Zac is at the center of \u201cLondon Falling.\u201d But Keefe situates his death on a bigger canvas: a city that has tried to address its collapsing industrial base by becoming increasingly dependent on oligarch money, and a police force that is woefully underfunded and plagued by complacency and corruption.<\/p>\n
As for Zac, his parents remember a happy, outgoing child who delighted in entertaining them with his imitations of family friends and his impressive mimicry of foreign accents. They noticed a marked change when Zac was around 13 and was rejected by the prestigious, academically rigorous private school that his brother attended; Zac was admitted instead to another private school, one filled with the scions of new money and lower down, Rachelle says, on the \u201cpecking order.\u201d<\/p>\n
In his new-money school, Zac became obsessed with conspicuous displays of wealth, badgering his parents to get a bigger home and a fancier car. The Brettlers were undeniably well off. Matthew worked in finance; Rachelle was a journalist who wrote regularly for The Financial Times\u2019s glossy magazine, How to Spend It. \u201cBut they made a point of living within their means,\u201d Keefe writes. They were baffled by Zac\u2019s increasingly ostentatious tastes, which he paid for with \u201clittle entrepreneurial schemes,\u201d like reselling sneakers and dealing loosies. One day he hired a chauffeured limousine to drive him home, explaining, \u201cI wanted to see what it would feel like.\u201d<\/p>\n
Zac\u2019s efforts at self-reinvention kept escalating. He started telling his parents that he was helping to broker high-end real estate deals, and he seemed to know people connected to the Russian oligarch-owned Chelsea Football Club. One of his Chelsea contacts introduced him to Akbar Shamji, a mysterious businessman whose daughter happened to go to school with Zac. Shamji, in turn, introduced Zac to Sharma. Both men said that Zac had claimed to be an oligarch\u2019s son, and both were among the last people to see Zac alive. Shamji left Sharma\u2019s apartment before Zac jumped, and returned to the apartment minutes after.<\/p>\n
What happened that night? Did Zac intend to kill himself? Or was he trying to escape Sharma\u2019s apartment? According to Sharma and Shamji, Zac had broken down in front of them, saying how depressed he was. But Zac didn\u2019t have depression, Rachelle says; he must have sensed he was in danger and, as a born performer, was doing his best to elicit sympathy. \u201cFeel sorry for me,\u201d is what she believed Zac must have meant; \u201cdon\u2019t hurt me.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Zac is at the center of \u201cLondon Falling.\u201d But Keefe situates his death on a bigger canvas: a…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":12760,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[6029,6031,27,6034,6033,6030,6032],"class_list":{"0":"post-12759","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-london","8":"tag-books-and-literature","9":"tag-keefe","10":"tag-london","11":"tag-london-england","12":"tag-london-falling-a-mysterious-death-in-a-gilded-city-and-a-familys-search-for-truth-book","13":"tag-organized-crime","14":"tag-patrick-radden"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/116396273333251720","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12759","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12759"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12759\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12760"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12759"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12759"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12759"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}