Riverwalk

In November 2019, nineteen-year-old Zac Brettler went missing. When his parents began looking for him, they discovered that Zac had been living a double life. Patrick Radden Keefe’s book is London Falling. Say hello on Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. Sign up for our occasional newsletter. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts. Sign up for Criminal Plus to get behind-the-scenes bonus episodes of Criminal, ad-free listening of all of our shows, invitations to virtual events, special merch deals, and more. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop. Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:01Speaker 00

  How much more would you get done with a personal assistant in your pocket?

• 0:05Speaker 01

  Life's too short to be like manually filing insurance claims and like being on hold waiting for like the lab tests that the, you know, that the doctor did. Like, I don't know, I feel like it's allowing me to show up in ways that I've always wished I could show up. I just, I'm so strapped for time.

• 0:20Speaker 00

  What we gain and give up when AI agents enter the picture. That's this week on Explain It To Me. Listen to new episodes Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:37Speaker 02

  On November 28th, 2019, 19-year-old Zach Bretler was living at home with his parents in London. He told his mother Rochelle he was gonna spend the weekend with a friend.

• 0:49Speaker 03

  Just to chill out. He told her he was a little stressed out and he was gonna do a phone detox.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  He'd told her he was gonna be staying in a part of London just a few miles away, in a fancy apartment complex called Riverwalk.

• 1:01Speaker 03

  And so, as far as Rochelle knew, that was where he would be.

• 1:06Speaker 02

  Journalist Patrick Raddenkeef. Zach's friend came to pick him up. And after he left, Rochelle realized Zach had left his keys and credit cards behind. His mother thought that was really odd.

• 1:21Speaker 03

  And so she just texted him and she said, you know, I'm so worried about you. Are you okay? If you've gone away for the weekend, you know, aren't you gonna need your keys and your wallet? Is everything gonna be all right? And hours later, he texted back, and he just wrote, "All good. X."

• 1:40Speaker 02

  The next morning, Rochelle was at home alone. Her husband Matthew was on a business trip. Around 9:30 a.m., she heard the doorbell ring.

• 1:50Speaker 03

  And there was a man that she didn't know, standing on the doorstep. A guy who was a kind of middle-aged man. He was black. He was elegantly dressed, in a suit and a bright tie. And she thought he looked maybe like a chauffeur, like a driver of some sort. And he was holding a phone, and the phone had somebody on speaker. And she came to the door, and he said, "Is Zach home?" And she said, "No, he's not. Who are you?" And he said, "Who are you?" She was a little taken aback. And she said, "Well, I'm his mom."

• 2:32Speaker 03

  And at this point, she heard a voice from the phone in this guy's hand. And she could hear this voice say, "That can't be his mom. His mom's in Dubai." And she was totally startled. She'd never been to Dubai. But before she could ask any questions, the guy on the doorstep turned around, got into a Range Rover, and drove away.

• 2:57Speaker 02

  After he left, Rachelle tried to call Zach, but her call went straight to voicemail.

• 3:04Speaker 02

  Then she called her husband, Matthew.

• 3:07Speaker 03

  They ended up calling the police. They had a kind of premonition that something might be very wrong.

• 3:13Speaker 02

  I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.

• 3:26Speaker 02

  When Zach Bretler was a little kid, his parents described him as bright and a little quirky.

• 3:33Speaker 03

  He was always a bit of a smart aleck. He was a great talker. He was the kid who would put on funny voices. He had a kind of theatricality to him. He would tell jokes. He was always very at ease talking to adults, even when he was a kid. And so, he was kind of fun to be around in that respect. You know, he had a sort of slightly jazzy style of conversation. You know, sometimes you encounter somebody and they... They're just kind of fun to talk to because you never know quite what they're going to come out with next. And he had a confidence to him, even as a really young kid.

• 4:09Speaker 02

  His older brother, Joe, remembers that once at a family party, when Zach was around five, a girl showed something to Zach and asked him, "Can you read this?" Zach told her, "I didn't bring my glasses."

• 4:24Speaker 02

  He used to memorize the electronic sections from shopping catalogs and loved cars, especially fancy sports cars. His favorite was a Bugatti.

• 4:36Speaker 02

  Zach started going to a school called Mill Hill. He became known as a class clown, and he did well. He joined the tennis team and the cricket team. His parents noticed he started to become obsessed with money. Many of his classmates came from very wealthy families.

• 4:54Speaker 03

  Really wealthy families. And so a lot of Zach's classmates were the children of oligarchs, the children of foreigners, often from the former Soviet Union, who had huge fortunes, billionaires, who had a second home in London. They made London their home, in part because they wanted to send their kids to school in London. Zach had never really been exposed to those kinds of people when he was growing up. But at 13, he gets to Mill Hill, and he's suddenly surrounded by these classmates, these kind of international students who had swagger, and they had money, and they had designer clothes. And on the weekends, they would go to fancy restaurants, and they'd party at nice hotels.

• 5:38Speaker 03

  A lot of the kids were boarding students. And the dormitory was about an eight-minute walk from class. And on cold days, these kids of oligarchs, they would summon Ubers to bring them to class.

• 5:51Speaker 02

  Zach started saying how great he thought Vladimir Putin was. His favorite movies were The Wolf of Wall Street with Leonardo DiCaprio and War Dogs, about childhood friends who get rich by becoming arms dealers. As a teenager, Zach began fighting with his parents. They argued a lot about money.

• 6:13Speaker 03

  Rachelle and Matthew were really well off by most standards. They lived in a nice 2,000-square-foot apartment in Maid of Vale, which is quite a nice neighborhood in central London. And they were paying to send these two kids to private school. So this was a family that, by most standards, was really privileged. But Zach felt as though he didn't have enough. And so he started to say to his parents, he would say, "Why don't we..." They drove a Mazda. "Why don't we drive a Mercedes? Why don't we drive a Bentley?" You know, we should really buy a house in this neighborhood. And the thing is that a house in that neighborhood, you know, could cost $10 million. And so he started to seem a little strange to them because there was a sense of, you

• 6:56Speaker 03

  know, how much do you want? But over time, he also just got kind of more sullen. I mean, in a way that anybody who's been an adolescent will relate to, that you're kind of pulling away from your parents. And I think that Rochelle and Matthew felt that in a painful way, but not in a way that felt like they should sound the alarm.

• 7:20Speaker 02

  Zach's friends said he talked about starting his own businesses all the time. He tried to convince them to go in on different ideas with him. He got older friends to buy him cartons of cigarettes and would sell them individually to his classmates. He found a storage room where the school kept things left behind by students and began selling those, too. He started wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase. After Zach turned 17, his father said Zach changed a lot. Zach's brother had just graduated school and was taking a gap year, while Zach had recently tried to transfer schools and had gotten rejected.

• 8:04Speaker 02

  He was angry a lot of the time, and Rochelle remembers that Zach was hard to talk to. They argued even more. One night, Zach and Rochelle were home alone.

• 8:15Speaker 03

  Zach started in on, you know, what was a very familiar argument to them at that point about how the family should have a nicer home. And she said something, she made some remark about how he sounded like a spoiled brat. And suddenly Zach's hands were around her throat. And it only lasted a second, and he didn't actually physically choke her, but it was that kind of impulse to sort of, literally, to kind of go for the jugular. And she was terrified. And it was over almost as quickly as it began, but on the other side of that, Rochelle insisted that Zach get into therapy.

• 8:56Speaker 02

  Zach went to see a psychiatrist who noted that Zach had a somewhat defiant manner. They talked about school and his family. Zach said he was, quote, "focused on being wealthy." The psychiatrist said Zach showed, quote, "a potentially dangerous lack of insight and skewed norms of behavior." The psychiatrist recommended therapy, but Zach only went to one appointment. And Rachelle and Matthew didn't make him keep going. They said after his fight with Rachelle, he seemed to calm down, and they argued thus.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  In 2018, Zach got an internship with a man who owned a chauffeur company. He told his parents he was doing well and doing real business deals.

• 9:45Speaker 03

  They were under the impression that he was making money, that he was, you know, he was actually doing deals. He told them about a real estate deal he'd done, where he'd gotten a finder's fee for this luxury apartment that he found for a woman who worked at Chelsea Football Club. He increasingly seems as though he's kind of impatient with school. He's not sure he wants to go to college. He really is in a hurry, you know, he wants to go out and kind of get rich and be out there in the world.

• 10:16Speaker 02

  Zach told his parents he was going to move out. He said he had met someone who owned multiple apartments in the Riverwalk complex in central London, right next to the Thames. And he was letting Zach stay in one.

• 10:30Speaker 02

  But by October, Zach was back home. He said he was lonely. Rachelle and Matthew said that during this time, there was a lot about Zach's life they didn't know.

• 10:43Speaker 02

  Rachelle knew that Zach had been visiting a neighbor, an older Russian woman. She sometimes wondered if they were dating.

• 10:52Speaker 02

  At one point, Zach showed his father his bank account. It showed he had over 800,000 pounds.

• 11:00Speaker 03

  They were really worried about his lifestyle. You know, they were worried he might be dealing drugs or using drugs. They actually kind of surreptitiously got his doctor to do a blood test. I mean, he had a blood test, had a checkup. They asked the doctor to screen the blood for drugs, came back negative. At one point, they went away on vacation and they actually installed a hidden camera in the living room of the house just to see who he might have brought home. But all that came up was, you know, there were some guys from the local tennis club who came back and they would watch TV, they'd just watch movies on the television.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  Zach told his parents about someone he'd been doing business with, a man named Akbar Shomji.

• 11:39Speaker 03

  He told his parents, I've met this guy. He is a really wealthy, really successful, just impressive London businessman. He went to Cambridge University. He's this kind of good-looking glamorous guy in his 40s. He has an apartment on Mount Street, and Mount Street in Mayfair. It's just, for those who don't know, London is, you know, Mayfair is one of the fanciest neighborhoods in London, and Mount Street is one of the fanciest streets. He had two kids who were younger than Zach, and he had a wife named Daniela Carnutts, and she was a fashion designer with an atelier in London.

• 12:18Speaker 03

  And she designed these very high-end gowns of the sort that you might wear to the Oscars or something for really well-known women, for Princess Kate, for Meghan Markle, for Gwyneth Paltrow, for Michelle Obama. He showed his mother the dresses, that fashion line is called Safia, the dresses on his iPad. He told his parents that he and Akbar were starting to look at some business deals. And so there were, you know, there was a deal involving cars and a deal involving CBD-infused skincare products, and so they were kind of out hustling, doing deals.

• 13:00Speaker 03

  And they didn't meet Akbar at that time. But to his mother and father, it seemed like he'd made friends with this guy who was maybe a mentor and kind of was what Zach wanted to become. So maybe with the help of somebody like Akbar, he could make something of himself.

• 13:17Speaker 02

  I mean, if I were his parents, I would think I would be thinking, what is a successful 40-year-old businessman doing, hanging around with my 18-year-old son? I mean, you know, were they suspicious at all?

• 13:33Speaker 03

  I think they were, yeah. I mean, I think it was a very, very difficult period of time for the Brettlers because Zach has turned 18. And he's already kind of trying to pull away and assert himself as an adult. So yes, they were anxious and suspicious, and they didn't really know what the story was, but they were worried that if they pushed too hard, they would push him away.

• 14:02Speaker 02

  The last time Rochelle saw Zach on the day he'd left his keys and wallet behind, Akbar Shomji was the friend who had picked him up. Four days passed. The police didn't have any news for Rochelle and Matthew. What's their next step?

• 14:20Speaker 03

  Rochelle called around to talk to various friends of Zach's, and one of them ended up giving her the phone number for Akbar Shomji.

• 14:29Speaker 02

  Akbar Shomji agreed to meet them and tell them about the last time he'd seen Zach. He asked them to come to a hotel called The Meridian.

• 14:38Speaker 03

  When they met Akbar, there was something kind of reassuring about him. He's a very elegant, polished guy. And he told them that Zach was a close friend, and he told them that he was really surprised to meet them. Because he had understood that Zach was not named Zach Bretler at all, that his real name was Zach Ismailov.

• 15:09Speaker 02

  Akbar Shomji said that he thought Zach was the son of a billionaire Russian oligarch. He had believed that Zach was living in the UK to invest his family's money.

• 15:20Speaker 03

  And so it was this very strange meeting of the two of them because Akbar was saying he was kind of shocked to meet these English parents who aren't billionaires and learn that they were Zach's real parents. And Matthew and Rochelle were shocked to learn that their son might have had this secret alter ego.

• 15:41Speaker 02

  Akbar Shomji said he had met Zach through a friend named Mark Foley, who managed some real estate for Chelsea Football Club.

• 15:49Speaker 03

  Which is the famous storied soccer team owned by Roman Abramovich, the most famous Russian oligarch. And so you can see how if you're Zach and you think that Putin is great and Roman Abramovich is great, and you're a little obsessed with the oligarch set in London. You meet a guy like Mark Foley, who works for Chelsea Football Club, that's a really appealing contact to have. So Zach initially tells Mark Foley that he is the son of an oligarch. He's the first person Zach tricks. And so Mark Foley arranges a meeting between Zach and Akbar. And that is where their friendship is born.

• 16:34Speaker 02

  As Akbar talked with Zach's parents, some of what Zach had told Rochelle and Matthew did seem to be true. Akbar said they had sold cars in Romania and Georgia and had made some money with rare earth mineral mining.

• 16:51Speaker 02

  Akbar told them that after he had picked up Zach on the day he went missing, they drove around the city before they went to the Riverwalk complex. They met a man named Verinder Sharma there.

• 17:04Speaker 03

  Verinder was another middle aged guy. And Akbar was a little ambiguous about what Verinder did for a living. He said he was kind of semi-retired.

• 17:14Speaker 02

  Zach's parents pieced together that when Zach had briefly moved out, he'd actually been staying with Verinder Sharma.

• 17:23Speaker 02

  Akbar said that on the way to Riverwalk, Zach said he needed to tell him something.

• 17:29Speaker 03

  Zach had confessed to him that Zach was addicted to heroin.

• 17:38Speaker 02

  As Akbar told Rochelle and Matthew, he took Zach to the Riverwalk complex, where Zach then confessed about his heroin addiction to Verinder Sharma. Akbar said that the three of them talked for a while, and by the end of the night, they'd all agreed that Zach would go to a rehab clinic in the morning. Akbar said he left Verinder and Zach at the apartment.

• 18:02Speaker 02

  He said Verinder called him in the morning and said Zach was gone.

• 18:08Speaker 02

  What did Zach's parents think when they heard about heroin? Did they believe that that could be a possibility?

• 18:16Speaker 03

  So all of this, you can imagine, was a lot coming at Matthew and Rochelle. And there was an interesting thing where when they heard that he'd been pretending that he was the son of a Russian holocaust, it was completely shocking. But they believed it. They could sort of see some version of their son who could find his way to telling that kind of story. When they heard from Akbar that Zach was addicted to heroin, neither of them believed it for a second. And, you know, it wasn't that they had some kind of parental fantasy that their kid couldn't take drugs. It's just that heroin didn't seem to be Zach's kind of thing.

• 18:59Speaker 03

  They thought if anything, it would be cocaine. And, you know, Zach had been living with them. They thought it was, it would have been difficult for him to kind of carry on a heroin addiction and be living with them and they would never pick up on any of the signs. This was a kid who got up in the morning and took long runs along the Thames. It just didn't seem right. Now, they did believe that Zach might have told Akbar that he was addicted to heroin, but they thought that if he said something like that, it was probably because he was scared or he wanted pity. You know, Zach was always the kid in school who would feign a migraine on the day of the exam. He often would come up with stories that he would tell in order to kind of get out of doing something or get somebody to feel bad for him.

• 19:43Speaker 03

  So they believed that Zach might have lied and said this to Akbar, but they didn't believe the heroin story for a minute.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  And what, and what do they think about Akbar? I mean, he's more their peer than, than Zach's peer. I mean, you know, age-wise.

• 19:58Speaker 03

  They recorded that first conversation. They actually recorded it on an iPhone. And eventually, they let me listen to the recording. And I think they were so reassured by Akbar. They were so grateful to him for his help. In that moment, they thought, this is a guy who actually kind of got burned by our son. He's like a real, serious grown-up with a professional life and a lot of money, clearly. And our son sort of wheedled his way into this guy's life, pretending to be something he wasn't. And Akbar has just learned that Zach was lying about all that. And yet, he seems very kind and he keeps saying, the most important thing is we've got to get Zach home. We've got to get him back safe.

• 20:39Speaker 02

  Akbar Shamji introduced the Breitlers to Verinder Sharma over the phone. Verinder also thought Zach was a billionaire. Zach had told him that he wasn't speaking to his mother because of a problem with his inheritance. He had said his mother and the rest of his family were all in Dubai.

• 21:00Speaker 02

  Verinder said, "I didn't think someone could lie to that extent."

• 21:06Speaker 02

  Rochelle and Matthew apologized to both men for Zach's lies. Verinder said the only thing that mattered was getting Zach back. They all agreed to stay in touch.

• 21:20Speaker 02

  The next day, two police officers came to the Brettlers' home.

• 21:26Speaker 02

  They said a body had been found in the Thames.

• 21:34Speaker 02

  We'll be right back. To listen without ads, join Criminal+.

• 21:52Speaker 02

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• 23:37Speaker 02

  Instead of striving for perfect health, support your foundational health. Save 25% on your first month at ritual.com/criminal. That's ritual.com/criminal for 25% off your first month. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. On November 29, 2019, police were called to the Thames. They had received a report that there was a body on the riverbank in front of the Riverwalk Complex.

• 24:15Speaker 03

  This initially is a John Doe investigation. The body had no ID, no tattoos, there was no suggestion of who this person was.

• 24:26Speaker 02

  He had no shirt on or shoes, just sweatpants and socks. The police assumed that he had jumped off a bridge somewhere else and that the body had drifted downriver through the night. About 30 people are found every year in the Thames. Most of them are people who died by suicide.

• 24:48Speaker 02

  The body was taken to the police station and then the mortuary. Police began trying to ID him.

• 24:55Speaker 03

  If you imagine how big London is and how big the Metropolitan Police Scotland Yard is, you have this kind of bizarre situation where there's this body, they don't know who it is, and in another part of the city, there's a missing persons investigation that starts where they're looking for this missing kid, Zach Bretler, and the left hand and the right hand aren't talking for about four or five days. And finally, the police put it together. They realized that the body found out in front of the building was the same kid who went missing.

• 25:26Speaker 02

  On December 5th, 2019, police arrested Varinder Sharma on suspicion of murder.

• 25:34Speaker 02

  Zach had told his parents Varinder Sharma was a rubber tycoon, but police knew that Varinder Sharma had a long criminal record. He was also known as Indian Dave. Police had investigated him for drug smuggling and potential involvement in a homicide from a drive-by shooting with an AK-47. At one point, he faked his death when he was charged with blackmail, but he'd actually gone into hiding in Monaco.

• 26:06Speaker 02

  There were accounts that he would hold people over the sides of buildings so they would pay back their loans.

• 26:13Speaker 02

  When he was questioned about the night that Zach died, Varinder Sharma said he believed that Zach had killed himself. He said he had fallen asleep after midnight. He'd been drinking whiskey and had taken a sleeping pill, so he didn't remember much about the night. He said Zach had been crying and was upset about his heroin addiction, but that by the end of the night, they had hugged. He said, "I would like to state for the record that I was not responsible for Zach's death in any way." When officers asked him more questions, he answered, "No comment."

• 26:49Speaker 03

  Which is the English equivalent of pleading the fifth. You know, this is a guy who was a very seasoned hardcore English gangster who'd been in prison and had been investigated for murder, and he did what those kinds of hard men tend to do in these situations, which is he totally clamped up.

• 27:11Speaker 02

  Police had also arrested Akbar Shomji. He told them he thought that Zach was, quote, "kind of slightly schizophrenic." Akbar Shomji told police that on the night of November 28th, he went home and his wife had been angry with him for staying out so late, so he'd slept in his car. But the police officers had evidence that he was lying. They had footage from CCTV cameras from the night that Zach died.

• 27:40Speaker 03

  And they looked at the CCTV footage. He was there and then he left and he drove away. And then Akbar didn't drive home. He actually just kind of drove around the area as if he was sort of hanging out just in case. And it was late at night, you know, this is 1:00, 2:00 in the morning. And Zach was alone in the apartment with Sharma for about 20 or 30 minutes. And then at a certain point, Indy and Dave called him. We know that from the phone records.

• 28:10Speaker 02

  The phone records showed that around 2:00 AM, Verinder called Akbar.

• 28:15Speaker 03

  And as soon as Akbar got that call, he turned his car around and he started speeding back to Riverwalk. He heard something on that call that made him desperate to get back there. And he pulls up in front of the building and gets out of the car and goes in and starts heading up. And just at the moment he pulls up in front of the building, the footage shows Zach walking out onto the balcony and walking over to one end and seeming to kind of look over the side and then walking over to the other and then walking to the center and jumping. So moments after Zach goes up the balcony, Akbar goes into the apartment. He's in there for about 15 minutes. We don't know what happens when he's inside because he wouldn't tell the police and neither

• 29:00Speaker 03

  would Sharma. But afterwards, Akbar goes downstairs and you think he's going to go home again. Instead, he walks around the building to the other side, which is where the river is. And he walks right over to the river and there's a river wall there. And he walks right over to exactly the point where Zach had just gone into the river. And the cameras capture Akbar Shamji leaning over and looking down into the river at just the point where Zach's just gone into it. Then, he straightens up, walks back around the building, gets into his car, and drives home.

• 29:43Speaker 02

  Police asked why Akbar Shamji had gone to look in the river. He said, "It's a nice bit of the river." One police officer said it seemed like too much of a coincidence. But Akbar said that he would have called the police if he had seen Zach. One week after Zach's death, Rochelle and Matthew met with the lead detective, a man named Rory Wilkinson. He explained that Zach had several injuries, most of them related to his fall, but the police said he had a broken jaw that they couldn't explain. Detective Wilkinson said police had video showing Zach alone on the fifth-floor balcony.

• 30:27Speaker 02

  But he said, "If someone is so scared that they jump, even if it's of their own volition, that still is obviously a criminal offense, possibly murder." Police officers had also searched Verinder Sharma's apartment and found Zach's phone broken in two. It wasn't his main phone that he used to text with his parents. It was a burner phone with special encryption. But police didn't have enough evidence to hold Akbar Shamji or Verinder Sharma. Both men were released on bail.

• 31:06Speaker 02

  How do Zach's parents feel the investigation is going? I mean, you know, when the police start, are they happy with the information they're getting?

• 31:19Speaker 03

  Initially, the police were very reassuring and they said, listen, you know, this is Scotland Yard. It's one of the biggest, most well-resourced police departments in the world. We will leave no stone unturned. The Breitlers basically took it for granted that the police would do what they said that they would do. And so initially, they, I think, felt as though it was in good hands. But then, the COVID pandemic kicks in and things kind of slow down. And they're not sure how much of the non responsiveness of the cops is a function of COVID, and how much of it is that they seem to have sort

• 32:02Speaker 03

  of lost the thread on the investigation. And over time, they become more and more uneasy. And so Rochelle and Matthew, rather than be passive, feel as though they owe it to their son to get to the bottom of what happened to him.

• 32:20Speaker 02

  Matthew and Rochelle had also hired a private investigator after Zach had gone missing. They started calling Zach's friends to find out for themselves what the last few weeks of his life had been like. One friend said that a few days before he died, he'd noticed Zach kept checking his surroundings. Zach said he was thinking of going to the police because he was being threatened. But his friends weren't always sure if what Zach said was real. He claimed that his father was an arms dealer. Later, Rochelle found out that when Zach was 13, during his first year at Mill Hill, he told his classmates

• 33:01Speaker 02

  that his mother had died. She learned that the neighbor she thought Zach had been dating, a woman named Zamira, had believed Zach was from Kazakhstan. She was from Russia, and they had become friends. She sometimes made Zach food, and had once invited him to celebrate New Year's with her family. Sometimes, when they talked, Zach threw in a word of Russian. Rochelle learned that her full name was Zamira Ismailova. Zach had used her last name for his fake identity with Akbar Shomji and Verinder Sharma.

• 33:38Speaker 02

  Rochelle and Matthew began to worry that the two men had been trying to extort money from Zach.

• 33:45Speaker 03

  They eventually start learning more about the gangster past of Verinder Sharma. And Akbar, it turns out, has a very checkered history in terms of his business and his life. And in fact, in the months before he meets Zach Bretler, Akbar has actually declared bankruptcy. Now, you wouldn't know it. He's still living a very luxe lifestyle with the apartment on Mount Street. And he meets people at these various private clubs that he's a member of. But he's actually in some financial trouble at the point where this young kid, who says that he is the son of a billionaire oligarch, suddenly wanders into his life.

• 34:26Speaker 02

  And where did Zach fall in this threesome?

• 34:30Speaker 03

  Zach was adopted by them, basically, as a kind of friend and protege. He would spend time with their families, with Akbar's kids, with Indian Dave's kids. And so he really kind of, in that sort of classic way with Zach, he went from not knowing people at all to ingratiating himself with them really quickly. I think they were amused by him. I think they absolutely were enticed by the idea that he might have access to hundreds of millions of dollars that he could help them out with, or he could channel some of that money in. The problem was, he kept telling all these stories about how he was going to come through with money and investments, and the money itself never materialized.

• 35:15Speaker 02

  Rochelle and Matthew checked Zach's bank account. They had saved checks from his grandparents over the years and money he'd gotten from his bar mitzvah and put it in a savings account. They'd given it all to him after he turned 18. It was about 18,000 pounds.

• 35:32Speaker 03

  He had kind of blown through that money, it turns out, pretending that he was the son of an oligarch, you know? Paying for meals, doing this and that, kind of here and there, to seem credibly like a rich person. And in the days before he died, Zach, in his bank account, had only four pounds. He was close to empty.

• 35:51Speaker 02

  They tried to contact some of the people Zach had said he was doing business with. But they said they didn't know anything that could help them.

• 36:01Speaker 02

  Zach's father, Matthew, spoke with the owner of a café in one of the Riverwalk's buildings. He'd been there the morning Zach's body had been found by the Thames. He helped them get in touch with some of the doormen from Riverwalk. And then, at the end of 2020, the lead detective on Zach's case called with news. Varinder Sharma had been found dead. We'll be right back.

• 36:44Speaker 02

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• 37:45Speaker 02

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• 38:26Speaker 02

  Make your bed your favorite place to be this season with Quince. Download the Quince app for app-exclusive offers, or go to quince.com. Get free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada and the UK, too. And when Quince asks where you heard about them, let them know Criminal sent you. It's the best way to support the show. In December of 2020, Varinder Sharma had been found dead in his apartment. Police believed he had died from a drug overdose.

• 38:58Speaker 03

  This is a year after Zach's death, almost to the week. But the officer who told them about it was a little ambiguous. He said it might have been a suicide. It might have been an overdose. He didn't really know the details. And he said he wasn't able to learn the details. He said, "We're being kind of kept sterile from that part of the investigation." And they were confused by this. If you're leading a murder investigation and your lead suspect dies, why it is that if you were that cop, you would be kept sterile from knowing the circumstances of that death?

• 39:35Speaker 02

  A year later, Detective Wilkinson asked to meet with Rochelle and Matthew. He had an update on the investigation. He told them that he wouldn't be able to give them a copy of the case files, but he would read everything aloud, and they could record it. Rochelle and Matthew were told about text messages on Varinder Sharma's phone, that in the days leading up to his death, Akbar and Varinder no longer trusted Zach. Varinder Sharma had written to Akbar trying to find out how much money Zach had, and texted that they should take Zach to an ATM. He also texted, "I want 5% of that 205 million."

• 40:19Speaker 02

  Akbar sent a voice memo back and said, "I'm highly skeptical about this 205 million." Varinder responded, saying that they were owed 50% of everything Zach owned. The night Zach died, Akbar had texted another man that he had been, quote, "heating up the knives and clearing up blood."

• 40:43Speaker 02

  Matthew and Rochelle asked if the police had interviewed that man. They said no. They also learned the police had not interviewed the chauffeur, who knocked on the door and told Rochelle that she couldn't be Zach's mother. It had been two years since Zach died.

• 41:02Speaker 03

  The cops really had very few answers and basically kept sort of suggesting, well, you know, maybe he just committed suicide. Maybe that's what this is. And at that point, the Brettlers were a little bit more aggressive because they had really done more homework than the police had. And the lead detective kind of defensively says, you know, I feel like I'm the criminal here and you guys are interviewing me. You know, you're interrogating me.

• 41:25Speaker 02

  In February of 2022, prosecutors in London said they would not file charges against Akbar Shomji in connection with Zach Brettler's death. 10 months later, about three years after Zach had died, the coroner's office held a public inquest about his death.

• 41:46Speaker 03

  Anytime there's a death in the UK that is unnatural or kind of unclear, ambiguous, there's what's called an inquest. And it's an interesting procedure. It looks a little bit like a judicial inquiry. There's a coroner who acts essentially like a judge. You have evidence presented. It's a somewhat adversarial situation in the sense that the Brettlers, in this case, had a lawyer who was able to cross-examine witnesses. And so this was kind of their last bite at the apple in terms of an opportunity to really try and get to the bottom of what had happened to Zach. In some ways, it was very dramatic in the sense that they were able to kind of confront face to face some of these people who clearly knew more than they were saying

• 42:28Speaker 03

  about the circumstances of Zach's death.

• 42:32Speaker 02

  The coroner said at the beginning of the inquest, "We're here simply to find the answers to four questions: who the deceased was, where he died, when he died, and how he came by his death." Akbar Shomji testified over video call. He had left London and was now working at a cryptocurrency company. He spoke for several hours.

• 42:58Speaker 02

  Matthew and Rochelle's lawyer asked Akbar about the text Verinder had sent him, saying he wanted 5% of that 205 million. Akbar said that Zack was always promising huge sums of money. "I pretty clearly told Sharma, I don't think there's any golden pot at the end of that rainbow." The Brentler's lawyer also asked about some of the texts Akbar had sent before Zack died, including the one where he said he was "heating up knives and cleaning up blood." Akbar said he was "a little bit drunk." He said he hadn't meant literal blood.

• 43:38Speaker 02

  He said that "blood" is "a more earthy, streety way of saying bro." The lawyer asked about the nine-minute call between Verinder and Akbar at around 2:00 a.m. that ended just a few minutes before Zack had jumped from the balcony. Akbar said he didn't remember what they had talked about. The lawyer asked if Verinder Sharma had seemed angry. Akbar said everything was fine. The coroner asked Akbar if he had ever talked with Verinder about what happened that night. Akbar said, "I never pushed too hard. I'm not sure what kind of hornet's nest I would have been kicking."

• 44:23Speaker 02

  When his testimony was done, the coroner allowed Akbar Shomji to continue listening to the rest of the inquest over video call. Most of the time, he kept his camera off. But at one point, he accidentally turned it on, and the courtroom realized he'd taken his computer to the bathroom, where he was taking a shower. The inquest took two days. At the end, the coroner's official finding was that the cause of Zack's death was inconclusive.

• 44:57Speaker 03

  The coroner says, "Could have been suicide. Could have been something more sinister. I'm not in a position to say." And so the Brettlers come out of that really kind of shimmering with fury because they feel as though this was the last opportunity when the authorities, the British authorities, could help them find answers about the death of their son, and they were let down once again.

• 45:24Speaker 02

  What do Rochelle and Matthew think happened to Zach?

• 45:29Speaker 03

  The Brettlers believe, and I think they're right, that Zach thought that if he stayed in that apartment, he was going to die. And so he went out onto the balcony and he did a swan dive. He thought, "The only chance I have is of making it to the river." And it was a fifth-floor balcony, and the worst part of this is that had he made it clean into the river, he might actually have survived. He probably would have been quite badly hurt, jumping into the river from that height, but he might have survived. But on his way down, his hip clipped the embankment wall, and so he died in the water.

• 46:11Speaker 02

  Patrick Raden Keefe wrote a book about Zach Brettler. After he finished it, Rochelle invited him to visit.

• 46:20Speaker 03

  It was last September, and Rochelle wrote to me and said, "We're going to have a little ceremony at our home to mark what would have been his 25th birthday." And it was about 30 or 40 people, friends and family, people who knew Zach and loved him. And it was the most extraordinary thing. It was actually kind of a joyous event. It was a celebration of his life. I think that Rochelle and Matthew and Joe, Zach's brother, they think a lot about Zach, and they try and honor his memory. But in kind of a strange way, through this process of kind of trying to solve his death, they've come to see him in a way that is more full and complete than they were ever

• 47:00Speaker 03

  able to when he was alive, and as flawed and complex as he turns out to be, to love him in that complexity.

• 47:17Speaker 02

  Rochella said Zack always stretched the truth a little. He should have been an actor. He should have been a writer. Zack's brother, Joe, told Patrick that he sometimes has dreams about his brother. He said they were usually happy dreams of Zack when he was younger. In January of 2025, the Breitlers met with two senior officers with the Metropolitan Police. One of the officers said that he still talked with the lead detective from the investigation, Rory Wilkinson, about Zack almost every week.

• 48:09Speaker 02

  Criminal is created by Lauren Spoor and me. Nadia Wilson is our senior producer. Katie Bishop is our supervising producer. Our producers are Susannah Robertson, Jackie Sajikko, Lily Clark, and Lena Silasen. This episode was fact-checked by Katie Cedarborg. Our show was mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisiscriminal.com/newsletter. Patrick Redden Keefe's book is called London Falling. We hope you'll consider supporting our work by joining our membership program, Criminal Plus.

• 48:54Speaker 02

  You can listen to Criminal, This is Love, and Phoebe Reads a Mystery without any ads. Plus, you'll get bonus episodes. These are special episodes with me and Criminal co-creator Lauren Spoor, talking about everything from how we make our episodes, to the crime stories that caught our attention that week, to things we've been enjoying lately. To learn more, go to patreon.com/criminal. We're on Facebook at This is Criminal, and Instagram and TikTok at Criminal underscore Podcast. We're also on YouTube at youtube.com/criminalpodcast. Criminal is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Discover more great shows at podcast.voxmedia.com. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal.