London Falling: Deception and a death without answers in a gilded city

How a teenager in London crafted a double life as the son of a Russian oligarch, and paid for it with his life under suspicious circumstances

London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth

By Patrick Radden Keefe

Published by Picador

361 pages  ₹899

  The last time Rachelle Brettler heard from her son Zac was on the night of November 29, 2019. His email to her at 2.03 a m said, “All good x.” Twenty minutes later, he appeared on the fifth-floor balcony of Riverwalk, a luxurious apartment building on the bank of the River Thames and, a minute later, he jumped. He was 19 years old.

 

Zac Brettler’s suspicious death and the circumstances surrounding it are the subject of Patrick Radden Keefe’s latest book London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth.  In telling Zac’s story, Mr Keefe also narrates the story of a city where wealth and power have become the unseen forces that shape the metropolis.

 

The police, after two years of “intensive investigation”, seemed “unable to deliver any definitive conclusions”, but the lead detective repeatedly returned to the possibility of suicide while speaking to Rachelle and her husband Matthew. This was something that Zac’s parents struggled to accept, not only because they deemed it out of character for their son, but also because the circumstances surrounding his death were suspicious. When he died, Zac was in the apartment with Verinder Sharma, also known as Indian Dave or ID, a man Mr Keefe links to a history of violence. Zac had also become associated with Akbar Shamji, whom the book describes as a “dilettante posing as an accomplished entrepreneur” and a “confidence man”.

 

Zac had not entered their orbit as Zac Brettler, a young man from a family that was comfortably off but not rich. Instead, he entered their lives calling himself Zac Ismailov, the son of a Russian oligarch. His parents were surprised to learn that this was not a one-off case. He often presented himself as someone from a moneyed background. This pretence came from his penchant for leading a life different from his own, which gained roots during his time at Mill Hill, a school where many of his schoolmates came from extremely rich backgrounds. The allure of money and the moneyed class made Zac pull away from his family as well. As the distance between him and his family increased, he came into contact with Akbar Shamji, a seemingly rich man who appeared to have taken Zac under his wing and who later introduced him to Verinder Sharma. Both Sharma and Shamji blamed Zac’s death on his alleged drug habit, expressed surprise upon learning that he wasn’t actually rich, and washed their hands of any responsibility — direct or indirect — for his death.

 

Mr Keefe launches a thorough investigation into Zac’s death, diving deep into the circumstances surrounding his fatal fall. This includes speaking to people with whom the police either had only a cursory conversation or didn’t speak to at all. He unearths aspects that might have given a different outcome to Zac’s family had those leads been followed. But his research never turns Zac and his family into mere subjects. London Falling has the force of a crime thriller but Mr Keefe doesn’t let his readers forget that the characters are actual people and the repercussions are real. It’s the nature of his subject that Mr Keefe doesn’t really reach a final conclusion. But his theory that Zac jumped in an attempt to escape the worse fate that awaited him inside the apartment is based on the foundation of his meticulous research, even if there is no final closure.

 

Mr Keefe devotes a couple of chapters to covering the backgrounds of the various characters involved in the story. While these might appear to be digressions, they help develop portraits of not just the people involved in Zac’s story but also of London, as Mr Keefe links what happened to Zac with the character of the city. Through its lucrative policies like the non-dom policy, which allowed rich Londoners to “live virtually tax-free in the city”, its “unwillingness . . . to take on the corrosive power of foreign money”, and its inability to solve the mystery of his death, London emerges as an enabler in Zac’s tragic story. With its get-rich-quick ambience, London gave an already-smitten Zac the false confidence that he too could be a part of this world using lies and manipulation.

 

London Falling is the portrait of a young man in a gilded city. Mr Keefe’s investigation into Zac’s death reveals how London’s proximity to wealth and glamour drew him into a mirage, until he reached a point of no return. 

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The reviewer is an independent writer and translator