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Early one winter morning in November 2019, a surveillance camera at MI6’s headquarters on the Thames registered the silhouette of a young man on the balcony of an apartment complex on the opposite side of the river. It was dark but the fifth-floor balcony was brightly lit. The man seemed to hesitate a moment before he jumped. On the way down his hip struck the embankment wall and, possibly unconscious as he hit the water, he drowned. His body was found five hours later face down in riverbank mud, shirtless and in tracksuit bottoms. The autopsy revealed multiple injuries (including a broken jaw) that were caused either by the fall or by a prior assault; the pathologist was unable to determine which.
The Metropolitan police identified the body as that of Zac Brettler, aged 19. He had spent the night he died with a gangland debt collector and drug trafficker named Verinder Sharma. Sharma, 55, said he owned the apartment and allowed Zac to stay with him in the complex rent-free. But phone records and CCTV showed that a third man, Akbar Shamji, had been present that night. A cryptocurrency and real estate trader who lived in Mayfair, Shamji denied any wrongdoing during police interrogation, and continues to maintain his innocence. He stated that Brettler was a compulsive liar who had pretended to be the son of a dead Russian oligarch in order to befriend him and his business associate Sharma. In a further bizarre imposture, Brettler used the alter-ego “Zac Ismailov” and even affected a Russian accent. Shamji could not be arrested on suspicion of murder since he was not in the apartment at the time of the fall. As for Sharma, the M16 camera provided proof that he had not pushed Brettler over the balcony. If these men did not cause the teenager’s death, who did?
In a scrupulously researched work of narrative nonfiction that started life as a long-form piece for the New Yorker, Patrick Radden Keefe reconstructs the events leading up to that night. The luxury Thameside high-rise where Brettler met his end – Riverwalk – was a far cry from his middle-class home in Maida Vale. In Keefe’s narrative, the building stands as an emblem of corruption in a London tainted by oligarchic interests and corporate greed. Brettler’s death, he argues, was the consequence of both his entrapment by criminal minds and the dangerous allure of speculatively-acquired wealth.
At his public school in Mill Hill, north London, Brettler was known for his tall stories. He fibbed about his parents’ jobs and became obsessed with gangster movies. He took to wearing a sharp suit and covered his chest in Russian gang tattoos (temporary ones bought on the internet). Somehow, he was able to make the wildest nonsense about himself seem credible. He told his mother one day that he was off to play blackjack at a Berkeley Square casino; he bragged to his father of his Kazakh and Nigerian business contacts. Was Brettler precocious or weaving a fantasy? He longed to be like the Russian boarders, who partied at Annabel’s and shopped at Harrods.
His reality, though comfortable, was less steeped in glamour. His parents were journalist Rachelle Gryn Brettler and financial services director Matthew Brettler. In 1939, at the age of 13, Matthew’s father had left Germany for the UK on the last of the Kindertransports; Rachelle’s father, Czechoslovak-born Hugo Gryn, survived Auschwitz and lost nearly all his family in the camps. In the UK he assimilated into the Anglo-Jewish community and became a much-loved, eminent rabbi. But he was not everything he seemed to be. He lied about attending Cambridge University and fathered a secret child by a woman in his congregation. Gryn’s children hoped the affair could be kept from the press, but it was exposed by the News of the World in 1988. Keefe notes the resonances between Gryn’s secrets and the fabulism of his grandson Zac. Rachelle Bettler found herself both the daughter of one man who had lived a double life and the mother of another.
Zac appears to have met the rakishly handsome Shamji some time in 2019, the year he died. The son of a Ugandan Asian businessman, the 47-year-old posed as an accomplished entrepreneur. Beneath the suave manner was someone Keefe says was saddled with a string of unpaid debts. He and Zac discussed the idea of launching a line of cannabis-infused skincare products and investing in a mine in Kazakhstan. Shamji was in awe of his father, Abdul, a devotee of Thatcherite conservatism who turned out to have built his trading interests entirely on unsecured borrowing. (He was jailed for perjury in 1989.) Akbar saw Zac as a “fatted calf” who could be taken advantage of financially; after all, wasn’t he the son of an oligarch?
It’s not clear exactly when Zac met his Riverwalk landlord Verinder Sharma. Known to the criminal underworld as “Indian Dave”, he hoped to take his own cut from the teenager’s supposed vast fortune. Sharma was capable of appalling violence: Keefe describes cocaine-fuelled punishment beatings and the suspected murder of a rival enforcer. To Zac, however, he styled himself as a well-intentioned father figure. Zac, in his turn, spun the yarn that his Dubai-based Swiss mother had barred him from inheriting high-end properties, but that he was still worth £6 billion. Sharma and Shamji became suspicious and resolved to confront Zac that evening in the apartment. Hours later, he fell from the balcony. The police were unable to charge Sharma or Shamji, and Sharma died of a suspected drug overdose in 2020. To this day, Zac’s parents insist that their son did not take his own life; rather, he was trying to escape a furious Sharma. Keefe believes the police missed vital evidence and wonders why they did not test blood-like smears on the bathroom and bedroom walls of the apartment.
London Falling, grimly absorbing from start to finish, opens a window on to a world of financial dirty work and Walter Mitty-like fantasies of aspirational wealth. Keefe, perhaps best known now for his books including Say Nothing and Empire of Pain, writes in the page-turning tradition of Gay Talese and Joseph Mitchell. He draws extensively from transcripts of police interrogations, emails, letters, and security camera recordings, but above all on hours of conversation with Rachelle and Matthew Brettler. For more than two years, Zac’s parents shared memories and reflections on the life of their much-loved child. They suffered a loss that can never be compensated – and for what? At the time of his fall, Zac was found to have all of £4 in his bank account.
