an unnecessary comma?

Reading about the Duchess of York today in The Age newspaper, I had to pause to think about the meaning of one sentence:

The man who inveigled the duchess into a long, boozy dinner, the sight of $US40,000 ($A48,000) in fresh notes beside an ashtray, and a bottle of wine afterwards is Mahzer Mahmood, whose elaborate stings have trapped celebrities, royals and crooks.

It's a sentence that sets the scene clearly, and I could imagine the duchess sitting there looking longingly at the money, but I had trouble with comprehending its meaning. At first I thought perhaps a comma, following the word afterwards, would make it clearer.

But then I remembered the rule that we should not use a comma between the subject and the verb. At its simplest, the above sentence is The man is Mahzer Mahmood. So we wouldn't want a comma before is.

So I guess it's just one of those long sentences that are correct but take a moment or two to process. If I'd written it, I would have put that comma in but I think I would have been wrong.