Patrick Radden Keefe on London Falling and the Architecture of a Lie

Children are often liars. Whether to fit in, to stand out, or to appease their own imaginations. We extend them grace on account of their innocence. But at what point does that impulse calcify into something compulsive, abnormal, or even dangerous? The question has preoccupied Patrick Radden Keefe since he first encountered the story of Zac Brettler, the 19-year-old Londoner who plummeted to his death from the fifth floor of a high-rise after spending years fabricating an identity as the billionaire son of a Russian oligarch. First published as an explosive piece of reporting in The New Yorker in 2024, the story became the seed of London Falling, a book-length excavation of Brettler’s dizzying architecture of lies.

Working closely with Zac’s parents and friends (but notably without the help of Scotland Yard) Keefe traces how a teenage fantasy of extreme wealth metabolized into a full-blown double life. In the process, Keefe uncovered a London transformed by dark money, reminiscent of the cartel-haunted fog of Mexico he reported on fifteen years ago, as he explained to his friend Issy Wood on the phone last week. In conversation, the two got to talking about the childhood urge for fabrication, the manosphere, and London’s gradual transformation into a glittering playground for oligarchs.

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PATRICK RADDEN KEEFE: Hey.

ISSY WOOD: Hi. This is weird. 

RADDEN KEEFE: I don’t think we’ve ever communicated this way.

WOOD: No, we’re mainly just text and restaurants.

RADDEN KEEFE: And walks.

WOOD: Also walks. I’m still very honored and a bit confused that you wanted me to be the one to do this. 

RADDEN KEEFE: Oh, come on. 

WOOD: I mean, it’s very special for me because we saw a lot of each other when you were in London shooting Say Nothing. And that was around the time that you heard about this story. I remember every time we’d try to meet up, you’d be like, “I can’t do tonight, because I’m chasing some police guy that doesn’t want to speak.” Should we talk about how we met?

RADDEN KEEFE: Yeah. I’m going to reconstruct this, and you tell me if I get it right. I was writing about Larry Gagosian for The New Yorker, and it turns out we have a bunch of mutual friends. But the one who gets all the credit is Naomi Fry who said I should talk to you because you had a complicated dynamic with Larry. He basically wanted you to become one of his artists and you flirted with the idea, but ultimately decided against it. Does that feel like a fair characterization?

WOOD: Yeah. 

RADDEN KEEFE: So we ended up talking a lot about Larry and you told this amazing story about being at a party at his place in New York coming out of COVID and everybody was in a celebratory mood.

WOOD: Yeah, freshly vaccinated.

RADDEN KEEFE: You talked about how at the end of the night, Larry was drunk and he kept shouting at his staff to play Aerosmith. And he was very cooperative with the profile, but during the fact-checking, there was one thing that he really took strenuous issue with. It’s my favorite parenthetical denial of all time, “Gagosian denies that he was drunk or requested Aerosmith.” And after the piece came out, Al Freeman Jr. then painted that line just onto a square of paper. I ended up buying it and it now adorns my bathroom downstairs.

WOOD: Ah. The Gagosian profile turned you into an art collector.

RADDEN KEEFE: Exactly. 

WOOD: I was wondering if you were maybe slightly more disgusted by the art world than the world of Zac Brettler and the London gangster milieu that he participated in briefly.

RADDEN KEEFE: They’re so adjacent. Well, let me back up for a second. For people who know nothing about the book, it’s about this kid Zac Brettler who was an upper middle-class teenager growing up in Maida Vale in London and went to a fancy private school in the northern outskirts of the city. Some of his classmates were the children of post-Soviet oligarchs and, as a teenager, he got very taken with the whole money culture in London. So supercars, designer clothes, and Mayfair, and private nightclubs. And he ends up, unbeknownst to his parents, adopting this alter ego. 

WOOD: Including a Russian accent in some cases.

RADDEN KEEFE: Yes, pretending that he is the son of a Russian oligarch and that his name is not Zac Brettler, but Zac Ismailov. He has this aspirational sense that there’s always another room you could be getting into. There’s always a more exclusive circle. There’s always a nicer car, a nicer house, a nicer watch you could own.

WOOD: Remind me briefly, which character in the book named his children after tax havens?

RADDEN KEEFE: [Laughs] Yes. So, One Hyde Park is this big, splashy, sterile development that’s hard to miss. It’s this monstrosity that’s plunked down there, and Zac pretended that he lived there. That building was developed by the Candy Brothers who started when they’re really young, kitting out luxury apartments for Russian oligarchs and then helping them build things and source real estate. And one of them seems to have named his two children after tax havens, a daughter named Isabelle Monaco and a son named Cayman.

WOOD: But he claims that Cayman is actually from a Porsche model rather than the islands.

RADDEN KEEFE: Yes.

WOOD: As if that’s in any way better?

RADDEN KEEFE: Well the punchline is like, “Of course, I would never name my child after the Cayman Islands. He’s named after the Porsche Cayman.”

WOOD: There are some very good, and very necessary, moments of comic relief in what is otherwise a very dark book. I was thinking about what I’ve taken away from it, and one conclusion is that London is—well, I suppose the legal term is dodgy-as-fuck.

RADDEN KEEFE: Yeah. I lived in London from 2000 to 2001 and I’ve been coming back at least once a year since then, and I feel as though the whole culture of the place has changed. Some of it is a generational thing, but there’s a ubiquity of luxury consumer goods. Even Mayfair feels different now.

WOOD: For sure. When I was in Qatar recently, I spent half my time trying to work out if Qatar was how it is because of Mayfair, or if Mayfair is how it is because of Qatar. I was like, “I’m in the same place with slightly different colors.”

RADDEN KEEFE: Right.

WOOD: Did you lie as a teenager?

RADDEN KEEFE: I did. I lied in the casual way that kids do, but not in the pathological way that Zac Brettler did. Zac was an extravagantly accomplished liar. I mean, this is somebody who would meet Russians and pretend that he was Russian. It boggles the mind to think about it. And he started really young. I spoke to people who knew him when he first arrived at Mill Hill, the school he attended at 13, and he would tell them his mother had died. My sense is he did this because he intuited that people make themselves emotionally available to someone they believe has suffered that kind of loss. It was a sort of shortcut to intimacy. So, on the one hand, he was in a class of his own when it came to lying. On the other hand, everybody lies.

WOOD: Yeah. I don’t know how innocent lying becomes pathological, whether it’s fated from the jump if you have that capacity, or whether it’s just the case of the first few lies having such pleasant results.

RADDEN KEEFE: Sometimes you get trapped in it. 

WOOD: I can’t remember who said this, but you marry your lies. It is your longest relationship.

RADDEN KEEFE: That’s a great line. I wrote a whole book about Gerry Adams claiming that he was never in the IRA [Say Nothing], and it becomes more and more ridiculous for him to say that. But I think that when he started telling the lie, he didn’t have any sense that he was going to marry it, or live with it forever.

WOOD: In the case of Zac, the escalation of it is shocking. I told a lot of lies as a teenager also.

RADDEN KEEFE: What kinds of lies?

WOOD: I mean, I was a child and a teenager with anorexia, which is to live in a constant state of lying about what you’ve eaten, about what you haven’t eaten. You lie to yourself, primarily. So, it’s a very dishonest state to begin with. But I remember the most insane lie I ever told was, I had never had sex, but I claimed that I had gotten pregnant and that I’d had an abortion.

RADDEN KEEFE: Wow.

WOOD: I grew up in Portsmouth on the south coast. It was a very rough football hooligan town, but it had so many teen pregnancies. There was something in me that just wanted to be part of that conversation. So I gave myself a kind of immaculate conception and a fictional abortion. It narrowed my already very narrow friendship base. There was not one person that ever believed it. I believed it the most.

RADDEN KEEFE: So, it was a situation where you told people and they just didn’t buy it?

WOOD: No. My appearance didn’t match this kind of thing. But it’s a relief to tell that story now because it was such a wild thing to do.

RADDEN KEEFE: But this is partially adolescence. 

WOOD: It is. I came up with this weird theory: I wonder if little girls primarily tell lies to try and fit in, and little boys primarily tell lies to try and stand out.

RADDEN KEEFE: Oh, interesting.

WOOD: But I mean, you’re a father of two sons, so you probably know this slightly better than I would.

RADDEN KEEFE: It’s funny because I think, if anything, their impulse is to fit in. Whereas in Zac’s case, the last thing he wanted to do was be another one of the teenagers in his school.

WOOD: What is your relationship like with Zac’s parents now?

RADDEN KEEFE: It’s great. It’s often the case that I’m writing about people who don’t want me to, or who are dead, or sometimes who are threatening to sue me. But in this case, they really opened themselves up to me. We spent hundreds of hours talking over the years about this very intimate stuff, and at times it could feel like therapy. But I had to keep reminding them it’s not therapy. We’re doing this intimate thing here in the dark, but eventually I’m going to turn on all the lights and open the blinds.

WOOD: Yeah. 

RADDEN KEEFE: There’s also this strange situation which they are about to experience where they might be on the tube and they see somebody reading the book. There’s that weird asymmetry where they don’t know anything about the person, but the person feels as though they’ve actually lived those years with the brothers, having been along with them as they try to solve the mystery of their son’s death. It’s strange.

WOOD: Right. And it’s hard to describe fame, this asymmetry. It’s like a one-way mirror. 

RADDEN KEEFE: Yeah. It’s strange for the parents to have that. One of the things that really interested me was the parents investigating their son’s death. He goes off the balcony of this luxury building into the Thames. It’s unclear, is this a suicide? Is it murder? Is it something more exotic? The parents trust Scotland Yard to get to the bottom of it, but then there’s this gradual awareness that the police aren’t actually going to come and help. So they have to try and work it out themselves. That was really interesting to me as a dynamic. They’re incredibly invested, but they also get pulled into this underworld in London inside the city they hadn’t known. 

WOOD: Oddly, your book has given me an extra fondness for London, which is the complete opposite reaction I was probably supposed to have. I’ve also been wondering what Zac Brettler would’ve thought of the Manosphere, having watched the Louis Theroux documentary so recently. I mean, your sons will probably know more about that world than you do.

RADDEN KEEFE: Well, it’s not that it’s their world exactly, but if you’re a kid and you’re online, you’re swimming in that water.

WOOD: Inevitably. And it involves, again, these aspirational signs of wealth. Houses, employing OnlyFans girls. 

RADDEN KEEFE: Yes. Zac, it appears, was doing a little bit of drug dealing. I think mostly prescription stuff. But one of his friends told me it was to a bunch of OnlyFans models and what have you. The funny thing is it’s all these macho guys peacocking around and talking about getting girls, but mostly what they want to do is spend all their time with other men, not girls.

WOOD: Right. Even just getting their teeth done, and the gym, and using steroids. These are gender-affirming procedures. It’s almost like drag. It’s very ostentatious in a way. That used to be young women, I think, more than men. I’m curious to know why it’s now happening to men.

RADDEN KEEFE: Why do you think?

WOOD: Sometimes I think that the promise of feminism was that we send women into the workplace, but men didn’t promise to go along with their share of the household stuff. That plus the industrial revolution means that men don’t really work with their hands anymore. I think that’s made for a perfect storm of lack of purpose. I mean, in the case of Zac, being that lost was very dangerous.

RADDEN KEEFE: Yeah. I don’t want to give in to this particular moral panic and yet, at the same time, it’s undeniable that our lives are so mediated by our phones and by an algorithm. They have this undertow quality where you just get sucked deeper and deeper into whatever your preoccupation is. 

WOOD: Right. There’s an endless supply. Pick your poison. Do you think Zac killed himself? 

RADDEN KEEFE: I don’t. I’m certain that he didn’t. I think he jumped to escape. The guy that he was in that apartment with was a very, very dangerous guy. And the more that I know about that individual — who I think on that particular night was in the process of figuring out that this kid was actually not the billionaire son of a Russian oligarch — the more I think he was trying to get out of there alive.

WOOD: I mean, it’s a great book because it functions like a Rorschach blot for conspiratorial thinking. I’d be very curious to see what people project onto it, given that we’re in a golden age of conspiracies right now.

RADDEN KEEFE: Exactly. I remember years ago writing for The New Yorker on Mexican drug cartels. During fact-checking, people in Mexico would roll their eyes and say, “You’re never going to get to the truth. It’s all a fog of conspiracy and innuendo. Some things just aren’t knowable.” And I remember, somewhat naively, thinking from an American point of view, “No, certain things are knowable.” They’d say, “A former president took a 60 million bribe, or maybe he didn’t. Who knows?” And I’d think, “That’s impossible. You have to be able to get an answer to something like that.” Now, though, London or New York feel more like Mexico did to me 15 years ago. There’s this sense that maybe it was a murder, maybe a conspiracy, maybe someone was working with authorities, maybe people at the highest levels were involved. But we’ll never know.

WOOD: Well, I look forward to hearing Dua Lipa’s take on this.

RADDEN KEEFE: So do I. Let’s see if she has one.

WOOD: The only review I care about.

RADDEN KEEFE: Me too. This has been so much fun.