The New Yorker staff writer, who has chronicled political violence under the Irish Republican Army and the opioid epidemic, traces how a teen came to impersonate an oligarch’s son.
April 17, 2026
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When Patrick Radden Keefe was living in London while shooting the TV adaptation of his book “Say Nothing,” he heard about a teen-ager who fell from a luxurious apartment tower under mysterious circumstances. As he looked into it, he learned that the boy, Zac Brettler, had assumed an alternate identity as the son of a Russian oligarch, and had connected with dangerous people—just as mysterious. His story in The New Yorker, “A Teen’s Fatal Plunge into the London Underworld,” became the basis of his new book “London Falling.” “It’s not crime, per se, that interests me,” Radden Keefe tells David Remnick, “but the intermingling of the licit and illicit worlds, and the ways in which people deviate from a kind of conventional morality by degrees—and then the stories that they tell themselves about doing that.” He shares recordings from Brettler’s parents of conversations that they had as they sought to uncover what had happened to their son.
Further reading:
- “London Falling,” by Patrick Radden Keefe
- “A Teen’s Fatal Plunge Into the London Underworld,” by Patrick Radden Keefe
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