By any measure, Zac Brettler was a precocious kid. He was “scarcely out of diapers” by the time he had memorized the lyrics of the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Going Back to Cali” and could regale his family with a word-perfect rendition. At five, he had the wit of a pint-size Groucho Marx. When asked by an older girl to read something, Zac didn’t miss a beat: “I didn’t bring my glasses,” he replied. Not only did Zac not wear glasses; he couldn’t yet read. By 10, his upper-middle-class, Jewish parents, Rachelle and Matthew Brettler, were astonished to hear him advising relatives to upgrade the family car to a Mercedes. In London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth, New Yorker staff writer Patrick Radden Keefe deploys his considerable investigative skills to piece together the tragic story of that once precocious kid, whose life was brutally snuffed out at the age of 19.
It is easy to see why Keefe, whose books and New Yorker pieces often explore con men and hustlers leading double lives, might have been drawn to the story of a young man whose troubles started when he adopted a fictitious alter ego as the son of an absent Russian billionaire. Zac Brettler, who sometimes passed himself off as Zac Ismailov, was a devotee of the “fake it till you make it” philosophy. But in the gilded, guttering world of London’shigh rollers, it was only a matter of time before this childish game veered dangerously out of control.
