Speaker 1: This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2: He basically said, you know, you civilians, you normal people.
Speaker 2: You just assume you can google someone. But the real
Speaker 2: badge of class is if you google someone and they
Speaker 2: don't come up.
Speaker 1: I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
Speaker 1: in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
Speaker 1: podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
Speaker 1: research for my many audio and book projects has taken
Speaker 1: me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
Speaker 1: with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
Speaker 1: and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
Speaker 1: crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
Speaker 1: good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
Speaker 1: unpublished details behind their stories. In twenty nineteen, surveillance cameras
Speaker 1: at the headquarters of Britain's spy agency in London recorded
Speaker 1: video of a nineteen year old man. He was pacing
Speaker 1: back and forth on a high balcony of a luxury
Speaker 1: tower along the bank of the river at two in
Speaker 1: the morning. He jumped into the water. Soon his family
Speaker 1: discovered that he had a secret life that might have
Speaker 1: led to his death. Best Selling author Patrick Radden Keef
Speaker 1: tells me about his book London Falling, a mysterious death
Speaker 1: in a gilded city and a family search for truth.
Speaker 1: So tell me how you found the story to begin with.
Speaker 1: You're at the New Yorker right now, right? Did it
Speaker 1: come to you through the magazine?
Speaker 2: No, it came to me in a weird way. You know,
Speaker 2: when I go looking for stories, I almost never find them.
Speaker 2: I have colleagues and friends who are really amazing at
Speaker 2: kind of going out and they sort of go fishing,
Speaker 2: and they occasionally will hook something great, and that never
Speaker 2: happens to me. My line always comes back empty. But
Speaker 2: if I just move around the world, things sometimes find me.
Speaker 2: And so in this case, I published a book in
Speaker 2: twenty nineteen called Say Nothing, which is about a murder
Speaker 2: during the troubles in Northern Ireland, and that book was
Speaker 2: optioned by a company in Hollywood before it came out,
Speaker 2: and there was a long period of time, kind of
Speaker 2: gestation period, where we were developing what turned out to
Speaker 2: be a limited series. In the summer of twenty twenty three,
Speaker 2: I was living in the UK, because we were making
Speaker 2: that book into a TV show which ended up coming
Speaker 2: out on Ooh, so I moved my family over there.
Speaker 2: I was a producer on the show, so I was
Speaker 2: pretty involved, and I was on set one day. We
Speaker 2: were in the Inns of Court in London and there
Speaker 2: was a sort of an office building that we had
Speaker 2: made to look like Scotland Yard. We had a scene
Speaker 2: at Scotland Yard, which is ironic. If you know what
Speaker 2: my book ended up being about, a lot of it
Speaker 2: is Scotland Yard. So I was there on set in
Speaker 2: this place that's been made up to look like Scotland Yard.
Speaker 2: And there was a guy who was a guest of
Speaker 2: the director that day and we just started chatting. We
Speaker 2: were sort of sitting in the director's chairs, you know,
Speaker 2: at the monitors between setups, and he learned that I
Speaker 2: was a magazine journalist, and I sort of talked to
Speaker 2: him a little bit about the kinds of stories I'm
Speaker 2: interested in, and then he said, you know, I think
Speaker 2: I might have a story for you. And I should
Speaker 2: say people say that to me all the time, and
Speaker 2: almost never do they have a story that I actually
Speaker 2: want to write. I'm always happy to hear their ideas.
Speaker 2: But it's because I spend five, six, seven, eight months
Speaker 2: working on a piece. It's just, you know, it's a
Speaker 2: big commitment. He said. I know this family in London.
Speaker 2: They're really good friends of mine. It's just like an
Speaker 2: upper middle class Jewish family. They live in West London
Speaker 2: and made a veil which is a nice neighborhood there.
Speaker 2: And they had a nineteen year old son who died
Speaker 2: in twenty ninety and he died in mysterious circumstances. He
Speaker 2: went off the balcony of a luxury building overlooking the Thames,
Speaker 2: the river that runs through London. And after he died,
Speaker 2: his parents were trying to figure out what had happened
Speaker 2: to him, how this could have happened, and they made
Speaker 2: this terrible discovery, which is that he had had a
Speaker 2: secret life that they hadn't known about. So this boy's
Speaker 2: name was Zach Brettler, and what his parents were named
Speaker 2: Matthew and Rachelle learned was that Zach had been going
Speaker 2: around London kind of living the identity of an alter ego.
Speaker 2: He had this alter ego, which was zachis mylof a
Speaker 2: name they'd never heard, and he was telling people that
Speaker 2: he was Zakis Mylof and he was the son of
Speaker 2: a Russian oligarch. That his father was a Russian billionaire
Speaker 2: living in London. And so, you know, the first shock
Speaker 2: for the parents is this terrible shock of their kid's death.
Speaker 2: The second shock is discovering that he'd been living with
Speaker 2: them and had been carrying on this secret life they
Speaker 2: hadn't known about. And so this guy, he basically told
Speaker 2: me as much as I just told you, and I
Speaker 2: knew if there's any way I can persuade this family
Speaker 2: to tell their story, which they hadn't gone public with
Speaker 2: at that point, this is how I'll spend the next
Speaker 2: year of my life figuring this out.
Speaker 1: Let's start where it makes sense for you, is that
Speaker 1: with Zach in his background and how he grew up
Speaker 1: or what's the best way to start.
Speaker 2: Yeah, maybe with Zach, I mean, you know, or with
Speaker 2: Matthew and Rochelle. Really so, his parents, who are really
Speaker 2: the main characters in the book, were a London couple.
Speaker 2: They're now in their early sixties. Matthew works in finance
Speaker 2: and Rochelle as a freelance journalist. And when they met,
Speaker 2: you know, it's interesting they had something in common which
Speaker 2: is that they both had fathers who were Holocaust survivors,
Speaker 2: and both fathers had survived the Holocaust at quite an
Speaker 2: early age. I g as teenagers and then they ended
Speaker 2: up in the UK basically alone in the world. Their
Speaker 2: whole families have been killed, and so these two young guys,
Speaker 2: Matthew's father and Rashell's father, as teenagers had to kind
Speaker 2: of reinvent themselves and like, you know, find a whole
Speaker 2: new life in England. And when they were in their thirties,
Speaker 2: Matthew Michelle met and they ended up having two sons.
Speaker 2: There's an older brother named Joe and then a little
Speaker 2: brother named Zach, and Zach was born in the year
Speaker 2: two thousand, so he's a real kind of child of
Speaker 2: the millennium. And they grew up, you know, it was
Speaker 2: a kind of happy, happy life growing up. They were
Speaker 2: financially comfortable, They lived in a nice apartment in a
Speaker 2: nice neighborhood, They traveled and they had kind of quite
Speaker 2: a close knit extended family. And Joe ended up going
Speaker 2: off to this sort of elite private school in London
Speaker 2: called UCS University College School. He did well there and
Speaker 2: it was all going well, and the parents just sort
Speaker 2: of assumed that Zach would go there too, And when
Speaker 2: it came time to take the test, he took the
Speaker 2: test and he didn't do particularly well, and he had
Speaker 2: an interview and he kind of flubbed the interview and
Speaker 2: he didn't get in. And this school had a policy
Speaker 2: they wouldn't give favoritism to siblings. The reason I tell
Speaker 2: you this it all seems a little in the weeds,
Speaker 2: but I think, you know, you look at the life
Speaker 2: of any family and sometimes weird things happen in adolescents
Speaker 2: and you kind of go back and you're trying to
Speaker 2: find the place where it all went wrong, and for
Speaker 2: the parents, this is actually sort of where it starts
Speaker 2: to go wrong. And Zach was really devastated that he
Speaker 2: couldn't get into the school that his brother was going to.
Speaker 2: He reapplied and didn't get in again, and then he
Speaker 2: ended up going to this other school in London called
Speaker 2: mill Hill, which was also a sort of fancy private school,
Speaker 2: expensive but not as hard to get into. And when
Speaker 2: he got there, a lot of his classmates were the
Speaker 2: children of oligarchs. They were the children of very wealthy
Speaker 2: people from the Soviet Union, the former Soviet Union, who
Speaker 2: had relocated to London, had a ton of money, and
Speaker 2: there were these kids who had the money and kind
Speaker 2: of swagger, and they were these sort of blingy kids.
Speaker 2: And Zach became really transfixed by these classmates who were
Speaker 2: living what to him at age, you know, fifteen sixteen
Speaker 2: years old, seemed like kind of a fantasy existence.
Speaker 1: I have to imagine that some of the oligarchs, the
Speaker 1: parents here were not on the up and up. Or
Speaker 1: is that the wrong assumption? They just had made so
Speaker 1: much money, you know, in this in the former Soviney Union,
Speaker 1: that they were able to afford a London private school.
Speaker 2: Well, I mean you need to It's a great question,
Speaker 2: and to answer it you sort of need to back
Speaker 2: up a little bit because you know, you hear people
Speaker 2: talk about the Russian oligarchs, what does it really mean?
Speaker 2: So when I was growing up, you know, I was
Speaker 2: born in nineteen seventy six, and there was the Soviet Union, right,
Speaker 2: it was this thing that existed and eventually it collapses
Speaker 2: in pretty dramatic fashion. And under the communist Soviet regime,
Speaker 2: there were these big state owned enterprises, so you'd have
Speaker 2: you know, whatever it was, like a big oil and
Speaker 2: gas company or a big utility or what have you,
Speaker 2: and those were state owned because it was a communist government.
Speaker 2: And then what happened was, in a pretty short period
Speaker 2: of time all that stuff got privatized and there was
Speaker 2: a huge amount of corruption at the time, and so
Speaker 2: you had this brief window where a lot of what
Speaker 2: had been the kind of industrial base of the Soviet
Speaker 2: Union suddenly ends up going into private hands. And it
Speaker 2: happens in kind of a quick and messy fashion, and
Speaker 2: so you get, you know, you get kind of rigged
Speaker 2: bids and cronyism, and people who suddenly go from you know,
Speaker 2: they knew the right person and then suddenly it's like
Speaker 2: they own fifty percent of a massive oil company or
Speaker 2: whatever it is. And so the first generation of oligarchs
Speaker 2: were people like that, people who got massively wealthy overnight
Speaker 2: by essentially taking over in these sweetheart deals these formerly
Speaker 2: stayed on enterprises. You know, is it the same thing
Speaker 2: as like walking into a bank the gun and robbing it? No?
Speaker 2: Is it what we would think of as totally kosher.
Speaker 2: Probably not. And they accumulated these huge fortunes and then
Speaker 2: the thing is that Russia was actually not a great
Speaker 2: place if you it was a great place to make money.
Speaker 2: It wasn't a great place to hold on to your
Speaker 2: fortune because there's a lot of political instability, there's a
Speaker 2: lot of corruption. You didn't know who was going to
Speaker 2: come for you. And so this generation of oligarchs, basically
Speaker 2: in the you know, starting in the kind of late
Speaker 2: nineteen nineties early two thousands, starts thinking, okay, well, where
Speaker 2: can I take my money where it's going to be safe,
Speaker 2: And the answer was London, and they moved in really
Speaker 2: large numbers to London. The city of London kind of
Speaker 2: incentivized them, you know, it said like, if you come
Speaker 2: in and you invest a certain mind in the economy,
Speaker 2: we'll give you a visa. We'll make it easy for you.
Speaker 2: We have great private schools, or you can send your kids.
Speaker 2: We've got awesome real estate that's you know, palatial and
Speaker 2: a great investment. And so you had this influx of
Speaker 2: people from Russia and Kazakhstan and various other former Soviet republics.
Speaker 2: And yeah, listen, I'm not here to tell you that
Speaker 2: all these people were crooks, but were there's some crooks
Speaker 2: among them. Absolutely were places like these private schools where
Speaker 2: they screening there's actually a quote in my book, there's
Speaker 2: a guy who's a consultant to these private schools because
Speaker 2: they suddenly had all these ex Soviet students, and he said,
Speaker 2: you know, we don't screen out the mafia, Like, how
Speaker 2: would you do that? We don't know where the money
Speaker 2: came from. And so that's this environment that Zach Butler
Speaker 2: grows up in, this environment where there's there's a lot
Speaker 2: of new money and there are these kids who just
Speaker 2: are living this kind of over the top lifestyle. It's
Speaker 2: like they would wear really fancy suits to class, and
Speaker 2: they would party in hotels on weekends and they you know,
Speaker 2: there's a story I tell in the book about how
Speaker 2: they would live in the dorms. They had dorms there
Speaker 2: and it was like an eight minute walk from your
Speaker 2: dorm to class in the morning, and on cold mornings,
Speaker 2: these kids would get ubers. But so that's the sort
Speaker 2: of environment he grew up surrounded by, and he or
Speaker 2: he was, you know, in school, surrounded by and his
Speaker 2: parents start to notice because he's he gets really into
Speaker 2: fancy cars and he's always wondering like mom and dad,
Speaker 2: why don't we have a nicer car, Why don't we
Speaker 2: have a bigger house. You know, they drove a Mazda,
Speaker 2: and he was thinking, you know, why don't we drive
Speaker 2: a range Rover. Why can't we do anything better. There
Speaker 2: was one day when he the school actually called their
Speaker 2: home and said, hey, you know, Zach was just picked
Speaker 2: up and he's coming home. But he was picked up
Speaker 2: in a Chaufford limousine and the parents didn't know what
Speaker 2: this is about. And when he got home they asked him, like,
Speaker 2: you know, how did this happen. He said, he paid
Speaker 2: for it himself, and he told them I wanted to
Speaker 2: see what it would feel like to be picked up
Speaker 2: in a limousine. So he was a kid who kind
Speaker 2: of starting to lose his bearings, I think because he
Speaker 2: was obsessed with conspicuous consumption and wealth.
Speaker 1: Yeah. I interviewed an author I think it was last
Speaker 1: year who wrote about the murder of a high up
Speaker 1: but local official in China, and part of it was
Speaker 1: that many members of the Communist Party in China sent
Speaker 1: their kids to London to get educated. Totally, so I
Speaker 1: see that. I mean, you know, just from that book,
Speaker 1: the kind of the opulence, which I don't think is
Speaker 1: as much as it would be from folks from the
Speaker 1: Soviet Union. But still before we talk a little bit
Speaker 1: more about Zach, I'm curious about what you think the
Speaker 1: expectations were for the folks from the Soviet Union who
Speaker 1: were wealthier of their kids in London. Would it be
Speaker 1: they go into finance. Would it be that they return
Speaker 1: home and you know, join with whatever business this is
Speaker 1: that their parents have gotten so wealthy from so quickly.
Speaker 2: I mean, I think it would probably vary. But my
Speaker 2: hunch is that the kinds of oligarchs that I'm talking about,
Speaker 2: these are people with billions and billions of dollars, so
Speaker 2: their kids don't need to work at all. And maybe
Speaker 2: depending on who the parent is, there's a sense of, oh,
Speaker 2: I hope my son or daughter, you know, makes their
Speaker 2: own way and distinguishes themselves somehow in life. But generally speaking,
Speaker 2: it's like, if they stay out of jail and maintain
Speaker 2: a relationship with you, it probably feels like a win.
Speaker 2: I just think that the whole I mean this in
Speaker 2: a kind of weird way. My book is a book
Speaker 2: about parenting, and when you get to that level of wealth,
Speaker 2: it's just all the laws of physics are a little
Speaker 2: different than they are for the rest of us. And
Speaker 2: so I think in Zach's case, you know, his parents
Speaker 2: wanted him to sort of live a decent life, you know,
Speaker 2: and to be happy and be close with his family,
Speaker 2: and sure like do well in school and have conventional accomplishments.
Speaker 2: But they were thinking in a fairly sort of straightforward register.
Speaker 2: And then Zach's looking at these kids, thinking, you know,
Speaker 2: I want to take over the world, right like I
Speaker 2: want to be a master of the universe.
Speaker 1: Did Matthew and Rochelle ever have any reservations about keeping
Speaker 1: him there? It must have been a pretty quick transition.
Speaker 1: Did they say, there are a lot of other schools
Speaker 1: in London, let's pull him out where there's not this
Speaker 1: kind of influence.
Speaker 2: I think that they did, and he actually did leave
Speaker 2: eventually for his last year. They did. But I think
Speaker 2: that in some ways this is a story in which
Speaker 2: they never realized how bad things really were until their
Speaker 2: son was dead, and then they looked back and they
Speaker 2: had to kind of retrace their steps and think, God,
Speaker 2: where did it all go so wrong? And part of
Speaker 2: what's so intriguing about Zach is that he, you know,
Speaker 2: in a way that they really didn't know. They knew
Speaker 2: that he could sometimes be dishonest, and he sometimes sort
Speaker 2: of told stories. They didn't know that he was a
Speaker 2: compulsive liar who was really pretending to all kinds of
Speaker 2: different people that he was somebody who he wasn't. They
Speaker 2: didn't know that until after he died, and so I
Speaker 2: don't think they had a real appreciation for how dangerous
Speaker 2: his situation was until it was too late to do
Speaker 2: anything about it.
Speaker 1: Is there something that happens at this school, in this
Speaker 1: high school that changes things other than he's starting to
Speaker 1: lie and maybe, you know, give me some examples of
Speaker 1: what lies he was telling while he was there.
Speaker 2: You know, it's interesting when Matthew and Rochelle started finding
Speaker 2: out about Zach's secret life, they were really looking at
Speaker 2: He dies at nineteen, so they're looking at the years
Speaker 2: kind of sixteen, seventeen, eighteen nineteen. I when I started
Speaker 2: working on this project, tracked down a number of his
Speaker 2: friends from school, and I interviewed people who told me
Speaker 2: about lies he told when he was thirteen. So when
Speaker 2: he arrived at mill Hill that school, there were some
Speaker 2: kids who he told that his mother was dead. It's
Speaker 2: a really unsettling thing to learn, I think, particularly for Rochelle.
Speaker 2: His mother. You know, like, what a strange thing for
Speaker 2: your child to tell people. But I do think that
Speaker 2: in that case, it was partially that he was a
Speaker 2: new kid at a new school. He wanted to make friends.
Speaker 2: I think he realized that, you know, I think most
Speaker 2: people are are pretty compassionate, and so I think that
Speaker 2: if you're a thirteen year old kid and you'd tell
Speaker 2: somebody that you've lost your mother, their heart opens up
Speaker 2: to you a little bit more quickly then it might
Speaker 2: otherwise if you're just a new kid in school. But
Speaker 2: there were lies like that, and then he would tell
Speaker 2: all these lies to his friends, where you know, he
Speaker 2: would say that he had all these deals going and
Speaker 2: he was getting into oil and gas deals, and he
Speaker 2: would say that his father, he told some of them
Speaker 2: his father was an arms dealer. And some of the friends,
Speaker 2: the friends who were sort of better friends, started to
Speaker 2: figure it out, so he Zach was. There were certain
Speaker 2: movies that Zach was really obsessed with. There's a movie
Speaker 2: a lot of people have seen, The Wolf of Wall Street,
Speaker 2: which was one of his favorite movies. He watched it
Speaker 2: again and again. And there's another movie called war Dogs,
Speaker 2: which is a movie that Jonah Hill was in Ironicy
Speaker 2: Jonah Hill is actually in both movies, and War Dogs
Speaker 2: is based on true story about these two these two
Speaker 2: young Florida kids, these buddies, who when they were in
Speaker 2: their early twenties went into business's arms dealers. This is
Speaker 2: sort of back in the days of the Iraq War,
Speaker 2: and they became these kind of illegal arms dealers. Basically,
Speaker 2: so he liked stories about young men, true stories about
Speaker 2: young men who were kind of on the make, were
Speaker 2: hustlers looking to make a lot of money quickly, willing
Speaker 2: to cut some corners and maybe lie in order to
Speaker 2: do so. And he would take little bits of inspiration
Speaker 2: actually from those movies. Specifically, so Zach, when he was
Speaker 2: eighteen years old, started his own business. He incorporated a business.
Speaker 2: I don't know that it ever actually did anything, really,
Speaker 2: but he formally incorporated this business and he called it
Speaker 2: Omega Stratton. And I think that Omega is a reference
Speaker 2: to the watch, just the watch that James Bond wears.
Speaker 2: But Stratton is clearly a reference to Stratton Oakmont, which
Speaker 2: is the name of the business in the Wolf of
Speaker 2: Wall Street, the guy when he starts his crooked brokerage firm,
Speaker 2: it's called Stratton Oakmont, which it's just such an insane
Speaker 2: thing to contemplate, right that you would you'd like to
Speaker 2: start a business and name it after the famously illegal
Speaker 2: business in a Martin Scorsese movie that sent the guy
Speaker 2: who ran it to prison. So he started telling these stories,
Speaker 2: and he would tell his friends that his dad was
Speaker 2: an arm stealer. And there's kind of a funny story
Speaker 2: where one of his friends, this guy Andre, played tennis
Speaker 2: with him. They were they would play doubles and there
Speaker 2: was a tournament at some point Matthew Zach's dad was
Speaker 2: going to drive them.
Speaker 1: To the tennis tournament in his Mazda.
Speaker 2: Well that's the thing. So in advance, Zach takes Andrea
Speaker 2: aside and he says, so listen, my dad, you know,
Speaker 2: has he's got two range Rovers. But the thing is
Speaker 2: both of them are in the shop, like you know,
Speaker 2: what are the chances and he's got this crappy loaner
Speaker 2: car and he's really unhappy about it. So whatever you do,
Speaker 2: don't mention the range Rovers. And so Andre expects this
Speaker 2: guy to be this like grizzled armsteeler who drives two
Speaker 2: range Rovers. And Matthew shows up in ma he was
Speaker 2: this kind of gentle, sweet guy who doesn't seem like
Speaker 2: an arms dealer at all and drives a Mazda, and
Speaker 2: eventually his friends started to see through some of the last.
Speaker 1: Did his parents reflect on that with you at all,
Speaker 1: just sort of you know, taking a left instead of
Speaker 1: a right in life and what would have happened if
Speaker 1: he hadn't had those influences?
Speaker 2: Yeah? Absolutely, I mean I think in a strange way,
Speaker 2: you know, the torture for them their son died now
Speaker 2: almost seven years ago, is that they're kind of trapped
Speaker 2: in a situation where they're constantly thinking about what if
Speaker 2: we'd taken that left, what if we'd taken that right?
Speaker 2: And I do think that part of what was so
Speaker 2: fascinating about Zach. So like, there's an obvious question when
Speaker 2: you look at Zach's life, which is was this kid
Speaker 2: actually clinically delusional? Like did he believe some of the
Speaker 2: stuff that he was saying? And I'm pretty convinced that
Speaker 2: he wasn't, in part because he was very selective in
Speaker 2: what lies he told to different people, and so there
Speaker 2: was all kinds of stuff that he was out there
Speaker 2: telling people about himself, you know, not just that he
Speaker 2: you know, eventually he goes he sort of takes it
Speaker 2: to the next level and starts claiming he's the son
Speaker 2: of a Russian oligarch. But he would say that he
Speaker 2: lived in this luxury building called one Hyde Park, which
Speaker 2: is this, you know, like the most expensive residential complex
Speaker 2: anywhere in the world, or that's what it built itself
Speaker 2: as when it was opened, this place in Knightsbridge, and
Speaker 2: people would actually come and meet him there, and he
Speaker 2: would he'd always be like right in front of the building,
Speaker 2: as if he'd just walked out, like nobody ever saw
Speaker 2: him actually walking out. He was very careful about that stuff.
Speaker 2: But I think if he had been at school with Joe,
Speaker 2: it would have been harder to get away with some
Speaker 2: of that stuff because you know, your older brother would
Speaker 2: be there to sort of fact check you.
Speaker 1: So had what happened to him not happened, and we
Speaker 1: need to get into that soon. I think would he
Speaker 1: have been perhaps destined. Do you see this as a
Speaker 1: potential Bernie made off path way considering how he felt
Speaker 1: about wolf Wall Street or do you feel like you
Speaker 1: know that maybe his parents thought this wasn't something that
Speaker 1: was ingrained in him and he would just need to
Speaker 1: go to university and snap out of it or something
Speaker 1: like that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I've thought a lot about this. I think there's
Speaker 2: a couple of different ways I would answer that. One
Speaker 2: is I think that we live in an era of
Speaker 2: pretty pervasive BS, right, And there's that old expression you
Speaker 2: got to fake it till you make it, And I
Speaker 2: think we are surrounded by people who have kind of
Speaker 2: faked it till they made it, Like people who I mean,
Speaker 2: for every Bernie made Off, where you've got somebody as
Speaker 2: a con artist and he kind of gets away with
Speaker 2: it until he doesn't. I think there's a lot of
Speaker 2: con artists out there, you know, still getting away with it.
Speaker 2: So I've always been of the view that if Zach
Speaker 2: had been able to survive his teens, and if he
Speaker 2: had not, we'll talk about it, but he ends up
Speaker 2: getting mixed up with some very dangerous people. If he
Speaker 2: had not gotten mixed up with the people he got
Speaker 2: mixed up with, yeah, I tend to think that he
Speaker 2: probably would have ended up in real estate or something,
Speaker 2: and he could be, you know, he could be a
Speaker 2: very wealthy twenty five year old today who had made
Speaker 2: a killing and you know, told a few lies along
Speaker 2: the way. But nobody was in any of the wiser
Speaker 2: There's a there's a really touching moment that I described
Speaker 2: in the book where Matthew the dad, was listening to
Speaker 2: a podcast after Zach died, and on the podcast they
Speaker 2: were talking about Bob Dylan and they talked about how
Speaker 2: when Bob Dylan was young, he told all these lies
Speaker 2: about himself, like when he first showed up on the
Speaker 2: scene playing music. I mean, even his name, you know,
Speaker 2: was a lot and he kind of invented a new
Speaker 2: name for himself. And he would say that he'd, you know,
Speaker 2: he'd run off to join the circus at a young age,
Speaker 2: and that he kind of ran away from home and
Speaker 2: he was you know, he's part Native American, and that
Speaker 2: he'd turned tricks in Times Square. There were all these
Speaker 2: stories that Bob Dylan was telling, and Matthew was really
Speaker 2: sort of taken by this account because he said, it's
Speaker 2: so interesting. You know, Dylan was kind of trying to
Speaker 2: establish himself on the scene, this really talented young guy,
Speaker 2: but he didn't really know who he was going to be.
Speaker 2: Nobody knew who he was, and so he's just kind
Speaker 2: of trying things out, and you know what Matthew said
Speaker 2: was eventually, like he settled down. Dylan would probably chuckle
Speaker 2: about it today if you asked him about it, but eventually,
Speaker 2: you know, he kind of lived a normal life once
Speaker 2: his feet hit the ground.
Speaker 1: So if we get into the main point of the
Speaker 1: story here, so we see that Zach is establishing this
Speaker 1: business Omega Stratton when he's eighteen. Is there any and
Speaker 1: I don't think you've said this, but do we see
Speaker 1: any illegal activity in high school before he graduates?
Speaker 2: I think there probably was some. I mean, I you know,
Speaker 2: in my reporting obviously all after Zach died, I was
Speaker 2: able to establish it. You know, he was dealing drugs
Speaker 2: in a I think a pretty low level way, but
Speaker 2: he was dealing some prescription drugs things like that. He was.
Speaker 2: It's funny because he was always very health conscious and
Speaker 2: he wouldn't drink alcohol for a long time, wouldn't spook
Speaker 2: cigarettes or marijuana or anything. But even just little things
Speaker 2: like he was. He would he would get some older
Speaker 2: friend to buy him a carton of cigarettes and then
Speaker 2: he would sell Lucy's to to kids in the school,
Speaker 2: presumably at a markup per cigarette. So he had little
Speaker 2: hustles like that. But there was nothing that seemed like
Speaker 2: kind of big time illegality.
Speaker 1: Now, okay, so where does it start? Where he is
Speaker 1: starting to meet people who you know, are are really
Speaker 1: above his league, and all of a sudden we go
Speaker 1: from high school teenager to an adult who maybe can't
Speaker 1: handle some of the things he's getting into. Where does
Speaker 1: that start.
Speaker 2: Well, so there's a few things that happened. He one
Speaker 2: night ends up somehow talking his way into this party.
Speaker 2: It's a it's a it's a kind. It's a place
Speaker 2: called the Chelsea Arts Club, and they're having a benefit
Speaker 2: and there's a lot of art on the wall and
Speaker 2: people are buying the art and people are kind of
Speaker 2: mingling with drinks, and somehow, to this day I don't know,
Speaker 2: Zach talks his way into that thing. He somehow gets in,
Speaker 2: gets on the list, and he ends up chatting with
Speaker 2: this guy. And I should say, just by way of background,
Speaker 2: Zach was really obsessed with a guy named Romana Bramovic.
Speaker 2: And Romano Bromvic is the was the owner. He's a
Speaker 2: Russian oligarch, someone who had had a He now claims
Speaker 2: that he's not close with Putin, but somebody who the
Speaker 2: perception has always been, you know, had a relatively close
Speaker 2: relationship with Putin, and he had bought the Chelsea Football Club,
Speaker 2: one of the biggest, most storied soccer teams in the UK,
Speaker 2: and put a ton of money into it, and so
Speaker 2: he was kind of a famous oligarch, just like a
Speaker 2: famously wealthy guy, you know, always being photographed in Saint
Speaker 2: Bart's on a huge yacht and you know, bought the
Speaker 2: biggest mansion here and the biggest mansion there, and a
Speaker 2: massive art collection and he just spent one hundred million
Speaker 2: dollars on a painting. He's that kind of guy. I
Speaker 2: don't think Zach ever met Romano Brovich, but he was
Speaker 2: very taken with him. He was like a superhero to Zach.
Speaker 2: So he shows up at this thing at the Chelsea
Speaker 2: Arts Club, and you know, we've all had this experience
Speaker 2: where you show up at something and you're there and
Speaker 2: kind of trying to mingle, but you don't really know anyone.
Speaker 2: You didn't come with anyone, and you end up sort
Speaker 2: of meeting eyes with somebody else who's there by themselves.
Speaker 2: You know, you're both in the same kind of awkward predicament.
Speaker 2: And he ends up meeting this guy named Mark Foley
Speaker 2: and they're introduced, and Mark Foley says that he works
Speaker 2: for Chelsea Football Club. So this random guy is there
Speaker 2: and he says, hey, I basically work for Romano Broovich.
Speaker 2: I work for the guy that is your idol. And
Speaker 2: at that point Zach says, oh, well, you know, I
Speaker 2: come from a Russian family. My father's a wealthy Russian
Speaker 2: guy here in London and I sort of help him
Speaker 2: out with business and what have you. And I think
Speaker 2: that Mark Foley was patient zero. I think Mark Foley
Speaker 2: is the first person's act told this lie to and
Speaker 2: the crazy thing is it works. Mark fully believes him
Speaker 2: and says, well, listen, we should get together. You know,
Speaker 2: if you want to make investments, we should talk. And
Speaker 2: so that's the sort of first run on the ladder,
Speaker 2: and then through Mark Foley, he ends up meeting a
Speaker 2: guy who's one of the major characters in the book,
Speaker 2: this guy ak Barshamji, who's a kind of slippery, dashing
Speaker 2: London businessman, and ak Barshamji introduces him to a friend
Speaker 2: of his who's a guy named Vernda Sharma but who's
Speaker 2: better known in London by the nickname Indian Dave. And
Speaker 2: Verrender Sharma was a gangster, a very very violent gangster.
Speaker 2: And so Zach pretty quickly after meeting Mark Foley, ends
Speaker 2: up in the orbit of these two guys who are
Speaker 2: quite different ak Barshamji an Indian Dave, but they are
Speaker 2: both pretty dodgy in their own ways.
Speaker 1: So what are the ages of all of these folks,
Speaker 1: Because he's what eighteen nineteen when this is happening. How
Speaker 1: how far back for his death does this start to
Speaker 1: happen for him?
Speaker 2: So this, all of this happens basically in his eighteenth
Speaker 2: and nineteenth years, So he's eighteen years old when he
Speaker 2: meets these guys. They are older, they are in their
Speaker 2: you know, Akbar at that point is probably in his
Speaker 2: mid forties and Indian Dave is probably in his fifties.
Speaker 2: And it's the sort of strange feature of this story
Speaker 2: that they meet this kid and they start hanging out
Speaker 2: with him. But part of what's so wild about this
Speaker 2: tale is that in a way that Zach didn't know
Speaker 2: and actually his parents after he dies, like it takes
Speaker 2: them the longest time to figure this out, they didn't
Speaker 2: know this either. Both Akharshamji and Indian Dave were in
Speaker 2: trouble at this point, so Akhbarshamji had been having all
Speaker 2: kinds of business problems and actually had just declared bankruptcy.
Speaker 2: He was still carrying on like a very wealthy guy.
Speaker 2: He lived in an apartment that costs ten million pounds
Speaker 2: and the nicest neighborhood and you know, had an office
Speaker 2: a fancy block and drove around in his Mercedes and
Speaker 2: he acted like he didn't have a care in the world,
Speaker 2: but behind the scenes, he had actually just declared bankruptcy.
Speaker 2: And Indian Day of the Gangster was facing a dilemma
Speaker 2: that a lot of gangsters do. I'm mean, I've written
Speaker 2: about a lot of gangsters over the years, and you know,
Speaker 2: there's no there's like no pension plan for these guys, right.
Speaker 2: So he was a really violent extortionist who had done
Speaker 2: some pretty awful things in his day, but he was
Speaker 2: getting old and you know, his daughter had just had
Speaker 2: a baby, and he was sort of wondering how am
Speaker 2: I gonna how am I gonna make it in retirement.
Speaker 2: So you have this kind of interesting turn of events
Speaker 2: where you get these two guys, both of whom are
Speaker 2: a little worried about their finances, and then onto the
Speaker 2: stage walks this eighteen year old kid who says, hey,
Speaker 2: my name is Zach. My father is a Russian oligarch
Speaker 2: worth billions of dollars, and he's entrusted me to make
Speaker 2: investments for the family, and he seems to want to
Speaker 2: hang out, and you get into this kind of weird
Speaker 2: thing where each of these guys had something that the
Speaker 2: other wanted.
Speaker 1: How would one find out if this kid was in
Speaker 1: fact the son of a Russian oligarch. I mean, is
Speaker 1: there not people they get asked to verify totally?
Speaker 2: This was my first question. Akbar Shamji to this day
Speaker 2: has never spoken with me on the phone. He refused
Speaker 2: to meet with me, but he did agree to email
Speaker 2: with me, and so we emailed quite a lot when
Speaker 2: I was working on this. And one of my first
Speaker 2: questions to him was, I remember they weren't just meeting socially,
Speaker 2: like they were talking about doing business together when it
Speaker 2: first When it first starts, Akbar has this residential complex
Speaker 2: that he's looking to build in Lisbon and he's looking
Speaker 2: for investors. So when he first meet Zach, the idea
Speaker 2: is that zak Ishmilov might invest his family's money in
Speaker 2: this project. And I said to Akmar you know, I'm
Speaker 2: just a writer, Like, I'm no savvy businessiness man. But
Speaker 2: if I met someone who was a potential investor and
Speaker 2: they said, oh, my dad's an oligarch worth billions of dollars,
Speaker 2: I would google them like I would google the name
Speaker 2: Zaki Smilov. Yeah, that much due diligence, I think I'd
Speaker 2: be capable of. And interestingly, there is an oligarch whose
Speaker 2: last name is this my love. But I don't know
Speaker 2: that zach was necessarily claiming that it was him, that
Speaker 2: that was the dad specifically. But then what Achbar said
Speaker 2: was he's it was really interesting. He said, you know
Speaker 2: when you move around London and there's all these people,
Speaker 2: some of them from the formeran Soviet Union, who have
Speaker 2: a ton of money, and the really wealthy people have
Speaker 2: a very low profile on the internet. Okay, he basically said,
Speaker 2: you know, like you civilians, you normal people, you just
Speaker 2: assume you can google someone. But the real badge of
Speaker 2: class is if you google someone and they don't come up.
Speaker 2: And so this is what he is. What he said,
Speaker 2: you know, do I buy it? I don't know. It
Speaker 2: always seemed to me a little insane that he was
Speaker 2: so easily tricked by Zach. But you know in walk
Speaker 2: Zach and he basically he's almost like there's almost a
Speaker 2: kind of talented mister Ripley thing right, Like he just
Speaker 2: sort of Zach was very cunning, he could be charming.
Speaker 2: He's very kind of quick witted, and he's just able
Speaker 2: to dupe these people who seem like quite trusting in retrospect.
Speaker 1: You know, you said mister Ripley, which I think is
Speaker 1: interesting because I was just wondering, how do you get
Speaker 1: Zach's voice? I mean, you have his parents, you have observations,
Speaker 1: and you've got these people, But are their emails, are
Speaker 1: their text messages? How are you able to kind of
Speaker 1: humanize him a little bit? What do you have access
Speaker 1: to those like in Zach's mind, what's happening?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's such a good question. I So, you know,
Speaker 2: I think of myself as writing in the tradition of
Speaker 2: narrative nonfiction. So ideally, when I'm writing a story for
Speaker 2: The New Yorker or I'm writing a book, I want
Speaker 2: it to feel to you as you're reading, like you're
Speaker 2: reading a novel. I need characters who feel kind of
Speaker 2: rich and robust and surprising. I need you to be
Speaker 2: able to kind of hear the voices of people. I
Speaker 2: basically won't write a story if I feel as though
Speaker 2: there aren't going to be those emotional access points. The
Speaker 2: challenge is that, unlike a novelist, I'm not able to
Speaker 2: make anything up or speculate or sort of do too
Speaker 2: much of kind of he would have thought, X, Y
Speaker 2: and Z. You know, you really have to be pretty
Speaker 2: disciplined about it. And so what that means is, I
Speaker 2: am always looking for, first of all, people who knew
Speaker 2: if somebody is dead and therefore not available to me,
Speaker 2: or if they're alive and they won't talk to me.
Speaker 2: I mean, sometimes I'm writing about people who don't want
Speaker 2: me to be writing about them. I am trying to
Speaker 2: find people who knew them well and can recount conversations.
Speaker 2: I'm trying to find artifacts. And so in Zach's case,
Speaker 2: what that means is emails, text messages, video that people took.
Speaker 2: And then you know, there's even situations in which say,
Speaker 2: there's somebody who wouldn't talk to me. But when the
Speaker 2: police started investigating, the police did their own interrogations, and
Speaker 2: I ended up getting transcripts of the police's interrogations, and
Speaker 2: so the person says, oh, well, on such and such
Speaker 2: a day, Zach said this to me, and so it's
Speaker 2: kind of putting together a collage of all that kind
Speaker 2: of material, and it's hugely important to me. I mean, listen,
Speaker 2: I should say, like, Zach's a pretty enigmatic guy, and
Speaker 2: I don't know that I'm ever going to truly figure
Speaker 2: him out. I don't think his parents are ever going
Speaker 2: to truly figure him out. There's always going to be
Speaker 2: some degree of mystery with this person. But in terms
Speaker 2: of getting a sense of how did he carry himself
Speaker 2: when he walked into a room, how did he talk,
Speaker 2: how did he look at you? I just interviewed a
Speaker 2: ton of his friends and family members and people who
Speaker 2: dealt with them over the years, and then it was
Speaker 2: really helpful also to get some of his texts.
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, well, and that's what I met by voice.
Speaker 1: I mean, I always took about the role of the journalists,
Speaker 1: especially when you're writing creative nonfiction. You know, a narrative
Speaker 1: nonfiction like you are and like I do. Is you know,
Speaker 1: You've got Zach's parents, their lens, what they're looking through,
Speaker 1: You've got all of the friends you've been talking to
Speaker 1: act about this stuff too, And you know, our job
Speaker 1: is to pull all of those little tiny pieces together
Speaker 1: to create this this profile of somebody that none of
Speaker 1: these people have. Nobody's pulled thatts together in the way
Speaker 1: you have. And then you've got this objectivity, you know,
Speaker 1: as a journalist who doesn't really have any you know,
Speaker 1: skin in the game with this, and your whole job
Speaker 1: is to try to get to him so that you're
Speaker 1: humanizing him, so that we care about what happens to
Speaker 1: this nineteen year old. So yeah, I think that. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's a very difficult job. But I think usually when
Speaker 1: people know that person and I think it's the end
Speaker 1: of a book, like with your book, you can kind
Speaker 1: of walk away and say, Okay, I see all the
Speaker 1: I see the little pieces in the quilt of this
Speaker 1: guy's life, and so I think that's great that you
Speaker 1: did all that due diligence.
Speaker 2: It's interesting. Listen. It is a ton of work. But
Speaker 2: I also think that it's important for me. You know,
Speaker 2: there's an analogy. This is not my original analogy. Some
Speaker 2: other writer use this, but somebody once compared it to
Speaker 2: a duck. A duck floating along the water, and if
Speaker 2: you look at the duck. Above the water, they're serene.
Speaker 2: It's just like glass. They're sort of smoothly floating along.
Speaker 2: What you don't see is that underneath the water they're
Speaker 2: furiously paddling like that. Yeah, and I sort of think
Speaker 2: of I think of a book like that where I
Speaker 2: want the reading experience to be perfectly fluid, but it
Speaker 2: does take an enormous amount of work and kind of
Speaker 2: frantic activity to get all that stuff. And for me,
Speaker 2: the greatest compliment is when some of Zach's family members
Speaker 2: have now read the book and when they feel as
Speaker 2: though it captured him. That means a lot to me.
Speaker 2: And sometimes somebody will read something I've written and say,
Speaker 2: as a good friend of mine who read the manuscript
Speaker 2: pretty early on, at one point he said something like, oh,
Speaker 2: Acbar wouldn't do that. I think Achbar would do this,
Speaker 2: And I just sort of felt as though, yes, okay,
Speaker 2: job done. I want you to have enough of a
Speaker 2: sense of who this guy is that I could describe
Speaker 2: some random situation to you and you could tell me
Speaker 2: how Akbar would.
Speaker 1: Respond, especially because you are essentially writing a non fiction mystery.
Speaker 1: I mean, that's what you're trying to do, is by
Speaker 1: the end, you have an opinion, and you know, I
Speaker 1: want to get closer to now to the to the incident.
Speaker 1: You have an opinion, but you know you also want
Speaker 1: the reader to have an opinion too, And those are
Speaker 1: the best kinds of books where it's sort of ambiguous
Speaker 1: and you say, okay, well what do you think after
Speaker 1: I have unspoiled everything I know about this guy? So okay,
Speaker 1: well this is you know, we're I think we were
Speaker 1: pretty well established now, I mean where we left things
Speaker 1: off were was that Zach was saying, I've got all
Speaker 1: this money and I'm ready to invent my dad's money.
Speaker 1: And he just said, go for it, whatever you want
Speaker 1: to do. And then you've got Akmar, who you know,
Speaker 1: says I've got tell me again, is it business complex
Speaker 1: or condos or what does he have?
Speaker 2: You know, initially there was this Lisbon project, which were
Speaker 2: these these residential towers that he wanted to build, and
Speaker 2: then what happened was basically they that was Zach. Zach
Speaker 2: said I'm gonna take over my family. But then Zach
Speaker 2: doesn't come through the money and at a certain point
Speaker 2: Zach says, oh, my father died suddenly, and now I'm
Speaker 2: fighting with my mother who lives in Dubai, and you know,
Speaker 2: there's a kind of a dispute over the estate with
Speaker 2: my siblings and so forth. So it gets really crazy.
Speaker 2: At a certain point, Zach says, I'm homeless. He tells
Speaker 2: Akbar like, I don't have any place to stay, and
Speaker 2: I've been kicked out of my family's you know, huge
Speaker 2: property at one Eyed Park in the fancy building. And
Speaker 2: at this point Akbar says, you know, I know this
Speaker 2: guy named Verrinder Sharma who's a good friend of mine.
Speaker 2: He doesn't, I don't think. He tells Zach right away
Speaker 2: that Sharma is a gangster and he has a big
Speaker 2: apartment in this luxury building called River Walk, which is
Speaker 2: overlooking the Thames River. It's kind of luxury high rise
Speaker 2: and he's just there on his own. Maybe you could
Speaker 2: stay with him. So Akbar introduces Zach to this guy
Speaker 2: who is known as Indian Dave. People call him Dave.
Speaker 2: You know, his actual legal name is Rinder Sharma. And
Speaker 2: Zach goes and stays with him. And Zach is telling
Speaker 2: all kinds of different people, different stories. So he tells
Speaker 2: Akbar and Verrinder, I'm the son of Russian oligarch. My
Speaker 2: father has just died. My mother lives in Dubai. There's
Speaker 2: a fight over the estate. She's kicked me out of
Speaker 2: my luxury of property in London. I have no place
Speaker 2: to stay, and so I'm just temporarily going to stay
Speaker 2: with you. He tells his parents. I I met this guy.
Speaker 2: He says, he's a rubber tycoon, and he has three
Speaker 2: apartments in this building and he's one of them is vacant,
Speaker 2: and he's letting me stay in it. Now, it wasn't
Speaker 2: three apartments, so it was one apartment, was a three bedroom.
Speaker 2: And for a few months, Zach goes and stays in
Speaker 2: this guy's apartment and becomes kind of closer and closer
Speaker 2: with this guy Sharma, who you know, is someone who
Speaker 2: I go through his whole criminal history in the book,
Speaker 2: but it had a long history as a gangster, as
Speaker 2: an extortionist, was involved in the contract killings. He was
Speaker 2: a real leg breaker, a dangerous, dangerous guy. And he
Speaker 2: and Zach developed this friendship and it all culminates on
Speaker 2: this one night in November twenty nineteen when Akbar and
Speaker 2: Sharma and Zach are in that apartment and at about
Speaker 2: two in the morning, Zach responds to an email from
Speaker 2: his mom. His mam At emailed them saying, hey, where
Speaker 2: are you? What's going on? Are you okay? And he
Speaker 2: writes back all good x And twenty minutes later he
Speaker 2: walks out on the balcony and he goes off the
Speaker 2: balcony into the Thames. And his parents actually initially didn't
Speaker 2: know who's dead because he wasn't carrying any ID and
Speaker 2: so when his body was found he was a John Doe.
Speaker 2: Very weird thing. But in London, it's this vast city,
Speaker 2: you know, and you have the Scotland Yard is huge,
Speaker 2: but you have basically a missing person's investigation in one
Speaker 2: part of the city and a John Doe in the
Speaker 2: other part of the city, and it takes days for
Speaker 2: them to realize that they're actually the same person. And
Speaker 2: this very weird thing happens, which is the morning after
Speaker 2: Zach dies. Rochelle doesn't know that he's dead. She's alone
Speaker 2: in the family apartment and there's a knock on the door.
Speaker 2: There's a guy there and he says, is Zach here?
Speaker 2: And she says no. She says who are you? And
Speaker 2: he says, well, who are you? And she says I'm
Speaker 2: Zach's mom, and the guy says, you can't be his mom.
Speaker 2: His mom's in Dubai, and she's totally confused. This means
Speaker 2: nothing to her. She doesn't know what could be going on,
Speaker 2: and the guy drives off, and it's only days later
Speaker 2: that she learns that Zach had this whole hidden story.
Speaker 1: I think I want context on where he stood with
Speaker 1: these two guys, Acbar and then Dave. Did he promise
Speaker 1: money or was he owing money? Were they, you know,
Speaker 1: supplementing his lifestyle of clothes or what would be the
Speaker 1: motive besides drunken something argument, what would be the thing
Speaker 1: that would really make them upset?
Speaker 2: Well, I think what happened was that Zach I should
Speaker 2: say he was nineteen, he was eighteen when he met
Speaker 2: these guys. Yeah, long term thinking is not always the
Speaker 2: strong suit at that age. You know, your brain hasn't
Speaker 2: actually developed all that. It's funny. On a different story
Speaker 2: that I wrote years ago, I remember there was a
Speaker 2: guy I quoted. It was a medical It was a
Speaker 2: doctor who was a witness in a criminal trial, and
Speaker 2: he described teenage, teenage brains and he said, you know,
Speaker 2: a teenage brain, you know, he said it's like a
Speaker 2: car with a powerful engine and no breaks. And I
Speaker 2: think that's a little bit what was going on. I
Speaker 2: don't know that Zach had like a long term plan
Speaker 2: that he thought out. I think he was going from
Speaker 2: one little hustle to another. He came into this saying,
Speaker 2: I'm really rich. I come from a wealthy family. I'm
Speaker 2: going to inherit hundreds of millions of dollars and I
Speaker 2: might be able to invest, we could do business together,
Speaker 2: so on and so forth. And I think what he
Speaker 2: was thinking was, these guys are glamorous, they're a little
Speaker 2: bit dangerous, they're exciting, they're living the kind of life
Speaker 2: I want to be living. I'm going to tell a
Speaker 2: few lies in order to see what I can do
Speaker 2: to kind of get him with them, just to get
Speaker 2: in the door, and I'll figure it out. I'll figure
Speaker 2: it out, you know, it'll kind of work itself out.
Speaker 2: So that's what he does. And he's a teenager, so
Speaker 2: he doesn't have a lot of money, and they do
Speaker 2: they do things like they pick up ubers here and there.
Speaker 2: You know, they'll pick up a meal here and there.
Speaker 2: It's nothing. They're not giving him a ton of money,
Speaker 2: but he gets a place to stay in this luxury
Speaker 2: apartment overlooking the Thames, and initially there's always some story,
Speaker 2: some excuse, some reason why he's not coming through with
Speaker 2: the money. And I think that what ends up happening
Speaker 2: that night when he ends up in the apartment with
Speaker 2: those guys, something has come to a head. And I
Speaker 2: think what it is is that they are beginning to
Speaker 2: figure out that he's not who he claimed that he was,
Speaker 2: and that he doesn't have billions of dollars lined up,
Speaker 2: that that money is not going to materialize. I have
Speaker 2: all these texts, and there's a text where Akbar says,
Speaker 2: you know, I keep telling Dave that there may not
Speaker 2: be a pot of gold at the end of this rainbow.
Speaker 2: And I think that that was part of what Dave
Speaker 2: was figuring out. And so you can imagine how incredibly
Speaker 2: dangerous this is for Zach is that he's with this
Speaker 2: really murderous, terrifying guy who's just realizing in real time
Speaker 2: that he's been duped by a kid, and that he
Speaker 2: actually took the kid into his home. Yeah, and that
Speaker 2: he's been totally tricked, and that the money he was
Speaker 2: counting on to see him through his retirement is not
Speaker 2: coming and that he's been had.
Speaker 1: Of these two men, I'm assuming you think that Akbar
Speaker 1: is the more rational. He's a businessman, you know, this
Speaker 1: is he would be vastly disappointed in Zach, but you
Speaker 1: would get a very different reaction from Dave. I'm assuming
Speaker 1: because he's just sort of this you know, he is
Speaker 1: a gangster and smart, but at the same time irrational.
Speaker 2: Also, yeah, I mean I think Acbar, you know, I
Speaker 2: would argue it's pretty irrational of Acbar to have introduced
Speaker 2: this kid, eighteen at the time, to this to like
Speaker 2: his most dangerous friend. No, I don't know that Achbar
Speaker 2: would win any awards in the in the rationality department,
Speaker 2: But I don't think that Achbar was violent, was like
Speaker 2: impulsively violent in the same way that Dave was. And
Speaker 2: there are you know, just to sort of give you
Speaker 2: a sense, because these are you know, this kind of
Speaker 2: background is important. But like there's a story in the
Speaker 2: book about Indian Dave and another gangster who actually did
Speaker 2: spend a lot of time talking with castrating a man
Speaker 2: like that's the kind of person we're talking about here.
Speaker 2: There's a story in the book about a guy that
Speaker 2: they were extorting and they Indian. Dave, you know, pushed
Speaker 2: a knife into the guy's neck. But then after doing
Speaker 2: that kind of opening up this wound in the neck,
Speaker 2: he took two fingers and like jammed them into the wound.
Speaker 2: He you know, he was a sadistic guy. So I
Speaker 2: think Akbar was incredibly responsible, and I mean it ends
Speaker 2: up being kind of funny, but when you look at
Speaker 2: his business history, like not actually a great businessman, it
Speaker 2: turns out, but not violent the way that Dave was.
Speaker 2: Dave was a really dangerous guy.
Speaker 1: Tell me about that surveillance footage that I know is
Speaker 1: picked up by m I six and what it shows
Speaker 1: and then sort of if there is an investigation at all,
Speaker 1: does it show is there any possibility according to this
Speaker 1: footage that he was pushed or tossed over or does
Speaker 1: it clearly show intention on Zach's part.
Speaker 2: So, London is a city with a ton of CCTV.
Speaker 2: It was one of the earliest adopters on CCTV, and
Speaker 2: that for me, it was kind of a gift because
Speaker 2: there's a big part of the book with sort of
Speaker 2: forensically looking at what happened that evening and there's some
Speaker 2: crazy stuff with who comes to the apartment, When do
Speaker 2: they leave, what do they do? And after Zach went
Speaker 2: off the balcony, they discovered that the building is directly
Speaker 2: opposite six, which is the spy headquarters of British Intelligence.
Speaker 2: And you know, a building that would be familiar to
Speaker 2: people who've watched the Jams Pond movies because it's the
Speaker 2: headquarters of I six and six had a camera facing
Speaker 2: riverwalks building and what they saw on the camera was
Speaker 2: the building was mostly dark, but the apartment was lit up,
Speaker 2: and it's the footage is from far across the river,
Speaker 2: but it's a little grainy, but basically Zach walks out
Speaker 2: onto the balcony. It's cold and very late at night.
Speaker 2: He walks out of the balcony. He walks to sort
Speaker 2: of one edge of the balcony and he kind of
Speaker 2: looks over the edge, and then he crosses to the
Speaker 2: other and looks over and then he comes crosses back
Speaker 2: to the center and he climbs up and he jumps,
Speaker 2: so he's not pushed. There's nobody else on the balcony
Speaker 2: with him, and you might have an inference then where
Speaker 2: you say, okay, well this is a suicide. So that's
Speaker 2: straightforward except that if you keep watching the footage, what
Speaker 2: you see is that the lights stay on and then
Speaker 2: there's some movement and somebody's moving around in the apartment
Speaker 2: after he's gone off, and then eventually the lights go out.
Speaker 2: So we know that Indian Dave was in the apartment
Speaker 2: when he dies. We know he's in the apartment afterwards,
Speaker 2: we know he does not call the police. Zach goes out,
Speaker 2: goes off the balcony, and actually I get into all
Speaker 2: this detail in the book. But Akbar comes back and
Speaker 2: comes back up to the apartment after he's gone off
Speaker 2: the balcony, and the two of them are in there,
Speaker 2: and then Akbar leaves and Indian Dave turns out the
Speaker 2: light and the risk of spoiling a little moment in
Speaker 2: the book, there's this incredible turn of events where I
Speaker 2: mentioned that London has all this CCTV. So what Acbar,
Speaker 2: in his police interrogation tells the cops is I basically
Speaker 2: said good night to those guys and then I drove home.
Speaker 2: What he doesn't mention is that he actually at a
Speaker 2: certain point drives back after Zax goon off and then
Speaker 2: they have the CCTV, and the CCTV shows him going
Speaker 2: up to the apartment. This is after zaxscon off. He's
Speaker 2: up there for like twenty minutes. Then he comes back down.
Speaker 2: He walks aroun round to the other side of the building.
Speaker 2: He goes over to the river front and he looks
Speaker 2: into the water at exactly the point where Zach has
Speaker 2: just gone into it. Then he turns around and goes
Speaker 2: to his car and drives away.
Speaker 1: Was there any chance of survival? How far up were
Speaker 1: we talking this?
Speaker 2: Five stories? And yes, I mean I think that there's
Speaker 2: a universe in which he could have survived had he
Speaker 2: made it clean into the water. But it was a
Speaker 2: long jump in order to get to the water. And
Speaker 2: what happened is that on the way down his hip
Speaker 2: clipped the wall, and so he died in the water. Listen,
Speaker 2: the water was cold. I mean, there's you know, there's
Speaker 2: all kinds of reasons why he might not have survived,
Speaker 2: but I think that the kind of most obvious cause
Speaker 2: of death was the fact that rather than make it
Speaker 2: clean into the water, he just clipped the water. He
Speaker 2: just clipped the wall and broke his hip.
Speaker 1: You know, I'm trying to get over the irony that
Speaker 1: you've got this awful gangster Indian day of living in
Speaker 1: this building and right across the street from m I six.
Speaker 1: And had he ever been surveiled under any circumstances for anything.
Speaker 2: I mean, he'd certainly been surveiled because of criminal stuff
Speaker 2: that he'd been involved in over the years. It's so
Speaker 2: funny that you should mention this. I thought about this
Speaker 2: a lot. You know, I've written about intelligence agencies before.
Speaker 2: My whole first book was about spying. And when you
Speaker 2: look at this building Riverwalk, it looks directly at six.
Speaker 2: And I talked to a few people on the fringes
Speaker 2: of the intelligence community, and they said, m I six
Speaker 2: is going to have a pretty good sense of what's
Speaker 2: going on in that building at any given moment in time,
Speaker 2: because if you think about it, you know, you could
Speaker 2: have the Chinese, or the Iranians or whoever the Israelis,
Speaker 2: you know, like any the Russians could set up shop
Speaker 2: in an apartment and basically surveil AM I six. And
Speaker 2: so presumably am I six is looking back into the building,
Speaker 2: but they were, you know, all we know is that footage,
Speaker 2: like we haven't. There's nothing has come out in terms
Speaker 2: of them knowing more about what might have gone on.
Speaker 2: The really crazy thing is that a year after Zach died,
Speaker 2: his parents got a call from the police saying, Indian
Speaker 2: Dave just died in the same apartment.
Speaker 1: Yeah, if we go back, what triggers an investigation here?
Speaker 1: I mean, this is a suicide. It happens, you know,
Speaker 1: this is a way that people do it. I assume
Speaker 1: this wouldn't have been considered unusual. Is it who was
Speaker 1: in the apartment at the time, or do his parents,
Speaker 1: you know, insist on an investigation or would that be normal?
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean I certainly when the when the parents
Speaker 2: initially meet with the police, the police are not making
Speaker 2: any judgments one way or another about how it is
Speaker 2: that Zach died, and the fact that he's in the
Speaker 2: apartment with these two guys that acbar. When he gets
Speaker 2: brought in to be interrogated by the police, he just
Speaker 2: lies a lot. He lies, you know, in a way
Speaker 2: that would seem not particularly cautious, but when you're talking
Speaker 2: with the police, like he lies in ways that they're
Speaker 2: going to be able to figure out. He tells them all,
Speaker 2: I got my car and I drove straight home, and
Speaker 2: then they get the CCTV in it's obvious that he didn't.
Speaker 2: He's not acting like someone who is totally innocent and Indian.
Speaker 2: Dave basically just says no comment, no comment, no comment,
Speaker 2: no comment. He won't answer any questions at all, and
Speaker 2: I think that arouses the suspicions of the police and
Speaker 2: Matthew Michelle. The parents were pushing for a kind of
Speaker 2: aggressive investigation and that was sort of what they were
Speaker 2: promised in the weeks after Zach's death. But then this
Speaker 2: kind of weird thing happens, which is that after promising
Speaker 2: them in the world, Scotland Yard kind of flubs the investigation.
Speaker 2: They just don't There's a lot of work that they
Speaker 2: don't do, really obvious calls that they don't make people,
Speaker 2: they don't track down questions, they don't ask. I think
Speaker 2: there's probably different explanations for that. I think the fact
Speaker 2: of COVID didn't help. Right that this is all happening
Speaker 2: in the end of twenty nineteen, so a few months
Speaker 2: later the pandemic sets in. Some of it is that
Speaker 2: there's been cutbacks at the Metropolitan Police, like Scotland Yard
Speaker 2: still has his reputation is a great police force, but
Speaker 2: in fact it's kind of a shadow of its former
Speaker 2: self at this point. But I think there's a kind
Speaker 2: of more interesting thing going on, which is that I
Speaker 2: think that cops think about things in categories, and it's
Speaker 2: all about clearing cases.
Speaker 1: You know.
Speaker 2: Somebody said to me, our job is not to be
Speaker 2: Sherlock Holmes. It's not to solve mysteries. Our job is
Speaker 2: to investigate crimes that can be charged in a court
Speaker 2: of law, you know. And in this case, what happened
Speaker 2: was it looks like a suicide, but maybe it wasn't
Speaker 2: a suicide. It looks like a murder. But then they
Speaker 2: have this tape showing that Zach was alone on the balcony,
Speaker 2: so it maybe is this third thing that's kind of
Speaker 2: more exotic, right where he's jumping off of his own volition,
Speaker 2: but he sort of has to jump off.
Speaker 1: Yeah, And which is a very Sherlock Holmes thing. Pick
Speaker 1: your poison, which one do you want?
Speaker 2: Absolutely, and the kind of thing that you know, a
Speaker 2: Sherlock Holmes would be all over. But if you're the
Speaker 2: kind of beleaguered police of Scotland Yard in the year
Speaker 2: twenty twenty, right, it all just seems like a little
Speaker 2: too much. And then there's a whole other dimension of this,
Speaker 2: which we haven't talked about, but is in the backdrop
Speaker 2: of my book, which is that this seemed like it
Speaker 2: was connected to the Russians. And there have been something
Speaker 2: like two dozen cases over the last twenty years in
Speaker 2: which people have died in or around London and mysterious
Speaker 2: circumstances who are connected in some way or the other
Speaker 2: to the Russians or have acrossed the Russians, you know,
Speaker 2: people falling out of windows and off of roofs and
Speaker 2: in front of subway cars. And I think that there
Speaker 2: was something happening in this case. Where do you find
Speaker 2: out he'd been pretending he was the son of a
Speaker 2: Russian oligarch. And for some of the cops there was
Speaker 2: a sense of Okay, well, we're not going to look
Speaker 2: too this all just seems a little above my pay grade.
Speaker 2: Whatever's going on here?
Speaker 1: Well, and also I was just thinking, I know that
Speaker 1: they didn't ask the questions they should have asked and
Speaker 1: investigated everything. But just like on the first blush, how
Speaker 1: would you prove it even if there were conversations, unless
Speaker 1: it was recorded, how could you prove that both of
Speaker 1: these guys or somebody threatened him. You know, I just
Speaker 1: don't even know how that would under great circumstances with
Speaker 1: the Sherlock Holmes, how would that be proved?
Speaker 2: Well, I mean I think so. I think part of
Speaker 2: the challenge that they had is that and this seems
Speaker 2: kind of insane to me, but you know, having written
Speaker 2: about many, many, many criminal cases over the last twenty years,
Speaker 2: it is very often the case, certainly with the FBI,
Speaker 2: that when the FBI is building a case, the first
Speaker 2: thing that'll do is they're going to have you come
Speaker 2: in and they want to interview you, and they tell
Speaker 2: you that you got to tell the truth. But what
Speaker 2: they're really hoping is that you lie to them, because
Speaker 2: then they have you online to the FBI, and once
Speaker 2: they've got that bit of leverage on you, then you're
Speaker 2: kind of theirs, you know, then they can make you
Speaker 2: play ball. And in the UK, under British law, it
Speaker 2: is not a crime by itself to lie to the cops.
Speaker 2: And so part of the challenge is that Achbar came
Speaker 2: in and he just lied and lied and lied, and
Speaker 2: they knew it, and they said, you know, we're having
Speaker 2: a little trouble squaring all the stuff you're telling us
Speaker 2: with the stuff that we know. They had these very
Speaker 2: polite ways of telling him that they knew he was lying,
Speaker 2: but they couldn't then turn around and say, and we're
Speaker 2: going to send you to prison for lying to us
Speaker 2: unless you tell us what really happened that night. And
Speaker 2: so Achbar just never cooperated. And at a certain point,
Speaker 2: Indian Dave is sort of out of the picture, and
Speaker 2: so I think that was other challenge for them.
Speaker 1: So this book is centered on the mystery of the
Speaker 1: death of this nineteen year old and how he's entangled
Speaker 1: with these two really bad people and you know, habitual
Speaker 1: lying and all of that. I'm wondering what the parents
Speaker 1: who first drew you to this this is you wanted
Speaker 1: the emotional part of it. What they wanted out of
Speaker 1: the book? Did they want you to come to a
Speaker 1: conclusion yourself. Did they want a new investigation or did
Speaker 1: they want to take control of the narrative and say,
Speaker 1: this is you know who our son really was and
Speaker 1: this is what we went through.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you know, it's interesting they when I met them,
Speaker 2: they had not spoken publicly about this at all. There
Speaker 2: was nothing on the internet when I first heard about this,
Speaker 2: no press articles, nothing, They'd kept it all very quiet,
Speaker 2: and their attitude had been the authorities are doing their job.
Speaker 2: We're going to trust the authorities. And part of the
Speaker 2: story I tell in the book is about how gradually
Speaker 2: they realized, oh my god, the police aren't going to
Speaker 2: really look into this, and there was an inquest process
Speaker 2: and that was also kind of inconclusive, and so part
Speaker 2: of what this story is about actually is these two civilians,
Speaker 2: these parents who are mourning the death of their son,
Speaker 2: having to kind of become detectives themselves. They have to
Speaker 2: do what the authorities wouldn't do, and they go out
Speaker 2: and start interviewing gangsters and you know, looking into some
Speaker 2: of the kind of strange subterranean places where Zach was
Speaker 2: spending his time. And they come out of that with
Speaker 2: a much richer sense of who their son really was
Speaker 2: in life. And when they talked to me, I think
Speaker 2: there were a few things going on. I mean, I
Speaker 2: think some of it was that they had kind of
Speaker 2: come to the end of the road with the authorities,
Speaker 2: and they wanted some greater degree of accountability, and they
Speaker 2: wanted to tell their story. And it's funny, you know,
Speaker 2: I trained as a lawyer before I became a full
Speaker 2: time writer. And I think a lot about what the
Speaker 2: burden of proof is in a legal context and then
Speaker 2: in a reporting context, and the role of justice in
Speaker 2: these different kinds of forums. I wrote a big book
Speaker 2: about the Sackler family, the family that became billionaires through
Speaker 2: the sale of oxy content and helped give rise to
Speaker 2: the opioid crisis, and that was kind of a story
Speaker 2: in which the bad guys get away with it in
Speaker 2: the end. You know, they were this very wealthy family
Speaker 2: who basically are you know, they're very wealthy at the
Speaker 2: beginning of the book and very wealthy at the end,
Speaker 2: and none of them go to jail. But there was
Speaker 2: a sense in which the book itself was a kind
Speaker 2: of small form of accountability because you're telling the story,
Speaker 2: and it's a true story, and it's undeniable. And I
Speaker 2: think that's part of what the Brawlers wanted, was listen,
Speaker 2: we're going to point the fingers here and tell the
Speaker 2: real story in this book. And I've never had a
Speaker 2: relationship with people that I'm writing about quite like the
Speaker 2: relationship I had with them. I spent hundreds of hours
Speaker 2: talking to them. It was very, very intense, and I
Speaker 2: have to say I was quite inspired by them, not
Speaker 2: just by their ability to investigate their son's death in
Speaker 2: this kind of tenacious, defiant way, but also by the
Speaker 2: way in which they weren't paralyzed by his death, and
Speaker 2: they have kind of figured out a way to keep
Speaker 2: living and to live joyously and to honor his memory,
Speaker 2: and in a strange way, I think the whole process
Speaker 2: of working with me on this book has been part
Speaker 2: of that. Well.
Speaker 1: It's interesting. I mean, I know that no one is
Speaker 1: ultimately held responsible for it, and we don't have all
Speaker 1: of the real answers. I know you have a conclusion
Speaker 1: and we'll let everybody read in the book, But to me,
Speaker 1: it also strikes me as a book about from their
Speaker 1: point of view, grieving a lot of grieving which I
Speaker 1: think everyone to a certain extent can relate to, and
Speaker 1: how you grieve and what that process is like, and
Speaker 1: you know, can you come to a conclusion or closure?
Speaker 1: Do you think if there is a sentence that kind
Speaker 1: of summarizes how they feel about you know, all of
Speaker 1: this has happened. Is it simply just like he was
Speaker 1: a kid, You know, he was nineteen, He was a kid.
Speaker 1: He didn't know what he was getting into, and he
Speaker 1: made a mistake, and he paid price, you know, but
Speaker 1: with all intensive purposes, you know, we feel like positive
Speaker 1: about the way that that his life would have gone.
Speaker 2: I don't know, Yeah, I mean I think I think
Speaker 2: that's that's a nice way of putting in. And I
Speaker 2: guess the other thing I would add is that the
Speaker 2: I'm always interested in people's backstories and in their family histories.
Speaker 2: I do this with all my books. I think that
Speaker 2: all of us are a kind of reflection on some
Speaker 2: level of where we've come from and who's come before.
Speaker 2: And so as a storytelling device, I love to introduce
Speaker 2: you to someone and then tell you about their grandparents
Speaker 2: and how they came to this place and so on.
Speaker 2: So I was drawn initially to this story of Zach because,
Speaker 2: you know, he had these two grandfathers who survived the
Speaker 2: Holocaust and their whole families were wiped out, and they
Speaker 2: arrived in the UK as teenagers. And you know, part
Speaker 2: of my story is a story about reinvention. Zach tried
Speaker 2: to reinvent himself as a teenager. He tried to become
Speaker 2: someone else. A lot of us do that as adolescens,
Speaker 2: and I was interested in the idea that he of
Speaker 2: these two grandfathers who would also reinvent in themselves. It's like,
Speaker 2: you come here, you're kind of tabula rasa. You've lost
Speaker 2: everything and you have to decide who am I going
Speaker 2: to be? And for the longest time, I thought that
Speaker 2: was the role that his grandparents played in the story.
Speaker 2: And then there's this one night towards the end of
Speaker 2: my work on the book where I was having dinner
Speaker 2: with Matthew Michelle at a little Italian restaurant and I
Speaker 2: was trying to convey to them just how sort of
Speaker 2: in awe I was that they keep getting out of
Speaker 2: bed in the morning and their life isn't joyless like
Speaker 2: they you know, they have friends and they're close to
Speaker 2: their family, and they were it's little things like they
Speaker 2: you know, like they loved The Grateful Dead and they
Speaker 2: were going to see The Grateful Dead played at the
Speaker 2: Sphere in Las Vegas, and they're excited about that. And
Speaker 2: I was asking them about that, and they started they
Speaker 2: both started talking about their fathers and they said, you know,
Speaker 2: both of our fathers lost everything. You know, experience like
Speaker 2: the greatest horror imaginable. It's like you're a teenage kid
Speaker 2: and your whole family's murdered, and yet both of them
Speaker 2: learned how to kind of lived defiantly and joyously in
Speaker 2: the face of that loss. Rachelle's sister Gabby told me
Speaker 2: she was like, you know, when I looked into my
Speaker 2: father's eyes, I never saw barbed wire. I just saw
Speaker 2: like a really loving father. And to me, that was
Speaker 2: so inspiring the idea, and it was something I really
Speaker 2: didn't see for the first two years I was working
Speaker 2: on the book, even though it was kind of right
Speaker 2: in front of my face. Was that part of what
Speaker 2: gave this couple the incredible emotional resources to deal with
Speaker 2: the death of a son, the most unimaginably awful kind
Speaker 2: of loss, was the fact that they'd grown up in
Speaker 2: these families that have been shaped by these grandfathers who
Speaker 2: both lost like that much and more and learned how
Speaker 2: to kind of keep living. And so there's a you know,
Speaker 2: there's that wonderful biblical quote actually, which which both of
Speaker 2: them loved and I quoted in the book because they
Speaker 2: cited it to me. But that idea of you know,
Speaker 2: I've put before you life and death, choose life, And
Speaker 2: I think that's kind of their that's sort of their motto.
Speaker 2: In a way.
Speaker 1: If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
Speaker 1: audio versions of my books The Sinners, All Bow, The
Speaker 1: Ghost Club, All That Is Wicked, and American Sherlock and
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Speaker 1: This has been an exactly right production. Our senior producer
Speaker 1: is Alexis a Morosi. Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain.
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