Ex-Premier of Italy Acquitted of Mafia Charges

A court in Sicily found former Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti innocent Saturday of consorting with the Mafia, ending a sensational four-year trial that put Italy’s Cold War political order on the dock along with that era’s dominant figure.

The three-judge panel’s verdict, read on national television, absolved the seven-time prime minister of charges that he governed under “a wicked pact of power,” protecting mob bosses on the southern island from prison in return for the votes of their vast political machine.

The verdict rebuffed the most ambitious attempt ever by prosecutors to establish a criminal connection between Italian politics and organized crime. During a trial that heard 350 witnesses and amassed 800,000 pages of testimony, they demanded that the 80-year-old defendant spend the next 15 years in prison.

Last month, a separate trial that relied on many of the same witnesses also ended in acquittal for Andreotti when a jury in Perugia, in central Italy, rejected charges that he conspired with the Mafia in the murder of a muckraking Italian journalist 20 years ago.

Few modern Western leaders have fallen so low from such a height as Andreotti, a shrewd politician who once symbolized his Christian Democratic Party’s seemingly permanent grip on power. The two verdicts brought him not only legal vindication but also a hero’s reception from many of the same Italians who had rejoiced at his government’s demise.

“The applause is nice, but I cared only about the verdict,” the hunched elder statesman told well-wishers Saturday outside the Senate, where he occupies a lifetime seat. He had testified in both trials but otherwise stuck to his routine in Rome, including daily communion at Roman Catholic Mass.

“It wasn’t so great to have waited so many years,” he added, describing himself as “somewhat moved” by Saturday’s verdict. “I consider the case closed.”

Prosecutors made no comment as they left the packed, bunker-like courtroom in Palermo, the Sicilian capital. They have a right to appeal after studying a written explanation of the verdict, which the judges will issue within 90 days.

Many Italian politicians and commentators saw the trial’s outcome, reached after 11 days of deliberation, as a call to prosecutors to rein in the aggressive and at times excessive zeal they have displayed in the 1990s.

“The message that really comes out in this verdict is that Italy’s postwar period must be judged in the history books and not in the tribunals,” said Franco Pavoncello, a political science professor at John Cabot University in Rome.

After applauding the anti-corruption crusade that ended more than four decades of rule by Andreotti’s Christian Democrats in 1992, Italians today are increasingly critical of the way that crusade has played out within a judiciary they view as sluggish, partisan and overly reliant on testimony from Mafia informants.

Italians also are enjoying the fruits of a relatively stable, scandal-free government under center-left leaders who brought the country into Europe’s single currency zone this year. As the public’s outrage over past scandals has dimmed, Andreotti has regained its sympathy with his humility in court--the David against a judicial Goliath.

“Andreotti’s acquittal is the definitive condemnation of judicial conspiracy theories based on the adventurism of certain state’s witnesses and the political ambitions of certain prosecutors,” said Gianfranco Fini, president of the rightist opposition National Alliance.

The trial was a marathon hearing on how the Sicilian Mafia thrived in Italy’s post-World War II politics. While Andreotti shaped the political order and was its leading power broker, the legal issue was whether his utility to the mob crossed the line into active complicity.

Andreotti helped transform Italy from an agrarian backwater devastated by the war into a leading industrial democracy. A member of 34 postwar Cabinets, he helped maintain political peace through government patronage, graft and endless compromises among myriad parties, including Europe’s largest Communist party, which was kept a safe distance from power.

Under a Christian Democratic mayor of Palermo, Salvatore Lima, an associate of Andreotti, the Mafia won building contracts and permits while delivering votes to the ruling party. Later, as the mob moved into drug trafficking, Andreotti’s government cracked down and violence shook the island; in 1992, mobsters murdered Lima and two crusading anti-Mafia prosecutors.

Andreotti’s accusers tried to prove that the former prime minister held secret meetings with Mafia bosses on the island and promised them immunity from punishment because of pressure he could exert on certain judges.

The most riveting accusation was that the defendant in 1987 proffered the traditional Mafia kiss of loyalty to Salvatore “Toto” Riina, the “boss of bosses,” who is now in prison.

“For some 20 years,” thanks to Andreotti’s patronage, “the Mafia was able to build its criminal capabilities, becoming the only organization in the world that could exercise its power over a legal state,” chief prosecutor Roberto Scarpinato said in summing up his case.

In his final court appearance, Andreotti said he felt “‘mortified” and “degraded” by the charges, which he said “lack any shred of proof.” He mocked the assertion that he had met with Riina, saying that if it was true, “you shouldn’t just convict me but demand that I receive psychiatric treatment.”

Much of the prosecution’s case, including testimony about the famous kiss, came from 27 pentiti, convicted Mafiosi who “repented” and made deals with the state under a witness protection program modeled on that of the United States. Turncoat testimony has sent hundreds of Italian Mafiosi to prison since the 1980s.

Andreotti argued that the Mafia sent false turncoats to testify against him in retaliation for his crackdown. He said Lima’s assassination proved that the mob was out to get him. Prosecutors said the killing showed merely that the erosion of the mob’s immunity after so many years of smooth dealings with Andreotti had angered the Mafia.

But the prosecution’s case was hurt by an admission from its star turncoat witness, Baldassare Di Maggio, that he had slipped away from the witness protection regime in 1996 to murder a Sicilian rival.

The trial so damaged the credibility of turncoat witnesses that Parliament came under pressure this month to disqualify their testimony in future cases. That effort was defeated after Andreotti spoke at the trial in favor of the witness protection program but called for a crackdown on its abuses.

Parliament is now expected to pass a bill that would keep would-be turncoats in prison longer, reduce their generous living allowances and bar them from consulting with one another before giving evidence.