yeah, I mean,

I think Zach was very much a creature.

First of all, I think people have always lied.

People lie in big and small ways more than we'd care to admit.

If you read the book, there were really fascinating incidents in Zach's family history of people telling lies.

And I think that especially now we live in a kind of fake it till you make it era.

You know, Zach was a creature of Instagram.

What was the world in which he found himself?

W- how do you observe what's happened there?

there?Well, listen, some of it I think is specific to the UK in the sense that London really at the turn of this century was really kind of remaking itself as a destination for money and people who had it.

And you saw that play out quite dramatically, and Zach Braeffler, this boy, was born in the year 2000, right? So he kind of comes of age against this backdrop.

But in another sense, I don't know that it's that specifically English a story in a sense that I think probably a lot of listeners in Australia would be able to relate to.

Zach was also a, a creature of social media.

You know, he grew up on Instagram.

And this was a kid who was quite comfortable economically, like he came from a family that was upper middle class and, um, really didn't, didn't want for anything, and yet he felt poor in comparison to the kind of blingy, ostentatiously wealthy people around London.

Uh, is that something that particularly fascinates you, the relationship between the unknown and the hidden in plain sight?

So let's talk a little bit more about what does that story reveal about London that a more kind of conventional book about oligarchs or dirty money doesn't? Do you think there's an indictment of the city in here somewhere?

Well, I do.

But let me let me pick my words carefully.

I should say I...

I'm a journalist.

I write for magazines, and I write nonfiction books.

Nonfiction is my idiom.

So tell us a little bit about that idea and about what thoughts you've had about parenting in a city like London in the 21st century, if you like.

How

about Empire of Pain? Well, I mean, the obvious one would be Michael Clayton.

If you read the opening scene of Empire of Pain, it owes a debt to the opening scene of Michael Clayton.

I had this challenge, which is that a lot of the time when I'm writing the books and the articles...

I trained as a lawyer, I never practiced, and I love court documents, legal documents, if I can get my hands on them.

And it's funny, because I think for other reporters, nothing could seem more dull.

Boring, yeah.

I feel like you must find in all of your books like criminals are outing themselves

Mm.

It's interesting, the, the idea of these kind of parallels between, um- Writing and cooking.

It's funny 'cause I often when I talk with, I mean, this gets a little bit kind of technical and into the craft a bit, but when I talk to writers and journalists about, um, how you assemble a book or an article or how I do, I often use a, a kind of a, a culinary metaphor, which is that the, um, um...

I never sit down to write with a blank page because I go out into the world, I try and stay curious.

I always start conversations with strangers.

Mm-hmm.

It's a habit of mine, but a good one, uh, I think, because you never know where an interesting story's gonna come from.

Sure they do.

You know, I think part of the...

If I'm honest, I think probably part of what appealed to me about this story is that I, like the Bretlers, you know, who had actually two sons, Zach and his big brother, Joe.

I'm the father of two adolescent boys who are close in age.

So maybe I related on that level.

But, but I do think there's a thing where kids hit adolescence, and they, as a parent, you sort of look at them, and you think, "Geez, where did that come from?" You know, I, I thought I, I thought I was controlling all the inputs here, and then suddenly they come out with some kind of strange characteristic.

In Zach's case, what happened is that he went to this school called Mill Hill.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And he said, "I might have a story for you." And what he said was, "There's a family here in London that I'm very close with, and they in 2019 had this tragedy.

They lost a son, their 19-year-old son, Zak, died in mysterious circumstances.

He went off the building of a luxury apartment building and died in the Thames, in the river there.

And after he died, his parents made this shocking discovery.

They learned that unbeknownst to them, he had had a secret double life, and he had been pretending that he was the son of a Russian oligarch." And this guy had said about that much to me, and I knew, "If the family will talk with me, I'm, I'm in.

I have to write about this."

[laughs]

Here is Patrick Radden Keith.

This is not my first visit to Portland.

Could I have a round of applause from people who were at my last appearance here in 2023? Oh, come on, it was not that many of you.

It wasn't that many of you.

Now let's have a round of applause from people who intended to be there, but couldn't make it on the day.

I have to tell you, it was one of the more memorable experiences.

I got here, this is early 2023, And you know, it's a whole kind of dog and pony show where you go and you talk to the high school and then you go and talk to local writers and so on.

Where you, have you been and are you concerned about safety and security for this book, for yourself, or in general? Has that ever become a big issue for you?

And you, you think if, if he could do it, and really all he had going for him was his, perhaps his, his digital savviness and a desire to pretend to be somebody else, and yet he was able to, to penetrate this fairly, fairly dark underworld.

Yeah, indeed.

But, but listen, again, I feel as though that was a function of the moment in which he was doing this.

So, uh, to me, uh, this is a story about the ascendance of the con, the idea that, um, so many people are out there trying to kind of fake it till they make it.

And I should say, you know, I'm speaking to you from the United States, where we have a president who basically faked it all the way to the top.

And I think Zak Batla was very aware of those kinds of archetypes.

His favorite film was The Wolf of Wall Street with Leonardo DiCaprio, and some people might watch that film as a cautionary tale, you know, the hero ends up in prison at the end.

No, it's not true." Are we as a society more vulnerable to cons now because of the time?

What did you learn about, you know, why he created this alternate reality for himself?

I think part of it was that, uh, in adolescence, he was a kid who was very much on Instagram.

He was on social media.

He was surrounded by a kind of blingy, conspicuous consumption in London.

I mean, London has changed a lot in the last quarter century.

It's a big part of what the book is about.

And with him seeing the kind of Bentleys and the Ferraris on the street corners-

Mm-hmm.

Can you tell us a little bit about how the process of working with Matthew and Rochelle went? They were remarkable in so many ways, and before deciding to share their story with you, we were not public figures.

Yeah, we met through, you know, the story came to me in a very random way.

I was on a film set.

I was on the set of Say Nothing, the series that we made based on my book.

And a guy plopped down next to me and I started chatting with him.

And this is a thing that I try and do is I try to talk with strangers.

Um, I think some of this is just kind of a natural impulse of mine.

And so this is a long way of asking, how did you decide when and how to conclude the book, given that the resolution that we have is fated to sit alongside what will remain unknown factually, and also this, you know, river of grief that the family will experience?

Uh, w- was it your impression that, that, uh, being a reporter in Britain is harder than being a reporter in America?

America?Yeah, maybe, but, but only...

I mean, listen, I think I, I've written stories from all over the world and, and, and it's, it's part of what keeps the job interesting, is that if you go and report a story in India, it's different from reporting a story in Australia or West Africa or wherever it is that you happen to be.

Um, it's different in the UK.

I...

Even prior to this book, I had sort of bristled a bit at where the, where the presumptions lie in the law.

Um, you know, I've had-- With an, with, with a number of books prior to this one, I've had situations where the UK publisher wanted me to make changes that weren't in the US edition out of deference to...

What do you tell young journalists about, about the trade we're in with journalists who, who haven't got, uh, aren't working for an organization like that and don't have that privileged position that you have?

So Patrick, can you just talk a little more about- One, hearing the pitch, I guess, which, you know, may not have even been a formal pitch that you got, what made you think that's more than just an interesting story to tell somebody in a bar, but something that's worth ten thousand, fifteen thousand words in The New Yorker? And then what makes that ten to fifteen thousand word story actually worth going even deeper into and, and treating it like a-- in, in full book form? What are the different hurdles that you overcome in your own mind to take those steps?

I have always, um, since my first, uh, book, really, um, and my early days in journalism twenty years ago, I've always gravitated to narrative as a kind of delivery device for complex information.

I tend to find that people are much more amenable to following you down whatever your chosen path is if they feel as though they're kind of following characters in a story, if they feel as though there's some sort of drama that you're kind of inviting them into, rather than just a, you know, a complex treatise on the origins of the opioid crisis, say, or the troubles in Northern Ireland.

There always has to be some sort of frame story for me.

And I should say that was, that was a kind of an initially a matter of my, just my own proclivities as a reader and as a writer.

It, it's always been that way in, in, in my career.

But I think particularly over the last ten or twelve years, it feels in some ways more urgent than ever to do that because I read less, I read less attentively.

Um, how did you come about reaching the decision to do that, and how did that fit into this kind of larger question about accountability, about documentation of the truth, um, as balanced against the desire for moving forward for political stability, for, you know, sustaining a fragile peace?

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

Well, they knew that there were issues by the time he was 16, 17 years old.

He, um, like I said, you know, this was a comfortable family.

His father worked in finance.

Mother's a freelance journalist.

They lived in a nice big apartment in a, in a, um, very well off part of London.

He went to private school.

I asked Patrick Radden Keefe to explain how that building itself was an important piece of the puzzle.

And then I'll go,

exactly.

And in this case, what happened is that Zach, age 18, meets a guy whose name is Mark Foley.

And when Zach and Foley start talking, Foley says, well, I work for Chelsea Football Club.

Now, this was really interesting for Zach, in part because Chelsea Football Club is one of the most storied English soccer teams, and Zach was into sports.

But more to the point, because Chelsea Football Club was owned by Roman Abramovich, and Zach was very interested in Russian oligarchs, and Roman Abramovich was one of the biggest Russian oligarchs.

So then Mark Foley says, what about you? And Zach, age 18, says, oh, you know, it's funny.

Can you talk a bit about the forces at work in the London of the sort of 2000s, 2010s,

What did you learn from listening to those recordings?

This was so fascinating.

As a reporter, you know, you're always talking to people about the experiences that they had and they're telling you what they remember.

But in this case, what happened is that this family, actually before they even knew Zach was dead, when they just thought he was missing, they started recording all of the conversations that they had with people as they were kind of becoming detectives, trying to figure out what happened to their son.

At a certain point they shared those recordings with me and it gives you this incredible real time record of what happened.

So the book is really kind of built around these very high fidelity recordings of conversations that they had with the other characters in the story as they're desperately trying to figure out what happened to their son.

What does that footage capture?

So interestingly enough, the security camera, it's not just any security camera, the building just opposite on the Thames is MI6 headquarters, the spy headquarters that'll be familiar people from James Bond movies.

I mean it's-

No, but Zach always had a very fluid relationship with the truth.

I mean, this is a kid who lied about all kinds of things, you know.

Um, and, um, I guess the other thing I would say is I think that the...

I do think that Zach was growing up at a very specific time and place, and so, you know, he's born in 2000.

He grows up on social media.

He's part of a generation of kids who I think have been raised to really...

Sir Isaac Brett did.

Film producers would help the agency with cover stories for real-life operations, and in return, the spooks would supply examples of real spy craft that would then end up in the movies.

When it comes to the idea of, you know, giving people a, uh, a little case of Delhi belly in order to incapacitate them temporarily, the best and most famous scene in the whole Mission Impossible franchise entails exactly that.

[instrumental music] The Tom Cruise dangling from the ceiling thing.

In order to free up the room-

The detail I'd forgotten was how they got rid of the guard

... and at one point he's, like, out in the, in the canteen or something, and the beautiful French spy sits down next to him, and she has a pen that she's, like, taking notes with.

But then, uh, an extreme closeup, Brian De Palma reveals to us that the pen is in fact secretly a syringe which she then plunges, and it drops just a few droplets of something into his coffee, and he then proceeds to go back to the room that Tom Cruise is trying to access, and suddenly feels a rumbling in his stomach.

Sounds ideal.

Yeah.

No, no disrespect.

Um, like there's no moment where...

For the people who report, you know, my friend Raffi Khatchadourian will talk to 70 people for a piece, and like he's not getting paid for those interviews.

The challenge for me is that I love reporting.

I'm ha- I, I feel as though I have to have a kind of level of mastery before I'm ready to sit down and write.

Did that come into it or?

Yeah

... yeah.

And, and a, a figure who, you know, was a w- a regular on, uh, the BBC and, um, kind of a public intellectual, a really grand figure of his day.

And when you look at the history, particularly with Hugo, there are these fascinating moments.

So there's a story that Hugo would tell about arriving at Auschwitz when he was just a boy.

He's about 13 years old, and arriving on a train with his family, with his father and mother and his little brother, and as they got out on the platform, he saw a guy walking towards him.

The guy was, was dressed in stripes, um, he was a Jew in Auschwitz, and he seemed mad.

Where do you put that pain?

Like, do you have a sense that if he had kept going, he would make it?

Yeah, I think about this a lot.

I mean, I think, um- It's funny 'cause there's a way of reading this story where you say, "Oh, this kid was this, like, wreck- reckless fabulist who, um, invented these stories and kind of flew too close to the sun and died." Uh, there's another way of reading it, which is that he actually kinda had our number.

Like, he sort of knew how the world works in this, at this point in this century.

Um, I think he looked around, and like a lot of young people, I think the future seemed really uncertain to him.

I think he didn't know what the job market was gonna look like.

Uh, he didn't know was he ever gonna be able to own his own home.

[laughs]

Mm.

Zach had always done that.

Um, there's a story I tell in the book about him being at some family function when he's about five years old, and some cousin or some older girl slides a- you know, piece of reading material under his nose and says, Zach, can you read this? And everybody's looking to see what he says.

And he says, and very casually without skipping a beat, he says, no, I didn't bring my glasses.

And, you know, he didn't wear glasses and he couldn't read, but he had that kind of fluid way of telling a lie.

I think there are other things going on too, though.

You know, this is a boy who was born in 2000.

Who are desperate to try and get answers.

Zach told his parents about someone he had been doing business with, a man named Akbar Shamji.

He told his parents, "I've met this guyHe is a really wealthy, really successful, just impressive London businessman.

He went to Cambridge University.

He's this kind of good-looking, glamorous guy in his 40s.

He has an apartment on Mount Street, and Mount Street in Mayfair, it's just, for those who don't know London, is, you know, Mayfair is one of the fanciest neighborhoods in London, and Mount Street is one of the fanciest streets.

Uh, he had two kids who were younger than Zach, and he had a wife named Daniela Karnuts, and she was a fashion designer with an atelier in London, and she designed these very high-end gowns of the sort that you might wear to the Oscars or something for really well-known women, for Princess Kate, for Meghan Markle, for Gwyneth Paltrow, for Michelle Obama.

He showed his mother the dresses, that, that fashion line is called Safiya, the dresses on his iPad.

What did Zach's parents think when they heard about heroin? Did they believe that that could be a possibility?

Yeah

...

Yeah, I don't.

It's all, but it's all, it's all just instinctive.

And, um, in the case of Say Nothing, I...

This is gonna sound...

Okay, I'm gonna say something s- sounds ridiculous and maybe a bit embarrassing, but then, then let me ex- let me explain and defend it.

Mm

Who are they and how did he end up falling in with them?

So Zach, at 18, is a kid who, um, is full of aspiration.

He kind of wants that Wild West, blingy side of London, you know.

He wants to make it big fast.

And he meets a guy one night who works for Chelsea Football Club, the famous soccer team at the time owned by a real, uh, Russian oligarch, Roman Abramovich, and he tells this guy, he claims to this guy, that he's the son of a Russian oligarch, that his name is Zachus Milov, that his father has a, a, you know, billion-pound fortune, and he's, um, kinda helping his dad make investments for the family.

And that guy says, "Well, I'd like to introduce you to a friend of mine." The guy buys it, first of all, buys the story, and says, "I know this guy who's, uh, got a real estate deal in Lisbon that he's trying to get off the ground.

They're looking for investors.

I'm sorry, go ahead.