Italian prime minister's party agreed to make life easier for jailed criminals, says turncoat

Philip Willan in Rome
Thursday December 5, 2002
The Guardian

Silvio Berlusconi, the Italian prime minister, was in personal contact with some of the mafia's most senior bosses, a major mafia turncoat has told investigators in a deposition revealed yesterday.
Antonino Giuffre, a powerful boss who began collaborating with magistrates in the summer, said the mafia decided to back Mr Berlusconi's Forza Italia party from its foundation in 1993, in exchange for help in resolving the mafia's judicial problems.

The testimony was given last month to Palermo prosecutors, and published by Italian newspapers yesterday.

On Tuesday, they submitted it as evidence to a court trying Marcello Dell'Utri - a Forza Italia senator and close associate of Mr Berlusconi - for alleged collusion with the mafia.

Last week, Mr Berlusconi refused to answer prosecutors' questions when the court travelled to Rome to ask him about alleged links between his Fininvest business empire and organised crime.

Mr Giuffre's evidence appears to add weight to the allegations of earlier mafia pentiti ("penitents") who claimed that Mr Dell'Utri and Fininvest had been dangerously close to Sicilian crime families.

Mr Giuffre, an aide to the mafia's supreme boss, Bernardo Provenzano, gave himself up to police in April and has reportedly been updating investigators' knowledge of the mafia's hierarchy and the evolving relationship between politics and organised crime.

Mr Giuffre has reportedly told prosecutors that the mafia turned to Mr Berlusconi's new party when its traditional contacts in the discredited Christian Democrat party proved unable to protect its members from the rigours of the law.

Worried godfathers sought assurances that their new political contacts would soften harsh prison conditions reserved for mafia members, help them overturn heavy prison sentences, and curtail the use of turncoat evidence and the confiscation of their ill-gotten wealth, Mr Giuffre said.

This revolution in the justice system was expected to take 10 years, he said.

The mafia, for its part, was required to abandon its assault on the state and fade into the shadows.

Mr Giuffre said Mafia representatives who were in contact with Mr Berlusconi included the Palermo bosses Filippo and Giuseppe Graviano - jailed for life in 1994 for ordering the murder of an anti-mafia priest - and the allegedly mafia-linked builder Giovanni Ienna.

Other channels of communication passed through a mafia boss employed as a stable manager on Mr Berlusconi's country estate, and a Sicilian-born financial police officer who moved from investigating Mr Berlusconi's tax affairs to acting as his legal representative, he claimed.

Mr Giuffre said of the establishment of the alleged mafia-Fininvest relationship: "Let's say, in all honesty, that it wasn't a very difficult battle."

"We didn't find - at least, I didn't find - any obstacle along my path," he said. "With God's help we officially embarked on the ship of Forza Italia."

Nando Dalla Chiesa, an opposition Daisy party senator, said Mr Giuffre's declarations were not wholly new, but were nevertheless alarming.

The centre-left's muted response to their publication, he said, reflected its desire to avoid being seen as exploiting Mr Berlusconi's legal difficulties. "But we will continue to raise the issue of Berlusconi's relations with this world," he said. "If these things were said about my own party, I would be the first person to demand an explanation."

Mr Dell'Utri's lawyer, Enrico Trantino, dismissed the allegations as an "anthology of hearsay". He said Mr Giuffre had perpetuated the trend that every new turncoat would attack Mr Dell'Utri and the former prime minister Giulio Andreotti in order to earn money and judicial privileges.

A Forza Italia spokesman, Sandro Bondi, said the publication of the new claims threatened to poison political life in Italy. He told the Rome daily La Repubblica: "If the entire political world does not this time show a united front to oppose this disreputable manoeuvre, we should be very worried about the future of democracy in Italy."

While Mr Berlusconi's supporters see the revelations as a judicial attempt to interfere with the sovereignty of the electorate, his opponents are equally convinced that democracy is at risk for as long as the levers of power remain in Mr Berlusconi's hands.