know, they were this very wealthy family who basically are you know, they're very wealthy at the beginning of the book and very wealthy at the end,

and none of them go to jail. But there was a sense in which the book itself was a kind of small form of accountability because you're telling the story, and it's a true story, and it's undeniable. And I think that's part of what the Brawlers wanted, was listen, we're going to point the fingers here and tell the real story in this book. And I've never had a relationship with people that I'm writing about quite like the relationship I had with them. I spent hundreds of hours

talking to them. It was very, very intense, and I have to say I was quite inspired by them, not just by their ability to investigate their son's death in this kind of tenacious, defiant way, but also by the way in which they weren't paralyzed by his death, and they have kind of figured out a way to keep living and to live joyously and to honor his memory, and in a strange way, I think the whole process of working with me on this book has been part of that. Well.

Do you think if there is a sentence that kind of summarizes how they feel about you know, all of this has happened. Is it simply just like he was a kid, You know, he was nineteen, He was a kid. He didn't know what he was getting into, and he made a mistake, and he paid price, you know, but with all intensive purposes, you know, we feel like positive about the way that that his life would have gone.

And so as a storytelling device, I love to introduce you to someone and then tell you about their grandparents and how they came to this place and so on. So I was drawn initially to this story of Zach because, you know, he had these two grandfathers who survived the Holocaust and their whole families were wiped out, and they arrived in the UK as teenagers. And you know, part of my story is a story about reinvention. Zach tried to reinvent himself as a teenager. He tried to become

someone else. A lot of us do that as adolescens, and I was interested in the idea that he of these two grandfathers who would also reinvent in themselves. It's like, you come here, you're kind of tabula rasa. You've lost everything and you have to decide who am I going to be? And for the longest time, I thought that was the role that his grandparents played in the story.

And then there's this one night towards the end of my work on the book where I was having dinner with Matthew Michelle at a little Italian restaurant and I was trying to convey to them just how sort of in awe I was that they keep getting out of bed in the morning and their life isn't joyless like they you know, they have friends and they're close to their family, and they were it's little things like they you know, like they loved The Grateful Dead and they

were going to see The Grateful Dead played at the Sphere in Las Vegas, and they're excited about that. And I was asking them about that, and they started they both started talking about their fathers and they said, you know, both of our fathers lost everything. You know, experience like the greatest horror imaginable. It's like you're a teenage kid and your whole family's murdered, and yet both of them learned how to kind of lived defiantly and joyously in

the face of that loss. Rachelle's sister Gabby told me she was like, you know, when I looked into my father's eyes, I never saw barbed wire. I just saw like a really loving father. And to me, that was so inspiring the idea, and it was something I really didn't see for the first two years I was working on the book, even though it was kind of right

in front of my face. Was that part of what gave this couple the incredible emotional resources to deal with the death of a son, the most unimaginably awful kind of loss, was the fact that they'd grown up in these families that have been shaped by these grandfathers who both lost like that much and more and learned how to kind of keep living. And so there's a you know, there's that wonderful biblical quote actually, which which both of them loved and I quoted in the book because they

cited it to me. But that idea of you know, I've put before you life and death, choose life, And I think that's kind of their that's sort of their motto. In a way.

This episode was mixed by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by Nick Toga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgarriff and Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram and Facebook at tenfold more Wicked and on Twitter at tenfold More. And if you know of a historical crime that could use the ten from the crew at tenfold more Wicked, email us at info at tenfoldmore Wicked dot com. We'll also take your suggestions for true crime authors for Wicked Words