| After Zac Brettler mysteriously plummeted into the Thames, his grieving parents discovered that he’d been posing as an oligarch’s son. Would the police help them solve the puzzle of his death?  Photographs by Lewis Khan for The New Yorker In the middle of a November night in 2019, a surveillance camera captured footage of a young man walking out onto the balcony of a fifth-floor apartment, and pacing from one end to the other. Moments later, it showed him jumping to his death. The person in the footage was Zac Brettler, a nineteen-year-old from an affluent neighborhood in London. At boarding school, he’d encountered the offspring of plutocrats from Russia, Kazakhstan, and China, which fed an obsession with a culture of shady dealmaking and ostentatious wealth that seemingly pushed him to concoct grandiose claims about his background and make promises he was unable to keep. In a riveting piece of reporting from this week’s issue, Patrick Radden Keefe attempts to unravel the fictions that Brettler spread while he was alive, and the strange circumstances that surround his death. “One reason such deceptions are so common on the Internet is that, in the anonymity of cyberspace, they’re generally low risk,” Keefe writes, of the scams that Brettler appears to have been pursuing. “It’s more dangerous to hoodwink people you know in real life.” Plus: For more twists and turns from Patrick Radden Keefe, read about the surreal case of a C.I.A. hacker’s revenge; the notorious gangster exposed by his own sister; and the detectives who never forget a face. | 
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