This story is little more than a brutal anecdote, which Patrick Radden Keefe has chosen to tell at excessive length. It has the kind of fact-checked gravity that indicates a star American journalist bent on perpetrating an entire book. (‘Built in 1923 and originally known as the Empire Stadium, Wembley was the most iconic sporting ground in Britain.’) But it occurred to me more than once as I read it that it has the hallmarks of a particularly black London comedy by Dickens or Ben Jonson or Joe Orton.
A violent knave, his activities previously limited to cheating the police, murdering his equally appalling criminal rivals, doing underhand deals and ripping off the rich, acquires an associate. The associate’s family have a history of spending other people’s money, buying massive mansions on the never-never. The associate knows a Russian teenager, the son of an oligarch, not very bright, eager to please and dazzled by glamorous toys – cars, watches and riverside apartments. The boy announces that he is about to come into £205 million, but that he has no idea what to do with the money or whom to trust. The knave goes into action, lighting up with the prospect of a nine-figure payday.
The Act Two revelation is that there is another practitioner of deceit in this scenario: the teenager. He isn’t Russian and his father isn’t an oligarch. He can’t speak a word of Russian. He has grown up in a flat in Maida Vale and his entire worldly estate is the £18,000 he came into on his 18th birthday – the product of various birthday gifts and ISAs that doting relations gave the less academically promising family member over the years. That has been quickly spent keeping up the appearances of the scion of oligarchy.
When, in Act Three, the furious knave, suspecting that something’s afoot, yells his demand for 50 per cent of what the teen-ager’s got, that amounts to 50 per cent of £4. It could be extremely funny, except for one thing. The 19-year-old ends by being tossed, or throwing himself, off the fifth-floor balcony of a riverside block in November 2019. He hits the embankment wall, shatters his hip, falls into the river and drowns. His jaw may have been broken some time earlier. The inquiry into his death reached an open verdict.
The boy’s name was Zac Brettler. His family were respectable and comfortably off. His maternal grandfather was Hugo Gryn, a celebrated media rabbi and Holocaust survivor. Brettler was a familiar London type. Not bright enough to get into the sort of schools his brother sailed through, he ended up at an expensive academy where he could hang out with other underachieving pupils. His obsessions were money, fast cars and luxury real estate.
What was wrong with him, when he’d had an expensive schooling and ought to have been better educated? More money was spent on ‘a kindly doctor in private practice with an office near Sloane Square’. The diagnoses proliferated. ‘Could he be bipolar? Did he have borderline personality disorder? Or narcissistic personality disorder? Or intermittent explosive disorder?’ Meanwhile, the boy was getting on with his big idea of becoming obscenely rich, even though he knew nothing about anything. What about being an estate agent? Dealing drugs? Brettler’s internet searches are pathetic: ‘Night club jobs London, football manager jobs, Formula One jobs, betting company jobs UK intern, easiest sport to become pro, how to become a pro dart player.’
London is full of knaves and thugs faking opulence, and always has been
Among the underachieving scions of the rich at school with Brettler was a girl named Safiya Shamji. Her father, Akbar, and his wife, Daniela Karnuts, were in the high-end luxury market, living in Mayfair, Daniela a fashion designer of red-carpet gowns with the label Safiyaa. On one of her few official appearances, Meghan Sussex wore a Safiyaa outfit. In this world your children take the name of the brand you plan, the places you squirrel your cash in (another family had children called Monaco and Cayman) or the possessions you hope for. One of these characters, Verinder Sharma, a professional connection of Akbar’s, had a daughter called Matisse. Verinder, on the other hand, was rarely known by his birth name. When he was finally hauled into court for false imprisonment his pals burst out laughing as his name was read out. They had only ever known him as ‘Indian Dave’.
Indian Dave specialised in meting out torture and worse to other murderous thugs. Akbar Shamji’s father Abdul excelled in other ways, making a show of vast wealth and promising even greater riches to whoever he was talking to. He even fooled Margaret Thatcher’s fundraisers for a short period and went to prison for perjury. One of his scams was to buy the Mermaid Theatre on a prime City site, then not pay anyone and let it go dark in the hope that the land would revert. (It didn’t work.) ‘Big announcement, then fuck all,’ was how the rueful director of the theatre later summed up the Shamjis’ modus operandi. One creditor took the unusual step of getting paid what he was owed by walking into one of the Shamjis’ ‘offices’ and, on finding jewellery, watches and diamonds scattered over a desk, scooped up the lot and sold it for what he could get.
Many people in this world were, to an outside observer, deeply unimpressive. Abdul Shamji was reduced to writing his own hagiography, describing himself as a ‘Phoenix Who Rose From Ashes to Recreate an Industrial Empire of Unsurpassed Splendour’. Another, Scot Young, who made a living creaming off profits from an oligarch’s deals, acquired an ambitious girlfriend and found himself starring in a fourth-rate reality show about social climbing, Ladies of London, and very unremarkable he was too. You would probably have to be a pathologically lying, not very bright teenager to take such characters seriously. But if you did, your story might end, as Brettler’s did, with being stuck in an apartment with Indian Dave and his sidekick Akbar. Shortly before Brettler’s death, the latter texted a friend: ‘I am not fucking playing. I have just been heating up knives and clearing up blood.’ Akbar denied that this message meant what it appeared to mean and blamed it on having been drinking; and there is no suggestion, that he himself assaulted or tortured Brettler or was involved in his death. He had left the flat by the time the boy fell.
This is a grim tale of London lives, mediocrity, money, incapacity and violence. The telling is largely driven by the understandable efforts of Brettler’s parents to find out what happened to their son and to hold someone accountable for his death. Naturally, few of Indian Dave’s circle would talk to an eager beaver American journalist, and those who did weren’t saying much. The police, on this telling, were useless, not even interviewing the friend Akbar sent the ‘heating up knives’ text to. For the most part they wouldn’t be interviewed either.
The dependence on Brettler’s parents as sources has some downsides for the reader. False trails that were entered on are explored in excessive detail. There is no suggestion that rich Russians played any part in the story apart from in the fevered imaginations of the deluded. In pursuit of a thrilling theory that Indian Dave was in fact a police informer, whose death (from a suspected drug overdose in 2020) was actually faked, it is first claimed that there had been no inquest. But it then emerges that Brettler’s parents had just missed it in their first investigation. An underground source tells Keefe that he’d heard that the police did have an informer called ‘Indian Dave’, before admitting that he might have been thinking of ‘another Indian Dave’. That could be suspicious, as Keefe claims, or it could just be the observation of an outsider of this particular London scene. If in New York one were told about a ‘Benny the Italian’, one might accept there was more than one. In any case, Keefe is unable to produce any previous case in which information received from this ‘Indian Dave’ played any part, and the claim remains at best unproven.
The challenge for Keefe in telling this story is that Brettler just isn’t interesting – or, rather, only interesting in the brutality of his end. The men who were with him up until his death aren’t interesting either. London is full of knaves and thugs faking opulence, and always has been. Brettler’s maternal grand-father, by contrast, did have a fascinating story, though its relevance is not obvious. Hugo Gryn survived Auschwitz by lying to the guards on entry, pretending to be five years older than he was and a qualified carpenter. Later, alone in England, he lied his way into a job by claiming to be a Cambridge graduate; even later he concealed an affair and an illegitimate daughter. Keefe asks bluntly whether lying was in the family blood and inherited by Zac (who never knew his grandfather). But the comparison is distasteful. The boy who knew he would be murdered as he entered Auschwitz unless he passed himself off as a carpenter should not be compared with the already rich boy who faked being the son of an oligarch to impress girls at his school.
If it had been told as a story in the vein of The Alchemist or Entertaining Mr Sloane, this book might have had some appeal at, say, 150 pages. I don’t think Keefe understands the horribly comic potential of many of the details he records. But as it is, London Falling bears witness to the contemporary obsession with tales of helpless victimhood. Brettler’s desires and dreams were utterly banal, and had he achieved them, becoming a deputy manager at Foxtons who had seen Prince Harry at a nightclub a few times, nobody would have cared beyond his disappointed parents. For them, we can certainly have much sympathy. But the book trusts too much in our imaginative investment in a youth who lucklessly found himself at the mercy of two people even more foolish than himself – they preparing to start the old hot-knives routine; he noticing that the door to the balcony was open.
Comments