The Last Supper by Philip Willan Read Free Book Online Page A

masonic meeting, written in Italian.
    There was certainly ample evidence of drug-dealing; besides the precision scales there was a hollowed-out
panettone
and 500 packets of baby laxative, used for cutting cocaine. ‘By the time I left the flat my lips had gone numb, there was so much cocaine in the air,’ Harness recalled.
    His investigation would lead him to Italy, the United States and Denmark, and throw up leads to several Latin American countries as well. ‘It was one of those investigations that took over your life,’ Harness told me 20 years later. ‘It was never solved, and certain things about it made me think it would never go to sleep.’ An initial attempt to make a tentative connection to the Calvi case, partly motivated by the masonic – though not P2 – connection, was rebuffed by the City ofLondon Police. ‘I suggested we compare indexes. The idea was rejected because the Calvi case was a “suicide”.’ 2
    The Vaccari investigation did turn up some other intriguing connections, though. A key found in the victim’s flat led to three safety deposit boxes at the London Silver Vaults in Chancery Lane. The boxes were jointly held in the names of Giuseppe Bellinghieri and Gianfrancesco Moccia and were found to contain three British passports, eight false Italian identity cards and two Italian driving licences, as well as £250,000 in cash. Most curiously, they also contained two Polaroid photographs of a Swiss ball watch dated circa 1860 and other photos showing a variety of antique snuffboxes dating from the nineteenth century. The watch had been stolen from a Christie’s showroom in Rome on 30 November 1980 and subsequently had come into the possession of Vaccari. Part of a haul of art and jewellery worth more than £500,000, it would create a still mysterious link between the playboy drug-dealer and the disappearance of Jeannette May, a London socialite who had been married to the banker Evelyn de Rothschild and was now married to Stephen May, a director of the John Lewis retail group. The Mays had bought a house in the rugged Marche region of east central Italy and it was there that Jeannette May and a female friend had disappeared on the day before the Christie’s robbery. The badly decomposed bodies of the two women would only be found 14 months later in a wood near the town of Camerino; victims of murder or of a kidnap that went wrong? Or did they simply die of exposure after losing their way in the mountains and getting caught in a winter storm? An Italian judicial investigation returned an open verdict.
    Bill Hopkins, a London antiques dealer who claims to have known both May and Vaccari, says the two met when May was intending to sell a gold and enamel snuffbox. ‘Jeannette May came into my shop,’ he told me. ‘I wasn’t interested, so I put her in touch with Sergio.’ Hopkins, who was Vaccari’slandlord for three years while the Italian lived in a flat above his antiques shop in Notting Hill, says he believes Vaccari agreed to buy the box from May in Italy and then set her up to be murdered. Hopkins believed the snuffbox came from an important Rothschild family collection, commissioned from some of the world’s greatest jewellers, and he suspected it had been stolen. 3
    Hopkins’ suspicion of Jeanette May’s snuffbox is supported by the contents of a British police report. Mrs May was ‘believed to have been involved in some of the shadier aspects of the antiques trade’, the report stated, and she had been in contact with a London restaurateur suspected of involvement in the drugs trade. The restaurateur was Giuseppe Pucci Albanese, owner of a restaurant on the King’s Road and at the heart of a web of social contacts linked to the Calvi affair. Albanese had come to London in the early 1970s and was a business partner of Pierluigi Torri, the financier identified by Paoli as an associate of Vaccari’s. According to the police report, Albanese had also had business dealings with