The Last Supper by Philip Willan Read Free Book Online

crucial role in organizing Calvi’s murder. He is presented by Paoli as a London-based Italian named Volpi. Paoli was unsure of the name, and in fact he got it wrong, along with the details of the man’s death: killed in his room in the ‘Celsea Cristal Center’ residence shortly after Calvi’s murder. But there were some intriguing details that Paoli got right and which would have justified treating his claims with the utmost attention.
    The man whose name Paoli had difficulty in remembering was an international drug-dealer called Sergio Vaccari. ‘Volpi was allegedly killed because he knew all about the facts connected to Calvi’s last hours,’ the report said, and his death was ‘made to look like suicide’. It wasn’t: Vaccaridied from multiple stab wounds; the death that was made to look like suicide was Calvi’s. The report continued: ‘The person concerned was in contact with Pier Luigi Torri and the world of international finance. The source pointed out that the individual concerned was also involved in drug trafficking.’ Paoli also observed, quite rightly, that this information could form the basis for a fuller reconstruction of the circumstances surrounding Calvi’s death. Torri was a man who had been involved in a banking scandal in London and was suspected of laundering money for the mafia. Flavio Carboni’s office diary records a visit from a ‘Sig. Torri’ at 16.05 on 19 April 1982.
    Vaccari, a wealthy playboy whose family had owned a printing works in Milan, financed his high-rolling life in London by trading in drugs and pornography. He had the brilliant idea of importing cocaine in hollowed-out
panettoni
, an industrially produced type of Italian cake traditionally consumed at Christmas. It may have helped that the cakes normally came with a small bag of icing sugar to sprinkle over the top, and that British customs did not routinely inspect imported foodstuffs. Vaccari’s day job was that of an antiques dealer and he was a partner with other Italians in the London Restoration Centre, a money-losing operation that had to be kept afloat with periodic injections of funds from Italy.
    Vaccari was found stabbed to death in the sitting room of his flat in Holland Park by his cleaning lady on the morning of 16 September 1982. Police photos show a grisly scene: his body is slumped on a pale-coloured sofa that has been extensively smeared with blood. He had been stabbed repeatedly in the chest and face, blood had drenched his shirt and pooled behind his head. The grimace on his upturned face and sightless eyes testify to the horror of his final minutes. Rumours spread among his acquaintances that he had been tortured by having his teeth pulled out with a pair of pliers. It didn’t encourage witnesses to come forward.
    Police believe Vaccari was killed at about 8 p.m. on the previous evening. He had recently returned from Rome with a consignment of cocaine and a set of electronic scales was set up and switched on ready for business. The lights in his luxuriously furnished ground-floor flat were switched on and the curtains were drawn. Understandably concerned about his personal safety – Vaccari kept a swordstick in the hall and owned a handgun – he had evidently let his murderers in because he recognized and trusted them. He appears to have been struck on the head from behind and then pinioned by one assailant while another struck him repeatedly with a knife.
    ‘There was more than one murderer and blood all over the place,’ said Detective Chief Superintendent David Harness, who oversaw the murder investigation. The flat had been searched in what police assumed was a hunt by the assassins for drugs and money, blood-stained hands leaving prints on cupboards and the fridge door. There was no knowledge of a possible Calvi connection at that time, so no idea that the killers might have been looking for something else. Among the documents in a briefcase in the sitting room was a summons to a