London Falling: Patrick Radden Keefe on How Money, Power and Corruption Shape Our City, with Emily Maitlis (Part One)

Summary

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Intelligence Squared – London Falling: Patrick Radden Keefe on How Money, Power and Corruption Shape Our City, with Emily Maitlis (Part One)

Date: May 10, 2026
Location: Royal Geographical Society, London
Guests: Patrick Radden Keefe (author, journalist)
Host: Emily Maitlis

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Episode Overview

This episode of Intelligence Squared features investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe discussing his book London Falling, joined by host Emily Maitlis. Keefe’s book investigates the mysterious death of 19-year-old Zach Brettle, using his story as a lens to explore London’s undercurrents of money laundering, organized crime, power, and transformation into a “gilded, corrupted city.” The conversation touches on parenthood, adolescence, class, identity, and the shadowy networks shaping modern London.

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Main Theme

How the unexplained death of a teenager illuminates the hidden networks of wealth, power, crime, and corruption beneath London’s glittering surface, and what this reveals about family, identity, and the city’s shifting moral and social structures.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Parenthood as a Central Theme

• Emily Maitlis frames London Falling as fundamentally about parenthood, quoting Andrew Solomon:

  “The truth about parenthood is that it abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger.” (03:12)

• Patrick Radden Keefe speaks about initially being drawn by the mystery, but discovering, through deep conversations with Zach’s parents (Rochelle and Matthew), that the story evolved into an exploration of the unknowability of children, the regrets and doubts of parenting, and the universal experience of “losing” one’s child to adolescence:

  “It kind of became a book about parenthood in a strange way… They've spent the last several years wondering, was there some exit ramp that we missed?” (05:09)

• Keefe connects his perspective as a parent of two adolescents to the universal uncertainties of parental judgment and intervention.

2. Adolescence and Reinvention

• Emily Maitlis cites vivid characterizations of Zach: surprising, funny, the life of the party, and questions the thresholds for parental concern.

  “At what point does something spark something in your head that makes you think, I have to change course or I have to question this, as opposed to, this is what kids do?” (07:22)

• Patrick Radden Keefe relates parenting an adolescent to being an “Uber driver”—kids enter their own orbits, sometimes distant but eventually returning:

  “You have to think of it as an orbit… There's a period of time when they're going to be on the dark side of the moon, but they'll come back around.” (08:12)

• Zach, like many teenagers, idolizes “swaggering gangster capitalists”—Vladimir Putin, Roman Abramovich, and Wolf of Wall Street-type figures. Parents wrestle with when and how to intervene, knowing that “stamping your foot” can heighten a child’s fascination.

  "If you're trying to subvert that, it's not always the best idea to kind of stamp your foot on the floor and bang your fist on the table and say, 'Don't be like that.' …because that might actually just reinforce the fascination." (10:46)

3. The Influence of Schools, Class, and Social Milieu

• The inflection point: Zach not following his brother to University College School, instead attending Mill Hill—where he’s exposed to the children of oligarchs.

  “I think it's some sort of combination of these things, where he's maybe trying to find a different lane…he’s then exposed to these kids who have a kind of dynamism and a swagger and a kind of immodest way of flaunting their own wealth.” (12:03)

• Class and schools: Keefe examines the nuanced “taxonomy of class” in London, noting both its eccentricities and transatlantic similarities.

  “The first real kind of wave of invasion is American bankers in 1987… that I think actually softens London up for the Russians in a weird way.” (15:00)

4. Consumerism, Social Media, and Aspirations

• Zach’s experimentations with wealth—ordering a limousine “just to see what it feels like”—reveal how young people in London are “pulled in” by visible affluence.

  “I wanted to know what it would feel like.” (Zach’s response, via Patrick Radden Keefe) (20:29)

• Algorithmic exposure: The constant barrage of images and stories on social media deepens obsessions and distortions.

  “You hesitate for just a second, a millisecond, with your fingertip on something, it catches your attention, and the algorithm figures it out, and it immediately starts serving you more…Imagine being 15…it's all you see. So I think there was a way in which Zach was getting kind of pulled deeper into his own preoccupations.” (20:29)

5. Changing Contexts: London, Truth, and Disinformation

• Zach's life tracks with seismic shifts in London and global culture: growing inequality, corruption scandals, and a broader breakdown of trust in information.

  “[Zach] has also seen, I guess, really big changes in the way that we think about truth…He's at his most vulnerable when all this stuff is happening in our city, in our world, right?” (Emily Maitlis) (23:44)

• Keefe parallels adolescent risk-taking with societal upheaval:

  “When you're 18, 19 years old and you have an adolescent brain, it's like a car with a really powerful engine and no brakes.” (24:32)

6. Zach’s Double Life and the Fatal Encounter

• Zach develops a reputation among his peers for storytelling and compulsive lying; classmates are skeptical, but adults aren’t.

  “The kids in the story, none of them believed Zach…It was the grownups who all believed the lies.” (Keefe quoting a reader) (25:58)

• Key story: At the Chelsea Arts Club, Zach tells a Chelsea FC employee he’s a Russian oligarch’s son. The adult believes him, which sets off the fateful chain of events:

  "Mark Foley, when Zack tried this line out, bought it and said, 'Oh, well...I have a friend named Akbar Shamji who has a real estate deal...maybe I could connect you.' And that's how this whole story begins." (30:25)

• Zach is drawn into deals with figures like Akbar Shamji and “Indian Dave” (Vrendra Sharma), moving him closer to danger and deception.

7. The Legal and Emotional Liminality of Late Adolescence

• At 18–19, Zach is legally an adult but emotionally still in transition; his parents are simultaneously excluded from and desperate to influence his fate.

  “There is this sort of gray area, isn’t there, between, is an 18-year-old a child, is a 19-year-old a child?” (Emily Maitlis) (31:53)

• Keefe notes Zach’s impatience to skip the traditional academic path and “vault into adulthood,” echoing the model of “self-made” figures like the Candy Brothers and Mark Zuckerberg:

  “[There's a] version of this story in which Zach was kind of hungry to get out there and start living his life and sort of vault into adulthood.” (34:19)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Parent-Child Distance:

  “My kids treat me now more or less like an Uber driver…they will get in the backseat of the car even when the front seat is available.”
  — Patrick Radden Keefe (08:12)

• On Adolescence and Risk:

  “It’s like a car with a really powerful engine and no brakes.”
  — Patrick Radden Keefe quoting a doctor on the adolescent brain (24:32)

• On Social Class:

  “…The first real kind of wave of invasion is American bankers in 1987…that I think actually softens London up for the Russians in a weird way.”
  — Patrick Radden Keefe (15:00)

• On Trying Out Wealth:

  “I wanted to know what it would feel like.”
  — Zach Brettle, via Keefe, on hiring a limo at age 15 (20:29)

• On Lies and Perception:

  “It was the grownups who all believed the lies.”
  — Keefe (quoting a reader’s insight) (25:58)

• On Youth and Adulthood’s Edge:

  “There is this sort of gray area, isn’t there, between, is an 18-year-old a child, is a 19-year-old a child.”
  — Emily Maitlis (31:53)

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Important Timeline & Segment Guide

• 02:18 – 03:12 — Introduction; framing the episode’s question.
• 03:12 – 05:09 — Keefe introduces the parenthood theme; Zach’s story.
• 07:22 – 10:46 — Adolescence and parental intervention dilemmas.
• 12:03 – 14:28 — Discussion of school choices, class, and sibling dynamics.
• 15:00 – 16:19 — Keefe on class structure, American vs Russian influence.
• 19:48 – 20:29 — Story of Zach’s limousine, social media, aspiration.
• 23:44 – 25:33 — How changing London, truth, and adolescence intermingle.
• 25:58 – 31:53 — Zach’s persona, the Chelsea Arts Club lie, adult complicity.
• 31:53 – 36:13 — The legal, emotional, and existential liminality of 18–19-year-olds; parents’ role.

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Tone and Style

The episode is empathetic, contemplative, and often personal—balancing reportage with candid reflection on parenting, adolescence, and the seductive dangers of wealth and reinvention in modern London. Keefe and Maitlis blend the personal and structural masterfully, making this episode essential for those interested in the intersections of family, city, and secret power.

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Transcript

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[Mia Sorrenti]

welcome to Intelligence Squared, where great minds meet. I'm producer Mia Sorrenti. What can a single unexplained death reveal about the hidden systems of money, power and corruption in a global city. Today's episode is part one of our recent live event with investigative journalist and author Patrick Radden Keefe. Keefe joined us at the Royal Geographical Society to discuss his new book London Falling and how money, crime and power shaped modern London. At the center of London Falling is the story of a teenager who fell to his death from a luxury apartment and his family's search for answers. Through this case, Keith explores the deeper structures that underpin the city and the currents of money laundering and organized crime that flow beneath the surface. Let's join our host, Emily Maitlis now live at the Royal Geographical Soccer.

[Emily Maitlis]

I'm actually not going to introduce Patrick Radden Keefe because this room wouldn't be jammed to the rafters if you didn't already know what he does and just how well he does it. Probably the leading investigative storyteller alive today. His Empire of Pain, many of you will know, exposed the Sackler family and their involvement in the opioid crisis. Still paying reparations today. And his book, his works say Nothing, focused on the IRA murder of Jean. The reverberations are still being felt and explored today. London Falling. I'm imagining many of you here have probably already read it or picked up a copy. You will know. I think you will know it's a very different sort of book. At its center is a 19 year old who mysteriously falls to his death. And it's about his family's determination to find out what happened. And it is so beautifully written that we can explore it from so many angles. The unsolved nature of a crime, the gilded, corrupted city of London, the forging of identity and the faking of it. But above all else, Patrick, it seems to me to be a story about parenthood. And I want to start with that quote from the writer Andrew Solomon. The truth about parenthood is that it abruptly catapults us into a permanent relationship with a stranger. And it seems that the heart of the story lies in that vital search that you do with, with Zach's parents, with Rochelle and Matthew, to find out how their son died, but also to find out who he was when he was alive.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I should say first of all, thank you, Emily, for doing this. Thank you all for being here. It's an honor to be in this beautiful space with all of you and to be talking about this book in London. I have been. The book came out almost a month ago and I Was on tour in the US for three weeks, and I've just been in Ireland. But it feels. It's an amazing feeling to get to talk about the book in the city that it is about. Yeah, it's weird. It kind of became a book about parenthood in a strange way. I mean, I think when I first heard the story and first met the Brettlers, I was drawn to the kind of mysterious, enigmatic nature of the story and this kind of tale of a young, fabulous in London. And London's a city that means a great deal to me. I lived here for a time, 25 years ago, and I've come back often, and I've watched the city change in the way that you all have as well. And I thought that there might be an opportunity to kind of look at these questions of reinvention. But then as I went along and I talked about a great deal with Richelle and Matthew about Zach and what it's like to have a child who in adolescence, kind of ceases to be the kid that you thought you knew. And the extent to which, in some ways, that's a normal and probably a very healthy thing as a. As a kid, sort of establishes their own identity. It got me thinking about all those types of questions. And I should say some of that, I think, grows organically out of many conversations with these parents who've spent the last several years wondering, was there some exit ramp that we missed? Was there something that we could have done differently? And I think my own kind of quite honest reckoning. And I say this as a parent of two adolescent kids myself, where I would sort of look at what they were doing at each juncture along the way. And I would think, nah, it's probably more or less what I would have done, too, that the kinds of things that they were wrestling with felt quite relatable to me as a parent right at the beginning.

[Emily Maitlis]

You describe Zach being born with a shock of red hair. You say, sometimes your own children can surprise you. And we see the young Zack as this character. He's fun, he's funny, he's a good imitator. He can be this sort of the life of the party. And then you start to sort of ask, I guess that the most normal of all the questions that any parent goes through, which is, is this all normal? Do I intervene? Like, at what point does something spark something in your head that makes you think, I have to change course or I have to question this, as opposed to, this is what kids do. This is. This is what adolescents do. This is what teenagers do.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

I think that's right. I mean, I think that there is a sense, which I think is quite a reasonable sense of adolescence as a phase. Right. It's this kind of crucible that we all pass through. We all remember passing through it. There's a very dear friend of mine, kind of a mentor of mine, who I was talking with about my own kids and how my own children at a certain point became quite ornery and. And less interested in my views of the world than they used to be. And I think what I said to this guy is that my kids treat me now more or less like an Uber driver in the sense that I drive them around. And it is often true, I'm ashamed to confess to you, that they will get in the backseat of the car even when the front seat is available, and my older boy will put his headphones in and sit in the back seat on his phone. And I was conveying this to my friend Link, and he said, you have to think of it as an orbit. You know, they're in an orbit, and there's a period of time when they're going to be on the dark side of the moon, but they'll come back around. And I think the challenge for Matthew and Rachelle, and I don't think they're alone in this, I think the challenge for many parents of adolescents is not just when do I intervene, but how do you intervene? Because, you know, Zach turned 18 at a certain point. And so there's a question of, I think any of us in a situation in which we feel as though our child might be kind of veering into dangerous company or kind of idolizing false gods, there might be an impulse to kind of snatch hold of them and smother them and hold them tight. But I think the danger there is that they flee, that you drive them away. I think there was an issue with Zach in particular, which was that. And again, this is an issue I really relate to in some ways as an adolescent. He became very taken with a certain kind of character, let's say, and this will be familiar to many of you, a kind of swaggering gangster capitalist. You know, he was very interested in Vladimir Putin. He was very interested in Roman Abramovich. He loved the film the Wolf of Wall Street. And so there were these kind of macho archetypes. And I think that the challenge for Rochelle and Matthew was, on the one hand, they found the notion that you would heroize people like that kind of abhorrent and curious and alien. On the other, Hand. There's a recognition that part of what kids do in adolescence is they define themselves in opposition to their parents. And if you're trying to subvert that, it's not always the best idea to kind of stamp your fist, stamp your foot on the floor, and bang your fist on the table and say, don't be like that. Those people are awful. Because that might actually just reinforce the fascination.

[Emily Maitlis]

But retrospectively. And what you describe in the book, in the story of Zach's life, is a moment that may have been pivotal, and we don't know that it was. But it's the moment that he doesn't follow his brother to one school, which Rochelle and Matthew know well, trust well, presumably sort of believe in, and he goes to another school which seems to be more moneyed or seems to. It's the school you describe as Lebedevs. I think he was the first child of an oligarch to go to Mill Hill. And so this question is raised. Was it something to do with the school, or was it something to do with that moment in time? Or neither?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Well, I don't. I mean, it's tricky because the kind of writing that I do sort of by design, allows for a certain flexibility of interpretation. I'm not writing a legal brief. I'm not writing a polemic. I think people are complicated. I think Rochelle and Matthew and Joe, Zach's brother, look back at the point where Zach didn't get into UCS University College school, where Joe went and instead went to Mill Hill as a kind of, as you say, a sort of decisive inflection point, that his life started to change after that. Why did it start to change? I mean, you could come up with a bunch of reasons, right? It's very difficult to experience, I think, for any of us, rejection, you know, that that experience of my brother gets to go and have this opportunity and this experience. And I have been told that for one reason or another, I'm not good enough. I think we've all had moments like that in our lives, and I think that they can kind of prompt quite dramatic changes in people sometimes. I think some of it was. It's not that Mill Hill was necessarily more moneyed than other schools. It's that it was moneyed in a different way and that there were these children there who were the children of oligarchs, and Zach exposed to those kids. And so I think it's some sort of combination of these things where he's maybe trying to find a different lane. I mean, this is something I relate to. I'm sure other people do as well. It's a thing that happens with siblings, right. Sometimes one sibling really distinguishes themselves in a particular area, and the next sibling sort of thinks, okay, well, I've got to find something else. You know, this isn't going to be my thing. And they have to find another lane. And I think there's something about that with Zach where he's then exposed to these kids who have a kind of dynamism and a swagger and a kind of immodest way of flaunting their own wealth. And their wealth is like, exponentially. I mean, this is a family that's quite comfortable economically in the grand scheme of things. But as compared to the children of billionaires, there's a huge gulf. And if you're 14, 15 years old, and also, I should say you're on social media, which kind of compounds all of this, I think that that can be quite destabilizing.

[Emily Maitlis]

You use this phrase, the taxonomy of class. And, you know, London well. I mean, you have been resident here and a big fan of the city for so long. But when you're writing about the. The sort of fluctuations between one private school, one public school, another. I mean, does it strike you as absurd to sort of look in on the British class system as an American and sort of try and puzzle, you know, this type of money went to that school, and is it very different? Or would you say it's.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

I mean, only. Only insofar as anytime I write a story, the thing I love the most about my work is I'm kind of parachuting into new environments where I don't know much and learning on the go. And the kind of social anthropology of any given place, whether it's West Belfast or West London, is different. And you have to kind of learn it as you go along. There's always talk about the kind of vanishing subtleties of social class in England. And there's obviously some truth to this, but we have our own issues in America as well. I mean, they're just different. And one thing that it was important for me to try and capture in the book, I should say, in fairness to the Russians, is that if you read the book carefully, the first real kind of wave of invasion is American bankers in 1987 who come into London and have a kind of approach to conspicuous consumption and a kind of aggression in. In their. In their sort of posture as capitalists that I think actually softens London up for the Russians in a weird way. So, you know, we have these issues ourselves.

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[Emily Maitlis]

There is a moment where Zach orders a limousine and Rochelle, his mother and Matthew clearly clock it as a slightly absurd moment. Why would their son need a limousine? They probably had an Uber driver dad themselves, you know. But he does it just to see what it feels like. So he is getting pulled in as a, what, sort of 15, 16 year old maybe into this world where he's trying out what it feels like to have throwaway money.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yeah. And I think it's funny because the line in the book, it's his line. And I mean, I got this from speaking with Rochelle and Matthew that they asked him, they got a call from the school saying he's gone home in a limousine. And when he arrived home in Maida Vale, they said, what was this all about? And he said he'd paid for it himself. And they asked him why. And he said, I wanted to know what it would feel like. And I find that line quite affecting. I sort of relate to that line in a strange way. I think that if you walk around. Well, if you walk out of this building and you walk around the neighborhood we are in right now, the kind of visual landscape is full of supercars, right? It's full of these automobiles that people have paid hundreds of thousands of dollars for. And they're really everywhere in some parts of London. And Zach was a kid who from an early age had an interest in cars and he would notice these things. It's a thing that you kind of take note of. He always had a very encyclopedic tendency from when he was really young. He was, I mean, it's again, that word taxonomy. But he would kind of, he liked a kind of data set that he could pour himself into and come to understand and recite at will in a way that would impress people. And I think that there were those kinds of signifiers in London. Real estate was another one Mansions in St. John's Wood. And he was on the Internet, you know, he was a. I feel like I need to be careful when I talk about this, because the book's not a polemic. I know there's a moral panic around kids and screens and algorithms, and I don't want this book to become an entry in that moral panic, while at the same time, I am personally morally panicked about kids and screens and algorithms. And it clearly was a factor here. But I think many of us have had this experience of scrolling through an algorithmic feed, and you hesitate for just a second, a millisecond, with your fingertip on something, it catches your attention, and the algorithm figures it out, and it immediately starts serving you more. So imagine being 15, and you're interested in Bentleys and Bugattis and Lamborghinis, and you're on Instagram, and suddenly it's all you see. So I think there was a way in which Zach was getting kind of pulled deeper into his own preoccupations. And that's why I kind of understand the idea that with all that exposure, both the kind of real world exposure of his own classmates living these kind of impossibly grand lives, but then also that, you know, that sort of strange online exposure where you're getting a glimpse into the. You know, when I was a kid, it was like the Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous, the TV show, you know, and now it's much more ubiquitous and seems kind of. It's so close you could touch it. So I understand what would motivate Zach to do that.

[Emily Maitlis]

And just to put this in a time frame which seems to me quite are important, or at least interesting. Zach is born on the cusp of the 21st century. He dies when he's 19. And during that short life, he's seen London transform. And he's also seen, I guess, really big changes in the way that we think about truth. We think about information, we think about disinformation, we think about people coming to power on the back of lies. And he has. He's at his most vulnerable when all this stuff is happening in our city, in our world. Right?

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Yeah. And he's a kid, right? I mean, he's young. He's. You know, I always think it's a strange analogy, but I years ago, wrote a piece for the New Yorker about the trial in the Boston Marathon bombing, the trial of Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was, I think, 19 when he and his older brother planted that bomb. And I always think about. There was A doctor who testified in that trial and was talking about the adolescent brain and said, the thing is, when you're 18, 19 years old and you have an adolescent brain, it's like a car with a really powerful engine and no brakes. And so I think that's part of it, too, is that all of that stuff is kind of going on, but then on top of that, you just have the kind of general developmental hormonal instability that anybody normally in any period of history would experience at that age.

[Emily Maitlis]

So let's tell the story a little bit, because Zach starts. He's taking in a lot of the stuff that's going around him. He sees the kind of gilded nature of London and the tons of money that's pouring in, and he starts to invent a Persona which his parents don't know about, but the kids in the school walked.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Well, it's interesting. I mean, there's this kind of strange thing that happens. We talked about this earlier, but the. One of the really amazing things about writing a book and putting it out into the world is you're sort of alone with it in the mineshaft by yourself with your manuscript for a long time, and you think you see it clearly, and you can see everything that's going on. And then you publish the book and it goes out in the world, and almost immediately, when it becomes this cultural artifact that's kind of out of your hands, people are reading it, and they're engaging with it. Probably some people in this room have read it already, and you may be seeing things in this story that I didn't see, and they could very well be true. I mean, it could be that you're observing things that I was just blind to for one reason or another. So I was. The book had just come out a few weeks ago, and I was touring around, and I was in Nashville, and a woman came up to me afterwards, and she said, you know, what I noticed about this book is she'd already read it. And she said, the kids in the story, none of them believed Zach. They could see through the lies. It was the grownups who all believed the lies. And there is an interesting thing where when Zach was at Mill Hill, he started to lie. And he quite quickly developed a reputation as a kid who told lies. And I should say some of his classmates said this is what made him fun to be around, is that he was very unpredictable, and he was a teller of stories, and he was always trying to kind of see what he could get away with. I think of him as almost like a Stand Up Comic where you. You're living your life and you have these experiences and then you. You're always kind of rearranging them into a narrative, and sometimes you're putting a little spin on the ball and you may be withholding a bit of information, maybe adding a little dash of something that's not true, and you're kind of seeing how it plays. There's a story I tell in the book about Zach sitting around in the dorm at Mill Hill with some of his friends. And Zach's very athletic and he played cricket. And he suggested to his friends that, as it happened, he had recently been approached by New Balance, the sneaker company which was hoping to sign him in a sponsorship arrangement. And so he tries this line out. And his friends all immediately said, oh, come on, Zach, you're full of it. Stop. This is obviously nonsense. And one of them said, you really need to stop. You're a compulsive liar. And this really seemed to kind of hit. Zach sort of took it personally. And he kind of went quiet for a while and got a little morose. And then he said, no, it's true, I'm a compulsive liar. It's always been this way, ever since this terrible accident that I had when I was. And they said, zach, you're doing it again. And so he would kind of embroider. He would tell people that his father was an arms dealer. And you sort of have to meet Matthew Brettler, but extraordinary guy, arms dealer, he's not. And he would say that his dad drove two Range Rovers and that the family had just bought a mansion in St. John's Wood. And most of the kids didn't buy it, but he was always looking for people who would. And then at a certain point it all changes because he meets a grown up outside of school and he tells a lie that's really kind of upping the ante. And this grown up believes it. So he's at the Chelsea Arts Club one night, and this is in early 2019. I still to this day don't know how Zach talked his way in, but there was a benefit of some sort at the Chelsea Arts Club. They were selling a lot of art on the walls. And it's funny because I relate so strongly to this experience, but you know that experience you have where you go to an event and you're on your own, you're not with anyone and you've been invited and maybe you wondered whether you should even go at all, and you show up and you get a drink and you're standing there alone trying to kind of figure out, can you barge into somebody else's conversation, Maybe you should just leave? And then often what happens is across the room, you see another sucker who's just like you, and then you kind of arbitrarily fall into conversation because you're the only two people who are there on your own. So there's a guy named Mark Foley, who. That was him this one night at the Chelsea Arts Club. He'd gone. He was there by himself. And he sees this young kid who's also there by himself. And they get to chatting, and Zack asks him what he does. And Mark Foley says, well, I work for Chelsea Football Club, which, as Zack knew, was at the time owned by his hero Roman Abramovich. And Foley says, how about you? And Zach says, oh, well, funnily enough, I am the son of a Russian oligarch. I come from a very wealthy Russian family. I am my father's right hand man. I help him make investments. And to this day, I think that there's a version of this story where Foley does what the kids back at Mill Hill did and just says, you're full of it. I don't buy it, and leaves the party. And Zach is still alive today. But instead, what happened was that Mark Foley, when Zack tried this line out, bought it and said, oh, well, as it happens, I have a friend named Akbar Shamji who has a real estate deal that he's trying to get off the ground, and they're looking for investors. So if you really are your father's right hand man with hundreds of millions of pounds to spend, maybe I could connect you. And that's how this whole story begins.

[Emily Maitlis]

Yeah. And through Akbar Shamji, he then meets this character, Vrendra Sharma, who is called by his sort of underworld name, Indian Dave. And that's when things really start to go wrong for Zak. And I guess what I kept coming back to was this idea that Zach is on the cusp of adulthood. And this is why I think it sort of speaks so strongly. I mean, Rochelle and Matthew are extraordinary in your book. They are the sleuths, they are the investigators, they are the parents who've gone through every single moment, not just retrospectively, but it sounds as if while things were happening, but essentially Zach has legally become an adult. Right. And there is this sort of gray area, isn't there, between is an 18 year old a child, is a 19 year old a child. We've all got friends who've been through trauma with their kids and said, I can't even access their medical records now. I can't even check because they're out of my jurisdiction. And in a way, this all happens just at that cusp. Doesn't.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

Does. And I think in addition to that, there is a version of the story, certainly. I think it probably appeared to Rochelle and Matthew in which Zach was making it clear by 18 or so that he wasn't necessarily going to pursue a kind of conventional path of scholarly achievement and necessarily kind of university bound and what have you. He was impatient. He wanted to kind of get out there and be an adult.

[Emily Maitlis]

And.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

And I should say, I mean, I have a whole section in the book, a fun little digression about the Candy Brothers, the real estate developers. And they, you know, as with most of the digressions in this book, they actually tie in in kind of surprising, interesting ways. So one of the lies that Zach would tell is he claimed to live in One Hyde park that, apologies to anyone who lives there, had a monstrous development in Knightsbridge, as you say, a

[Emily Maitlis]

stone's throw from here, pretty much, indeed, the end of this road.

[Patrick Radden Keefe]

And Akbar Shamji would come, and he would tell Akbar to come pick him up at his place at One Hyde Park. And when Akbar would come to get him, Zach was always standing right out front. Never saw him come out of the building, but he was always there waiting. So One Hyde park was developed by the Candy Brothers, these real estate developers who, when they. I just. I just love this. When. When they built One Hyde park, it was described by the developers as the most expensive real estate development ever built anywhere in history in the world. I just love the idea that there are people in London who would think that's for me, you know, also, just parenthetically, it's like, you know, Versailles would like a word, but. And the Candy Brothers got their start when they were 18, 19 years old, initially flipping apartments and then ultimately decorating apartments for Russian oligarchs. So there was a kind of version of this story. I mean, Mark Zuckerberg started Facebook when he was 19. There's a version of this story in which Zach was kind of hungry to get out there and start living his life and sort of vault into adulthood. And he seemed to be making money. He was friends with these people who appeared to be quite successful, these older men, and had these business deals going on. And so I think some of it for his parents was a sense that there was maybe a limit to their control over somebody who was now a young man. But some of it was also a hopeful sense that if he was going to sort of forge this alternative path, maybe, maybe there was a version in which his kind of outsized ambitions could convert into some adult reality.

[Mia Sorrenti]

Thanks for listening to Intelligence Squared. This episode was produced by Ginny Hooker and it was edited by Mark Roberts. For ad free episodes and full length recordings. You can become a [e-mail] forward SLME membership and if you'd like to join us at future events, you can find our full program and buy tickets [e-mail] attend. You've been listening to Intelligence Squared. Thanks for joining us.

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[Emily Maitlis]

Edu Sci Hablas Espanol Spries to Joy

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