When Claudio Gaetani collapsed and died during a rush hour morning in north London, his corpse remained on the busy street for six hours in full view of children going to and coming home from school.
The 45-year-old Italian had been cycling for only a few minutes when he had a heart attack shortly after 8am. A doctor passing by worked to revive him for a good ten minutes but to no avail.
Two local police constables arrived by car minutes after the ambulance and recorded the time of death as 9.45am.
In the absence of a tent to shield the body from gawpers, a neighbour’s blanket was placed under Claudio’s wet lifeless body, which was moved to a section of pavement covered by scaffolding.
A heat blanket from the ambulance crew lay over the corpse giving the macabre scene a silver shimmer in the otherwise dull early September morning.
“I don’t know how in 2022 in London a body has to remain on the pavement for six hours in a way that was quite brutal,” recalled Gianluca, a close friend who Claudio was staying with, having arrived from Italy the day before.
Claudio Gaetani was an actor, director, lecturer on film and playwright from the Marche region of Italy on the Adriatic coast.
“He’s the type of person when you meet you can fall in love with, absolutely cheerful and positive, even with his physical condition of dwarfism he was never saying no to any adventure.” Gianluca told The Upsetter.
Claudio was in London at the request of Unlimited, a festival at Southbank Centre that showcases disabled artists from around the world. The organisers were interested in his latest play, The Long Shadow of the Dwarf.
Like many aspiring dramatists, Claudio had learned his craft from attending workshops by Dario Fo, the Italian maestro of political plays poking fun at the establishment.
Fo’s most recognised work in the UK was Accidental Death of an Anarchist - a play about a left wing activist who ‘fell’ out the window of a police building and how the cops’ complicity unravels when another prisoner, the maniac, passes himself off as the investigating magistrate looking into the case.
Fo had written the play in 1970 amid the Italian government’s “strategy of tension” which covertly encouraged far right wing violence that could then be overtly blamed on the left to justify a clampdown on civil liberties.
Three years later, fascists kidnapped, tortured and raped his wife, the actress and co-writer, Franca Rame.
Their masterpiece was being savagely adapted for a run at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith, west London when Claudio arrived at Stansted Airport on 7 September.
This new version was set in a Metropolitan police station in the present amid the corruption, deaths, racism and misogyny that had recently forced the resignation of commissioner Cressida Dick.
Mark Rowley was appointed in July 2022 as the stop the rot boss of the Met, and just days before he took office on 12 September, one of his officers stole from dead Claudio’s wallet.
Stealing from a corpse was a new low for the Met. Two officers, not long before, had been jailed for sharing photos of the bodies of murdered sisters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman.
Now it was Claudio Gaetani’s turn to be dehumanised. But thanks to the persistence of his London-based best friends, the long shadow of the dwarf was about to be cast over Scotland Yard.