May 16, 2026 • 16 mins
Award-winning journalist Patrick Radden Keefe has made a name for himself by taking complex true crime stories - mysterious deaths, greedy families or shadowy underworlds -and bringing them to light.
Patrick has written six books, all best sellers - with Empire of Pain and Say Nothing being the standouts.
His latest book is London Falling, a story of London teenager Zac Brettler who mysteriously fell to his death in 2019, and it's available in stores now.
"Part of what I was trying to do with this book was look at the way in which any of us as parents, when we're parenting an adolescent - particularly these days when everybody's on their phones - is that the child we thought we knew can start to become somebody unrecognisable."
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News Talks.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
EDB Award winning journalist Patrick rad and Keith is the
master of taking complex true crime stories, mysterious death's, greedy families,
or shadowy underworlds and bringing them to light through gripping storytelling.
Patrick has written six books, all best sellers. You may
be familiar with his previous books like Empire of Pain
and Say Nothing. His latest book is London Falling, a
(00:32):
story of the London teenager Zach Brenchler, who mysteriously fell
to his death in twenty nineteen. While trying to understand
their son's death, Zach's parents undercover a fantasy life in
which Zach had been posing as a wealthy Russian oligarch.
It's another incredible read from Patrick. I couldn't put it down.
He's in the country this week for the Auckland Writers' Festival.
I'm thrilled to finally have him back on the show.
(00:52):
Patrick rad and Keif, good morning.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
I'm so delighted to be with you.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Can I start with your career because I first spoke
to you hour for Empire of Pain. You now have
six books, all hugely successful. How do you keep finding
these great story worries to write about?
Speaker 3 (01:08):
Well, I try and just go out and kind of
remain curious. I feel with every passing year more strongly
that you're not going to find the best story ideas
on the internet. So you have to kind of get
your nose out of your phone and start conversations with strangers.
Which is where this article actually or this you know,
what started as an article and then became this book
actually came from is I just got to chatting with
(01:29):
a total stranger and he told me this story.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
Is there anything you won't write about? Any ideas or
opportunities that have come your way that you've turned down.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
I haven't covered a war, you know, I have small children,
And even though there is sometimes you know, some degree
of nefarious, with some nefariousness with some of the characters
that I interact with in my stories, I haven't gone
to a war zone. And that's a thing that I,
you know, at least at this juncture in my life,
I don't know I would do.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
Nefarious is a good word. I mean, is there a
certain amount of danger digging up some of these stories?
I know that you've had legal threats and the like.
How do you deal with that?
Speaker 3 (02:09):
Yeah, it's funny. You know. I've spent years writing about
gangsters and drug lords and all of these underworld types.
But the only people who ever actually threatened me are
the rich people. It's the billionaires who hired their lawyers
and their pr people to come after you. You know.
For this book, for London Falling, I got to know
a guy named Andy Baker, who was a long time
(02:30):
English gangster who was briefly out of prison and is
now back in prison. But I think with relationships like that,
you know, I try and be as transparent as possible,
and I try and make sure that I'm careful obviously,
and generally things are okay. One advantage I have is
that I can leave. So when I think about my book,
for instance, about the Troubles, say nothing. If I lived
in West Belfast and my wife worked there and my
(02:52):
kids went to school there, it would have been harder
for me to write that book the way that I did.
I had a passport, I could always leave at the
end of the day, and That's often been the case
across the stories that I've written in my career.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Interested that you brought up Andy Baker, because when you
meet him, he did make it very clear in a
non threatening way that he knew the name of your
children and your wife and things like that, didn't he.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
He did, And I don't even know that I would
call it necessarily non threatening. It wasn't explicitly threatening. But
this is the way that these guys work is that
he kind of shook my hand. He got right into
my personal space, you know, a lot of unbroken eye contact,
and with a big smile on his face, he asked
after my wife and kids by name, and I hadn't
told him their names. And that's sort of the way
these folks operate, is that Andy was telling me, you know,
(03:37):
I know you have a vulnerability. I know you have
a family. I should say, though, as I get into
in the book, Andy also has a family. He has children,
you know, he has parents. And I try and sort
of situate even the more colorful, disreputable characters within the
frameworks that they come from. You know that we all
exist in this matrix of family and relationships.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Are you absolutely find the human in them? Tell me
about zech.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
So Zach Brettler was a boy who was born in
the year two thousand in London, and he was a
really fun little kid.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
He was.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
Kind of quick witted, he was unpredictable, he was a
little zingy. He would sort of do jokes and accents
and imitations. And as he got older, he grew up
in a loving, i would say, upper middle class family
in central London. As he got older, he became really
taken with the culture of wealth in London, really obsessed
(04:32):
with supercars and luxury real estate and the kind of blingy, gaudy,
excessive wealth that had come to characterize the city during
his lifetime. And slowly he started to graduate from being
kind of a fun conversationalist to somebody who told lies.
He became a bit of a fabulous and so initially
(04:54):
he would tell kids in his school that his family
is very wealthy, that they had bought a mansion, that
they drove a pair of range Rovers, And then in
time he started to actually invent a whole knew alter
ego and he claimed that he was the son of
a very wealthy Russian oligarch.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
His parents had no idea about this life that he
had created. After he died, they it's revealed to them,
could they make sense of it? Petruck no.
Speaker 3 (05:25):
I mean, part of what I was trying to do
with this book was look at the way in which
any of us as parents when we're parenting an adolescent,
and I would say, you know, perhaps, particularly these days
when everybody's on their phones, you know, the child that
we thought we knew can start to become somebody unrecognizable.
(05:46):
And the Bretlers, Matthew and Rochelle are their names. They
were aware that Zach was changing in adolescence and that
he was sort of rejecting the kind of conventional middle
class values that they had and really becoming enamored with
these sort of gangster capitalist type folks in the culture.
But they had no inkling that he was going around
with completely invented alter ego, pretending that he was the
(06:09):
son of a Russian oligarch. So all of this came
at them very quickly in the aftermath of his death,
and a lot of what the book is about is
these parents having to kind of become detectives after their
son's death. You know that they loved their son and
they're devastated by the loss of him, but they needed
to figure out a how did he die? How did
this actually happen? But kind of more importantly and on
(06:31):
a deeper level, b who was he really in life?
You know, was there a side of him that they
had never understood when he was living under their roof.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
Because one of the things that's going on in the
back of your mind when you're reading this book is
what drives the young man to create a whole new
persona to lie to such an extreme.
Speaker 3 (06:49):
Yeah, I mean, I'm happy to hear you say that,
because the other aspect of this for me was, you know,
this is in part a story about London. London is
itself kind of a character in this book. And one
of the questions for me, you know, I lived in
London in the year two thousand and two thousand and one.
I lived there so quarter of a century ago, so
this was the city that I thought I knew quite well.
(07:09):
The question for me was, what is it about London
today that would make it the kind of place where
a teenage kid with you know, really any opportunity he
would like ahead of him. This is a boy who
could have done anything, He had lots of opportunities. What
is it about London that would make him aspire to
be the son of a Russian Oligarch.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
Tell us a little bit about the London that you
sort of delve into. It's more really, it's recent history,
isn't it. The demise of manufacturing in the docks, and
the rise of the financial sector, the fact that London
was very happy to welcome and accommodate Russians and their money.
It's sort of a whole new world, isn't it.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
It is, Yeah, I mean it's interesting. You know, if
you were to go to London and say nineteen fifty,
it pretty much resembled the city that you would read
about in Charles Dickens, right. It was a big port city,
It was one of the most important shipping cities in
the world. It was this kind of, you know, still
a sort of imperial city in a way, and it
was a manufacturing city city where things were made. And
(08:08):
then in the space of about twenty five years, all
the docks in London closed. So this whole industry that
has sustained really the kind of eastern half of the
city for centuries just vanished practically overnight, and eighty percent
of the manufacturing jobs disappeared, and so London was left
with a bit of an identity crisis. It had to
sort of decide, you know, what kind of a city
(08:28):
are we going to be now? And really, with the
arrival of Margaret Thatcher, you start to see London transform
as a destination for money and people who had it,
kind of a commodious second home for the global plutocracy.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
And so obviously Zech was kind of exposed to this.
To the Russian oligas as they arrived in London to
inspire him, I presume to come up with this other PERSONA.
Speaker 3 (08:55):
Yeah, exactly. So Zach, at the age of thirteen, ends
up at this school called mill Hill, which is on
the northern outskirts of London. His big brother had gotten
into a school called University College School, which is a
very elite, academically rigorous private school in London, and Zach
had always expected that he would go too. But when
he applied he didn't get in. He was rejected, and
(09:17):
he took this rejection really hard. He applied again and
again was rejected, and so he ends up at this
school called mill Hill. Now mill Hill was a very expensive,
fee paying school, but it wasn't a selective academically, and
when Zach arrived there he found that he was surrounded
by the children of oligarchs. By this next generation of
(09:39):
just supremely wealthy Londoners whose parents were foreign plutocrats who
had made a second home in London, wanted to send
their kids to posh English schools. And so Zach, at
a young age, you know, as an adolescent, is suddenly
exposed to these kids who have a kind of swagger.
You know, they sort of carry themselves in a very
(10:01):
sort of preening, macho way. On the weekends they party
an expensive hotel all as they dress in designer clothes
to go to class. There's a story I tell in
the in the book about how the dormitories at the
school were an eight minute walk from the classrooms and
on cold days, these kids would summon ubers to take
(10:21):
them from the dorm to class rather than walk. And
so Zach is exposed to these kids, and he really
becomes kind of enthrall to them. You know, he becomes
obsessed with wealth. And I should say he was a
creature of Instagram, of social media. And we've all had
that experience of being on our phones or on an
iPad and you hesitate for just a moment with your
(10:43):
finger as you're scrolling through something, and the algorithm figures
out that you have an interest and it starts to
serve you more. And so as Zach became interested in
supercars and luxury apartments and mansions, he started seeing more
and more of that online and he kind of went
deeper into his own preoccupation.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
Patrick, I don't want to give away too much of
how the story unfolds, because every chapter is like, where
are you taking us now? It's an incredible story. But
one thing that baffled me, and I know that I'm
pretty sure that it Befel's experients Rachel and Michelle as well,
was Zach wasn't just hanging around with young local thugs
his own age. He found himself in a very adult
(11:22):
world with very dangerous adults, and you start to sort
of I mean, there's just so many questions that arise
as to how he ended up there and how he
managed to kind of pull things off to the extent
he did.
Speaker 3 (11:37):
Yeah, you know, it was a fascinating thing that happened
where Zach was very taken with a certain kind of
hustle culture. And I think that in some respects this
would be familiar to people in New Zealand, as it
is in London or New York or anywhere else where.
The culture now kind of writ large, I think, is
very very taken with kind of capitalistic success stories, these
(12:02):
sort of big swaggering personas. I remember a point where
my I have two sons, and my younger boy was
six years old and he came home from school one
day and he was talking about Elon Musk and I thought,
how do you even know who that is? You know,
what is it about the culture? Now, that would mean
that a six year old had any idea of who
that is. But Zach grew up in that culture and
(12:25):
wanting to kind of hustle and make it big, and
make it big quickly. And in his new Guys. As
the son of an oligarch, he was introduced to these
older men, men who seemed to him to have everything
that he wanted, these kind of glamorous playboy businessmen in London. Now,
there were a few things going on here. One was
(12:45):
that these men believed that Zach had access to hundreds
of millions of pounds to invest. So you can kind
of pretty quickly figure out what these men in their
forties and fifties saw in him. They thought that there
was a prize for them in it. But what he
didn't realize is that he was not the only impostor here,
that some of these guys were pretending to be some
(13:06):
thing that they weren't. So there's one big figure in
the book, a man named ak Barshamji who seems like
a kind of jet setting, high flying businessman, and little
does Zach know that shortly before they met, ak Barshamji
had actually declared bankruptcy. And Akhbarshamji then declared introduces Zach
to a friend of his who is named Vernda Sharma,
(13:29):
and he seems like a kind of a vuncular, retired businessman,
kind of living out his days in a luxury apartment
overlooking the Thames. But Verrinder Sharma, it turns out, was
a gangster, a leg breaker, better known in the London
underworld by the nickname Indian Dave. And so bizarrely, this
is a story not just of one person pretending to
(13:50):
be someone he's not, but of three different people each
pretending to each other.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
All of your books, Patrick, in depth investigative pieces. You
spend a lot of time with the story and the
people in them. Do these stories and the people did
they stay with you or are you able to sort
of leave them behind once you've completed a book.
Speaker 3 (14:11):
They do linger with me. I mean, I think there's
no way, there's no way for them not to. In
this case, it was a particularly tricky one in the
sense that I was writing about a family, you know,
in which there were these two sons who were quite competitive,
and then one of those sons died in adolescence. And
I have two sons of my own who were close
(14:33):
in age and also quite competitive with one another and
also going through adolescence. And I think if anything that
gave me more compassion for Matthew and Rachelle. It meant
that I was able to really kind of see and
resonate with the predicament that they experienced and try and
capture that on the page for readers. But I should
(14:53):
also say that, you know, it's funny we're so used
to hearing about the decline of the written word and
the contraction of the news industry, but I think it's
important for those of us who do this work to
remember that there is still a power in journalism, and
with that power comes a certain responsibility. And so in
this case, I was writing about the private trauma of
(15:15):
a family, and that is an undertaking and a responsibility
that I take really seriously. And so what that meant
is I have a duty of care to this family.
You know, of course I have journalistic objectivity. I have
written the book in a kind of scrupulously factual way,
and I should say there are things in the book
family secrets and so forth, that the Butlers were somewhat
(15:35):
uncomfortable with. But I've also felt that it was important
for me to look out for them to know that
it is a lot of trust they've placed in me
in kind of entrusting this very private personal story for
me to capture in the pages of this book. And
so that too, is an ongoing relationship.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
You know.
Speaker 3 (15:52):
I've been texting with Rachelle Butler this morning even as
I'm here in New Zealand, because it's a strange experience
for them to see the book out and in bookshops,
to see strangers reading it, and so I want to
kind of stay close to them and make sure that
they're all right.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
Well, I very much appreciate them sharing their story with you,
and you did an excellent job on the book, Patrick
Red and Keith. It's been a delight to talk to you.
Thank you so much, Oh, thank you. That was investigative
journalist and best selling author Patrick red and Keith. The
book we were talking about is London Falling. It's in
stores now.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
For more from the Sunday session with Francesca Rudkin, listen
live to News Talks it' B from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio
You're listening to the Sunday Session podcast with Francesca Rudkin
from News Talks.
Speaker 2 (00:11):
EDB Award winning journalist Patrick rad and Keith is the
master of taking complex true crime stories, mysterious death's, greedy families,
or shadowy underworlds and bringing them to light through gripping storytelling.
Patrick has written six books, all best sellers. You may
be familiar with his previous books like Empire of Pain
and Say Nothing. His latest book is London Falling, a
(00:32):
story of the London teenager Zach Brenchler, who mysteriously fell
to his death in twenty nineteen. While trying to understand
their son's death, Zach's parents undercover a fantasy life in
which Zach had been posing as a wealthy Russian oligarch.
It's another incredible read from Patrick. I couldn't put it down.
He's in the country this week for the Auckland Writers' Festival.
I'm thrilled to finally have him back on the show.
(00:52):
Patrick rad and Keif, good morning.
Speaker 3 (00:55):
I'm so delighted to be with you.
Speaker 2 (00:56):
Can I start with your career because I first spoke
to you hour for Empire of Pain. You now have
six books, all hugely successful. How do you keep finding
these great story worries to write about?
Speaker 3 (01:08):
Well, I try and just go out and kind of
remain curious. I feel with every passing year more strongly
that you're not going to find the best story ideas
on the internet. So you have to kind of get
your nose out of your phone and start conversations with strangers.
Which is where this article actually or this you know,
what started as an article and then became this book
actually came from is I just got to chatting with
(01:29):
a total stranger and he told me this story.
Speaker 2 (01:32):
Is there anything you won't write about? Any ideas or
opportunities that have come your way that you've turned down.
Speaker 3 (01:39):
I haven't covered a war, you know, I have small children,
And even though there is sometimes you know, some degree
of nefarious, with some nefariousness with some of the characters
that I interact with in my stories, I haven't gone
to a war zone. And that's a thing that I,
you know, at least at this juncture in my life,
I don't know I would do.
Speaker 2 (01:59):
Nefarious is a good word. I mean, is there a
certain amount of danger digging up some of these stories?
I know that you've had legal threats and the like.
How do you deal with that?
Speaker 3 (02:09):
Yeah, it's funny. You know. I've spent years writing about
gangsters and drug lords and all of these underworld types.
But the only people who ever actually threatened me are
the rich people. It's the billionaires who hired their lawyers
and their pr people to come after you. You know.
For this book, for London Falling, I got to know
a guy named Andy Baker, who was a long time
(02:30):
English gangster who was briefly out of prison and is
now back in prison. But I think with relationships like that,
you know, I try and be as transparent as possible,
and I try and make sure that I'm careful obviously,
and generally things are okay. One advantage I have is
that I can leave. So when I think about my book,
for instance, about the Troubles, say nothing. If I lived
in West Belfast and my wife worked there and my
(02:52):
kids went to school there, it would have been harder
for me to write that book the way that I did.
I had a passport, I could always leave at the
end of the day, and That's often been the case
across the stories that I've written in my career.
Speaker 2 (03:04):
Interested that you brought up Andy Baker, because when you
meet him, he did make it very clear in a
non threatening way that he knew the name of your
children and your wife and things like that, didn't he.
Speaker 3 (03:14):
He did, And I don't even know that I would
call it necessarily non threatening. It wasn't explicitly threatening. But
this is the way that these guys work is that
he kind of shook my hand. He got right into
my personal space, you know, a lot of unbroken eye contact,
and with a big smile on his face, he asked
after my wife and kids by name, and I hadn't
told him their names. And that's sort of the way
these folks operate, is that Andy was telling me, you know,
(03:37):
I know you have a vulnerability. I know you have
a family. I should say, though, as I get into
in the book, Andy also has a family. He has children,
you know, he has parents. And I try and sort
of situate even the more colorful, disreputable characters within the
frameworks that they come from. You know that we all
exist in this matrix of family and relationships.
Speaker 2 (03:58):
Are you absolutely find the human in them? Tell me
about zech.
Speaker 3 (04:02):
So Zach Brettler was a boy who was born in
the year two thousand in London, and he was a
really fun little kid.
Speaker 1 (04:10):
He was.
Speaker 3 (04:11):
Kind of quick witted, he was unpredictable, he was a
little zingy. He would sort of do jokes and accents
and imitations. And as he got older, he grew up
in a loving, i would say, upper middle class family
in central London. As he got older, he became really
taken with the culture of wealth in London, really obsessed
(04:32):
with supercars and luxury real estate and the kind of blingy, gaudy,
excessive wealth that had come to characterize the city during
his lifetime. And slowly he started to graduate from being
kind of a fun conversationalist to somebody who told lies.
He became a bit of a fabulous and so initially
(04:54):
he would tell kids in his school that his family
is very wealthy, that they had bought a mansion, that
they drove a pair of range Rovers, And then in
time he started to actually invent a whole knew alter
ego and he claimed that he was the son of
a very wealthy Russian oligarch.
Speaker 2 (05:12):
His parents had no idea about this life that he
had created. After he died, they it's revealed to them,
could they make sense of it? Petruck no.
Speaker 3 (05:25):
I mean, part of what I was trying to do
with this book was look at the way in which
any of us as parents when we're parenting an adolescent,
and I would say, you know, perhaps, particularly these days
when everybody's on their phones, you know, the child that
we thought we knew can start to become somebody unrecognizable.
(05:46):
And the Bretlers, Matthew and Rochelle are their names. They
were aware that Zach was changing in adolescence and that
he was sort of rejecting the kind of conventional middle
class values that they had and really becoming enamored with
these sort of gangster capitalist type folks in the culture.
But they had no inkling that he was going around
with completely invented alter ego, pretending that he was the
(06:09):
son of a Russian oligarch. So all of this came
at them very quickly in the aftermath of his death,
and a lot of what the book is about is
these parents having to kind of become detectives after their
son's death. You know that they loved their son and
they're devastated by the loss of him, but they needed
to figure out a how did he die? How did
this actually happen? But kind of more importantly and on
(06:31):
a deeper level, b who was he really in life?
You know, was there a side of him that they
had never understood when he was living under their roof.
Speaker 2 (06:40):
Because one of the things that's going on in the
back of your mind when you're reading this book is
what drives the young man to create a whole new
persona to lie to such an extreme.
Speaker 3 (06:49):
Yeah, I mean, I'm happy to hear you say that,
because the other aspect of this for me was, you know,
this is in part a story about London. London is
itself kind of a character in this book. And one
of the questions for me, you know, I lived in
London in the year two thousand and two thousand and one.
I lived there so quarter of a century ago, so
this was the city that I thought I knew quite well.
(07:09):
The question for me was, what is it about London
today that would make it the kind of place where
a teenage kid with you know, really any opportunity he
would like ahead of him. This is a boy who
could have done anything, He had lots of opportunities. What
is it about London that would make him aspire to
be the son of a Russian Oligarch.
Speaker 2 (07:28):
Tell us a little bit about the London that you
sort of delve into. It's more really, it's recent history,
isn't it. The demise of manufacturing in the docks, and
the rise of the financial sector, the fact that London
was very happy to welcome and accommodate Russians and their money.
It's sort of a whole new world, isn't it.
Speaker 3 (07:46):
It is, Yeah, I mean it's interesting. You know, if
you were to go to London and say nineteen fifty,
it pretty much resembled the city that you would read
about in Charles Dickens, right. It was a big port city,
It was one of the most important shipping cities in
the world. It was this kind of, you know, still
a sort of imperial city in a way, and it
was a manufacturing city city where things were made. And
(08:08):
then in the space of about twenty five years, all
the docks in London closed. So this whole industry that
has sustained really the kind of eastern half of the
city for centuries just vanished practically overnight, and eighty percent
of the manufacturing jobs disappeared, and so London was left
with a bit of an identity crisis. It had to
sort of decide, you know, what kind of a city
(08:28):
are we going to be now? And really, with the
arrival of Margaret Thatcher, you start to see London transform
as a destination for money and people who had it,
kind of a commodious second home for the global plutocracy.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
And so obviously Zech was kind of exposed to this.
To the Russian oligas as they arrived in London to
inspire him, I presume to come up with this other PERSONA.
Speaker 3 (08:55):
Yeah, exactly. So Zach, at the age of thirteen, ends
up at this school called mill Hill, which is on
the northern outskirts of London. His big brother had gotten
into a school called University College School, which is a
very elite, academically rigorous private school in London, and Zach
had always expected that he would go too. But when
he applied he didn't get in. He was rejected, and
(09:17):
he took this rejection really hard. He applied again and
again was rejected, and so he ends up at this
school called mill Hill. Now mill Hill was a very expensive,
fee paying school, but it wasn't a selective academically, and
when Zach arrived there he found that he was surrounded
by the children of oligarchs. By this next generation of
(09:39):
just supremely wealthy Londoners whose parents were foreign plutocrats who
had made a second home in London, wanted to send
their kids to posh English schools. And so Zach, at
a young age, you know, as an adolescent, is suddenly
exposed to these kids who have a kind of swagger.
You know, they sort of carry themselves in a very
(10:01):
sort of preening, macho way. On the weekends they party
an expensive hotel all as they dress in designer clothes
to go to class. There's a story I tell in
the in the book about how the dormitories at the
school were an eight minute walk from the classrooms and
on cold days, these kids would summon ubers to take
(10:21):
them from the dorm to class rather than walk. And
so Zach is exposed to these kids, and he really
becomes kind of enthrall to them. You know, he becomes
obsessed with wealth. And I should say he was a
creature of Instagram, of social media. And we've all had
that experience of being on our phones or on an
iPad and you hesitate for just a moment with your
(10:43):
finger as you're scrolling through something, and the algorithm figures
out that you have an interest and it starts to
serve you more. And so as Zach became interested in
supercars and luxury apartments and mansions, he started seeing more
and more of that online and he kind of went
deeper into his own preoccupation.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
Patrick, I don't want to give away too much of
how the story unfolds, because every chapter is like, where
are you taking us now? It's an incredible story. But
one thing that baffled me, and I know that I'm
pretty sure that it Befel's experients Rachel and Michelle as well,
was Zach wasn't just hanging around with young local thugs
his own age. He found himself in a very adult
(11:22):
world with very dangerous adults, and you start to sort
of I mean, there's just so many questions that arise
as to how he ended up there and how he
managed to kind of pull things off to the extent
he did.
Speaker 3 (11:37):
Yeah, you know, it was a fascinating thing that happened
where Zach was very taken with a certain kind of
hustle culture. And I think that in some respects this
would be familiar to people in New Zealand, as it
is in London or New York or anywhere else where.
The culture now kind of writ large, I think, is
very very taken with kind of capitalistic success stories, these
(12:02):
sort of big swaggering personas. I remember a point where
my I have two sons, and my younger boy was
six years old and he came home from school one
day and he was talking about Elon Musk and I thought,
how do you even know who that is? You know,
what is it about the culture? Now, that would mean
that a six year old had any idea of who
that is. But Zach grew up in that culture and
(12:25):
wanting to kind of hustle and make it big, and
make it big quickly. And in his new Guys. As
the son of an oligarch, he was introduced to these
older men, men who seemed to him to have everything
that he wanted, these kind of glamorous playboy businessmen in London. Now,
there were a few things going on here. One was
(12:45):
that these men believed that Zach had access to hundreds
of millions of pounds to invest. So you can kind
of pretty quickly figure out what these men in their
forties and fifties saw in him. They thought that there
was a prize for them in it. But what he
didn't realize is that he was not the only impostor here,
that some of these guys were pretending to be some
(13:06):
thing that they weren't. So there's one big figure in
the book, a man named ak Barshamji who seems like
a kind of jet setting, high flying businessman, and little
does Zach know that shortly before they met, ak Barshamji
had actually declared bankruptcy. And Akhbarshamji then declared introduces Zach
to a friend of his who is named Vernda Sharma,
(13:29):
and he seems like a kind of a vuncular, retired businessman,
kind of living out his days in a luxury apartment
overlooking the Thames. But Verrinder Sharma, it turns out, was
a gangster, a leg breaker, better known in the London
underworld by the nickname Indian Dave. And so bizarrely, this
is a story not just of one person pretending to
(13:50):
be someone he's not, but of three different people each
pretending to each other.
Speaker 2 (13:55):
All of your books, Patrick, in depth investigative pieces. You
spend a lot of time with the story and the
people in them. Do these stories and the people did
they stay with you or are you able to sort
of leave them behind once you've completed a book.
Speaker 3 (14:11):
They do linger with me. I mean, I think there's
no way, there's no way for them not to. In
this case, it was a particularly tricky one in the
sense that I was writing about a family, you know,
in which there were these two sons who were quite competitive,
and then one of those sons died in adolescence. And
I have two sons of my own who were close
(14:33):
in age and also quite competitive with one another and
also going through adolescence. And I think if anything that
gave me more compassion for Matthew and Rachelle. It meant
that I was able to really kind of see and
resonate with the predicament that they experienced and try and
capture that on the page for readers. But I should
(14:53):
also say that, you know, it's funny we're so used
to hearing about the decline of the written word and
the contraction of the news industry, but I think it's
important for those of us who do this work to
remember that there is still a power in journalism, and
with that power comes a certain responsibility. And so in
this case, I was writing about the private trauma of
(15:15):
a family, and that is an undertaking and a responsibility
that I take really seriously. And so what that meant
is I have a duty of care to this family.
You know, of course I have journalistic objectivity. I have
written the book in a kind of scrupulously factual way,
and I should say there are things in the book
family secrets and so forth, that the Butlers were somewhat
(15:35):
uncomfortable with. But I've also felt that it was important
for me to look out for them to know that
it is a lot of trust they've placed in me
in kind of entrusting this very private personal story for
me to capture in the pages of this book. And
so that too, is an ongoing relationship.
Speaker 1 (15:52):
You know.
Speaker 3 (15:52):
I've been texting with Rachelle Butler this morning even as
I'm here in New Zealand, because it's a strange experience
for them to see the book out and in bookshops,
to see strangers reading it, and so I want to
kind of stay close to them and make sure that
they're all right.
Speaker 2 (16:07):
Well, I very much appreciate them sharing their story with you,
and you did an excellent job on the book, Patrick
Red and Keith. It's been a delight to talk to you.
Thank you so much, Oh, thank you. That was investigative
journalist and best selling author Patrick red and Keith. The
book we were talking about is London Falling. It's in
stores now.
Speaker 1 (16:25):
For more from the Sunday session with Francesca Rudkin, listen
live to News Talks it' B from nine am Sunday,
or follow the podcast on iHeartRadio
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