Top Reformer Quits Italy’s Main Party; Scandal Widens

Italy’s runaway political crisis claimed major new casualties Monday, with a prominent judge and two former Cabinet ministers added to the list of those suspected of Mafia connections, and a leading reformer resigned in disgust from the country’s biggest political party.

The fresh trauma threw doubts on the survivability of the government of besieged Prime Minister Giuliano Amato. On Monday night, President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro summoned legislative leaders to a meeting this morning that some observers believe could presage formation of an emergency government to replace Amato’s weak coalition.

Mario Segni, 52, the Parliament member son of a former Italian president and the architect of an April 18 referendum on political reform, angrily quit the tarnished Christian Democratic Party. The dominant force in Italian politics since World War II, the party is reeling from judicial accusations of Mafia activity against Giulio Andreotti, who has been its man for all seasons and prime minister seven times.

The party, Segni charged, “has become an apparatus which has lost all links with the healthy part of Italian society, an apparatus which for too long has forgotten its Christian inspiration, an apparatus dominated by men who have opened the doors of the republic to the corrupt and to Mafiosi.”

Since February, 1992, the comfortable foundations of Italy’s political life, forged in the Cold War, have been eroded by relentless judicial inquiry that has uncovered elaborate and systematic corruption as a means of financing parties and politicians.

The investigation began in Milan and has implicated more than 1,000 prominent politicians and businessmen in a web of payoffs, bribes and vote-buying that has spread to almost all major cities. As the investigation moved south, it has been fueled by accusations from underworld turncoats telling judges about Mafia links with high-ranking politicians and local businessmen.

In an unprecedented blitz last week, Naples judges notified 17 members of Parliament that they are under investigation and issued arrest warrants for the outgoing mayor and 10 members of the Naples City Council.

In Palermo on Monday, Italian reporters said an investigation is under way to determine if appeals court Judge Corrado Carnevale had links to organized crime. Carnevale became controversial for annulling more than 400 sentences against convicted Mafia figures on legal technicalities. He is said to have been named by the same Mafia turncoats who accused Andreotti of underworld contacts through Salvo Lima, the senior Christian Democratic Party official in Sicily. Lima was murdered last year by Mafia gunmen.