In 2019, a 19-year-old man named Zac Brettler died after jumping off the balcony of a luxury apartment in London near the River Thames. Police never came to a conclusion about what led to Brettler’s death. But soon after, it was revealed that Brettler was living a double life, filled with lies and organized crime in a city changed by extreme wealth. Patrick Radden Keefe dives into this story in his newest book, “London Falling,” focused on Brettler’s death and the people around him. He joins us in front of a live audience of students at Portland’s Lincoln High School in Portland to share more on his newest book.
Note: The following transcript was transcribed digitally and validated for accuracy, readability and formatting by an OPB volunteer.
Dave Miller: This is Think Out Loud on OPB. I’m Dave Miller, coming to you in front of a student audience at Lincoln High School in Northwest Portland. We are spending the hour today with the bestselling writer Patrick Radden Keefe. Patrick Radden Keefe has said that he has an almost childlike sensibility. If he finds out you have a secret that you won’t tell, he’ll do everything he can to figure out what that secret is. That curiosity and tenacity have served him well. They fuel in-depth reporting that often uses crime as a prism to understand society.
In his book “Say Nothing” he dug into an unsolved murder to tell a broader story about The Troubles in Northern Ireland. In “Empire of Lies” he made a sprawling portrait of the Sacklers, a pathologically secretive and proudly philanthropic family who more than any other fueled our country’s opioid addiction epidemic. His latest book is called “London Falling.” It is at first blush, a more narrowly focused book. It’s about a London family’s search for answers after the mysterious death of their nineteen-year-old son. But in Radden Keefe’s telling, it unfurls propulsively into a broader story, one about lies and secrecy and the ways that unimaginable wealth deforms people and places. Patrick Radden Keefe, it’s a pleasure to have you back on Think Out Loud.
Radden Keefe: It’s great to be with you.
Miller: You first heard about the story that turned into a magazine article and then this book from a friend of a friend, when you were working in London about three years ago or so. What did he tell you? What was the elevator pitch that you first heard?
Radden Keefe: So I was living in London in the summer of 2023. I was producing a TV drama called “Say Nothing” based on my book for Hulu. I was on set one day, just kind of hanging out because, from the outside, a film set seems really glamorous and exciting, but when you actually get there, it’s incredibly boring a lot of the time, it’s just people moving lights and setting up shots. And so I was sitting around just doing Wordle on my phone, and a guy sat down next to me, a stranger, somebody I didn’t know.
But one thing as a journalist that I try and do is I have a habit of starting conversations with strangers. I’ll just chat with anyone. My kids are really mortified, if we get in the back of an Uber, I’ll always start talking to the Uber driver. And I just started chatting with the guy, in part because I was curious and in part because I tend to think as a journalist that the best stories you’re not gonna find on the internet, you’re gonna find them from going out in the world and talking to people.
And I told the guy what I did. I said I write for The New Yorker, I write these investigative stories. And he said, “I might have a story for you.” And what he said was, there’s a family here in London who I’m very close with. They’re close friends of mine, and in 2019 they had this tragedy. They lost a child. They had a son. His name was Zac. He was 19 years old, and he died, and he died in mysterious circumstances. He went off the balcony of this luxury apartment building overlooking the Thames, the big river that runs through London.
And after he died, his parents, whose names were Matthew and Rachelle, started trying to figure out what happened to him, and they made this really shocking discovery, which is that unbeknownst to them, Zac had been living a double life. He’d had a secret life that his parents hadn’t known about. He had an alter ego where he was pretending to be someone else and he was moving around London pretending that he was Zak Ismailov, not Zac Brettler, which was his real name. He was Zak Ismailov and he was the son of a billionaire Russian oligarch living in London.
And this guy who I met that day had basically said just that much to me, and I knew right there sitting talking with him, if I can get this family to talk to me, I’m in. This is my next story.
Miller: Next magazine article. It starts at that level.
Radden Keefe: Yeah, I didn’t have any notion of it being a book until I was sort of partway through.
Miller: You ended up spending hundreds of hours talking with them, trading text messages back and forth, but what do you remember about that first meeting? He set it up, you sat down with him. What most stands out to you about that first meeting?
Radden Keefe: It’s interesting, one of the things about my job that is interesting, but also quite intense is that a lot of the time I’m meeting with people and I’m asking them to describe sometimes the most awful thing that’s ever happened to them. I like to think I’m a pretty good listener, but I also think that most people have a kind of natural urge to tell their story. They want to be understood. And so we sat down, I sat down with Matthew and Rachelle at a cafe, it was during the summer, just had coffees. I didn’t even take out a notebook. We had met with the understanding that we would talk off the record. So if they decided, you know what, we don’t want this story to be public, then I would walk away and I wouldn’t be able to write about it. They were quite a private family, and after Zac died, they tried to keep the story out of the press.
And in fact, after I first heard that pitch from the guy on the film set, I went home and I googled Zac Brettler, death, balcony, Thames, boy, and nothing came up. There was nothing on the internet. You can imagine, there were traces of Zac. It seemed almost as if he was still alive. There were traces of him online, but nothing to indicate that he was dead. So we sat down and they just talked for two hours. It all just kind of came tumbling out and it was a little confusing, honestly, when I wrote the article and then the book, part of what I’m thinking about is how do I take this tangled story and kind of untangle it and then tell it to you in a way that you’ll be able to digest, it won’t be overwhelming for you. But when they first told me about it, it all just kind of came tumbling out all at once. It was like a hairball of complexity and agony, and I just listened.
Miller: What did you understand that they wanted from you early on?
Radden Keefe: I think they weren’t even totally sure themselves. I think that there was a kind of interesting coincidence, which is that when we met, the official investigation into Zac’s death had kind of run its course. There had been a police investigation and basically the police had kind of thrown up their hands after a couple of years. They said, we don’t, we’re not able to get to the bottom of this. It might have been a suicide. Might have been something more sinister. We can’t really say. We’re not going to charge anyone. There’d been what’s called an inquest in the U.K., which is basically a sort of, it’s almost like a judicial procedure, except that they’re not assigning criminal blame, and they kind of look into a death and so you have witnesses and lawyers, and there was an inquest and the inquest basically came back and the inquest also basically said we don’t know, we don’t know what happened to Zac.
That was the point at which they met me and I think that they had a sense that there were still big unanswered questions and that maybe I could help answer some of those questions. I should say, I try to be very transparent with people when I’m working as a journalist, and so I said to them, I really want to tell this story. I think it’s an important story, and I want you to kind of open up to me. It’ll be weird to take your private tragedy and turn it into this public thing. But I don’t want you to do it if you have some unspoken expectation that I will crack the case in exchange, that…
Miller: That you’re a journalist as opposed to a private investigator?
Radden Keefe: Yeah, or a lawyer or an activist. I said I will do my level best to get to the bottom of this. I will write about it, but it shouldn’t be a thing where you think there’s a transaction here, and you’re opening up your lives to me and in exchange, I will bring you the justice that the police couldn’t bring.
Miller: Let’s take a question from our audience. What’s your name and what’s your question?
Serena: Hi, I’m Serena. Thank you so much for being here. My question is, how do you balance the emotions of a grieving family with keeping the article itself objective?
Radden Keefe: Oh, it’s a great question, Serena. Thank you. It’s interesting, I think when I write about people, part of what I’m trying to do is certainly when I meet with them and I hear their stories, I try and stay very open. I try and meet people where they are. I try not to judge them too much when they’re talking to me. I always, even if it’s a horrible person and I’ve, for this book, I’ve interviewed murderers, the people who’ve done really bad things. I still want to kind of try and keep an open mind when I sit and talk with them and hear their version of the story. When I sit down to write, I’m making judgments. And so there’s these kind of two different periods.
With the Brettlers, I did feel enormous compassion for them. I felt really strongly for this family and I think that for me as a writer, it’s important, you want to maintain an objectivity when you sit down. You don’t want to become too close to them. You don’t want to feel like you’re writing for them. I would have these moments where I would say, I’m not a therapist. It may feel sometimes when I interview you as if it’s therapy, but I’m not a therapist. I’m gonna go away and write about this. I’m not a private detective.
I’m also not in PR. It’s not my job to make people look good or to hold back certain details. And so it was just a very complicated relationship over a couple of years where, to the degree that my heart goes out to them, and I feel for them, and I feel compassion for them. I don’t want to stamp that out. I actually think that’s good for a writer. I think if the story is making you feel something, you should listen to that and that’s actually telling you something.
But I think that you need to kind of keep these two thoughts in your head at once, where on the one hand, you’re alive to the fact that it’s making you feel things. On the other hand, you need to resist the urge to only think about the feelings of the people you’re writing about. And so in the book, there are a bunch of things that I think make the family really uncomfortable. There are things that if they had editorial control, like if I had given them the book to edit, there’s a bunch of stuff they would have pulled out of the book that they didn’t want in there.
Miller: You know that because they told you or you just know them well enough?
Radden Keefe: I know them well enough, but also we talked about stuff. I mean, because I am who I am, if you invite me into your house and let me in, I’m gonna root around and I’m gonna find stuff. And in this case, there were family secrets that I think when they started talking to me, they never thought that there were certain things I found out about. And they’re just really awkward moments involving Zac and their family. To their great credit, the case that I made to them was, this is a story about lies. It’s about a boy who was lying about who he is. And so if we’re going to do this, if I’m going to write the book, it has to be kind of bracingly, painfully truthful, and all of that stuff has to go in. I think they end up in an interesting place where there are aspects of the book that are uncomfortable for them, but also they’re very supportive of the book. We launched the book in New York three weeks ago and they came to New York for the launch to be there, as did Joe, Zac’s big brother.
Miller: Well, you mentioned the lies. Let’s turn to that. What was Zac Brettler like as a young kid, and then when did he start changing?
Radden Keefe: So Zac from a really early age was a kind of, some of you might recognize his personality type. He’s a really fun kid, and he was really chatty, he was uninhibited. He had a kind of zingy, funny personality, a little bit the life of the party. He liked to tell stories, sometimes he liked to tell lies, but it was all pretty harmless. I think of him when he was young, as a little bit like a stand-up comedian. So a stand-up comedian kind of moves through life, they’re having these life experiences, but then they’re always converting their own life experience into a story and maybe a funny story, and they’re trying the story out and maybe they put a little spin on the ball or they change a few details and very high emotional intelligence. They’re like looking at your face, they’re seeing what you react to, they’re seeing what makes you laugh and what makes you not laugh, and then they tweak the story, right? Zac was like that.
So there’s a story I tell in the book about when Zac was about 5, he’s at some family party and an older girl, a cousin or something, gave him a piece of written material and she said, “Zac, can you read this?” And without skipping a beat, Zac, age 5 says, “No, I don’t have my glasses.” And he didn’t wear glasses and he couldn’t read, but that was Zac. He was kind of embroidering and…
Miller: Can I stop you there because there’s something about knowing how his life ends and knowing the lies that he wove later on that even when I read that anecdote, which made me laugh, or at least chuckle out loud, I read, it’s funny. It’s a kind of preternatural skill for a 5-year-old. But it’s also, I think, impossible to not read that and read into it. When you’re trying to piece together what happened, you hear something like that, how do you make what feels like an honest portrait that doesn’t get too clouded by what happens later, if that makes sense?
Radden Keefe: And it does. So I think of myself as working in the tradition of narrative nonfiction. It’s a very specific kind of journalism. I’m sure if some of you are in journalism classes, you’ve probably read some of it, where it really reads like a story, it reads like a novel, ideally, it’s a story about characters. There’s scenes, you feel like there’s some dramatic momentum, but it’s all true. What that means is, I don’t have a thesis statement in my books or my articles. I’m not trying to make an argument. It’s not an op-ed. It’s not an essay. And instead, it’s a story and I present it to you and I hope that there’s room in the way that there would be in a work of fiction, that the characters are rich enough that there’s actually different readings that you could have.
Part of what’s so fun about putting a book like this out into the world is that there are readings that never occurred to me that people are having. So I’ll give you guys an example, and this will be interesting to you. Zac starts lying more and at school, when he first gets to this new school, he tells kids at 13 that his mother’s dead. She’s not. But I think he realized that it was kind of a shortcut to close relationships, that when he met new kids, if they thought that he’d just experienced a loss – he did this especially with girls – that they would sort of open their hearts to him a little bit.
He was at a school where there were a lot of really rich kids, and he envied their wealth. He came from a pretty comfortable family. They’re fairly well off, but he was going to school with the children of billionaires. And so he started telling lies about, my dad drives two Range Rovers, my family lives in a mansion. And part of what’s really fascinating, I hadn’t even noticed this when I was writing is in this whole book, which is about this kid who lies, there’s a woman who came up – I did a reading in Nashville 10 days ago, and the book had only been out for about three days, but this woman had already finished it – and she came up and she said, the thing I noticed is in your book, throughout the whole book, the kids can see through Zac’s lies, it’s the adults who don’t. So the adults keep believing what he presents to them. But it’s actually his peers, who from really early on, could kind of smell the BS, they could sort of tell.
Miller: Does that ring true to you all in the audience? I’m curious, when you were reading the book and reading about, especially his early, I mean, he died so tragically young, but his earlier years. What was going through your mind? Does anybody wanna just raise your hand and we can bring the mic to you? What’s your name and what went through your mind?
Brian Pemberton: My name is Brian Pemberton, and I don’t know, I think that’s really true.
Miller: True that kids can spot liars among them better than adults can?
Pemberton: Yes, and I’m saying that because in my experience, when I lie to my parents, they don’t find out. But if I lie to my peers, they usually can tell.
Radden Keefe: Let’s hope they’re not listening.
Miller: So this is from the liar’s perspective. OK, and right next to you somebody else had their hand up, I think. What’s your name and what went through your mind?
Sariah Stewart: My name is Sariah Stewart, and what was going through my mind was really that peers will observe certain behaviors of yours with more importance than parents because parents will look at you in a different light. And I know that in my experiences my mother has focused on certain aspects of my personality that my peers maybe didn’t notice and I think that’s a real reason for why peers will notice different things, because they know how you talk when you’re being more free with yourself, whereas sometimes people are more reserved at home where they talk in a nicer or more toned down version of themselves.
Miller: So kids are more likely to see the real versions of each other and then they can see when you’re diverging from that, that makes sense. You mentioned billionaires there and in order to understand what happened to Zac, you go into some detail about London’s extraordinary transformations over the last four or so decades. What happened starting in the 1980s and then with a kind of major escalation when the Soviet Union collapsed?
Radden Keefe: Yeah, I mean, London had historically been a big city that had an identity as a manufacturing town. It was a city with factories. I don’t know if you guys have read any Charles Dickens. Do people still read Charles Dickens in high school? No?
Miller: A couple of nods.
Radden Keefe: In the world of Charles Dickens, London was this kind of big, grimy, sooty, industrial city that made things and had these big factories lining the Thames, the river there, and the Thames itself was this great port, where there were ships bringing in goods and leaving with goods from all over the world. And what happened is in the space of about 25 years, really from about 1960 to about 1985, the whole city changed and all the factories shut down, and all the shipping left and the docks closed. And so London as a city had to decide, well, who are we going to be now? Historically, we were a city that did these very specific things and really thrived on those, and now it’s all gone.
And we’ve seen versions of this story in American cities, right, where there’s a big manufacturing base and there’s a city or a town that’s kind of known for making a particular thing, and then eventually the factories close. And there’s a little bit of an identity crisis. And what London decided, in around the era of Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s, was that it would be a money town. It would be a town where you had banking, financial services. It became kind of a destination for foreign money and also for people who had that money. And so you had a big influx of wealthy foreigners who started coming to London. And particularly with the collapse of the Soviet Union, where you had really a handful of people, it wasn’t that many people, but these people who we now refer to as the oligarchs, where, basically, if you remember, the USSR was a planned communist economy in which you had these big industries, but the industries in theory were kind of publicly owned. It was owned by the state. It was in theory, it was owned by the whole Soviet public. And then overnight, basically, the Soviet Union collapses and the economy privatizes. And as those huge assets go into private hands, it doesn’t happen in a very fair way or a transparent way, and you get basically a handful of people who become megabillionaires overnight because they manage to kind of maneuver and take over these huge, like big oil companies, big electricity companies, what have you.
So those people accumulate these big fortunes. They’re known as the oligarchs, and the oligarchs, once they have these fortunes, start looking for a nicer place to live. And a lot of them end up in London. And London, which is looking for a new role for itself, essentially says, come on in. They roll out the red carpet. They have what’s called a golden visa program, which basically says, if you invest enough money in our economy, then we’ll let you come in and be a permanent resident. And these people drive up the real estate prices. They buy these big apartments and mansions. They come in with fancy cars, and they send their kids to fancy schools, which is how Zac Brettler as a teenager gets exposed to all these kids.
Miller: Let’s take another question from our audience. What’s your name and what’s your question?
Kyle: My name is Kyle, and my question was, are you ever scared of the people you write about?
Radden Keefe: Yes and no. I write about some scary folks, and it’s important for me to try and talk to those people and get to know them. There’s a guy who’s a minor character in the book named Andy Baker. So there’s a gangster who’s one of the big characters in this book, who Zac got to know. Zac was an interesting kid, he was a little drawn to the dark side. His favorite movie was “The Wolf of Wall Street,” and he really watched “The Wolf of Wall Street” almost like an instruction manual for how you should live your life. And he ended up becoming friends with this gangster, whose name was Verinder Sharma, but he was better known by his nickname in the underworld, which was Indian Dave.
And I wasn’t able to talk to Indian Dave for the book, but I wanted to talk to people who knew him. And so there was another gangster named Andy Baker, and Andy Baker got out of prison, and I got in touch with him, and was I scared? I was scared enough that when I went to see him, I had a friend who had a pin on my phone. I had two other friends who knew that if I didn’t get in touch with them by a certain time that day, there were a series of people they should call. You have to be careful with these people.
And when I met Andy the first time, he did this slightly creepy thing, which is we met in a coffee shop. He’s like a big guy with these watery blue eyes and an ankle monitor. And we met in the back of this coffee shop and he shook my hand and he looked me in the eyes and he smiled and he asked if he could get me a coffee, and then he asked after my wife and children, and he asked after them by name. And I hadn’t told him their names, and that’s kind of the way these guys roll. He wasn’t really threatening me, but he was just letting me know he knows who they are. But the weirdness of it is I got to know him pretty well. I went and spent some more time with him, and he became a big source. I write about him in the book. He ended up going back to prison. And when the book came out two weeks ago, he called me on publication day from prison to congratulate me. So, Andy and I are still in touch.
Miller: Let’s take another question. What’s your name and what’s your question?
Rider Larson: Hi, my name is Rider Larson. Thank you so much for being here today. My question is, what are the specific issues or difficulties of writing about someone who has died?
Radden Keefe: Oh, what a good question. I’m often writing about people who’ve died. One of the big characters in my book “Empire of Pain” was Arthur Sackler, and he was dead before I started writing. Three of the big characters in my book “Say Nothing” were dead before I came along. What a lot of journalists will tell you is it’s great to write about people who are dead, because the dead can’t sue.
Miller: Their estates can.
Radden Keefe: No, not for defamation.
Miller: OK.
Radden Keefe: No, no, no, you can’t defame the dead. Yeah. So that makes you feel like you’re on a slightly more solid ground. But I think the challenge for me is whether it’s somebody who’s dead or somebody who’s alive but won’t talk to me, I want you, when you’re reading my books or my articles, not to feel like you’re looking at that person through a telescope. I don’t want you to feel like you’re seeing them from 100 miles away, and it’s kind of hard to make out their facial features or get a sense of how they move through the world. I want you to feel like you’re in the room with them. And what that means is just more reporting. You have to kind of dig and dig and dig.
And so in Zac’s case, he was dead before I started writing about him. But I could talk to his parents, I could talk to his brother, I could talk to his cousins, I could talk to his aunts and uncles, I could talk to his school friends, I could talk to various people that he met when he was pretending to be the son of an oligarch. I got his text messages, I got his Google searches, I got videos of him, and slowly you’re able to kind of put together a picture.
Miller: Let’s take one more question. What’s your name and what’s your question?
Bonu: My name is Bonu, and [as] you’re reading this there’s a lot of sensitive subjects. So my question was if you left any details out due to ethics?
Radden Keefe: Well, I know some of you are student journalists, and so you’ll know when I interview somebody and they say to me, “Oh, can we go off the record?” ethically, I have to respect that. And so there were definitely things that I was told, not just by the brothers, but by other people who said, “I’m gonna tell you something off the record,” and then unless I can persuade them to put it on the record, it stays off the record. There were some tricky things. I mean, there’s one thing I don’t wanna, I don’t want to get into what it is, but there’s a big surprise about a kind of a family secret of the Brettlers that comes in at the end of the book. And what happened there was Rachelle, this is Zac’s mother, who has worked as a freelance journalist, so she sort of knows the rules of journalism, she did a kind of tricky thing.
She called me one day and she said, “I wanna tell you something, but I’m only gonna tell you if you agree that you will never write about it.” So what do you do if you’re me? What do you say when she says this? I didn’t have any choice. I said, “Rachelle, I don’t like this, but I guess I’ll agree,” not knowing what’s behind door number one. And then she told me this thing that I immediately knew had to be in the book. And I also knew that if I had been left on my own, I probably would have figured it out on my own. And so slightly tricky thing she’s doing there, right, because she took it off the table.
Miller: It was different than saying, I’m going to say this off the record. She was saying, don’t write about this no matter how you hear about it.
Radden Keefe: Yes.
Miller: OK, so that’s a broader “No.”
Radden Keefe: But what choice did I have? It wasn’t a situation where when she made that proposal to me, I was gonna say, no, I don’t want to know, right? I then spent the next year plus talking with her and with her siblings and trying to persuade them that it really belonged in the book and that it would not be fair to readers and to the truth to keep it out of the book, and it’s in the book. In the end I won that argument, but I will say that had I not been able to persuade her, it wouldn’t be in the book, and I would feel really bad about it. And if you ask me the question that you just asked me, and I knew that this big thing wasn’t in there that should be in there, I would feel on some level as if journalistically I had really failed.
Miller: As you said, one of the big reasons the Brettlers wanted to talk with you is that they felt very unsatisfied with the quality and breadth of the police investigation into their son’s death. You point out that for years there had been this pattern when people connected to Russian oligarchs would die in very questionable circumstances, falling from buildings, say, or getting hit by trains, the ways that didn’t necessarily seem like suicides. The police were very quick to say, “Yep, this is a suicide, nothing to see here,” and the theory, by many people is that the powers that be didn’t want to get in the way of a lucrative situation for the UK. Do you think that played out in the investigation into Zac Brettler’s death?
Radden Keefe: I do. I think that was a strand of it, but I don’t think there was a big conspiracy. I think that there have been decades of cutbacks to the Metropolitan Police. Scotland Yard still kind of has a nice ring to it, right? It seems like it’s good branding still, Scotland Yard, but not actually that great a police force, it turns out these days. And so I think some of it was that they just weren’t sort of up to it. I think some of it was that Zac died just before COVID, and that slowed things down. I think some of it was, yes, that there had been a kind of learned behavior on the part of the cops in London that when people died and it felt a little exotic and there was a whiff of Russia involved, they tended to just look the other way and say it looks like a suicide, looks like an accident.
I mean, truly, there’s a story I tell in the book about a guy who was found with like 30 stab wounds from two different knives, and the cops were like, oh, definite suicide. So you tell me. So I think there was all of that going on, and then I think the last thing, which is significant, is that there was footage of Zac going off that balcony. There was a building across the river, which is MI6 headquarters. If any of you have seen the James Bond movies, it’s the headquarters there.
And there was a CCTV camera that showed Zac alone on the balcony, so he wasn’t pushed off the balcony. And for the cops, that becomes really significant because they say, well, if we don’t have footage of somebody pushing him, if he’s jumping off, it looks like voluntarily, then we’re not going to be able to bring a murder case. And I think it’s almost like they have a kind of pattern recognition. If they see that it’s not a murder, then maybe it’s a suicide, and if it’s some other more exotic thing, like if you learn that there was a really dangerous guy in that apartment when he went off, that’s just not a thing that they really know how to engage with.
Miller: Let’s take another question from the audience. What’s your name and what’s your question?
Allegra: I’m Allegra, and my question is, how do you prepare for interviews?
Radden Keefe: Good question. I’m usually really underprepared for interviews. I hate to tell you, this is maybe not the thing to tell budding journalists. I think when I was a young journalist, a lot of the time, I would be incredibly prepared, and I made this mistake, which is that when I sat down with people, I wanted to show them how much homework I’d done. I wanted to show them how smart I was. I wanted to impress them. And I realized, it took me years, that a lot of the time it’s actually better if the person that you’re interviewing thinks you’re kind of dumb, or a little simple, and you haven’t really prepared, because they will then explain it to you the way they would explain it to a child. And that is a lot of the time really helpful because your reader is not gonna necessarily be an expert.
So I found that I would often go into interviews saying like, “Oh yeah, and of course I know about blah blah blah blah blah,” just to show that I did as a kind of a flex. And then what would happen is that the person I was talking with would assume, OK, well, I obviously don’t have to explain that stuff because he’s already done all the prep on that. So, of course, I try and sort of understand and think through where the conversation might go, and I do prepare, but I don’t come in with a list of 30 questions. For me, it’s much more about a conversation and being willing to kind of go down some road that you didn’t expect.
Miller: Let’s take another question. What’s your name? What’s your question?
Sofira: I’m Sofira. My question is, I like how you’re writing shows that someone lied about something and it almost makes me feel sick. How do you achieve that?
Miller: Can I ask you a question about your question? So reading about, like realizing in Patrick’s writing that someone has lied, it just gives you like a queasy feeling?
Sofira: Yes.
Miller: OK.
Radden Keefe: I hate to say it, but I’m happy to hear you say that because I want you to feel things when I’m writing. You guys have all grown up with phones, right? And so you are coming at this from a slightly different vantage point than I am, but I look back to what it was like for me to read before I got a smartphone, and I had a different relationship with books than I do now. It may seem weird for me as a person who writes books and magazine articles to confess this to you, but I’m not as good a reader as I used to be, and it’s because I have this little distraction device in my pocket.
And I miss that. I think there’s a kind of deep concentration that you can get when you’re reading a book and you’re actually not like looking for alerts every two minutes, that is pleasurable and made me feel smarter and made me feel more engaged with the world. So when I’m writing, I’m doing anything I can to try and grab onto you and not let go, and I know you have a phone, and I know that you’re feeling that itch, and you want to check it, and I want to kind of pull you over here and keep you here. And if I can make you feel things, that helps.
And so with the lies, there was a sort of interesting thing here where I had a ton of access to the Brettlers, to the parents, Matthew and Rachelle. And there was a really interesting thing in the reporting for this story, which is that they, from the moment Zac went missing, started recording on their iPhone the conversations they were having. So I didn’t just have their memories, I actually had the real-time recordings of these conversations.
What that meant is that in the book, I could create these situations where they hear things, people are telling them things, and they’re lies. The Brettlers don’t know they’re lies yet. And I made a decision, which is, I don’t want to tell you, the reader, up top, oh yeah, this guy’s lying. I’d much rather have you be like them, and kind of naively taking him at face value, only to 20 pages later, realize he was lying the whole time. And if that makes it feel like your stomach drops a little bit, that’s like mission accomplished from my perspective, that’s what I want.
Miller: What led, and you said the Brettlers, I think you write that it was primarily Matthew at first who was the chronicler of these things. What was driving him? This was years before you entered the scene, way before, this wasn’t to preserve something for journalists. What was driving him?
Radden Keefe: Well, I think Matthew and Rachelle are pretty sophisticated people. And it’s interesting, it used to be that in a criminal case, right, if you had a bank robbery or a shooting or something, and in a criminal case, if the prosecutors had an eyewitness or the defense had an eyewitness, that eyewitness testimony was the best. You’ve got somebody who was there and they saw the bank robbery, right? And now what we know is that in fact, eyewitness testimony is really unreliable, that if you’re there witnessing a bank robbery or witnessing a shooting, you’re totally unreliable, because in fact, you’re having a traumatic experience and you may not fully understand what you’re seeing in real time, and then you may misremember it in retrospect.
And I think that Matthew and Rachelle kind of knew, even as they were looking desperately for their son, that they weren’t being as kind of rational as they would like to be. And so they would have these conversations and they would go into them knowing, this is gonna be a really intense conversation. We’re kind of overwhelmed by emotion right now. We want to have a record of it so that we can go back and study it later. And that was the impulse, and so they would start recording these conversations. And for me, obviously, it’s a gift. Like the police wouldn’t talk to me for this book. They wouldn’t give me a single interview. But when Zac was killed, the police had all these meetings with the Brettlers, and at the beginning of those meetings, the Brettlers would say, hey, do you mind if we record this? And the police never put any conditions on them, so they just gave me those recordings.
Miller: What do you think we can learn about society by focusing on people who break societal rules in all kinds of ways: white collar crimes, violent crimes, or breaking the norms of just interpersonal life, of saying you’re somebody who you’re not. There are different versions of breaking societal rules that you focus on in your articles, in your books, but there is a thread of people who are going against what they’re supposed to do. What can we learn about society by focusing on that?
Radden Keefe: Yeah, I like the way you put it. People sometimes refer to my work as true crime, and I always get a little uncomfortable because I feel like there’s a sort of true crime industrial complex now and you’ve all seen a million kind of schlocky Netflix documentaries and listen to bad true crime podcasts, and I don’t really think of that as where I’m working. I am interested in transgression. I am interested in what brings people to do awful things and I’ve always thought, whether I’m writing about a white collar criminal or the Sackler family or Chapo Guzmán, the head of the Sinaloa drug cartel, that some readers will say, oh well, I would never be like that person. I would never do, I’m not an evil person, like all us good people, we all live over here on this side of the line and then there’s those other people on the other side, and I have nothing in common with them.
And I think that’s nonsense. I think it’s a kind of comforting story that people tell themselves. And so for me, the interesting question is, how do people get to the place where they, like how do you become the Sackler family? How do you become Chapo Guzmán? It doesn’t happen overnight. I don’t believe these people are inherently evil. I don’t believe they were born evil. I think that they do really terrible things, evil things in some cases, but they’re getting there by degrees. And the really interesting thing is each degree along the way, they’re kind of telling themselves a story. They look in the mirror and they think, who am I? How do I justify what I’m doing? And so those types of questions I think are really worth attending to.
Miller: Let’s get another question from our audience. What’s your name and what’s your question?
Catherine: I’m Catherine and I was just wondering what drew you into investigative journalism compared to more traditional types?
Radden Keefe: I wish I knew. I always went from basically the age you guys are, I knew I wanted to be a writer. I wasn’t sure what kind of writer. I started reading The New Yorker magazine when I was in high school, and I thought it would be really cool to be a New Yorker writer. I tried fiction and I wasn’t very good at it, I think. And as I got into it I liked stories that, some people write short things, I write longer things, my stories will take you 45 minutes to read. And I know that there’s a kind of pressure in our world where everything gets reduced down to a tweet or a TikTok video. Everything is getting smaller and smaller, and I sort of buck against that.
I like things that are told in a more leisurely way, in part because I think that if you have a story that’s investigative, what it means is I can gather all these cards, and then I’m just gonna deal those cards out to you. And it sort of goes to the question earlier about feeling your stomach drop when you find out that somebody’s been lying to you. That feeling that you have, that only works if you’re telling a story over a longer period of time, if you’re sort of absorbed in the story, and I can kind of take you down one path and then switch you down another. And so I think investigative work just naturally lends itself to that where I’m constantly surprised in my own experience as a reporter, and then a lot of the time what I’m trying to do is I wanna take that feeling of surprise that I have as I’m learning these things and translate it to the page so that you can have that experience of surprise as well.
Miller: We have another question from our audience. Go ahead.
Julian: I’m Julian, and what’s an essential part of reporting that people overlook?
Radden Keefe: Oh man, I mean, I think that the weird thing about the internet and and now AI as well is that it takes a lot of the friction out of reporting and there’s a natural tendency, and I have this, this is not me shaking my fist and telling you kids to get off my lawn. Like I have this too, where there’s a sort of natural tendency that you have to think, oh, all the answers are going to be right here online. All I have to do is, like heaven forbid, I pick up the phone and talk to someone.
And I think that the kind of fundamentals of reporting to me, actually are not about finding stuff that’s already on the internet and then rearranging it. And I think if you want to AI proof yourself as a journalist, it’s really essential that you understand that like, if all you’re doing is taking stuff that’s already online and just rearranging it in a different way, you will 100% be replaced by AI, right away. The job is to find stuff that’s not on the internet already. The job is to go out and knock on doors and get to know people, get to know sources over a long period of time, make phone calls, call strangers, get hung up on.
Like I’ve been doing this for 20 years now, and I think I’m pretty good at it, and I’ve had some success, and most of my week is reaching out to people who blow me off. Like it’s a huge amount of rejection that I get. I call people, they hang up on me, I call people, they say they don’t want to talk. But I think you need to kind of develop a thick skin for that. And what you realize is that like the first nine people may hang up on you, and the tenth will give you gold, and it’s something that you couldn’t have found if you Googled it. So I think that would be the biggest thing for me is in a weird way, like get offline and actually start connecting with real human beings.
Miller: You mentioned the first meeting with that gangster and him asking about your kids by name. If I’m not mistaken, your sons are right now around the age that Zac was when he really started to stray from the values and expectations of his parents. What was it like to reckon with those big themes of the book as a parent yourself?
Radden Keefe: It’s hard. I mean, I think the nature of adolescence is that you start to become your own person and your own person is gonna be different from who your parents are.
Miller: Which is what we want for our kids.
Radden Keefe: Yeah, but it doesn’t make it any less hard. I think that a lot of parents, and maybe this will resonate with you guys, but I think, for better or for worse, I think a lot of the time parents feel an urge. There’s a sense that they can kind of mold their kids and they’re gonna make them a certain way. And particularly in adolescence, kids for good reason start to, there’s other inputs coming in, the kids might decide, I like this about my parents, I like this aspect, but at this other aspect, I kind of want to be different. And then there’s this other thing altogether. And I think that’s hard emotionally for any parents.
And in the case of Zac’s parents, they felt like their son was becoming a stranger, and they didn’t really know how to handle it, and they worried about his safety, and they were really torn between like, how much do we try and kind of just wrap him up and not let him go anywhere, and how much freedom do we give him? And I think for me as a parent, it gave me some humility. Like I try and talk to my kids about this stuff. And to this day, I don’t know if this is the right approach or not, but what I tell them is parenting is hard and it’s not a science. And I tell them I love you and the most important thing for me in a way is that I want us to kind of keep being in dialogue, I want us to keep talking. I don’t want them to kind of disappear, but they’re teenagers. I mean, you guys know what it’s like, right? To my kids, I’m basically an Uber driver. It’s like I drive them around. They sit in the back seat. They don’t sit in the front seat, and they put their headphones in, and they’re on their phones.
Miller: Are you a private chef at times as well?
Radden Keefe: Oh, believe me, I’m the, yeah, I run the, yeah…
Miller: You provide a lot of services.
Radden Keefe: Yeah.
Miller: Let’s take another question from our audience.
Sophia: Hi, I’m Sophia. In your story, there’s a lot of lying, and my question is, how do you make sure when you interview people that they’re not lying to you, like twisting the story?
Radden Keefe: Yeah, you gotta have a good nose for this stuff, and I think actually it’s good practice for a journalist to always be skeptical of everyone. You sort of always have to take everything with a grain of salt. There’s an old joke that journalists of a certain age will make. It’s a story, a kind of little anecdote, but the idea is that you’ve got some grizzled old city desk editor talking to some cub reporter. And he says, “If your mother tells you that she loves you, check it out.”
And it’s that kind of attitude that I think you always need to have, is don’t take anything for granted, ever. Always be a little skeptical. And so, even when people are telling me the truth, I try and remain a little bit skeptical. I think you really need to guard yourself because there’s a danger as a journalist, if you’re too credulous, that you can just kind of reprint lies. And unfortunately, we live in a moment where a lot of people are telling a lot of lies and your job as a journalist is not to be a stenographer who just repeats that stuff. You need to kind of poke it and prod it and see what you believe and then tell the truth as you see it.
Miller: What did you learn in the end from Rachelle and Matthew about living with grief, about the choices they’re making now, what seven years later, in moving forward with their lives?
Radden Keefe: Well, they’re amazing people, I have to say, and there’s a whole aspect of this which we haven’t talked about, which is that Zac had two grandfathers who both survived the Holocaust, and they actually survived the Holocaust as children, basically, and their whole families were murdered. And both of these grandfathers arrived in England as teenagers. One of them was 14, one of them was 16. Just try and imagine this, and their whole families were gone. They were alone in the world at that age as refugees, and they had to learn English and kind of find a new life. And they did. I mean, it’s kind of miraculous to think about, but both of these guys as teenagers, just kind of created a whole new life. They learned English, they found a trade, they got married, they had kids, they had grandkids.
And part of what’s extraordinary about Matthew and Rachelle is that they grieve Zac, they think about him every day, but they haven’t kind of given up on life and they’re still great parents to Joe, his brother, and they still, they go to parties, they go to concerts, they’re engaged with their friends. And I have to say for me, it was quite humbling because I looked at them and I saw, I sort of thought, God, if I ever, heaven forbid, experienced a loss like this, I wish I could deal with it the way you are. And the really interesting thing is when I asked them about this, they both said it was because of their fathers, because their fathers had kind of given them this example, right, of how do you move forward in the face of just catastrophic loss and how do you not let that be the end of your story.
Miller: Patrick Radden Keefe, thanks very much.
Radden Keefe: Thank you.
Miller: Patrick Radden Keefe is the author of the new book “London Falling.” Thanks as well to Lori Lieberman and Mary Rechner here at Lincoln High School, Olivia Jones Hall from Literary Arts, and most of all, a big thanks to our great student audience.
“Think Out Loud®” broadcasts live at noon every day and rebroadcasts at 8 p.m.
If you’d like to comment on any of the topics in this show or suggest a topic of your own, please get in touch with us on Facebook, send an email to thinkoutloud@opb.org, or you can leave a voicemail for us at 503-293-1983.
