Age: 57
Sex: male
Date: 4 Oct 1995
Place: Borough, Southwark, South East London
Tony Lavell was battered to death in a warehouse on Wednesday 4 October 1995.
He ran a newspaper distribution company, Martin Lavell Ltd, and was beaten to death at its main warehouse in Borough, Southwark. He was said to have turned up for work early on the morning he was murdered.
A 30-year-old warehouse manager at the company was tried for his murder but acquitted. He was described as an ambitious executive and it was submitted that he had murdered Tony Lavell because he had wanted to take over his business empire.
The man said that he had arrived at the warehouse for work and had been confronted by two men in boiler suits who had forced him to help them clean up the murder scene which was how his finger prints ended up in Tony Lavell's blood in Tony Lavell's Mercedes car.
The prosecution said that the manager had been caught stealing and Tony Lavell was going to fire him.
Tony Lavell had lived with his wife and two sons on a 350 acre stud in Warninglid, west Sussex and had been a millionaire.
When the jury acquitted the warehouse manager at the trial at the Old Bailey on Friday 13 December 1996, there was uproar in the court and relatives and friends of Tony Lavell shouted out, 'You have got it all wrong. You are letting a killer go. I feel sorry for you'.
The warehouse manager was later found to run a company called Homebased Promotions which was part of Homeworkers Monthly Ltd that was sending out letters to people stating that if they invested £10 with his company, they would receive a guaranteed £2,615 over the next five years. A person the wrote for the Financial Mail looked into that and stated that they found that the address of the company was on the seventh floor at 456 The Strand in London, but said that he found that that building didn't have a seventh floor and found that it was instead the address of the address of Mailboxes Etc who took mail in for people. when the man from the Financial Mail spoke to the man, he said that he told him that the £2,615 would come from the other investors. He said that the man told him that half of each £5 would go into his business. But when the man from the Financial Mail pointed out that to do that he would need 523 people to provide your £2,615, and that to then pay the 523 he would need 273,529 more investors which he pointed out was a get-rich-quick that was commonly known as a 'money circulation game', and that is was illegal. The man from the Financial Mail said that when he pointed that out to the man that had been tried for the murder of Tony Lavell, the man added that they had stopped the scheme two weeks earlier after finding that it was not ethical and that they had ceased trading. however, the man from the Financial Mail noted that the man had been telling Financial Mail reader as recently as 11 February that it worked and that they were sending out letters, claiming that the company had been doing it for three years. However, the man from the Financial Mail noted that in fact the company had been set up just four months earlier. The man from the Financial Mail concluded by saying, 'If Homebased Promotions really has got cold feet, that's fine. It's one less scam to worry about. But surely the impossible arithmetic was clear from the start. In which case, why did he offer investors something that he could never hope to deliver?'. In his article, the man from the Financial Mail also pointed out to his readers that the man running the scheme had previously been acquitted of a suspicious murder.
see This Is Money
see Aberdeen Press and Journal - Wednesday 11 October 1995
see Aberdeen Press and Journal - Friday 06 October 1995
see Birmingham Daily Post - Thursday 05 October 1995
see Aberdeen Press and Journal - Saturday 14 December 1996