An International Mystery Turns into a Tragedy

One of the most frustrating experiences for a journalist is when a story turns out to be smaller than it seemed. The increase in deaths has a banal statistical explanation, the juicy story is a widespread rumor, the source turns out to be more arrogant than accurate.

Patrick Radden Keefe, whose 2018 book Don’t Say Anything shot him in the rare position of a well-known journalist, he is a very good writer and reporter, and so he has made a very readable book out of material which, I suspect, is not what he expected. His new book, London Falling (extended from 2024 The New Yorker piece), begins with the mysterious death of a young man who appears to be connected to the world of money laundering, Russian cash, and international crime. The first part of the book reads like a thriller. But the story that ends up being told is sadder and deeper than that secret first promised, and one that has little to do with London at all.

Patrick Radden Keefe, whose 2018 book Don’t Say Anything shot him in the rare position of a well-known journalist, he is a very good writer and reporter, and so he has made a very readable book out of material which, I suspect, is not what he expected. His new book, London Falling (extended from 2024 The New Yorker piece), begins with the mysterious death of a young man who appears to be connected to the world of money laundering, Russian cash, and international crime. The first part of the book reads like a thriller. But the story that ends up being told is sadder and deeper than that secret first promised, and one that has little to do with London at all.

In 2019, a young Londoner, Zac Brettler, jumped to his death from the fifth floor of the Riverwalk, a luxury apartment building overlooking the Thames. In one of many coincidences, his flight was caught by a surveillance camera on a waterside building, the headquarters of MI6, Britain’s equivalent of the CIA.

The circumstances of Brettler’s death were immediately suspicious. The 19-year-old girl was trapped by two elderly men: Akbar Shamji, then 47, and Verinder Sharma, 50, both of whom were in the house she had jumped from that night. He had told his parents that he was driving and dealing in London’s rich world, striking deals with Russian oligarchs to buy apartments and investing in mining projects in Kazakhstan. Shamji said he knew Brettler as “Zac Ismailov,” a young man who claimed to be the disinherited son of a Russian billionaire.

London is full of dirty money, and Keefe brilliantly describes the world of the Russian rich, who discovered after the Cold War that British leaders were only too happy to help them transfer their stolen wealth to the West. England itself is a clean country, but London’s professionals—bankers, lawyers, brokers, real estate agents—grew fat on money looted from corruption. somewhere else. London offered convenience fiction such as “non-residents,” which allowed foreigners to live there without incurring tax obligations; a legal system that was aggressively favored scam tourism for people who wish to end investigations into their wealth; and many opportunities to use in style. British police can they have even turned turned a blind eye to Russia-linked murders in the 2010s to keep the good times going.

But Brettler’s death was a case of deception and petty crime, not an international conspiracy. A carefree student, Brettler had ended up at a London private school with a non-challenging admissions policy for the children of the wealthy. His own family were upper-class London Jews (father in finance, mother in journalism); very well but he was not on the same level as some of his classmates, some of whom were children of Russian oligarchs.

Brettler became a serial enthusiast, claiming sexual, social and financial success beyond reality. His peers were more skeptical of his claims than some adults—even his parents, who clearly hoped their son had stumbled onto early success and believed a fake screenshot where he claimed to have £850,000 in the bank.

In reality, he was getting an inheritance of about £18,000, “paying for Ubers and picking up the tab often enough to appear credible,” and perhaps dealing low-level drugs to colleagues. By the time he died, there was only £4 left in his account. His claims to be connected to money and power were magpie fantasies, assembled from tiny scraps of reality and nodding friends.

If Brettler had been more fortunate, all this would have reached an embarrassing period of praise or ridicule in adulthood. Instead, it brought him into the circle of Shamji and Sharma, two men with their own false histories of conceit and notions of wealth.

Shamji was, as the British say, a chancellor: somewhere in the dark realm that includes businessmen and con artists. Sharma was an outright crook, a high-flying thug known as Indian Dave. They seem to believe Brettler’s claims of wealth—and then get angry when he doesn’t cough up the money he promised. Apparently threatened with violence, Brettler appears to have foolishly attempted to jump into the river, hitting his hip on the way down, turning a dangerous fall into a fatal one.

As a result, the book gradually changes from a thriller to an examination of the loss of a child. Keefe became close to Brettler’s parents, who struggled through the process of uncovering their son’s fantasies and the police force largely did not want to dig further into the case. Sharma died of an apparent suicide in December 2020, but Brettler’s family couldn’t find the details of his death for years and began to wonder if it was being covered up as part of some larger scheme. They wanted, understandably, their son’s death to have meaning, instead of just being, as his mother notes, “three con artists, selling airs.”

A parent’s grief is always moving, even if it is for an unsympathetic child. Maybe Zac would grow up to be a better person; many people do that. As it is, he seems like a boy who was handed the world on a plate—loving parents, lots of money, lots of education—who decided he deserved more. At one point he tries to strangle his mother in a fit of rage, apparently angry at his parents for not being rich enough.

Where the book falls short is in its attempt to make this tragedy say something about London itself. Material about London’s role as “butler to the world,” as Oliver Bullough put it in his 2022 bookit almost feels as if it’s left over from an early draft of the story, before the usual truth of Brettler’s lies is revealed.

Brettler, Sharma, and Shamji were all fiercely trying to emulate the wealth around them, but this is not a common phenomenon in London. The world is full of sad men of all ages trapped in dreams of a lifestyle they can’t have, especially in the age of online influencers.

Keefe delves briefly into Brettler’s online life, but not until the end of the book—and these sections are based mostly on the dead boy’s Internet searches, not his use of the software, which, by 2019, was the main way any 19-year-old with no imagination interacted with the Internet. Thanks to TikTok and YouTube, millions of teenage boys have convinced themselves that they too should drive Maseratis and live in multi-million dollar apartments.

It is a whole other city that is based on these illusions: Dubai, not London, is the international hub of agitators who aim to feed the hateful imagination of young men. Even more so than the British capital, it offers superficial glamor and easy housing for international money, as well as lowly servants exploited to support those dreams. Most of these influencers are con artists like Sharma and Shamji, who live six to a room Dubai and rent cars for the day. It is said that when Brettler imagined another life, he claimed his mother was living in Dubai, not London.

There is another kind of London story in this book, though—one of previous generations and their arrival, success, and pain in the capital. Keefe charts the histories of Shamji’s father, Abdul, and Brettler’s grandfather, a beloved rabbi and media personality. Hugo Gryn. Both men came to London as refugees from traumatic situations abroad: Gryn was a young survivor of Auschwitz, Abdul Shamji one of Uganda’s most successful businessmen before Idi Amin expelled the Asian community. (Abdul Shamji was more settled than most Ugandan Asians, who left with only a few suitcases, and managed to get more than a million dollars abroad through Swiss bank accounts.)

In England, both men engaged in public work—but they also told stories and lies. Gryn maintained a secret second family. Shamji became a successful businessman and friend of Margaret Thatcher, soon after he had his own empire fall into scandal. The connection between Abdul Shamji’s fiction and his son’s fictional world is clearer than between Gryn, who died before his grandson was born, and Brettler.

But those stories of reinvention, deception, and generational trauma provide a reminder that London’s openness to the world has meant a haven for people, not just money. The vast majority of immigrants who still flock to the city are not oligarchs or swindlers, but people looking for the respectable, hard-working life for themselves or their children that Brettler left behind.