Patrick Radden Keefe

And he got to this school, Mill Hill, at 13 and found himself surrounded by the children of oligarchs, the children of very wealthy foreigners in many cases who had come to London and wanted to send their kids to good English schools.

And these kids were everything his parents weren't.

They were...

kind of blingy and a little bit ostentatious with their wealth and also just supremely wealthy in a way that even to somebody as well off as Zach seemed just kind of unimaginably rich.

And he was in, I think, a way that maybe isn't totally unusual for an adolescent boy.

He was kind of taken in by that.

He was very seduced by the swagger of these kids.

Yeah, I mean, I should say, first of all, that his parents were not aware of any of this.

His parents knew that he was having a difficult adolescence, but it was really only much later that they became aware that he had been lying.

He'd been at first telling lies in school to kids saying that the family was much wealthier than they were.

He claimed that his father was an arms dealer, which Matthew very much is not.

He said they lived in a mansion in St.

John's Wood and that the parents drove two Range Rovers and those kinds of lies.

And then eventually he graduated to the bigger lie.

which was he invented a whole alter ego and started telling people that his name was Zach Ismailoff and that he was the son of a Russian oligarch living in London and that his father was a billionaire and that he was his father's right-hand man and that he had hundreds of millions of pounds to invest.

Well, I think there was this strange moment and you've identified it.

It's this it's really this kind of 25 year period between the mid 1950s and then about 1980 when London just dramatically transforms and the city that happens.

had existed for hundreds of years kind of ceases to exist because all of the docks shut down and the manufacturing sector during that period in London, 80% of the jobs disappear in about a two-decade period.

And so the city has to kind of decide, well, who are we going to be now?

You know, what is London if it's not a port city?