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. Yet when Shamji met with the Brettlers at the Méridien hotel, three days later, he didn’t mention that a corpse had been discovered outside Riverwalk hours after Zac went missing. Nor did Sharma or Shamji alert the police that the victim might have fallen from Sharma’s balcony, which would have enabled them to identify Zac—and commence their investigation—four 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 each case, there were circumstances—debt, drugs, divorce, depression—that made suicide plausible. But the fact of so many sudden deaths over a short period of time involving high-flying London businessmen with Russian connections seemed dubious on its face. The press called the alleged suicides a “ring of death,” but as far as Scotland Yard was concerned they were just a series of unfortunate events. In 2017, BuzzFeed News published a groundbreaking investigation identifying fourteen men “who all died suspiciously on British soil after making powerful enemies in Russia.” According to the report, U.S. intelligence had shared evidence suggesting that numerous deaths being described by the London police as suicides had actually been murders. But a culture of timidity within British law enforcement, combined with weak institutional capacity after years of budget cuts, had shut down investigations. Some people expressed an even darker view: Britain had become so reliant on the largesse of Russia’s oligarchs that decisions had been made at a high level not to persecute London’s new mafia class, thereby extending to them the courtesy of being able to kill their enemies on British soil with impunity. One national-security adviser to the British government told BuzzFeed that ministers were desperate not “to antagonise the Russians.”
The Brettlers did not view Zac’s death as part of an international conspiracy, but they did come to fear that the Metropolitan Police had an inclination to categorize any suspicious death that wasn’t obviously a murder as a suicide. Rachelle and Matthew emphasized to me that they harbored no stigma about suicide, and resisted the notion that Zac killed himself only because so many clues pointed to something more nefarious.
They began their own investigation, tracking down friends of Zac’s and hounding the police for information, and uncovered additional signs that their son may have been in danger. They spoke to a friend who’d seen him two days before he died (and who didn’t know about Zac’s oligarch persona). The two boys had gone for a drive, and Zac kept fearfully looking over his shoulder. He mentioned that he might have information for the authorities, and was considering going into police protection. I spoke with the friend recently, who asked that I not use his name. “He was being threatened by someone,” he told me. “Apparently, they threatened to harm his family.” Of course, it was difficult to know how seriously to take such talk from Zac, given his propensity for dramatic stories. Nevertheless, police recovered an iPad among Zac’s belongings, and discovered that two days before he died he had done an Internet search for “witness protection uk.”
To a degree that his parents didn’t fully appreciate, Zac’s career as a fabulist started early. Numerous former classmates told me about his inventions. “He made up quite a lot of stuff,” a friend who met Zac at Mill Hill when they were both thirteen said. “He told a lot of people that his mum was dead.” Zac probably concocted this lie for sympathy or attention, the friend ventured. As an insecure new arrival at a school that he had not wanted to attend, he may have discovered that compassion can be a shortcut to intimacy—and that many people will open their heart to a stranger if they hear he’s suffered a terrible loss.
Zac also told classmates that he came from money. “Most of the lies related to wealth,” his Mill Hill housemate Andrei Lejonvarn recalled. Zac claimed that his family lived in One Hyde Park, and that his father was an arms dealer who owned a pair of Range Rovers. Lejonvarn was Zac’s doubles partner in tennis, and Matthew Brettler once drove them to a tournament. Before Matthew picked them up, Zac warned Lejonvarn that both Range Rovers were in the shop for repairs; his father would be driving a Mazda, and was “very touchy” about it, so Lejonvarn shouldn’t under any circumstances mention the Range Rovers. When Lejonvarn, who’d been expecting to meet a hardened arms dealer, got in the car, he was surprised by Matthew’s gently inquisitive manner. “He’s, you know, a nice guy,” Lejonvarn recalled. He said of Zac, “You could smell the bullshit.”
At one point, Zac told Mill Hill classmates that New Balance wanted to sponsor him as a cricket player.
“You’re full of shit!” one of them said.
“Zac, you’re a compulsive liar,” Lejonvarn chimed in.
For a moment, Zac seemed genuinely chastened. “I know,” he said. “I’m a compulsive liar.” Then he launched into a story about how he’d developed the problem after having this terrible accident as a kid.
“No! Zac!” Lejonvarn cut him off. “You’re doing it again!”
When I told Matthew and Rachelle how extensive and long-standing Zac’s duplicity seems to have been, Matthew offered the redemptive gloss of a mourning parent. His son, he said, had always had “a slightly preternatural ability to tell stories.” Being a boarding student, Matthew observed, is “a little like when you go to college, living away from your parents for the first time. It dawns on you that you’re meeting people who know absolutely nothing about you. You’ve got a tabula rasa—a reset point. You feel like you’ve got a little bit of editorial control in a way that you didn’t previously. I think that’s what happened with Zac. Being in that boarding environment with people who had this mind-boggling access to money, Zac suddenly saw a space in which he could create another version of himself.”
Another Mill Hill friend told me that Zac would forge quick bonds with people “for a certain moment, and then disappear” as they came to doubt his stories. The friend who saw Zac in London shortly before he died reflected, “If you’re lying to your friends, it’s a bit of a lonely place to be, 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 has maintained that Foley introduced Zac to him as Zac Ismailov. It is ironic that Foley vouched for Zac’s story, because he is presumably no stranger to the post-Soviet oligarchy, given that Roman Abramovich owned Chelsea for nearly two decades. “From my knowledge of Russian investors, they’re a fairly secretive bunch,” Foley told me. “You didn’t always get the full story from them, and they played their cards close to their chest.” Zac, he said, struck him as “one of these types.”
It’s tempting to see, in Zac’s final year, an echo of Tom Ripley, the sociopathic con man of the Patricia Highsmith novels, who achieves the life style he covets by preying, brilliantly, on others’ gullibility. But it’s startling to think that Foley could have been duped by a London teen-ager who’d never so much as vacationed in Russia—and that Zac might have been so reckless as to attempt this trick on precisely the sort of oligarch-adjacent Londoner poised to see through it.
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 project in Lisbon. They needed financing, and Foley offered to introduce them to his new friend Zac. When I asked Shamji if he’d bothered to Google Zac’s name before the meeting, he responded, “Personal introductions in London are far more trusted than social media, particularly with Eastern Europeans who have to keep a lower profile.” When I asked Connies-Laing about this, he said, via e-mail, “Mark was well connected in the Oligarch world and I had absolutely no reason to think that Zac was not credible.”
According to Shamji, he and Connies-Laing met Zac at a café in St. John’s Wood, and Zac mentioned that he’d recently made an offer on a lavish home around the corner, on Hamilton Terrace. Zac was dressed casually, but, Shamji told me, he was convincing in his role. As Shamji explained to police, Zac “talked the life of a very rich young kid—he had fancy watches, fancy cars, planes, all the stuff that is very aspirational wealth in London.” Shamji didn’t actually see any cars or watches or planes, but he assumed that Zac preferred a more understated mode of presentation. As their friendship solidified, Zac began joining Shamji when he walked his dog. They’d meet in front of One Hyde Park. Shamji never saw Zac emerge from the building; he was always waiting outside.
The financing from Zac’s family for the Lisbon deal never came through, and the project ultimately foundered. But Zac and Shamji pursued other opportunities together. Shamji was cagey when I inquired about the particulars, but I pieced together details in other ways. There had been a notion to sell fibre-optic cable to India. Zac introduced Shamji to the uncle of a friend of his who had the cable and was looking for a buyer. The three men met at the Dorchester, an extravagant hotel favored by London’s status-conscious rich. But, when I spoke to the potential business partner (who didn’t want me to use his name), he said that within minutes of sitting down he had the distinct impression that Shamji was “full of shit.” They’d scarcely ordered tea and scones when Shamji pulled out his phone to show off the photograph of his handshake with Prime Minister Modi. With a sigh, the man told me, “I know too many Akbars.” He was more impressed by Zac: “The frightening thing is, had he actually done some deals, he would have ended up a serious player.”