In the early hours of a November morning in 2019, a surveillance camera at MI6’s headquarters captured the silhouette of a young man on a brightly lit balcony across the Thames. He hesitated, then jumped. The fall broke his jaw and knocked him unconscious; he drowned in the river. The body was identified as Zac Brettler, 19, from a middle-class family in Maida Vale.
The Metropolitan Police found that Brettler had spent his final night with Verinder Sharma, a 55-year-old gangland debt collector and drug trafficker. Sharma claimed Brettler stayed rent-free in his luxury apartment at Riverwalk, a Thameside high-rise. Phone records and CCTV revealed a third man, Akbar Shamji, a cryptocurrency and real estate trader from Mayfair, had been present that night. Shamji denied wrongdoing, stating Brettler was a compulsive liar who pretended to be the son of a dead Russian oligarch, using the alias 'Zac Ismailov' and affecting a Russian accent.
Neither man could be charged with murder: Sharma was not seen pushing Brettler, and Shamji was not in the apartment at the time. In his book 'London Falling', New Yorker writer Patrick Radden Keefe reconstructs the events leading to Brettler’s death, arguing it was the result of entrapment by criminals and the dangerous allure of ill-gotten wealth. The Riverwalk building, he writes, symbolises corruption in a London tainted by oligarchic interests and corporate greed.
Brettler’s background was comfortable but not glamorous. His parents were journalist Rachelle Gryn Brettler and financial services director Matthew Brettler. His maternal grandfather, Rabbi Hugo Gryn, a Holocaust survivor, had hidden a double life: he lied about attending Cambridge and fathered a secret child. Keefe notes the resonances between Gryn’s secrets and Brettler’s own fabulism. At school, Brettler told tall stories, wore sharp suits, and covered his chest in temporary Russian gang tattoos. He dreamed of being like the wealthy Russian boarders who partied at Annabel’s and shopped at Harrods.
Brettler met Shamji in 2019. Shamji, 47, posed as a successful entrepreneur but was saddled with debts. Together, they discussed launching cannabis-infused skincare products and investing in a Kazakh mine. Keefe’s scrupulously researched narrative nonfiction traces the web of deceit that led to Brettler’s avoidable death, painting a compulsive tale of money, lies, and tragedy.
