Italian Ex-Premier Scorns Allegations of Ties to Mafia

Proclaiming his innocence in a spirited defense, former Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti on Wednesday challenged judicial accusers to produce evidence of his alleged Mafia connections.

“The charges are inconsistent and unreasonable. They are without factual foundation . . . laughable,” Andreotti declared in presenting a detailed, 76-page defense statement to a Senate commission in which he complained of “persecution.”

The chief state prosecutor in Palermo launched the investigation after key Mafia turncoats identified Andreotti as the Cosa Nostra’s political contact in Rome and said he had met secretly in Sicily with mob bosses.

Seven times prime minister and now a senator-for-life, Andreotti spoke for more than two hours before the commission weighing whether to lift his parliamentary immunity at the request of Judge Giancarlo Caselli.

Accusations against him, Andreotti averred, “are the fruit of rumors.”

He charged that magistrates in Palermo are prejudiced against him.

To support his request, Caselli presented the Senate commission with nearly 300 pages of testimony from Mafia turncoats. He ordered parts released Wednesday that indicate Andreotti was the key political contact for the Cosa Nostra between 1978 and 1992.

The documents include interviews conducted by Caselli in the United States with high-level Mafia informers Tommaso Buscetta and Francesco Marino Mannoia, both living there under federal protection.

Buscetta, 65, a former mob “man of honor,” was the first to break the Cosa Nostra’s traditional code of silence in 1984. His testimony was crucial to the state’s case in a maxi-trial that brought 338 Mafia convictions in 1987.

In his testimony, Buscetta told Caselli that the former prime minister, a leading figure in Italian political life for nearly half a century, was “the politician with whom the Mafia consulted before deciding any top-level assassination.”

A scornful Andreotti wondered aloud Wednesday why it had taken Buscetta 10 years to remember that fact.