Italy Turns Up Wattage on Anti-Mafia Campaign : Justice: A seven-time prime minister goes on trial this week for alleged criminal ties. A media circus is expected.

It is one of modern Europe’s most sensational political trials, with the accused star none other than Giulio Andreotti, Italy’s seven-time prime minister.

The charge is equally stunning: that Italy’s dominant political personality for four decades--the man who dined with presidents, attended summits of the leaders of the top industrialized nations and commanded one of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s bigger armies--also was deeply entangled with the mother of Mafias, the Sicilian Cosa Nostra.

The 36 counts against Andreotti link him to crimes including fraud, extortion, perversion of justice, massive misuse of public funds and, in one instance, a contract murder.

Besides the spectacle of Andreotti, 76, being hauled before an anti-Mafia court, the trial--scheduled to begin Tuesday in the Sicilian capital, Palermo--also marks the high point in one of the Italian state’s biggest-ever offensives against the infamous mob.

“This trial is fundamental in the fight to control the Mafia,” summed up Ferdinando Imposimato, a former judge and now a member of both the Italian Senate and the Parliament’s Anti-Mafia Commission. “The nation needs to see this.”

See it Italy will. The trial’s opening phase, at least, may be nationally televised, and the case’s import and the personalities involved promise a prolonged media circus. With the prosecution’s pretrial submissions running more than 8,000 pages, and with more than 500 witnesses scheduled to testify, Italian judiciary experts estimate that it could take two years before a verdict is reached.

But these proceedings will spotlight more than just a former premier and a parade of other political luminaries. Among the potential defense witnesses are Hans-Dietrich Genscher, the former German foreign minister; Javier Perez de Cuellar, the former U.N. secretary general, and Maxwell Rabb and Peter Secchia, two former American ambassadors to Italy. Twenty-four Mafiosi who decided to forsake omerta , the Cosa Nostra’s code of silence, will testify for the prosecution.

The trial also will almost certainly shed dramatic light on a larger, more troubling phenomenon that has dogged modern Italian democracy since its birth in the 1940s: the powerful role of Sicily’s Cosa Nostra and its three mainland cousins--the Camorra in Naples, the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta and the Sacra Corona Unita in Puglia--in shaping Italy’s post-World War II destiny.

“In almost every country, you have the problem of organized crime working against the state. But in Italy, the Mafia is the state,” said Leoluca Orlando, the outspoken anti-Mafia mayor of Palermo, a Cosa Nostra stronghold. “Andreotti is a symbol of this system of power.”

In June, during a visit to Palermo by Italy’s President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, Orlando put the problem this way: “In this city, the Mafia has made itself the boss. It is . . . a true and proper system of power--a deviant and criminal organization of political, economic and cultural power.”

The source of this power is simple. The Mafia can deliver the only thing that matters in a democracy at election time: votes. Through its economic muscle, patronage and entrenched position in a society where family and personal ties remain more powerful than the law, the Mafia can deliver 12% to 15% of the vote in western Sicily and 2% to 3% in other areas of southern Italy. “This is a mass of votes that is often decisive,” said Guiseppe Ayala, a member of Parliament and a former anti-Mafia state prosecutor in Palermo.

The Mafia ensnares successful candidates much as a drug dealer hooks an addict. “They become enslaved,” said Imposimato.

In return for votes, the Mafia has traditionally received a big slice of lucrative public works contracts; had a say in local and regional government appointments, and enjoyed the freedom to quietly conduct its illegal businesses--such as international drug or arms smuggling. Politicians honor its requests for political favors, whether those be bending a law, fixing a trial or securing an influential job. Whether in the construction of soccer stadiums in advance of the 1990 World Cup tournament, foreign aid projects in the Third World or rebuilding from the 1980 earthquake that claimed 2,700 lives around the southern seaport of Naples, the Mafia was there for its cut. According to one estimate, the Neapolitan Camorra alone skimmed $8 billion of the $40 billion spent on quake reconstruction.

In part, Mafia power has flowed from this phenomenal business success. Quoting “reliable sources,” apparently within the Italian government, the respected Italian weekly Il Mondo earlier this month estimated that the annual income of the Cosa Nostra and its three sister organizations routinely runs between $12 billion and $15 billion, a figure that would make them collectively the financial equal of one of Italy’s largest corporations. (Fiat’s global auto sales last year amounted to about $21 billion.)

But Mafia power had other roots: Until the collapse of the country’s established political order three years ago, its votes usually went to the Christian Democrats--Andreotti’s party, the organization that controlled the direction and shape of Italy for almost half a century.

Detailing the limits of Mafia political power is difficult. But examples of its influence abound.

* Salvatore Lima--the Christian Democratic mayor of Palermo who rose to become a member of Andreotti’s Cabinet as well as of the Italian and European parliaments--was described as a key figure of the Palermo Mafia’s power structure by the parliamentary Anti-Mafia Commission. Lima was assassinated in 1992.

* Antonio Gava, who headed the Christian Democratic political machine in Naples and went on to become Andreotti’s Interior minister--and thus was in charge of Italian law enforcement--has been accused of being a part of the Camorra’s command structure.

* Then there is Andreotti himself, accused, among other things, of planting a kiss of respect on the mouth of the Cosa Nostra’s “boss of bosses,” Salvatore (Toto) Riina, during a 1987 meeting in a Palermo home. Andreotti vehemently denies the accusation--and all others--insisting that such a meeting with Riina would have been impossible because Andreotti always traveled with police escorts.

But others are convinced that the incident occurred. “I have long protested [that] Andreotti had contacts with the Mafia,” said Imposimato. “He had a direct rapport. I am absolutely sure it [the kiss] happened.”

There also are those who are convinced that, as prime minister in 1978, Andreotti could have saved Aldo Moro, his former party colleague and a former premier who was kidnaped and subsequently killed by left-wing terrorists. Under this theory, Andreotti halted efforts to free Moro after learning he had begun to discuss the government’s Mafia links with his kidnapers.

But even the Mafia’s most outspoken opponents admit that it is hard to pinpoint the organization’s exact role in influencing government policy. “When Andreotti spoke internationally, did he speak for Italy or for the Mafia?” Orlando asked. “How can you know?”

Still, some claim Mafia fingerprints on the Christian Democrats can be found almost everywhere, even in the White House. In an interview, Imposimato claimed that Sicilian banker Michele Sindona, an Andreotti confidant deeply involved with the Mafia before he was mysteriously poisoned in 1986, personally helped forge ties between the Italian Christian Democrats and conservative Republicans in America.

Mafia connections across the Atlantic are hardly surprising. Indeed, many Italians argue that the Cosa Nostra’s power stems directly from key political decisions made at the start of the Cold War that were quietly approved and supported by successive American administrations.

One of those was the decision of the Sicilian Christian Democrats to enlist Mafia help to beat back a common enemy--an increasingly powerful Communist Party. For many supporters of Italian democracy, including the United States, backing the country’s principal centrist party, the Christian Democrats, became an article of faith. Mafia or no Mafia, it was better than communism.

Italians also often refer to a letter written by Roman Catholic Cardinal Ernesto Ruffini of Sicily to Pope John XXIII in the early 1960s, noting that the priority of keeping the Communists at bay made it impossible to complain about growing Mafia power.

Those familiar with Cosa Nostra activities point to the mid-1970s as the height of Mafia political power, a time when the Communist threat remained strong, the first major Mafia trials had not yet begun and American drug connections shifted from Marseilles in France to Palermo, putting a fortune into Mafia coffers.

But just as they affected so much else in Europe, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the death of communism shifted political priorities in Italy, and gradually the public mood began to shift against the well-known yet little-discussed connections between the Mafia and the country’s mainstream parties.

A revulsion against widespread political corruption that culminated in the demise of the Christian Democrats and much of the postwar democratic order two years ago--coupled with the May, 1992, assassination of Giovanni Falcone, the country’s leading anti-Mafia prosecutor--transformed public opinion and sent the Mafia further into retreat, experts say.

In “Excellent Cadavers,” his recently published history of Mafia involvement in post-World War II Italy, Alexander Stille, an Italian American writer, notes that between 1992 and 1994, the arrest rate in southern Italy jumped by 46% while the murder rate dropped by 42%. Today, the Mafia’s income has reportedly dropped, sizable amounts of its money have been seized, and the collapse of the Christian Democrats has diminished its political influence.

The state’s crackdown has also taken its toll. With 4,000 Mafiosi now in custody, the crime organization’s legal bills are rising. Further, a quarter of those in jail have brushed aside the traditional code of silence and have turned state’s evidence, helping public prosecutors build new cases against the Mafia. Two years ago, barely two dozen had taken that step.

Despite all this, few talk of the Mafia being crushed. “ Defeat is a big word for a group that’s been around for 130 years,” Stille said. He and others point to evidence that the Mafia is already casting around for new political alliances. In the March, 1994, elections, Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia Party and the neo-fascist National Alliance appear to have been the main recipient of Mafia votes. “This doesn’t mean that Forza Italia is a Cosa Nostra party,” noted Ayala. “It means the Mafia is saying, ‘Let’s give them our votes and see what happens.’ ”

The nation is also waiting to see what happens to Andreotti. “Whether there’s enough evidence to convict him, God only knows,” commented James Walston, professor of Italian politics at the American University of Rome. “But it’s going to be a great show.”

Janet Stobart of The Times’ Rome Bureau and Times research librarian Peter Johnson in Los Angeles contributed to this report.