ID
Who Was The London Gangster Behind The Death of a Public Schoolboy?
The unexplained death of an upper middle-class white teenager at the apartment of an “unassuming” but “terrifying” London gangster has caused a belated stir in the US and UK media this month.
At 2.24am on Thursday 28 November 2019, Zac Brettler, then 19 years old, jumped from the fifth floor balcony of the luxury Riverwalk apartments overlooking the Thames on the Pimlico side of Vauxhall Bridge.
CCTV from MI6, whose headquarters are directly across the river, is said to show Brettler was alone on the balcony when he jumped. Furthermore, that he paced the length of it before taking a leap to his death.
Below the balcony is a substantially wide concrete walkway separated from the river by a thick embankment wall. It would have been possible to drop down from the fifth floor but not without serious injury.
Brettler appears to have hit the wall on his way down and drowned, suggesting he may have miscalculated his ability to reach the water, which was past high tide.
An even greater miscalculation by the ex-public schoolboy was his association with the gangster living at the riverside apartment; a man known in the London underworld as Indian Dave or simply ID.
Questions remain whether Zac was trying to commit suicide or escape from ID, who had summonsed the kid to a sit down.
Digital and other evidence available to Brettler’s parents suggests their son was something of a Walter Mitty obsessed with wealth and perhaps a grifter in the making.
Zac was passing himself off as the estranged son of a Russian oligarch with a £200m inheritance within reach.
In certain quarters of London, where old and dirty money mix, this charade appears to have dealt young Brettler an entree into the lives of the rich, their enablers and hangers on.
The kid would have been right to calculate there was little risk to life and limb if in a world of bullshitters he came a cropper and was exposed as a fraud.
But in another respect Zac very badly miscalculated that he could make a mug of someone like ID without consequences.
The gangster had hosted Zac at his riverside apartment over the summer of 2019 most likely in the hope of getting a percentage of the inheritance he believed existed.
ID prowled the same world that Zac was desperate to inhabit and had well-worn masks of congeniality and generosity that could soon give way to terror if he didn’t get what he wanted from the marks he targeted.
The teenager may have believed ID was an Indian rubber baron only to discover when it was too late that the man he’d had over was an unforgiving gangster.
In ID’s world such a loss of face is not usually written off with a c’est la vie shrug of expensively tailored shoulders. Not least when the person doing the suckering turns out to be a teenage boy.
Zac not having the proverbial pot to piss in didnt have to be the end of the matter for ID - there was always the boy’s well-to-do family to ‘stick it on’. They probably had cars, savings, a house in London and another son they’d like to see grow up, right?
It wasn’t like ID had no form for taxing the rich. Yet outside the odd newspaper cutting about a contract killing over a drug deal, little is known about Indian Dave.
In this dispatch from the underworld, The Upsetter talks exclusively to his associates and one of his victims who lived to tell the tale but ended up in witness protection - two words that Zac himself is said to have Googled just days before being summonsed to his death.
