London Falling Part 1: The Fall - The Saturday Story

April 11, 2026·39 min·3 clips

A 19-year-old jumps from a luxury apartment opposite MI6, but his death hides a secret life and dangerous connections.

A young man is dead. Gabriel Pogrund opens on a cold November night in 2019, when 19-year-old Zach Brettler jumped from a balcony in a luxury apartment opposite MI6. Police kept coming back to suicide. The episode sits with the unease around that conclusion, because Zach had become mixed up with dangerous people before he died. Five years later, the story reaches Patrick Radden Keith, the reporter who questioned how quickly the case was read that way. Zach had been performing wealth. He was pretending to be the son of a Russian oligarch, talking about a billionaire father and a future inheritance worth hundreds of millions. The lie had a use. It helped him pass as someone looking to make investments for his family, and that pulled him into Akbar Shamji's world. Shamji looked convincing. The guest describes an elegant, handsome and charismatic man in his forties, living around Mayfair and moving through a glamorous investment world. His life had all the right surfaces: an apartment on Mount Street, an office on Berkeley Square, a Cambridge background, and a marriage to fashion designer Daniela Carnoort. Her Safia gowns add another layer of polish, with clothing photographed on famous women, including members of the Royal family, Gwyneth Paltrow and Michelle Obama. Then the gloss starts to crack. Shamji came from a wealthy Ugandan Asian family that arrived in London after Idi Amin expelled that community from Uganda. His father hangs over the story: a man who made and lost a fortune, then, for complicated reasons, ended up in prison. The episode does not make any of this feel neat. It keeps returning to the space between what people appeared to be, what they claimed to be, and what police decided had happened.

As heard by us

A measured investigative story about Zach Brettler, Akbar Shamji, and the unresolved line between suicide and something else.

This episode treats Zach Brettler's death as an open question, not a neat ending, and starts with the 19-year-old's fall from a luxury apartment on the south bank of the Thames before moving into the reporting around what followed.

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Why you'd press play

When you want a London mystery that starts with a balcony death and widens into lies, reinvention, and dangerous company.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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