A younger man named Zac Brettler walked onto the balcony of a fifth-floor luxurious residence in central London early one morning in 2019 and leapt in the direction of the black water of the River Thames. He did not make it. Brettler’s hip clipped the embankment and he ended up face-down within the muck alongside the river financial institution. A passerby discovered his physique after daybreak.
Brettler was simply 19, a current graduate of an costly personal college, and the grandson of a well-known London rabbi. The residence from which he jumped was price greater than $5 million, owned by a Saudi princess and occupied by a feared London gangster and leg-breaker named Dave Sharma.
Brettler had been dwelling a double life. He’d satisfied Sharma he was “Zac Ismailov,” the son of a fictitious Russian oligarch, and was poised to inherit greater than $270 million. Not lengthy earlier than Brettler’s dying, Sharma had realized the child had tricked him.
That is how Patrick Radden Keefe opens his gripping new guide: London Falling: A Mysterious Demise in a Gilded Metropolis and a Household’s Seek for Reality.
The London Metropolitan Police and Bretter’s mother and father – who knew nothing of their son’s alter ego – had many questions. Amongst them, did Brettler commit suicide or did he bounce making an attempt to save lots of himself?
Keefe, a New Yorker workers author, is a grasp at utilizing true crime as a car for exploring social and political pathologies. His guide The Snakehead focuses on “Sister Ping,” a Chinatown grandma and folks smuggler, to look at the human pipeline from China’s Fujian province to the U.S. In Say Nothing, printed in 2019, Keefe successfully solves a decades-old chilly case of a lacking mom of 10 in Belfast, a killing that illustrates the nihilistic violence and human toll of the Troubles.
On the floor, London Falling paperwork the Brettler’s investigation into the dying of their son and the thriller of his life. However additionally it is – like The Snakehead — a journey into an city underworld.
Most guests to London see an old-world scrim of royal palaces, historical pubs and West Finish theaters. The trendy metropolis is a special place. Over many years, London has grow to be a safety-deposit field for the worldwide, uber-rich to stash unexplained wealth, typically in multi-million greenback houses that sit darkish and empty a lot of the 12 months.
Zac Brettler.
Chrysa DaCosta/Courtesy of Doubleday
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Chrysa DaCosta/Courtesy of Doubleday
Because the Brettlers dig into their son’s secret life, they notice that London isn’t just the glittering cultural capital they thought, however a hotspot for money-laundering and, as Keefe writes, a “metropolis filled with crooks with pretensions to legitimacy.”
“This complete world we did not find out about,” Zac’s mom Rochelle tells Keefe, “this underworld that exists on our doorstep.”
Zac is an underachieving fabulist with an Instagram-fueled ambition to bypass exhausting work and standard success to grow to be a high-roller. The Brettlers are usually not poor. Zac’s father works in finance; his mom writes for the Monetary Occasions‘ How To Spend It journal. The household automobile is a Mazda, however Zac daydreams of a Bugatti Veyron.
Keefe recounts a dialog during which Zac tells a college buddy, referring to his father’s wealth, “It is not sufficient. I wish to be larger.”
Zac has a Walter Mitty high quality. Keefe additionally writes that it is tempting to match him to Tom Ripley, Patricia Highsmith’s sociopathic striver. However Ripley’s con had an financial logic. How precisely did Zac plan to revenue from his? It was solely a matter of time till Zac’s fraud can be revealed and he would face the fury of the prison he’d conned.
The story of Zac and his mother and father additionally turned out to be relatable in methods I did not anticipate. I labored as NPR’s London correspondent from 2016 to 2023. On my numerous journeys to the Tate Britain artwork museum, I walked previous the identical spot the place Brettler had jumped, however knew nothing of his dying on the time. The story didn’t seem within the London papers when it occurred. Keefe successfully broke the story within the The New Yorker almost 5 years later.
Throughout my household’s time in London, we – like Zac – additionally brushed up towards stratospheric wealth. My children went to a personal college with the kids of a actual Russian oligarch and others whose households had been fantastically wealthy. One in every of my son’s classmates roamed the Mediterranean one summer season on his guardian’s Amex Centurion Card, which is out there by invitation solely.
To compete in such an surroundings, some children can really feel strain to brighten. Keefe studies that Zac claimed his father was an arms supplier and the household lived subsequent to Hyde Park, however schoolmates knew he was mendacity and confronted him about it. Among the many guide’s intriguing questions is how somebody who spun such clear lies was capable of trick a seasoned prison. The reply could also be that Sharma, like Zac, was additionally lower than he appeared. By the point he took Zac beneath his wing – so to talk – Sharma was an ageing, drug-addled gangster who had misplaced his edge.
Keefe writes that Sharma might have seen Zac and his impending “fortune” as one final rating. One in every of Sharma’s gangster associates tells Keefe that when Sharma realized he’d been conned, there was no manner Zac was leaving the residence alive.
Ultimately, Zac – who pretended to be wealthy – and Sharma – who pretended to be his mentor – had been each imposters. As Keefe writes, they “had been caught up within the glitzy, mercenary aspirational tradition of contemporary London.”
Neither would survive it.
Frank Langfitt served as NPR’s London correspondent from 2016 to 2023. He’s the creator of The Shanghai Free Taxi: Journeys with the Hustlers and Rebels of the New China.
