The immersion of a teenager in the underworld of London

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By Patrick Radden Keefe

After Zac Brettler died, his parents struggled to decode the mystery of what had happened to him. They thought that they could pinpoint the moment he’d started to change: three years earlier, when, at sixteen, he began boarding at Mill Hill School, in North London. Zac had grown up in Maida Vale, a quietly affluent neighborhood in the city. His father, Matthew, is a director at a small financial-services firm; his mother, Rachelle, is a freelance journalist. As a child, Zac was bright and quirky, with curly red hair and a voice that was husky and surprisingly deep. He was an excellent mimic, and often entertained his parents and his brother, Joe, by putting on accents. Joe was nearly two years older than Zac, and he attended University College School, an élite day school in Hampstead. But when Zac took the University College entrance exam he struggled with the math portion, and wasn’t admitted. He was clearly intelligent and creative, but he was less of a student than Joe, and after applying unsuccessfully to two other schools he enrolled at Mill Hill, as a day student, at the age of thirteen.

Founded in 1807 and occupying a one-hundred-and-fifty-acre campus, Mill Hill has superior enrollment, but its educational reputation is lower than its peers. In the middle-class environment Zac grew up in, mentioning that you attended Mill Hill could be interpreted as saying you were rejected from more rigorous schools. When Zac arrived in 2013, he found himself in the company of the pampered children of plutocrats from Russia, Kazakhstan and China. “They were children of oligarchs,” recalls Andrei Lejonvarn, a former student who befriended Zac at Mill Hill. Children wore designer clothes and partied in fancy hotels. In cold weather, instead of making the eight minutes from the dorm to class, they called Ubers. Because London is the second home to so many wealthy foreigners, the city has long been a bastion of strident consumerism. To Zac, the ostentation of his companions seemed exotic; His parents were not exactly materialistic. Rachelle told me: “This global Porsche, plastic surgery and Ibiza thing is everything we are not. ” One day, an administrator called the Brettlers’ house to tell them that Zac had just left school in a chauffeur-driven limousine. Zac admitted to his parents that he paid for this extravagance himself. “He wanted to see what I would do,” he said.

The adventure from Maida Vale to Mill Hill took almost an hour, so Zac started staying for the week. His parents thought he was relatively well-adjusted. He was given decent grades and excelled in tennis and cricket. Every once in a while, I’d bring friends over and they’d seem like cool kids. But Zac was increasingly obsessed with wealth. He had been interested in cars since formative years and now expressed shame for his family’s humble Mazda. Like many teenagers, he developed a fascination with gangsters, watching documentaries about characters from London’s underworld, including murderous twins Reginald and Ronald Kray. He enjoyed videos about budding men, such as “The Wolf of Wall Street” and “War Dogs,” which tells the true story of two young Florida men who have become overseas gun dealers.

By 2018, Zac had had enough of boarding school and for his senior year of top school, he transferred to Ashbourne College, Kensington as it was closer to home. He still had the face of a baby, with flawless skin and red cheeks, but he behaved like an adult. He wore a Moncler vest elegantly and kept his homework in a briefcase. He told his parents about businesses (promotion of high-end cars and homes) in which he was allegedly involved. They didn’t know how seriously to accept those claims. Was your child precocious or playful? Zac was personable and had quick analytical skills, and those qualities, they even thought, might well prepare him to become a young entrepreneur. In any case, the Brettlers didn’t need to discourage their son or, worse, push him away. Although they doubted his preference for wealth and glamour, they tried to help him gently.

In early 2019, when Zac was finishing high school, she announced to her parents that she had married Akbar Shamji, a wealthy businessman in his forties who lived and worked in Mayfair Array, one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in London. . Shamji had a big, charming dog, a black Weimaraner named Alpha Nero, and Zac rarely stopped by Shamji’s Mount Street apartment and took Alpha Nero for a walk. Rachelle felt that Zac enjoyed the feeling of walking alone in Mayfair next to this elegant and dazzlingly loved animal, as if it were his own. But he was not just an errand boy for Shamji. In fact, she told his peers that they were going to become business partners and were discussing various deals, from launching a line of CBD skin care products to investing in a mine in Kazakhstan. Zac formed a company, Omega Stratton, which was indirectly described in a public document as being involved in “security contracts and raw materials. ” He sometimes sent emails to his family from his work account. For about a month in the summer of 2019, Zac even moved into a luxury apartment in Pimlico, in a new development called Riverwalk, situated right on the River Thames near Vauxhall Bridge. He wouldn’t be transpahire if he had a roommate (he wouldn’t let Matthew and Rachelle stay with him), however, in a video chat he showed them the stylish interior of the apartment. Zac had gotten admission offers from several universities, but now he was thinking about skipping college. He told his parents that he earned enough money from his various businesses to pay the rent in Riverwalk, although at the end of the summer he had returned home, saying that he was lonely in Pimlico.

Matthew and Rachelle were becoming increasingly uncomfortable with Zac’s trajectory. He grew up too fast and behaved belligerently: stomping on the apartment, slamming doors, physically intimidating. Fearing he might be using drugs, they asked their pediatrician to draw blood at their next checkup and surreptitiously examine him. The result was negative. One day, while they were going on vacation to Oman and leaving Zac’s house alone, Matthew hid a video camera in the living room; all it captured was Zac with friends from the local tennis club, watching football on TV. At Rachelle’s request, Zac was evaluated by a psychiatrist, but the doctor found no clear indication of a disorder.

Matthew’s business is overseas and on Thursday, November 28, 2019, he is in the United States on a painting trip. Zac had told Rachelle that he planned to spend the weekend with Shamji to do a “digital detox”: avoiding computers and phones. But that night, at her family’s apartment, Rachelle discovers that Zac had forgotten his wallet and keys. “I’m a little worried about you,” she emailed him. “You left your jacket, your coat, and your credit cards here. How are you?” Are you going to be away for a few days?She signed, “Sending you so much love. ” At 2:03 a. m. m. , Zac replied, “Okay x. “

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Twenty-one minutes later, a surveillance camera affixed to the Thames headquarters of the British spy agency M.I.6 captured sudden movement outside a building across the river. It was Riverwalk, where Zac had stayed that summer. The building’s façade featured curved balconies overlooking the Thames. At 2:24 a.m., the camera recorded Zac walking out of a brightly lit fifth-floor apartment. He went to one corner of the balcony, then to the other. Then, returning to the center, he jumped.

The Thames is two hundred and fifteen miles long, but the stretch that rises and falls at salt tide stretches from Teddington Weir in west London to the North Sea. The tide peaked Thursday night, but by morning it had dropped about nine feet. exposing a wide shoulder of muddy shoreline in front of the Riverwalk. Shortly after 7 a. m. , a passerby spotted a pale frame in the riverbed. Someone called the police and the London Ambulance Service arrived temporarily. The frame was “cool to the touch and incredibly stiff,” a paramedic later noted. “Life was declared extinguished at 7:36 a. m. “

Every year, scores of people attempt to kill themselves in the Thames, often by jumping off a bridge. Many survive the impact and are fished out by rescuers. But if a fall is fatal the body often drifts with the tide. Consequently, the police didn’t realize, on discovering Zac’s body, that he’d plummeted from a balcony directly above; it was more probable that he’d been borne to the Pimlico riverbed by the current. After loading the body onto a boat, they transported it to a mortuary. No wallet was found in the sweatpants Zac had been wearing that night, so the police had no idea who he was.

Six kilometers to the northwest, in Maida Vale, Rachelle woke up worried about her son. She kept calling Zac, but his phone jumped straight to voicemail. About half-past nine the bell rang. The Brettler apartment occupies the ground floor and basement of a beautiful red brick building. At the door, Rachelle met a muscular, clean-shaven chauffeur, dressed in an adapted blue coat and purple tie. He had a phone to his ear.

“Where’s Zac? The driver asked.

“I don’t know who you are?” Raquel said.

“Who are you?”

“I’m Zac’s mother. “

The guy holds his phone so the user on the line can continue the conversation. On the phone, Rachelle heard a male voice saying, “It can’t be his mom. His mom is in Dubai.

Rather than explain what this could possibly mean, the man climbed into a Range Rover and drove off, leaving Rachelle in her vestibule, feeling deeply unsettled. That evening, she called a police hotline and reported Zac missing. Zac had been gone only since the previous afternoon, but she had a sense of foreboding. Through a friend, she got the contact information of a private investigator. She’d alerted Matthew, who had decided to return to London. Rachelle had also tracked down a friend of Zac’s who had a phone number for Akbar Shamji, and she arranged a meeting.

As of Monday, December 2, police had yet to establish the link between the John Doe discovered in the Thames and the Maida Vale missing persons case. So, as Matthew later said, “We thought we were looking for a living person. “Rachelle and Matthew went to the Meridien Hotel in Piccadilly, where Shamji had advised them to chat in a lounge to which he had access. Shamji was forty-seven years old and had a libertine beauty, an aquiline nose, and abundant brown hair. He wore a tight-fitting suit with an intense print. Shamji said he was worried about Zac, too.

He handed the Brettlers the black duffel bag Zac had brought with him 4 days earlier. He said he spent Thursday night with Zac at the Riverwalk, along with Dave Sharma, a 55-year-old friend who lived in the apartment. Sharma’s daughter, Dominique Sharma Clarke, in her early twenties, was also present. It was a provocative evening, Shamji continued. Zac had confessed to being addicted to heroin.

The Brettlers were stunned: They hadn’t noticed any symptoms of heroin use. According to Shamji, Zac had stated that he had been secretly using the drug for years. On Thursday night, Shamji continued, he and Sharma had promised to find Zac a treatment program. Then he and Dominique left, leaving Zac with Sharma. On Friday morning, Shamji said, Sharma had informed him of Zac’s disappearance. “We started to get worried,” Shamji told the Brettlers. He notoriously went out looking for drugs. “Sharma arranged for one of his partners, the driver, who received Carlton’s call, to look for Zac at Maida Vale’s apartment.

Shamji further infuriated the Brettlers by explaining that he and Sharma knew their son not as Zac Brettler but as Zac Ismailov, the wealthy son of a Russian oligarch. Shamji had been introduced to him about 8 months earlier through a guy named Mark Foley, who worked for Chelsea Football Club, a team then owned by Russian billionaire Roguy Abramovich. Foley had told Shamji that Zac was looking to invest some of his family fortune. Shamji said that, until he spoke to Rachelle, he was under the impression that Zac’s father had recently passed away and his mother lived with Zac’s siblings in Dubai. Zac had claimed that his circle of relatives owned a penthouse in One Hyde Park, a luxury hotel in Knightsbridge known for its reserved and absentee tenants, and described the Maida Vale Apartment as an investment asset where he only lived temporarily and alone.

Shamji seemed like a credible person: he’d attended Cambridge University and had impeccable manners. Moreover, Zac had told his parents that Shamji had an office on Berkeley Square—a rarefied address even by London standards. His wife, Daniela Karnuts, runs a successful fashion label, Safiyaa, which has made clothing worn by Meghan Markle and Michelle Obama. Yet Shamji’s story seemed outlandish. Matthew found him nervous and fidgety, noticing that he avoided eye contact with them. But Shamji emphasized that he and Sharma were desperate to find Zac and “get him back” for the Brettlers. They all agreed to stay in touch and continue searching.

The next day, Rachelle was on the phone with Joe in the living room of their family home when she saw a police car pull up outside. “I knew instinctively why they had come,” he later said. Two uniformed police officers entered the apartment. One of them took Rachelle’s hand and told her that Zac’s body had been found.

Last fall, in freezing rain, I visited the Brettlers. I first contacted them over the summer and since then we had had several long, painful conversations about their son. The Maida Vale apartment is undeniably modern. Rachelle writes about crafts and design, and the area was elegantly decorated and illuminated with colorful glass vases. A framed snapshot on a shelf showed Zac and Joe as young children, dressed in costumes at a school fair. Zac was “a cute, giggly idiot,” Rachelle said. Both Brettler parents are now sixty-one years old. Matthew wears glasses, is athletic and bald. He has an obviously analytical brain and a gentle intensity, and he dealt with the devastation of wasting a child by channeling his energies into investigating Zac’s disappearance. Rachelle is small, with bright eyes and a tendency to smile even when she tells a sad story. Joe came and went as we talked. He is twenty-five years old, with ringlet curls and an affectionate and carefree attitude toward his parents.

In the four years since Zac’s death, the family will have learned just how much the boy they thought they knew leads a double life. Zac has possessed one of Walter Mitty’s qualities: he polished his achievements (boasting to friends about his sporting prowess and business prospects), or highlighted his intentions to associate with celebrities (falsely claiming, for example, that he knew Virgil van Dijk, the captain of Liverpool Football Club). But none of the Brettlers had ever imagined that Zac could simply move around London by pretending to be someone else.

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Matthew said, “Zac is very clever when it comes to choosing people. . . “

“Sweet places,” Rachelle chimed in.

“He was a very good reader of people,” Matthew went on. In “War Dogs,” one character says, of the movie’s antihero, “He would figure out who someone wanted him to be, and he would become that person.” The Brettlers recognize now that Zac assembled fabrications like a magpie, picking up strands of truth in one corner of his life and repurposing them as fiction in another. Across the road from the Brettlers was a glamorous Russian woman, a single mother who drove a Bentley. She befriended Zac after he introduced himself on the street, and when she cooked meals she occasionally gave him some of the food. Her name was Zamira Ismailova. “He took her name,” Rachelle noted.

I recently spoke to Ismailova and she told me that she knew Zac by another fictitious name, Thaimas, and that she believed him to be a young Kazakh man living alone. Since the Brettlers’ building has a shared front serving multiple apartments, he had no concept that he shared the apartment with his parents. She spoke English with Zac, but he uploaded a word of rudimentary Russian. London is full of young people whose families and fortunes come from abroad but who are raised to be perfectly English. “I doubted what he said,” he told me Ismailova. No he was informed of the fact until after Zac’s death.

Shamji was right about Zac being a fabulist, but Matthew and Rachelle are adamant that he wasn’t suicidal. He’d never talked about killing himself, nor did he seem depressed. On the contrary, he was brimming with plans and ambitions, all too eager to commence adult life. Just after seven o’clock on the evening he died, Zac e-mailed Rachelle to say that he’d used her credit card to pay for a test to obtain his driver’s license. “I hope that is okay x,” he wrote. While I was at the Brettlers’, Rachelle disappeared into Zac’s bedroom and came out holding the overnight bag that Shamji had returned, which Zac had packed hours before he jumped off the balcony. “It’s not a bag of someone planning to commit suicide,” she said, pulling out neatly folded items. “You’ve got underwear, underwear, T-shirt, T-shirt. You’ve got deodorant.”

When Zac moved to Riverwalk in July 2019, he told his parents he rented the apartment to Verinder Sharma, an Indian rubber tycoon. At the time, Rachelle had done a Google search on “Verinder Sharma,” “India,” and “rubber” and found no apparent matches. In fact, Verinder is the birth name of Shamji’s friend, Dave Sharma. In London, his friends called him the Indian Dave. No he is a rubber tycoon. He’s a gangster.

The morning Zac’s body was identified, the private investigator the Brettlers had hired, Clive Strong, visited Sharma at Riverwalk. Sharma, who was short, sharp-featured, and physically fit, liked to box, and told Strong that he’d just returned from a sparring session. According to Strong’s notes, Sharma said that Zac had presented himself as someone whose “father was an oligarch,” and had claimed that he’d clashed so much with his mother—who lived in Dubai, along with four of his siblings—that she’d barred him from their various luxury properties in London. He was therefore homeless, despite being fantastically rich. “I felt sorry for the young man,” Sharma told Strong. “I said that he could stay in my flat”—the Riverwalk apartment.

Sharma, the last user to see Zac alive, told pretty much the same story as Shamji: Last Thursday night, Zac and Shamji had arrived at Riverwalk; Sharma’s daughter, Dominique, joined them; after a few hours, Shamji and Dominique left; Sharma fell asleep and when he woke up at 8 a. m. m. , Zac was gone. In Sharma’s view, Zac is a troubled child who “is becoming suicidal. “Sharma noted that he was happy to communicate with Strong, as he was a user researcher, but he did not like talking to the police, as he had had “bad reports in the past. “

Sharma did not elaborate on what those reports were, but he had a history with authorities. In 2002, he was arrested for heroin trafficking. He was later implicated in the murder of bodyguard turned nightclub owner, Dave (Muscles) King. who he killed in a drive-by shooting in 2003 as he left a gym in Hertfordshire. This is the first time a fully automatic AK-47 was used to assassinate someone in England. In a high-profile trial, the ruling described the murder as “completely planned, ruthless and brutally executed. ” The shooter and driver were sentenced to life in prison.

Sharma had been one of Muscles’ friends in the drug trade, but they fell out. When authorities arrested Sharma and others in the 2002 heroin bust, the only suspect they didn’t end up prosecuting was Muscles, and in front of witnesses in open court Sharma angrily called him a “grass”: an informer. Moments after Muscles was shot to death, the assassin called a mobile phone in France, which the police subsequently linked to Sharma. I spoke to a former official who was involved in the investigation, and he said that Sharma was a dangerous person. At the time of the murder trial, authorities had tried to locate him in France for questioning, but he’d gone underground. “I’ve no doubt Sharma was involved in organizing the shooting,” the former official told me. “But we didn’t have enough evidence to charge him.”

After returning to England, Sharma worked as a debt collector. I spoke to a source who’s had occasional business in London’s underworld, and he said that Sharma wasn’t afraid to exert his will through physical force. Stories circulated about Indian Dave hunting down people who owed money and dangling them off rooftops. When Clive Strong, the detective, visited him at the Riverwalk flat, he wanted to see the balcony. Sharma flicked a switch on the wall, the glass door slid open, and they stepped out and looked at the Thames. Strong made a note of the fact that the glass door was opened and closed from inside the apartment.

On December 5, 2019, two days after Zac’s body was identified, Dave Sharma and Akbar Shamji were arrested and interrogated. Sharma refused to speak to police, but provided a handwritten statement saying that on the night in question he passed out around 12:30. A. m. , after becoming “heavily intoxicated” after drinking Jack Daniel’s and taking a sedative. Before waking up at 8 a. m. , she said, Zac had to kill himself by jumping off the balcony. “I wasn’t responsible,” Sharma added.

Because the government didn’t initially make a connection to the construction of Riverwalk when they discovered Zac’s body, police didn’t enter Sharma’s apartment until four days after the fall. When two officials inspected the premises, they found it to be “spotless,” one of them said. On the glass security wall of the balcony, right where Zac had jumped, they saw a domain that looked like it had been recently cleaned, they couldn’t tell what could have been cleaned. A police officer asked Sharma if he remembered whether the balcony doors were open or closed when he was handed over that morning. Closed, he said.

Sharma had some visual injuries — a cut on the bridge of his nose, between his right thumb and forefinger — but the police report doesn’t imply that he was asked how he got them. As investigators scanned the ground, they saw something: The back of a prepaid phone that belonged to Zac had fallen on the railing of the sliding balcony door. They discovered the front component under a couch. The phone was visibly damaged in half, suggesting that it had fallen to the ground hard.

When a pathologist examined Zac’s body, he found no lines of heroin. A coroner’s inquest determined that Zac had almost managed to get into the Thames, but that his hip had gone through the stone wall of the river. He suffered an open fracture of his left elbow, probably due to contact with water. The pathologist also noticed an injury that couldn’t be so easily attributed to the fall: Zac’s jaw was damaged on his right side.

The most dramatic revelations came when investigators tested Shamji and Sharma’s phones. Interestingly, Shamji had deleted his WhatsApp exchanges with Sharma in the weeks before Zac’s death. But Sharma had not taken such precautions, so Shamji’s messages were visible on his phone. Police cross-referenced this knowledge with CCTV footage from Got Hereras around the Riverwalk complex, which helped reconstruct the two men’s movements and communications that night.

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Shortly after 9 p. m. , cameras caught Zac and Shamji parking Shamji’s red Mercedes outside the Riverwalk. Accompanied by Alpha Nero, Shamji’s dog, they went upstairs to apartment 504. A few hours later, Sharma’s daughter, Dominique, parked in an underground garage and also entered the apartment. At 1:25 a. m. , Shamji and Dominique left with Alpha Nero. They went down to the garage and chatted in Dominique’s car until 1:56 a. m. m. , when she left Shamji and the dog in the Mercedes, and the cars drove away.

Sharma had lied about falling asleep that night at 00:30. At 2:12 a. m. , nine minutes after Zac emailed Rachelle “Everything is fine x,” Sharma called Shamji from the apartment. Shamji was back in Mayfair and they talked for nine minutes. But anything should have alarmed Shamji, as he turned and headed back to Riverwalk. At 2:24 a. m. , the camera at the M. I. 6 construction captured Zac’s dive. The images, taken from an abundant distance, in At Night, are grainy, but obviously alone on the balcony. But right after the jump, the footage appears to show the silhouette of a user moving around the apartment.

Two minutes after Zac hit the river, Sharma telephoned Dominique. The call lasted three and a half minutes. Then, at 2:34 a.m., Shamji’s Mercedes reappears on the CCTV. He goes up to Apartment 504, Alpha Nero still by his side. After twenty minutes, he leaves the building, heads back to his car, and loads in his dog. But, rather than get in himself, Shamji walks around to the other side of the building, where a promenade runs along the Thames. According to subsequent police testimony, this is what happens next: “Mr. Shamji is then seen to look over the river wall in directly the spot that Zac has fallen into.” The wall is about four feet high, and Shamji cranes his torso over it, peering down into the water. Then he straightens, returns to his Mercedes, and drives away.

London is so beautiful that it can be easy to forget that much of it was built on imperial plunder. This dissonance between the veneer of refinement and the sinister forces pulsing beneath has become especially stark in recent decades, as the United Kingdom, stripped of its empire, has found a new role as a commodious base for global kleptocrats. In the recent book “Butler to the World: How Britain Helps the World’s Worst People Launder Money, Commit Crimes, and Get Away with Anything,” Oliver Bullough explains that a combination of lax regulation, permissive law enforcement, plaintiff-friendly libel laws, discreet accountants, unscrupulous attorneys, deluxe real estate, and venerable schools has turned London into a mecca for moneyed reprobates—a modern-day Casablanca. The London property market offers countless opportunities for someone looking to park a dodgy fortune. Take a stroll around Belgravia or Regent’s Park, and you’ll notice that many of the multimillion-dollar dwellings stand unoccupied, their blinds drawn. Here is a safety-deposit box for some tycoon in a turbulent industry; there is an insurance policy for a corrupt minister of mines. London is the capital of pristine façades, often painted in wedding-cake shades of cream or ivory; the city’s dominant aesthetic is literally whitewash. As a 2021 report by the British think tank Chatham House put it, the U.K. is a “comfortable home for dirty money.”

Laundering cash (or a reputation) is like mixing dirty with clean, and one of the consequences of London’s new identity as a 24-hour laundromat is that the city is full of criminals with pretensions to legitimacy and businessmen who They seem a little corrupt. . Akbar Shamji came to London with his family in 1972, when he was less than a year old. His father, Abdul, came from an Indian family in Uganda, where he founded a successful business company called Gomba. But Idi Amin, who became president of Uganda in 1971, attributed the country’s economic inequality to the good fortune of the Asian minority, and in 1972 he announced that he would deport all Asians. They only had 90 days left to leave. When the Shamjis arrived in England, Abdul decided to rebuild his business. He began shipping Johnnie Walker whiskey to Zaire and then expanded into trucking, mining and hospitality. There was a handbag factory in Blackburn and a crocodile farm in Malaysia. The reincarnated Gomba was incorporated into the offshore tax haven of Jersey and its offices were on Park Lane in London. As Abdul became richer, he donated cash to the Conservative Party. Margaret Thatcher attended a fundraiser at her home, a Tudor-style mansion in Surrey, where Akbar grew up.

Abdul’s holdings included several prominent London theatres, in addition to the Mermaid and the Garrick. For a time, he even co-owned Wembley Stadium. In the 1980 mystery “The Long Good Friday,” Bob Hoskins plays a London crime boss who looks at himself. into a tycoon of legitimate assets. He owns a sleek white boat and hosts parties there on a cruise on the River Thames. Reportedly, the boat used in the film was leased to the filmmakers, at a price that one of them described as “huge”, through its owner, Abdul Shamji.

Abdul suffered a scandal in 1985 following the bankruptcy of its main monetary backer, the Johnson Matthey bank. Gomba had significant debts to the bank, amounting to £5 million that Abdul had personally guaranteed. Questioned in court about his financial situation, he said he had no bank account in Switzerland. But it turned out to be like this: six of them. One MP called him a “delinquent”. Abdul insisted he was a scapegoat, but he tried and found him guilty of perjury. “You lied like a policeman,” the judge declared, sentencing him to fifteen months in prison. Akbar was seventeen years old at the time.

In 1993, fresh out of Cambridge, Akbar told an interviewer that his father had “moved his board from Monopoly” to East Africa, and that Father Shamji retained at least one of his stakes in Monopoly. When Akbar was twenty-one, he was appointed general manager. Akbar had done theatre at Cambridge; In a student production of “Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves”, he played a con man named Honest Achmed. The Shamji poured cash into The Mermaid, but, according to Marc Sinden, its artistic director at the time, the theater offered virtually no shows. The family built a new dining room and a stainless steel kitchen, but no one used them. “There were a lot of monogrammed cutlery with the mermaid logo and porcelain plates still in their boxes,” Sinden told me. “It was like I had walked into a fully stocked hospital, but they had forgotten to take in the patients. “

The Shamji staged a short series of one-man shows about Muhammad Ali, and paid Ali to stop in London for the premiere. “There were shots of Akbar with Ali, and we were talking about what Akbar had done to save the theater,” Sinden said. “But it almost ruined everything. ” The exhibition lost money. I spoke to the lead investor, a former boxer named Tony Breen, who told me that in the end Shamji owed him thirty-five thousand pounds. Breen suspected the theater was “a cash-laundering operation. “A lawyer for Shamji denied the claim, calling it “absurd. “)At the time, Akbar was driving around London in a Rolls-Royce Corniche. When things started to get “a little good” with the Shamji, Breen recalls, he advised them to give him the car as payment. But Akbar objected that the Rolls Royce belonged to Abdul, who would never have allowed it. Akbar “was his tomboy,” Sinden said. (Abdul Shamji died in 2010. )

By the early 2000s, Shamji had branched out into the music business, running a few labels indiscriminately in the United States. In the decades since, he has moved from one industry to another to play hopscotch. Their LinkedIn page is spotty; The Experience segment calls him a “thought-provoking. “The online page of a company called CPEC, which is considered a major player in India’s renewable energy sector, features a photograph of Shamji shaking hands with Prime Minister Narendra Modi and claims that Shamji served as the company’s lead CEO between 2010 and 2020, but an old shareholder document states that CPEC’s board of directors was basically made up of Shamji and two of his own employees. his siblings; According to other documents I discovered online, Daniela Karnuts, the wife of Shamji’s fashion designer, is another senior executive. More recently, he has become very interested in cryptocurrencies.

When Shamji was arrested on suspicion of murder, he was questioned at Charing Cross police station. After the police made it clear that they knew he hadn’t gone straight to his home in Mayfair, but had returned to the Riverwalk for twenty minutes before going downstairs to take a look at the river, Shamji said he had forgotten about that component of the evening, which had only been a week ago. (“If I’d had an evening like this,” one of the officials told him in a later interview, “I wouldn’t have forgotten it. “)

Shamji did not reveal what he and Sharma talked about the phone call that ended 3 minutes before Zac’s jump. He insisted that he didn’t remember any overdue calls that night. Why had he returned to the apartment? To say goodnight, he said. When the police asked him who he had said goodnight to, Shamji first claimed that he discovered Zac in the apartment with Sharma and that they all kissed before leaving. But as the investigators knew, this was impossible: Shamji had entered the building ten minutes after Zac landed on the Thames. Alerted to this discrepancy, Shamji changed his story even further. Maybe he hadn’t really noticed Zac at the time. His memory was fuzzy.

Shamji was asked to participate in the interlude as he walked around the construction of the Riverwalk and gazed out over the Thames. “It’s a nice piece of river,” he said. Sometimes I sit there. “Quiet position, picturesque view: as smart a position as any to smoke a cigarette at 3 a. m. ” I spend a lot of time outdoors,” he says.

The police insist: given the length of the walk, why had he approached the exact place where Zac had fallen? “It turns out to be a big coincidence for me, and I don’t like coincidences,” one officer said. When Shamji was asked if he had noticed Zac’s body in the water, he responded that if he had, he would have immediately called the police.

“Nothing bad happened that night,” Shamji said. Still, he continued to behave like a guy who has something to hide. “If it’s not as bad as it sounds, why don’t you tell us what it is?” another officer said. But Shamji kept obstructing.

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Meanwhile, the police have become aware of other deceptions by Dave Sharma. He hadn’t slept until eight o’clock in the morning, as he had claimed. I was up and texting Shamji at 6:50 p. m. When Riverwalk’s head concierge, Ana Nunes, arrived for her eight-hour shift, the police boats deserved to have been visible through the lobby windows. A co-worker told him that Sharma had called the head table in the past to ask if there were any symptoms that someone had jumped out of the building. At 8:10 a. m. , the phone at the front table rang again and Nunes answered. “Hi Ana,” Sharma said, according to a de Nunes. Can you tell me if someone jumped off the balcony?»

Sharma was calling from Apartment 504. If he’d stepped out onto the balcony, or just looked out a window, he likely would have seen the dead body down below. Perhaps he called Nunes to find out whether the police had drawn a connection between the body and the building. Or perhaps Sharma believed that, through some wild coincidence, it was someone else’s corpse, and Zac had survived the fall. This might explain why he sent the chauffeur, Carlton, to visit the apartment in Maida Vale that morning.

According to phone records, Shamji and Sharma exchanged messages several times that day. However, when Shamji met with the Brettlers at the Meridien Hotel three days later, he failed to mention that a dead frame had been found outside the Riverwalk a few hours later. after Zac disappeared. Sharma and Shamji also failed to alert the police that the victim had possibly fallen from Sharma’s balcony, which would have allowed them to identify Zac (and begin their investigation) 4 days earlier.

When Sharma was interviewed by police, he responded to dozens of pointed questions with a gruff “No comment.” Although both he and Shamji had been arrested on suspicion of murder, they were released on bail, and were free to go on with their lives. To Matthew and Rachelle, it felt as if, after an initial flurry of activity, the investigation started to lose momentum. “They took their foot off the gas,” Rachelle said. Some of this was likely a consequence of the pandemic, which set in not long after Zac died. The Brettlers may also have contributed, inadvertently, to the diminution in the energies of the London Metropolitan Police by keeping the whole incident relatively quiet. The death itself was not a secret: “I have the saddest news. Our beautiful son Zac died,” Rachelle wrote in a Facebook post. Family and friends turned out in large numbers for a funeral at Hoop Lane, a Jewish cemetery in Golders Green. But the London press, which is insatiable when it comes to the mysterious deaths of young white people, never picked up on the story. No florid Daily Mail spread featuring photographs of Zac and Riverwalk; no grandstanding about police inaction. The result was a lack of sustained pressure on law enforcement. And the Brettlers, at least at first, put their trust in the authorities, assuming that the unexplained death of a nineteen-year-old from West London would compel a rigorous investigation.

This faith in the proper functioning of law enforcement and the justice system might seem naïve anywhere these days, but especially in London. In 2014, a fifty-two-year-old resident named Scot Young died in circumstances similar to Zac Brettler’s, plunging from a fourth-floor apartment in Marylebone and getting impaled on a wrought-iron railing. Young was a property developer who’d become mixed up with unsavory Russian businessmen. Before his death, he told friends and family that he feared for his life. But the Metropolitan Police declared the death unsuspicious; they didn’t even dust the apartment for fingerprints. As it happened, a month earlier, a friend of Young’s, Johnny Elichaoff, had died after falling from the roof of a shopping center in Bayswater. Suicide, police had concluded. A vicious killer appeared to be stalking London: gravity. The Russian oligarch Boris Berezovsky had died in 2013, hanging himself, supposedly, at his Berkshire estate, after many attempts on his life by adversaries who wanted him dead. The previous year, another friend of Young’s, Robbie Curtis, who’d also become entangled with dodgy Russians, died after falling in front of a Tube train. Two years before that, yet another Young friend, the British developer Paul Castle, was killed (again, by Tube train).

In all cases, certain cases (debt, drugs, divorce, depression) made suicide plausible. But the fact that so many sudden deaths in a short period of time involved prominent London businessmen with connections to Russia seemed dubious at first glance. The press described the alleged suicides as a “circle of death”, but for Scotland Yard it was simply a series of unfortunate events. In 2017, BuzzFeed News published a groundbreaking investigation that identified fourteen men “all of whom died suspiciously on British soil after making tough enemies in Russia. ” According to the report, US intelligence agencies had shared evidence suggesting that many deaths described by London police as suicides were murders. But a culture of timidity within British law enforcement, combined with weak institutional capacity after years of budget cuts, had derailed the investigations. Some expressed an even bleaker view: Britain had become so dependent on the largesse of Russian oligarchs that decisions had been made at the highest levels not to pursue London’s new mafia class, thus granting them the courtesy of being able to kill. his enemies on the spot. British soil with total impunity. A national security adviser to the British government told BuzzFeed that ministers were desperate not to “upset the Russians. “

The Brettlers didn’t see Zac’s death as part of a foreign conspiracy, but they were concerned that the Metropolitan Police tended to label any suspicious death that wasn’t a notorious homicide as suicide. There was no stigma around suicide and that they resisted the concept that Zac had committed suicide just because there were so many clues pointing to something more harmful.

They began their own investigation, tracking down Zac’s friends and harassing the police for data, and exposed more symptoms that their son could possibly have been in danger. They talked to a friend who had noticed him two days before his death (and who didn’t know Zac’s oligarchic personality). The two boys had gone for a walk and Zac was looking over his shoulder in fear. He talked about how he might have data for the government and that he was contemplating going under police cover. I recently spoke with the friend, who asked me not to use his name. “He’s being threatened through someone,” he told me. They allegedly threatened to harm his family. ” Of course, it’s hard to know how seriously to take such speeches from Zac, given his propensity for dramatic stories. However, police recovered an iPad from Zac’s belongings and discovered that two days before his death, he had conducted a web search for “witness coverage in the UK”.

To an extent that his parents didn’t fully appreciate, Zac’s career as a fabulist began at a young age. Many former classmates told me about their inventions. “He made some things up,” said a friend who met Zac in Mill Hill when “He told a lot of other people that his mother was dead. “Zac probably made up this lie to elicit sympathy or attention, the friend ventured. As an insecure newcomer to a school you didn’t need to attend, you’ve possibly discovered that compassion can be a shortcut to intimacy and that many other people will open their hearts to a stranger if they are informed that they have suffered a terrible loss.

Zac also told his classmates that it came from the money. “Most of the lies were akin to wealth,” recalls Andrei Lejonvarn, his roommate at Mill Hill. Zac claimed that his family lived in One Hyde Park and that his father was a weapons dealer who owned a pair of Range Rovers. Lejonvarn was Zac’s doubles spouse in tennis, and Matthew Brettler once took them to a tournament. Before Matthew retrieved them, Zac alerted Lejonvarn that the two Range Rovers were in the shop to be repaired; his father drove a Mazda and was “very susceptible” about it, so Lejonvarn didn’t mention Range Rovers under any circumstances. When Lejonvarn, who was expecting to meet an inveterate arms dealer, was taken to the car, he was surprised by Matthew’s mild response. curious behavior. ” He’s, you know, a great guy,” Lejonvarn. He remembered of Zac, “You can smell it. “

At one point, Zac told his Mill Hill teammates that New Balance was looking to sponsor him as a cricketer.

“You are complete!” one of them.

“Zac, a compulsive liar,” Lejonvarn interjected.

For a moment, Zac seemed genuinely reprimanded. I know,” he says. “I’m a compulsive liar. ” He then introduced a story about how he evolved into this challenge after suffering this terrible twist of fate as a child.

“No! Zac! Lejonvarn interrupted. “You’re doing it again!”

When I explained to Matthew and Rachelle that Zac’s duplicity seemed to have been extensive and long-standing, Matthew presented the redemptive glow of a grieving father. His son, he says, has had “a slightly supernatural ability to tell stories. ” Boarding, Matthew observed, is “like going to school and living away from your parents for the first time. You realize you’re meeting other people who probably don’t know anything about you. You’ve been given a blank slate, a reset point. You feel like you have a little bit of editorial control in a way you didn’t have before. I think that’s what happened with Zac. Being in this boarding school environment with other people who had mind-blowing access to money, Zac suddenly He saw an area where he could simply create some other edition of himself.

Another friend from Mill Hill told me that Zac would make quick connections with other people “for a while and then disappear” when they came to doubt his stories. The friend who saw Zac in London some time before his death reflected: “If you lie to your friends, it’s a bit of a lonely place, isn’t it?

It’s difficult to say exactly when Zac Brettler graduated from telling classmates fanciful tales to road-testing an alter ego in the more hazardous environment of adult London. Nobody I spoke to from Zac’s high schools remembered him pretending to be the son of a Russian or Kazakh oligarch. When did the charade begin? I recently spoke with Mark Foley, who confirmed that he has worked for many years as a consultant for Chelsea Football Club, managing properties. One evening in early 2019, he said, he attended an opening at the Chelsea Arts Club and got to talking with a young man who mentioned that he came from a wealthy Russian family. They agreed to meet for coffee several days later.

Shamji claimed that Foley brought him to Zac as Zac Ismailov. It’s ironic that Foley endorses Zac’s story, as he’s arguably no stranger to the post-Soviet oligarchy, given that Roman Abramovich owned Chelsea for roughly two decades. “We know about Russian investors, they’re a pretty secretive bunch,” Foley told me. “They didn’t tell you the whole story and played their cards very close to their chest. “Zac, he said, seemed to him “one of those guys. “

It’s tempting to see, in Zac’s final year, an echo of Tom Ripley, the sociopathic con man from Patricia Highsmith’s novels, who achieves the lifestyle he covets by brilliantly attacking the gullibility of others. But it’s unexpected to think that Foley might have just been duped by a London teenager who hadn’t even been on vacation in Russia, and that Zac might have been reckless enough to try this trick on exactly the kind of Londoner close to the oligarchs. Ready to watch.

Last December, I wrote to Akbar Shamji. “Zac’s death is an event which I do not wish to talk about,” he responded, declining to speak by phone or to meet in person. When I pressed, he wrote that Zac “had built an extraordinary web of lies,” and intimated that it would be insensitive of me to dredge up this sad story, saying that he didn’t “feel comfortable” taking Zac’s “parents deeper into these wounds.” But in subsequent weeks I e-mailed Shamji various questions, and he replied. His answers were slippery, and he outright ignored many difficult questions, but he was unfailingly, almost ostentatiously, polite.

In early 2019, he told me, he was working with a friend and occasional business partner, John Connies-Laing, on a real estate assignment in Lisbon. They needed funding, and Foley showed up to introduce them to his new friend Zac. When I asked him if Shamji had bothered to Google Zac’s call before the meeting, he replied: “Personal introductions in London are much more reliable than social media, especially for Eastern Europeans who have to keep a lower profile. When I asked Connies-Laing about this, she replied via email: “Mark had smart connections in the oligarch world and surely had no reason to think Zac was not credible. “

According to Shamji, he and Connies-Laing met Zac at a café in St. Petersburg. John’s Wood, and Zac commented that he had recently made an offering for a luxurious space around the corner on Hamilton Terrace. As Shamji explained to the police, Zac was “talking about the life of a very rich young man: he had luxury watches, luxury cars, airplanes, everything that represents very ambitious wealth in London. “Shamji didn’t see any cars, watches, or planes, but he guessed that Zac liked a more low-key form of presentation. As their friendship solidified, Zac began enrolling in Shamji when he was walking his dog. They ended in front of One Hyde Park. Shamji never saw Zac leave the building; I was still waiting outside.

Zac’s family’s investment in the Lisbon Agreement never came to fruition and the assignment ultimately failed. But Zac and Shamji pursued other opportunities together. Shamji was suspicious when I asked him the main points, but I put them together another way. There was the idea of ​​selling fiber optic cable to India. Zac took Shamji to the uncle of one of his friends who owned cable and was looking for a buyer. The three men met at the Dorchester, an extravagant hotel favored by wealthy and status-conscious Londoners. But when I spoke to the potential business partner (who didn’t need me to use his first name), he told me that within minutes of sitting down, he got the distinct impression that Shamji was “full of shit. ” They had ordered some tea and buns when Shamji took out his phone to show the photo of his handshake with Prime Minister Modi. With a sigh, the boy told me: “I know Akbars too well. »He was more inspired with Zac: “The scary thing is that if he had made deals, he would have become a serious player. “

On another occasion, Zac arranged a meeting with an acquaintance of his family, Antony Buck, who in 2015 had sold a skincare company he founded to Unilever. Zac and Shamji came up with the idea for a line of CBD-infused skincare products. “Invest in R

Shamji said little in this assembly, letting Zac take the stage, and Buck was impressed as well. “Zac was very self-possessed and persuasive,” she told me. “He wasn’t like someone who gave the impression of being dressed in his father’s costume. “(Buck noted that he took the assembly as a favor, only to offer advice, and considered the claims of R&D. they were publicity stunts; He did not have any additional involvement in the project, which lost steam. )

If Zac could secure such meetings through his own connections, why go to the trouble of creating a false identity? He may have supposed that he’d enjoy quicker entrée to the business world if he came off as a more colorful figure, and he wouldn’t have been wrong to think so: in the circles he hoped to run in, an introduction from Mark Foley counted as currency. Some of Zac’s friends told me that he bragged to them about his “Russian connections.” He’d hardly have been the first entrepreneur to embrace a fake-it-till-you-make-it approach. But, as Matthew and Rachelle began tabulating their child’s deceptions, it became clear that he hadn’t merely traded on an exotic identity; he’d also been pretending to have a giant fortune.

Shamji provided mutually inconsistent answers about what he considered Zac’s background. He told me, via email, that Foley described Zac as “a very wealthy young man whose father had passed away. ” In 2019, he told police that when he met Zac, the story was that the oligarch was alive; Then, a few weeks after their meeting, the father had “some kind of heart incident and Zac suddenly had to fly to Switzerland. ” After the patriarch’s alleged death, Shamji said, Zac began gambling poorly, claiming that his mother in Dubai was blocking his inheritance. It now becomes highly likely that Zac, a possible meeting with Foley at the Chelsea Arts Club, spontaneously told a story about being the son of an oligarch, and Foley bought it, allowing Zac to suddenly ascend into London society. When he met Shamji, he cemented his persona with a false last name. Zac does not appear to have gotten any significant money from Shamji or Sharma, but during the months they spent together, they gave him free rent and meals and the prospect of various businesses. Like the teenage boys, it turns out that Zac lived primarily in the present; He lacked the long-term strategic calculation skills necessary to pull off a major scam.

If Zac was indeed engaged in a con, it bears some resemblance to the so-called Nigerian-prince scam, a classic Internet phishing scheme. A swindler poses as a prince who has temporarily lost access to tremendous family wealth and just needs a little money to unlock it. Sometimes the ruse exploits kindness: the mark is moved to generosity on hearing of the prince’s travails. But more often what animates it is greed: the mark gives money today in expectation of a share of the liberated inheritance in the future. One reason such deceptions are so common on the Internet is that, in the anonymity of cyberspace, they’re generally low risk. It’s more dangerous to hoodwink people you know in real life.

One point that has haunted Matthew is whether Shamji was deceived by this ruse or whether he was involved in some way. Shamji, in his accounts to the Brettlers, the police, and me, maintained that he believed Zac was the son of an oligarch until he met Matthew and Rachelle after Zac’s death. But Zac’s company, Omega Stratton, was registered under his legal name, and I saw emails Zac sent to Shamji using a name that called him Zac Brettler. In addition, Mark Foley denied introducing Zac to anyone like Zac Ismailov and told me that he had only known him as Zac Brettler. When I told Shamji that he should know that Zac was switching between two identities, he replied, “Zac had explained to me that his father sought to have them use another name, because of threats to their lives. Brettler isn’t an unusual name, but, just as Shamji claims he never Googled “Zac Ismailov,” he maintains that he hasn’t done any due diligence on “Zac Brettler. “

“Zac was talking with a comfortable but distinctive Russian accessory around me,” Shamji told me. But when I interviewed Antony Buck and the guy who met Zac and Shamji at the Dorchester, they both said they had no illusions about Zac’s identity, because they knew his background. In his presence, Zac spoke without any perceptible accessory; If I had, they told me, it would have seemed strange to them. “Akbar knew exactly who he was,” the boy from Dorchester exclaimed. “It’s Zac Brettler!”

Shamji told the government that he met Dave Sharma around 2016, at a north London gym they frequented. Despite their obvious differences, the two men have become friends. Matthew and Rachelle told me of their horror that Shamji had taken his then eighteen-year-old son to a suspected drug dealer who had been involved in a gang shootout. But it turns out that Shamji did not hesitate; he says that he brought them because Sharma, who lived alone in a giant apartment, could provide accommodation for the temporarily homeless Russian heir. According to Shamji, Sharma and Zac have become close. They also seem to have explored joint ventures, but when I asked about this, Shamji closed its doors again. However, phone records collected through police clearly show that Sharma was obsessed with Zac’s supposed wealth and felt he deserved a percentage of it. Before Zac’s death, Sharma’s bitter entitlement sharpens. “I’m thinking about fucking this kid,” Sharma texted Shamji on the morning of Nov. 28, 2019, Zac’s last day.

The virtual lines of the three men imply that a crisis was unfolding. Shamji, who was in Türkiye on business, had just returned to London. He says he interrupted him, in part because Zac claimed to be suicidal and in need of help. Most likely, Zac has talked to the older men about the possibility of dying. His parents believe he did it out of sympathy. He was too scared and perhaps looking for compassion, just as he had been when he lied as a student. He may have pretended to use heroin for the same reason.

That Thursday, Sharma prompted Shamji to ask Zac “how much he had been given to live on,” and also suggested that they “check their accounts” and “go to an ATM with their card. “The men do not seem to have carried out this plan, but if they had they would have been surprised. After Zac’s death, Matthew checked his son’s bank statement – there was only £4 in his account. In another message, Sharma said, “Akbar, I need 5% of this 205 million and that’s it. When I asked Shamji what Sharma meant by that, he replied, “I’d heard those guys talk about big numbers and big business. I don’t forget all the details. The messages mean that Zac had recruited Sharma in an attempt to repair his supposed lost fortune, and that Sharma was now seeking a really large commission in return. It turns out that the fact that there was no fortune began to dawn on Sharma the night Zac died.

The messages also contradicted Shamji and Sharma’s claims that the night at Riverwalk had centered on a concerned verbal exchange in which they and Sharma’s daughter, Dominique, showed up to help Zac quit heroin. The scenario is obviously more volatile. At 10:35 p. m. , Shamji texted one of his friends, Mervin Sealy, who seemed agitated. “I just heated knives and they drew my blood,” he wrote. A few minutes later, he followed up with a voicemail to Mervin. : “I’m not joking, black, come to that fucking Pimlico, take that fucking car and take me home, bro. And he added: “It’s about to go bad. Evil!”.

By the time police leaked those messages to the Brettlers, it had been nearly two years since Zac’s death. They had felt isolated in their anguish. ” I was living on that balcony with Zac, in my head,” Painlle told me. I literally had abdominal pain for months after he died, because you have to digest the pain. “

But even as the government began tracking what might have happened that night, Matthew and Rachelle were coming up with their own race theory. According to them, Zac probably wouldn’t have been kicked off the balcony, but he didn’t dedicate himself to committing suicide either. He had been left alone in the Riverwalk apartment with Sharma, who was furious with him, probably having learned that there might not be a fortune to plunder. It seemed very clear to the Brettlers that there was danger in this apartment and that Zac had felt that he could not escape by walking out the front door either.

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Not long ago, one night, I visited the prom that connects the Riverwalk building to the River Thames. The lights of the M. I. 6 construction reflected off the water and traffic crossed Vauxhall Bridge. I looked at apartment 504, its dark windows, its curved balcony jutting out of the walkway. Thus, the situation outlined through the Brettlers seemed even more plausible. The edge of the balcony doesn’t grow large enough to jump straight into the river. In the water, one would have to jump between six and eight feet, a distance that can be reached from a five-story H8. When Matthew and Rachelle were talking about their son’s best moments, Matthew was talking about how bouncy and athletic Zac was as a kid, how he jumped down the stairs with a bold punch. If Zac had intended to commit suicide, the safest way to do so would have been to throw himself directly onto the boardwalk. It’s a long balcony, and jumped from the point closest to the river. .

Matthew told me about a verbal exchange he had with a boy who attended West Point: “He said, ‘You know, the Marines are full of nineteen-year-olds who think bullets bounce off their heads, off their chests. ‘That’s all. Feeling of inexpugability. They don’t appreciate danger the way a more mature brain does. Zac didn’t jump off the balcony to die, his parents concluded, but to live. It’s a desperate but also brave move, the kind of escape you’d see in a “Mission: Impossible” movie and Zac might even have managed to escape to Hollywood if his hip hadn’t hit the embankment.

The Brettlers are certain that whatever awaited Zac in that apartment was more terrifying to him than the prospect of a five-story drop. And, if this version of events were true, then Dave Sharma would have a great deal to answer for. But by the end of 2020 Sharma was dead.

Riverwalk was built by London real estate businessman Sir Gerald Ronson, who was convicted in 1990 of conspiracy, false accounting and theft in an inventory fraud case; He spent time in prison and then, in 2012, was named Commander of the British Empire for his philanthropic work. “Imagine the parties you can throw here,” he told an Evening Standard interviewer in 2016, once the structure was completed.

Just as there is no news in the press about the boy who threw himself to his death from apartment 504, there is also no news on the web of a second death, a year later, in the same apartment. One day in December 2020, Matthew was at his home in Maida Vale when he received a call from Rory Wilkinson, the lead detective investigating Zac’s case. “Verinder Sharma was found dead in his apartment,” Wilkinson said. Matthew asks about the circumstances: Was it a suicide? Murder? A homicide that looked like a suicide?

It was a drug overdose that may have simply been a suicide, Wilkinson said, adding that Sharma’s case was being treated as “not suspicious. “When Matthew pressed for more details, Wilkinson gave an answer. “He said, ‘I’m going to stay sterile about the investigation,'” Matthew recalls. According to Wilkinson, it would be a clash of interests for those investigating Zac’s death to know too much about the upcoming death, in the same place, of the guy who had been their prime suspect. “The police told us, ‘Sharma’s relatives must be given privacy,'” Rachelle recalls, with a chill of indignation. To this day, Sharma’s death remains “completely mysterious,” Matthew said. “Was there an autopsy?” Was there an investigation? The government refused to say. (Several former law enforcement officials I spoke with expressed bewilderment when I described the turn of events, saying that the lack of transparency about Sharma’s death is highly rare and not justified by any precept of classic policing. )

Sharma’s disappearance eliminated a key witness in the Zac case, and during the time the pandemic subsided in 2022, the Brettlers felt deep discontent with the handling of the official investigation. “Needless to say, I have no pleasure in committing serious crimes. “investigations,” Matthew said. But I think the technique used by the police is absolutely mind-boggling. “Investigators admitted that Shamji knew more about the cases that led to Zac’s death than he let on. However, they never used pressure tactics to push for it to be more open. Prosecutors may have simply accused him of perverting the course of justice in the investigation; Instead, they greeted his blatant avoidance style with an existential shrug.

In fact, the police had expressed their intention to classify the case as the suicide of a child in difficulty. When they searched Riverwalk’s apartment a week after Zac’s death, they discovered bloodlines in one of the bedrooms and in a sink, but they never bothered to conduct a forensic check, as they had already concluded that there were “no obvious physical signs. “the driver who showed up at Maida Vale; or Mark Foley, who took Zac to Shamji; and Shamji’s wife, Daniela Karnuts, who, according to her interview with police, had met him at the door when he arrived late at night.

Matthew told me that one of the strangest facets of his ordeal was trying to figure out whether the curious habit of officials reflected incompetence or something darker. Arrest reports are not considered public documents in England and when the circle of relatives asked for a copy of Sharma’s criminal history, the government refused to provide it. When I asked the Metropolitan Police for details about Sharma’s death, they only told me that he was “not a suspect”. Matthew, after finding old news articles about Sharma’s obvious involvement in the Muscle drive-by shooting, wondered if Sharma might have simply been a police informant. If that were the case, it could explain the strangely abbreviated investigation into Zac’s death. Despite being involved in an infamous shooting, Sharma had returned to England without being charged. Matthew told me that he had trusted the police to investigate in “good faith,” but that his conduct in that investigation was “hard to reconcile with that. “

In February, 2022, Matthew and Rachelle met with Detective Inspector Wilkinson and one of his colleagues, at Hammersmith Police Station. Matthew recorded the meeting, with permission. When he asked if Sharma had been an informant, Wilkinson said, “I have no idea.” If this were true, he noted, it would have been a closely compartmentalized secret. But he gave no indication that he’d met interference on that ground.

The Brettlers had detailed questions ready, and Wilkinson was obviously uncomfortable with the forensic content of Matthew’s cross-examination. “We work a lot with a lot of people,” he said. At one point, Wilkinson joked that he felt like he was being interrogated.

Matthew asked Wilkinson if the police had Mervin Sealy, his friend Shamji texted him about “heating knives and getting rid of the blood. “

They hadn’t, Wilkinson said, “Mervin wasn’t there. “

“I find that astonishing,” Matthew said. “You don’t interview the guy?”

“The challenge is he doesn’t know what’s going on,” Wilkinson said.

“We don’t know!” Matthew exclaimed. We didn’t ask him!”

Rachelle maintained a more reserved demeanor, but she, too, had been obsessively investigating the case, and she was still angry. “For about the first year, we were dazzled by the shock of Zac’s death,” he told Wilkinson and his colleague. “This year we hope to have an answer. “

On one level, Wilkinson seemed to agree with the Brettlers’ theory on the matter: Zac had given other people the false impression that he was “going to inherit a huge amount of money” and that “this thing was starting to fall apart. ” He explicitly told them that he believed Shamji had lied to investigators. But the Brettlers felt that the police tended to blame the victim: the message was that whatever Zac died, it was in cases he caused himself. “He was in way over his head,” Matthew admitted to me. “But I don’t think that means he deserved what he got. ” Maybe it was suicide after all, Wilkinson suggested. But the only thing he was sure of was that he did not have enough evidence to support a murder charge. It seemed that the police could tolerate a degree of ambiguity about what happened, even if the grieving parents simply wouldn’t. The problem, Wilkinson weakly concludes, is that “we can’t force anyone to tell us what happened. ” (The Metropolitan Police declined to answer specific questions about the case. A spokesperson expressed “sincere condolences” to Zac’s relatives via email. Investigators had explored “every conceivable hypothesis. “) the spokesperson continued, but “we were unable to provide further complete answers. “)

One afternoon in December, I met Rachelle for tea in central London, and afterward she proposed a walk around Mayfair. We headed to 52 Berkeley Square, supposedly Shamji’s former business address. It was an attractive five-story building fronted by a wrought-iron fence. At the entrance, Rachelle brought my attention to a panel featuring twenty-five buzzers for different businesses. Either the accommodations were very crowded inside or this was all sleight of hand—an illustrious address functioning as a mail drop.

We headed toward Mount Street, passing the Connaught Hotel, a sumptuous heirloom of the British aristocracy now owned by the ruling family of Qatar. “During covid, we did quite a lot of biking, and we used to come and bike along this street,” Rachelle said. “Once, I saw Akbar outside that hotel, on his phone.” I asked whether, consciously or not, she’d been looking for him. She acknowledged that she had been. In the years since Zac’s death, she’d haunted this corner of London. “Sometimes I wondered if I would see Daniela,” she said, referring to Karnuts, who has reared two children with Shamji. “I knew what I would say to her,” Rachelle added, her voice thickening, her eyes rimmed with tears. “ ‘I’m Zac’s mum. As a mother, is there anything you can tell me about what happened that night?’ ” (Karnuts did not respond to repeated requests for comment.)

Whenever a death occurs in the UK whose cause is unknown or abnormal, the government must open a public inquiry. On December 13, 2022, Rachelle and Matthew went to Poplar Coroner’s Court, a brick building with a dark interior, and passed an old sign that said “no spitting” and imposed a fine of 40 shillings. They were accompanied by Rachelle’s brother, David, and three friends who had joined them to provide moral support. Earlier that year, prosecutors officially declined to prosecute Shamji, explaining that because the state may not resolve an underlying crime situation, it made no sense to charge incidental fees to someone who might have obstructed the investigation. In a series of Kafkaesque correspondence, the Brettlers requested an appeal, claiming the victims’ right to review, but were denied, on the grounds that they were not victims. When they asked for a meeting with prosecutors to discuss the denial, they got a letter that said, “Unfortunately, a meeting cannot be presented, as it is only presented to families grieving for homicide. ” »

It had been three years since Zac’s death. The investigation would be presided over by a coroner, but the coroner would act more like a judge, listening to the evidence and making a decision. And the procedure would be contradictory: the Brettlers were accompanied by a lawyer Alexandra Tampakopoulos, who can simply cross-examine witnesses. Police officers testified. Statements from a Riverwalk paramedic and a janitor were read aloud. A pathologist said he was brought in after a doctor who initiated an autopsy concluded that some of Zac’s injuries, in addition to the damaged jaw, indicated a imaginable foul act. But the pathologist was willing to The damaged jaw is attributed only to a violent blow. The injury could have been caused simply by water or a punch, it was unimaginable to say.

“Zac was a nineteen-year-old boy looking to locate his position in the world,” Rachelle said in a write-up. “I was looking for a wonderful life, full of status, wealth and power. . . Unfortunately, he was living this lying and creating a harmful scenario for himself. Matthew also contributed to a report in which he described his February 2022 meeting with a Riverwalk worker, where, by all accounts, discretion is a key asset. The worker recalled that a colleague recognized Zac’s body in the riverbed, but warned him “not to share this data with anyone. “(My efforts to achieve success with the colleague were unsuccessful. )

At the time, Dave Sharma was dead, but his daughter, Dominique, was called as a witness and testified via video. Dominique (who declined my request for an interview) worked in real estate in London. “Basically, my father didn’t play a very active fatherly role in my life and in the lives of my siblings,” he told the coroner. However, she had developed a close relationship with him and he had brought her to Zac. Like his father, he thought Zac “came from a very wealthy Russian family. “Sharma befriended Zac quickly and, he says, would invite him to join the family for Sunday lunch. Dominique told the same story as Shamji about Zac admitting to abusing heroin in Riverwalk. He insisted the night ended without acrimony and said that when he left the apartment, his father was asleep.

How did she understand the phone call he made to her right after Zac jumped?But, as one police officer noted, “this call lasts 03 minutes and 28 seconds, so it’s too long to be probably a pocket call or an unanswered call. “”.

About thirty minutes after the call ended, Dominique called Sharma. He did not answer. “Why are you calling him at two fifty-nine in the morning?” Tampakopoulos asked.

“Probably because I was, I don’t know, a little worried,” Dominique said.

She was also questioned about a text message her father sent her at 6:41 a. m. m. , more than an hour before Zac’s body was found. “Dom, let them know they’d better surround me conscientiously,” Sharma wrote. Take no prisoners to protect my family. ” As Dominique noted, Sharma rambles on through texting, rarely to the point of incoherence. But the gist of the message seemed clear: he was a guy to be feared, and he would attack anyone who let him down.

“I don’t even remember it,” Dominique said.

When asked by the coroner about Zac’s intellectual health, Dominique replied that he thought he had suicidal intentions. This infuriated the Brettlers: Dominique’s dubious testimony about the events at Riverwalk has cast doubt on his credibility; instead, the coroner was soliciting his amateur (and not at all disinterested) opinion on Zac’s mental state. According to Matthew, Dominique’s contributions were “from start to finish. “(Dominique, through an attorney, told The New Yorker that his testimony was entirely truthful. )

Another statement came from Roger Howells, the psychiatrist who’d evaluated Zac in January, 2018. The doctor said something that surprised me. Rachelle and Matthew had told me that Zac had become obstreperous and even menacing toward them, but Howells mentioned several incidents of physical aggression. One involved Zac “losing his self-control in an argument and throttling his mum.”

This revelation led me to wonder, and not for the first time, to what extent the Brettlers had perceived the gravity of their son’s situation. Were they distracted? Joe Brettler told me that dating his brother had been competitive and rarely difficult. But, like his parents, he saw Zac as an “occasional” rather than a pathological charlatan. Siblings know things about each other that their parents don’t. , but Joe had no idea of Ismailov’s character.

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In my heart-wrenching conversations with the Brettlers, I discovered the frankness with which they talked about Zac and his problems, without any reflex of respecting appearances. According to the psychiatrist’s report, Rachelle said Zac strangled her “more out of rage than seriousness. “When I asked her about the meeting, she said that she had been alone with Zac and that they had had a family argument, in which he insisted that his family buy a better car or move to a better house. She told him dryly, “That’s not happening,” adding that he looked “spoiled,” and suddenly her hands settled around his throat. “I’m 1. 70 meters tall and he’s almost 1. 80 meters, and I don’t perceive where that anger is. “He came, and I don’t feel smart and I don’t feel safe,” she told me. After that incident, she insisted that Zac go to the psychiatrist, and “that triggered something,” she said: He was never violent with her again.

In Shamji’s email responses, the empathy he claimed to feel for the Brettlers was undermined by the scathing tone with which he referred to them. “The fact is, Zac was so haunted by them and his life that he would do anything to escape,” she wrote. On another occasion, he said, “I know it’s hard for his parents to settle for how much he hated them and how far he went to create a new personality for himself. Eventually, you may no longer live with yourself or your lies.

Zac, during his consultation with the psychiatrist, said that he discovered that his parents were “controlling”, but it turns out to be the opposite: the Brettlers gave their son an enormous amount of freedom and they accept it as true – much more, they believe – them now, than they had done. have. Shamji’s suggestion that Zac was driven by hatred of his parents to invent a different ego and ultimately commit suicide is malicious and selfish, but the tragedy forced the Brettlers to reflect on the origins of the family’s instability and resentment. son of him. “I spent my life, my children’s lives, looking to fix everything I could for them,” Rachelle told me. When I told him that Zac had told his classmates when he was 13 that his mother had died, I was afraid it would be painful for him to hear. Like any mother and her son, they had their ups and downs, Rachelle told me. But she was close to Zac, or at least she felt he was. During summer vacations, they rarely went to New York. “We would have fun,” she said. They rode motorcycles around town and she took Zac to play tennis on Randall’s Island. “He might just say he hates me,” she said. “But we had a genuine relationship. “

The star witness of the investigation was Akbar Shamji. He no longer lived in London and was the CEO of a crypto company, Bitzero. In the spring of 2022, it had announced major plans to convert a Cold War-era missile silo complex in Nekoma, North Dakota, into a crypto mining facility. Bitzero’s North American headquarters would be located in the state, Shamji promised at a press conference, emphasizing, “We are divided between Fargo and Bismarck. “

When I asked Shamji where he lives precisely on those days, his answer was vague. “The work takes me a lot around the U. S. , Canada, and Scandinavia,” he wrote, adding, “I also spend time in London. “It doesn’t seem to have come to fruition. (Bitzero has a new interim CEO, Carl Agren, who told me that Shamji asked to step down in September. )In a recent press release, Shamji referred to himself as the CEO of another company, DarkByte, which presents itself in terms of language. It’s so loaded with jargon that it can’t be explained, as if it has anything to do with AI. (Marc Sinden, whom the Shamji hired at the Mermaid Theatre in 1993, summed up Akbar’s modus operandi to me as follows: “Big ad, and then it. “)

Shamji’s children, who knew Zac, are active on social media and Rachelle, with a touch of masochism, browses their Instagram accounts looking for photos of the smiling family. There’s even an account dedicated to Weimaraner, Alpha Nero. Of course, social media is just one more step for the characters created, but for Rachelle it’s been frustrating to watch Shamji move on. In an email, he told me that, for him, “the case was closed,” implying that it was the whole story. Akbar’s son, who is now about the same age Zac was when he died, is a successful role model. A photograph on Instagram shows Akbar, dressed in a leather jacket and a big smile, at the fragrance branch of a store. her son’s face appears in a giant ad for a Tom Ford fragrance.

Shamji participated in the research from a hotel room. Her hair was now long and fell over her shoulders. He vowed to tell the whole fact and nothing more, and then he entered into the same story he had told before. “I’m not a big protagonist,” he insisted. It’s not my apartment or my drug addiction. “

Tampakopoulos said, “What the circle of relatives needs is for him to tell us the truth. And you don’t have to worry about Mr. Sharma. He’s not with us anymore. “

But Shamji remains as amnesiac as ever. He said he didn’t remember his own text messages. A message Sharma had sent to Shamji, at 4:30 p. m. On Zac’s last day, he said, referring to Zac: “He has no right to run away now, he is dealing with us. “

“That’s just the way Sharma used to talk,” Shamji said. “ ‘Us’ was like a royal ‘we’ to him. It wasn’t me and him, it was him and the world.”

Other responses were ridiculous. When asked about his text message to Mervin about “cleaning up the blood,” Shamji replied, “It’s not like ‘blood,’ like in a vein. “way of saying ‘brother. ‘” He hadn’t chased away the blood. It was “clearing, blood. ” (Mervin did not respond to my requests for comment. )

Shamji testified for hours, his sonorous voice and vaguely patrician tone. At times, he relied on his intentional sympathy for Zac’s parents and brother. At other times, he showed a slight impatience with the procedure. Coroner Mary Hassell expressed similar enthusiasm for getting this over with, interrupting Tampakopoulos. “I appreciate that Zac’s parents have all those unanswered questions,” she said. But only two other people knew exactly what happened in the apartment before Zac jumped out, he continued, “and none of them are here today. “

Matthew interrupted to point out that Shamji had come back to the apartment minutes after Zac jumped. “So if anybody on this planet who is still alive had any capacity to share with Rachelle and me what happened and why it happened, that person is Mr. Shamji,” he said.

But this is an investigation, not a trial for criminals, and the coroner warned that the Brettlers were seeking to get something out of the process that they could not contribute. For Matthew and Rachelle, now susceptible to the relentless ruthlessness of the British authorities, the coroner’s reaction is infuriating: it’s their last chance to uncover the truth. After two days of testimony, the coroner issued an “open” verdict, meaning he would not rule on whether the death was suicidal or suspicious. “I can’t speculate,” dijo. dicho. No I know what happened. “

Although Zac’s death officially remained an unsolved mystery, the investigation managed to clear up the ambiguities surrounding several key elements of the case. According to the coroner, the evidence showed that Shamji almost knew that Zac had left the balcony and that when Shamji looked over the riverbank, “looking for Zac. “He also concluded, based on recovered testimony and text messages, that “Zac was visibly frightened” before he died.

And, in an instant, Shamji blurted out. Asked about the post in which Sharma said, “Akbar, I need 5% of that $205 million,” Shamji replied, “It would be because Zac promised. “He continued, “Zac was promising huge amounts of money, and I made that clear to Sharma. . . I told him more than once that I didn’t think there was any pot of gold at the end of this rainbow.

One reason that it’s so difficult to know what happened at Riverwalk is that Zac was by no means the only impostor in the apartment that night. Dave 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 kid, 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. On a cold morning, I took a brisk walk through Regent’s Park with Matthew. He was talking about his disappointment in the official investigation and describing how, for him and Rachelle, the past four years have been a dark journey of discovery. With time, and with endless probing, they have come to understand more fully the life of their son. They have also come to see their city in a very different light. “It’s been eye-opening for us,” Rachelle told me. “This whole world we did not know about, this underworld that exists on our doorstep.” As Matthew and I walked, he muttered, “Sometimes it really makes me hate London. It makes me want to leave.”

We talked about Zac’s deceptions and Matthew suddenly brought up a podcast he’d been listening to about Bob Dylan. “I didn’t understand that Dylan would tell other people that he ran away to sign up for the circus at the age of thirteen. “he said. ” I’m not looking to equate Zac with Dylan in terms of talent. But there are many other people who have created imaginary lifestyles for themselves, and that hasn’t stopped them from operating in the genuine world when their feet still touch the ground.

One day in the summer of 2019, the Brettlers attended Matthew’s mother’s birthday party in south London. Joe and Zac arrived here and everyone was in a very good mood. But Zac said he had to leave early. He had recently moved to Riverwalk and had told his parents that later, as they were about to cross Vauxhall Bridge, they called him. Once the party was over, Matthew, Rachelle, and Joe headed north and called out to Zac on the way. As they crossed the bridge, they looked toward the Riverwalk building, and there was Zac, alone on the fifth-floor balcony, a small figure waving at them. ♦

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