Patrick Radden Keefe on parenting in the age of mega-wealth

What do you do when your child gets caught up in hustle culture? As Zac Brettler reached adolescence, his parents Rachelle and Matthew began to feel that they were losing their son. He questioned why the family didn’t have a nicer car or apartment, and told his parents that he looked up to people like Vladimir Putin. It wasn’t until after Zac’s death at 19 that his parents discovered his secret life posing as the son of a Russian oligarch and dealing with London’s elite upper class … and its criminal underworld.

Patrick Radden Keefe’s new book, “London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search for Truth,” explores the mystery surrounding Zac’s death and the events leading up to it, as his parents tried to do everything they could to intervene. “On the one hand, you want to kind of smother your kid, you want to sort of put them in a straight jacket, and hang onto them until they get through adolescence,” says Keefe. “On the other hand, you can't do that.”

Reporting on the Brettler family shaped Keefe’s own approach to parenting: “I want to do everything I can to kind of keep the communications channels open and feel as though I'm seeing them fully,” Keefe tells Khrais. “But also just with a real humility, humility and an understanding that the most difficult thing about parenthood is no matter how much you love them and how much you want to help them, there is ultimately a limit on your control.”

A few takeaways from this episode:

• Proximity to the ultra-wealthy played a part in Zac’s transformation. He attended Mill Hill School, a private school attended by, as Keefe describes them, “the children of the global super-rich.” He became infatuated with their lifestyles and began telling elaborate lies to draw them in.

• London underwent a dramatic cultural change in the early 2000s, when oligarchs from the former Soviet Union moved en masse to London. Keefe told us, “Zac grows up in a London where…there’s just generally speaking, a level of material excess…that would’ve looked strange to people in London several decades ago.”

• Keefe relates to the Brettler family’s attempt to keep their kids grounded. “We may be living in a culture that’s saturated by these images of extreme wealth,” he says. “A lot of what I’m trying to do day to day is tell my sons, that’s not where it’s at.”

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