Worry turned to fear, then panic. Their teenage son was missing.
Matthew and Rachelle Brettler, a cultured and comfortable Jewish couple living in a respectable London district, watched in confusion as the youngest of their two sons, Zac, changed.
At 19 years old, he was dressing and behaving so unlike the intelligent, entertaining and sociable kid they adored. He had become bratty, a show-off obsessed with imitating an Instagram-polished luxury lifestyle. His idols had morphed from sports stars to Vladimir Putin and “Wolf of Wall Street” crook Jordan Belfort. His outbursts had turned violent and his new friends were nothing like his family: flashy, foreign and inexplicably rich.
Still, in the days leading up to his disappearance, Zac was hopeful and ambitious, eagerly anticipating a bright future as an entrepreneur. He was planning to take the exam for his driver’s license. He seemed anything but depressed.
But the Brettlers and the Metropolitan police were too late for Zac. At 2:24 a.m. on Nov. 29, 2019, he plummeted to his death from a fifth-floor balcony of a luxury London apartment tower on the Thames. The balcony looked directly across the river at MI6 headquarters, which captured grainy footage of the fall on a surveillance camera.
As the new book “London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth” (Penguin), by Patrick Radden Keefe, suggests, to the police, it was just another suicide — one of the thousands the city suffers each year. To the Brettlers, it looked like something far more sinister and strange. It was.
In the days before his death, as they desperately hunted for their son across London, the Brettlers discovered the truth about Zac: He was living a dangerous lie.
At some point, Zac Brettler had stopped being an upper-middle-class Jewish kid — the grandson of a famous rabbi — from the affluent neighborhood of Maida Vale, and transformed into Zac IIsmailov, the alleged prodigal son of a Russian (possibly Kazakh) oligarch and a Swiss model. He pretended to live at One Hyde Park in Knightsbridge, London’s most expensive apartment building.
He boasted about his family’s multi-billion pound fortune — a largesse that he would inherit and share with his five jet-setting siblings. He spoke in a Russian-inflected accent with enough fluency to trick even native-born Russians. He used a .ru email address and wore a Moncler vest, as if equally as comfortable on the slopes as in the boardroom. He spoke like a jaded rich kid already weary with his portfolio of properties, his collections of watches and cars, and the tinkling of champagne glasses at Annabel’s in Mayfair.
Zac’s new, much older associates weren’t rubber magnates and international traders, as he had claimed to his bewildered parents. They were unscrupulous businessmen, well-connected with the henchmen of real oligarchs: hardened criminals, drug dealers and murderers.
Riverwalk, the apartment tower on the Thames where Zac spent his final hours, was the home of Verinder Sharma, a notorious gangster who went by the underworld sobriquet “Indian Dave” and had a reputation for collecting debts by dangling his victims over the edge of a balcony.
Zac had moved in with him at the behest of his new mentor, Akbar Shamji, a crypto investor with a long family history of dirty deals. Somehow a teenage boy had convinced these well-connected and worldly adults that he was the real thing, the unaccompanied son of a billionaire — until they realized he wasn’t.
“He wanted money and power. Fast,” Rachelle said at the inquest into son’s death. Had it cost him his life?
Author Keefe expands on his 2024 New Yorker piece, delving deep into the incredible circumstances surrounding Zac’s death and the suspiciously inept police investigation that followed. But instead of zooming in on the con artistry of yet another charismatic “imposter” — see: Anna “Delvey” Sorokin or Simon Leviev “The Tinder Swindler” or even Frank Abagnale of “Catch Me if You Can” — Keefe uses a wide angle lens.
“London Falling” is a story about the material circumstances that create a kid like Zac — part Walter Mitty, part Tom Ripley. From the financial heights of London and the unsavory foreign actors its generous tax policies attracted, to the criminals that both service and prey on the rich, Zac swam in a city and culture his parents hardly recognized.
In the years leading to his death, more than a dozen powerful Russians were brazenly assassinated on British soil with exotic toxins and even radioactive poisons. Some were even found at the bottoms of buildings. In many cases, these deaths were ruled suicides.
“Britain had become so reliant on the largesse of Russia’s oligarchs that decisions had been made at a high level not to persecute London’s new mafia class, and to instead extend to them the courtesy of being able to kill their enemies in England with impunity,” Keefe writes.
Was Zac another victim of that look-the-other-way policy?
Grieving for almost two years with no breakthroughs, the Brettlers decided that the police had given up on Zac’s case. After all, the surveillance video showed that he was alone on the balcony when he jumped. But the more they studied the scene, the more the Brettlers were convinced that Zac hadn’t jumped to end it all, but to escape — to live.
The autopsy suggested that Zac’s jaw may have been broken before the jump. Perhaps he was aiming for a wet landing in the Thames and misjudged the distance.
But now, the most obvious suspect, Indian Dave, was also gone. He died from a drug overdose — in a manner “very similar to how Russians would kill someone,” a criminal compatriot said — on the one-year anniversary of Zac’s death.
Karma had caught up with him, but he took his secrets to the grave. Indian Dave’s death satisfied the police that their job was done. Shamji, the only man who still knew the truth about their son’s death, was never charged, and seemed to be thriving as the head of a new company.
“One reason that it is so difficult to know precisely what happened at Riverwalk is that Zac was by no means the only impostor in the apartment that night,” Keefe writes. “Verinder Sharma was a leg-breaker posing as a benevolent mentor. Akbar Shamji was a dilettante posing as an accomplished entrepreneur. And Zac was just a London teenager, posing as the son of an oligarch. Each was pretending to be something he wasn’t, and each was caught up in the glitzy, mercenary aspirational culture of modern London. ‘It was three bulls–t artists, selling air,’ Rachelle said.”
Like “Serial” and other true crime stories, “London Falling” leaves many questions unanswered. What was Zac’s end game with Shamji and Sharma? Had these men really bought Zac’s story? If not, what did they want with him? Was Zac having sex with these men? Was Sharma murdered? Was Sharma a police informant and was the investigation botched to protect him? Those dangling questions may irk the reader, but they also connect us with the confusion, pain, disillusionment and anger experienced by Zac parents.
“I literally had a stomachache for months after he died,” Rachelle says. “Because you’re having to digest grief.”
Keefe comes closest to giving us closure towards the end of his investigation by contextualizing a key piece of evidence: a text message Shamji sent from the apartment before Zac’s death (a clue that the police maddeningly refused to pursue).
“I am not f–king playing,” Shamji wrote to his drug dealer. “I have just been heating up knives and clearing up blood.” Zac’s final Google search, typed less than half an hour before he jumped, was “what to do with skin burns.”
In 2025, a year after the New Yorker article was published, an underworld associate of Indian Dave reached out to Keefe to spell things out.
“Dave’s favorite thing was warming up the knife,” the gangster said. To inflict pain on a person who owes you money, he said, you heat up the blade of a knife so that it will “just melt into him.” The act is so theatrical and frightening, he said, that most of the time you don’t even need to cut anybody.
”You put it on the stove,” he said. “You toss it, you turn it. You make him see… Then you walk towards him with it. It scares you, doesn’t it?” This was Indian Dave’s “go-to method.”
Faced with that, who wouldn’t chance a jump into the Thames?
