On an early morning in 2019, a 19-year-old named Zac Brettler jumped from a fifth-floor balcony in central London toward the River Thames. He didn’t make it far. His hip clipped the embankment, and he landed face-down in the muck below. A passerby found his body after dawn.
What makes this death remarkable isn’t just the tragedy itself, but the life Brettler had been living before it. He was the grandson of a famous London rabbi, a recent private school graduate. But he’d also convinced a feared London gangster named Dave Sharma that he was “Zac Ismailov,” the son of a fictitious Russian oligarch about to inherit over $270 million. When Sharma discovered the con, the kid’s time was running out.
Patrick Radden Keefe, a staff writer for The New Yorker, has turned this story into a new book titled “London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family’s Search for Truth.” The investigation that follows isn’t just about solving the mystery of Brettler’s death. It’s about uncovering the hidden architecture of modern London itself.
A City of Facades
Most tourists see what London wants them to see: royal palaces, ancient pubs, West End theaters. The reality is messier and far more revealing. Over decades, London has transformed into what amounts to a global safety-deposit box for unexplained wealth. Multimillion-dollar apartments sit empty most of the year, owned by oligarchs and foreign elites who may never set foot inside them. The city has become, as Keefe describes it, a business hub for money-laundering and, in his words, “a city full of crooks with pretensions to legitimacy.”
Zac’s mother, Rochelle, tells Keefe something that captures the shock of discovery: “This whole world we didn’t know about, this underworld that exists on our doorstep.” The Brettlers were not poor. Zac’s father works in finance; his mother writes for the Financial Times’ How To Spend It magazine. They thought they knew their city. They didn’t know it at all.
The Ambition to Be Bigger
Zac was an underachiever and a chronic fabulist. He wanted the trappings of extreme wealth without putting in the work. His family had money, but it wasn’t enough for him. In one conversation Keefe recounts, Zac tells a school friend: “It’s not enough. I want to be bigger.” He daydreamed about owning a Bugatti Veyron while his parents drove a Mazda.
He invented elaborate stories. He told people his father was an arms dealer. He claimed the family lived next to Hyde Park. His schoolmates called him out on these transparent lies, but somehow, inexplicably, Zac managed to convince a seasoned criminal that he was the son of a Russian oligarch with a massive inheritance on the way.
How is that possible? The answer may lie in a cruel irony: Sharma, the tough guy, was himself less than he appeared. By the time he took Zac under his wing, Sharma was an aging, drug-addled gangster who had lost his edge. He saw Zac and his supposed fortune as one last score. And according to one of Sharma’s associates, once Sharma realized he’d been conned, there was no way Zac was leaving that apartment alive.
The Con That Captivates
There’s something magnetic about stories of aspiring con artists. We’re drawn to their audacity, repulsed and fascinated by watching them stack lies like Jenga blocks higher and higher. Characters like Jay Gatsby, the bootlegger who reinvented himself, tap into something deep in how we understand ambition and reinvention. Keefe has written about these worlds before. His earlier book “The Snakehead” examined a Chinatown people smuggler operating a human pipeline from China’s Fujian province to the U.S. In “Say Nothing,” published in 2019, he effectively solved a decades-old cold case in Belfast tied to the violence of the Troubles.
But what makes “London Falling” stick is how it operates on multiple levels at once. On the surface, it’s about the Brettler family grappling with the death of their son and the revelation of his hidden life. Underneath, it’s a portrait of a city that has become something its long-term residents barely recognize.
A Personal Connection to the Story
Frank Langfitt, the NPR correspondent who reviewed this book for The New Yorker, worked in London from 2016 to 2023. He walked past the spot where Brettler jumped multiple times without knowing anything about the death. The story wasn’t covered in the London papers when it happened. Keefe broke it nearly five years later. During his time there, Langfitt’s own children attended a private school where some classmates were the actual children of real Russian oligarchs, kids with access to invitation-only Amex cards and Mediterranean yachts. He understands the pressure Zac felt to embellish and compete in that rarefied atmosphere.
That pressure is real, and it’s worth examining. When you’re surrounded by stratospheric wealth, the temptation to exaggerate your own position, to claim you’re richer or more connected than you are, becomes its own kind of gravity. Most kids resist it. Zac didn’t.
The Imposters on Both Sides
What emerges from Keefe’s investigation is a strange symmetry. Zac pretended to be rich. Sharma pretended to be a mentor and protector. Both were caught up in what Keefe calls “the glitzy, mercenary aspirational culture of modern London.” One was a teenager desperate to matter in a world of wealth he didn’t possess. The other was an aging gangster clinging to relevance in a criminal underworld that had passed him by. They deserved each other, in a way, and they destroyed each other.
The London Metropolitan Police had questions about whether Brettler committed suicide or jumped trying to save himself. His parents had even more questions. But the deepest question the book raises isn’t really about how Zac died. It’s about the kind of city that makes a kid like Zac possible in the first place, and what happens when ambition, wealth, and criminality become so intertwined that no one can tell them apart anymore.
