Gangster 'Indian Dave' 'was after middle-class London schoolboy's £200million inheritance' on night teen plunged from a luxury flat to his death into the Thames, family say

By VIVEK CHAUDHARY, SENIOR REPORTER Published: 00:54, 2 June 2026 | Updated: 01:02, 2 June 2026 The family of a violent gangster who was the prime suspect in the mysterious death of a London teenager which has sparked a best-selling book and forthcoming major TV adaptation have spoken for the first time. Zac Brettler, 19, jumped from the fifth floor of a luxury riverside apartment building and was found dead in the Thames six years ago – while notorious gangland enforcer Verinder Sharma, known as 'Indian Dave' was the only person present. The mystery surrounding the death of the middle-class public schoolboy from Maida Vale is explored in a new publishing sensation, London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City, which hit the shelves last month and has become a global best seller. The book tells how fantasist Zac pretended to be the son of a Russian oligarch personally worth £200million and attracted the company of some very shady people determined to get their hands on the imaginary money. Now, for the first time, members of the gangster's family have spoken about what happened – and revealed that Zac's death may have come shortly after furious Indian Dave found out that the money didn't exist. Speaking on condition of anonymity, relatives of Indian Dave told the Daily Mail: 'Dave wanted the kid's [Zac] money. 'And Dave found out that he did not have nearly as much money as he was telling everyone. 'So he called the kid in for a "sit-down". And Dave is not someone you mess with.' Zac Brettler was a middle-class London schoolboy who created a fantasy persona of the son of a Russian oligarch worth £200m, which attracted the attention of of some shady people One of those such characters was a gangster in the criminal underworld called 'Indian Dave' Sharma - who took an interest in Zac's reported wealth and, according to his family, wanted his share of it. Dave was with Zac in the hours before he fell from a five-floor balcony to his death Zac's father Matthew Brettler, a director of a financial services firm, and his mother Rachelle, a journalist, still don't really know what happened to their son on the night he fell into the Thames That so-called sit down happened at the Thameside flat where Sharma lived and from which Zac would jump to his death hours later. In the hours preceding Zac's fatal jump, Indian Dave had sent a message saying he wanted £10million from 'the kid' and was thinking 'f*** him'. He then talked about cleaning blood and handling knives – and soon afterwards, bloodstains were seen on the flat's walls while Indian Dave had cuts to his hand and nose while Zac had a broken jaw that wasn't caused by his fall. But the career criminal – who was known to use extreme violence as a debt collector and was believed to have commissioned a gangland hit – took his own life a year later, saying that he was worried about the police investigation into his role in Zac's death. Indian Dave's relatives went on: 'We will never truly know what happened on the night Zac died because Dave took that secret with him to the grave.. 'But knowing what we know of Dave, if he wasn't happy about something – or felt let down – you would soon know it. And that often meant violence.' They had always felt intimidated by him and never discussed the fate of Zac Brettler. 'We never asked him directly about what happened because he was not the sort of man you did that with, and he never spoke about his business. 'Those of us who know him are still scared about speaking about Dave, he's left that kind of legacy. 'He was a very hard and mysterious man.' The first interview with members of Indian Dave's family is a significant new development in the case which inspired the hit book – which has already been bought up for a major TV adaptation. It tells how Zac grew up in an ordinary middle-class family, comfortably off but by no means rich, and had seemingly a normal childhood. Zac's father, Matthew, was a director of a financial services firm while his mother Rachelle was a freelance journalist. The family home was in leafy Maida Vale, a north-west London enclave that includes the picturesque Little Venice. Zac was good at cricket and tennis and, at the age of 13, was enrolled as a day pupil at the exclusive £30,000-a-year Mill Hill School in north London. At 16, he became a boarder to save two hours a day commuting. Zac became conscious that his circumstances were a good deal more modest than those of wealthy Mill Hill peers, many of whom were the children of millionaires from China, Russia and the former Soviet republics. He is said to have been embarrassed by his family's humble Mazda when other parents drove Porsches – and he began to concoct self-aggrandising stories to compensate. These started out quite simply: he started claiming, for example, that he was friends with Liverpool FC captain Virgil van Dijk. Soon, the lies became more ambitious, however. He once hired a chauffeur-driven limousine to pick him up from school, pretending his family owned the car. Then Zac started claiming he was the son of a recently deceased Russian oligarch, that he lived in a penthouse flat in the One Hyde Park complex at Knightsbridge, a property worth millions, and that his mother was away in Dubai. He put it about that he would soon benefit from a trust fund worth £200million. Zac's concerned parents noticed he was changing. Even before he left school, for example, he'd taken to carrying a briefcase – an odd look for a teenager. Zac was offered places at university but chose to defer them and spoke, instead, about not going into higher education at all. Instead, he began trying to penetrate London's elite social circles and began plotting ways to make a business fortune. Some influential people began to fall for Zac's lies – particularly when he told them he was looking to invest millions. One key early contact was a commercial manager at Chelsea Football Club, a man whose job involved helping star players with their property arrangements. Incredible as it might now seem, this man believed Zac's far-fetched story that he hailed from the same kind of moneyed Russian background as the club's then owner, Roman Abramovich. The only 'evidence' Zac could offer was a crude fake accent and a surname borrowed from one Zamira Ismailova, a glamorous Russian neighbour in Maida Vale, who drove a Bentley. The Chelsea contact introduced Zac to another key character who would play a pivotal role in the drama. Akbar Shamji seemed to embody the world to which Zac aspired. Cambridge-educated, Shamji appeared to have several lucrative business interests, lived in Mayfair, travelled the world, and was married to glamorous fashion designer Daniela Karnuts, who had dressed the likes of Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle. Yet this was by no means the full picture. Shamji was the son of a notorious fraudster who had served time in prison. He was behind a web of companies which had opened and then shut, often leaving strings of debts. Yet Shamji, then 47, apparently believed in Zac's fake persona and the supposed £200million inheritance. Soon, he was inviting the teenager to join him in putative business ventures in fashionable fields such as cannabis oil. He would also introduce Zac to the man we met earlier: Virender Sharma, aka Indian Dave. Zac was told that Sharma, too, was a successful international businessman – a rubber tycoon. The plush Thames-side apartment Sharma occupied appeared to corroborate this. Yet, Indian Dave was known across the criminal underworld as a gangster and enforcer whose speciality involved collecting debts through extreme violence. There were rumours he liked to dangle victims from rooftops, 'encouraging' them to pay up. Indian Dave had been implicated in the drive-by shooting of a nightclub owner in Hertfordshire in 2003. At one point he had been arrested for heroin smuggling. At first, Shamji and Indian Dave were generous, apparently believing Zac's story that he was a 'Trustafarian' suffering short-term cashflow problems while waiting for a huge inheritance. They continued to discuss business deals they might eventually do. Indian Dave even allowed Zac to move in with him, rent-free, for a few weeks in the summer of 2019. Zac lied to his parents that he was making enough money from his supposed business enterprises to have leased the place himself. Indian Dave's twenty-something daughter, Dominique, lived in an apartment on the first floor and regularly popped in to see her father. But the lies told by all three of these principal characters – Zac, Shamji and Indian Dave – had set them on a collision course. Despite being almost penniless, Zac was apparently hoping his new friends would help him 'fake it till he made it' in business. The two older men, meanwhile, scented a share of a £200million fortune that didn't exist. Zac was a fantasist who was said to been embarrassed by his family's humble Mazda when other parents at the private school he attended drove Porsches - and so created a new narrative for himself to compensate for his parents' more humble backgrounds Zac's back story of how he was about to inherit his Russian oligarch father's estate while his mother and the rest of his family lived in Dubai, brought him into the obit of Dave Sharma who put him up in his apartment fifth floor of Riverwalk, the Thameside apartment building And one of the pair – Indian Dave – seems to have been prepared to use extreme violence to get it. That 'sit down' happened on the fifth floor of Riverwalk, the Thameside apartment building, on the evening of Wednesday, November 27th, 2019. In the early hours of the following morning Zac would reply to an email from his mum in which she had said she was 'a wee bit worried about you' as he had left behind his jacket, coat and credit cards at the family home when going out earlier. At 2.03am Zac replied: 'all good x'. But just 21 minutes later, a surveillance camera positioned outside the MI6 HQ across the river in Vauxhall picked up sudden movement high on the Riverwalk building on the north bank. It was Zac walking about on the balcony, which was still brightly lit in the small hours of the morning. Another figure was visible inside: Indian Dave. Zac could be seen walking from one corner of the balcony to the other before jumping 200ft to the river below. The youngster's body was discovered on the muddy Thames shore five hours after he fell just after 7am on November 28th. At first, the death seemed entirely mysterious. No proper forensic search of the apartment was ever carried out. Yet one officer who took a statement from Indian Dave in the early days of the police inquiry noticed that there were smears of what appeared to be blood on the walls of the bathroom and kitchen in the apartment. There were also traces of blood on a panel of glass – which had recently been wiped clean – on the balcony from which Zac jumped. Indian Dave himself had visible injuries – cuts to his nose and hand – but wasn't asked how he had acquired them. When Zac's body was examined by a pathologist, it was discovered he had a broken jaw, an injury which could not be attributed to the fall. Messages produced at the eventual inquest into Zac's death in 2022 provided a further insight into what Sharma had been hoping to get from Zac: a £10million cut of his supposed inheritance. On the morning before their sinister 'sit-down', Indian Dave had messaged Shamji saying: 'I'm thinking f*** this little kid.' In another message to Shamji that day, he wrote: 'Akbar, I want five per cent of that 205million.' When later asked what Indian Dave might have meant by this, Shamji replied: 'Zac was always promising huge sums of money.' Yet he also insisted: 'I told him [Indian Dave] more than once that I don't think there's any golden pot at the end of that rainbow.' Which is to say that Shamji didn't believe Zac's stories of vast wealth. In another message sent that night by Indian Dave – to a different friend – he wrote: 'I have been heating up knives and clearing up blood.' A few minutes later, he followed up with a voice message, saying: 'I'm not f***ing around…. come to f***ing Pimlico.' He added: 'Sh**'s about to go wrong. Wrong!' Shamji and Dominique had both been at the flat that evening, but left at 1.45am, leaving Zac alone with Indian Dave. At 2.12am, when Zac was still alive, the gangster phoned Shamji in his car and spoke to him for nine minutes. This led to Shamji turning the car around and heading straight back towards Riverwalk. Zac jumped at around 2.24am. Two minutes later, Indian Dave called his daughter, Dominique, and they spoke for three minutes. Shamji returned to the scene at 2.34am, around ten minutes after Zac hit the water. Further footage taken from the MI6 building shows that when Shamji arrived back at Riverwalk, he went downstairs to peer into the river, looking at the exact spot where Zac had fallen. Central to Zac's story is Akbar Shamji. Shamji seemed to embody the world to which Zac aspired. Cambridge-educated, Shamji appeared to have several lucrative business interests, lived in Mayfair, travelled the world, and was married to a glamorous fashion designer who had dressed the likes of Kate Middleton and Meghan Markle. Shamji introduced Zac to Sharma In the early hours of Thursday, November 28th, 2019 Zac fell 200ft from the apartment where he was staying. His body was discovered on the muddy Thames shore five hours later at 7am At Zac's eventual inquest, both Shamji and Dominique claimed that their gathering in Sharma's flat that night had been friendly. They said the aim had been to help the boy get off heroin, to which, they said, he had become addicted. Both claimed that Zac had been feeling 'suicidal'. Yet no trace of heroin was found in Zac's system, and his devastated parents vehemently deny he'd ever spoken about suicide. Coroner Mary Hassell, after examining the circumstances of Zac's death, recorded an open verdict, meaning there was insufficient evidence to know for certain what had happened. Crucially, however, she rejected the implication from Shamji and Indian Dave's daughter that it was a clear-cut suicide. The coroner added that Indian Dave had almost certainly known Zac had jumped from the balcony – something he denied to the police – and that when Shamji peered over the river wall he was 'looking for Zac'. She also concluded that 'Zac was obviously scared' before he died. By this point, however, any hope of a successful prosecution against the only man present at the time of his death had long disappeared. Indian Dave was found dead, in December 2020, barely a year on from Zac's death – in the same Pimlico flat. He had taken an overdose. The gangster's inquest heard it was not the first time he had tried to take his own life in the preceding months. After a previous attempt, he told a psychiatric nurse that he'd been stressed by the police investigation into Zac's death. Both Indian Dave and Shamji had been arrested on suspicion of Zac's murder, but both denied wrongdoing and neither was charged. Zac's family still hope Shamji may be investigated further. According to recent reports, he enjoys a largely nomadic – if free spending – life abroad, with occasional visits to London. The Brettlers have been fiercely critical of the police investigation and co-operated with American investigative journalist Patrick Radden Keefe, author of London Falling. No comments have so far been submitted. Why not be the first to send us your thoughts, or debate this issue live on our message boards. By posting your comment you agree to our house rules. Do you want to automatically post your MailOnline comments to your Facebook Timeline? Your comment will be posted to MailOnline as usual. Do you want to automatically post your MailOnline comments to your Facebook Timeline? Your comment will be posted to MailOnline as usual We will automatically post your comment and a link to the news story to your Facebook timeline at the same time it is posted on MailOnline. To do this we will link your MailOnline account with your Facebook account. We’ll ask you to confirm this for your first post to Facebook. You can choose on each post whether you would like it to be posted to Facebook. 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