Berlusconi paid Mafia protection money
Source: Agencies |
April 25, 2012, Wednesday
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FORMER Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi paid large sums of money to the Sicilian Mafia to protect himself and his family from kidnapping in the mid-1970s, Italy's highest appeals court said yesterday.
Cosa Nostra's protection "was not free," the court said, adding the media magnate was a victim of extortion.
"Berlusconi handed over conspicuous sums of money to the Mafia," the supreme Court of Cassation said in a document explaining its decision last month to quash a trial against Marcello Dell'Utri, a Sicilian who worked for Berlusconi in those years.
In the 1970s, Italian criminal organizations routinely kidnapped wealthy people or their children, often in the wealthy north of the country, and held them for ransom.
The most notorious example was John Paul Getty III, the grandson of oil baron John Paul Getty Senior, who was taken from central Rome and held for 5 months by the Calabrian mob in 1973. Getty's ear was cut off and mailed to an Italian newspaper to push the family into paying a ransom.
Vittorio Mangano, a Sicilian mobster later convicted of murder, lived in Berlusconi's home near Milan in the mid-1970s, allegedly to tend the horses. At the time Berlusconi had two small children with his first wife.
Cosa Nostra's protection "was not free," the court said, adding the media magnate was a victim of extortion.
"Berlusconi handed over conspicuous sums of money to the Mafia," the supreme Court of Cassation said in a document explaining its decision last month to quash a trial against Marcello Dell'Utri, a Sicilian who worked for Berlusconi in those years.
In the 1970s, Italian criminal organizations routinely kidnapped wealthy people or their children, often in the wealthy north of the country, and held them for ransom.
The most notorious example was John Paul Getty III, the grandson of oil baron John Paul Getty Senior, who was taken from central Rome and held for 5 months by the Calabrian mob in 1973. Getty's ear was cut off and mailed to an Italian newspaper to push the family into paying a ransom.
Vittorio Mangano, a Sicilian mobster later convicted of murder, lived in Berlusconi's home near Milan in the mid-1970s, allegedly to tend the horses. At the time Berlusconi had two small children with his first wife.
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