Courtroom testimony of Cosa Nostra's No. 2 explains sudden demise of Christian Democrats and mysterious rise to power of Forza Italia 

The London Guardian
Philip Willan in Palermo
Sunday January 12, 2003
The Observer

Sicilians have a natural gift for story-telling and, if the tales that Antonino Giuffre is telling magistrates are true, the shock waves could shatter careers and reputations far beyond the confines of southern Italy where earthquakes and volcanic eruptions have been the norm of late. 

Giuffre, 58, is the most important mafia supergrass since the infamous Tommaso Buscetta 20 years ago. 

Last week, Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was a target of his court deposition in Palermo. This week it will be the turn of Giulio Andreotti, the symbol of postwar Christian Democrat power, to feel Giuffre's verbal lash. 

Known in mafia circles as Manuzza (the Hand) - his right hand crippled by polio - Giuffre has an encyclopaedic knowledge of Cosa Nostra's affairs over the past two decades, partly from having played host to Michele 'the Pope' Greco in the Eighties, when the supreme mafia boss was on the run and took refuge near Caccamo, Giuffre's home town. 

Patience and determination took him up the ladder, until the agricultural sciences teacher became number two to Bernardo Provenzano, the now fugitive 'boss of bosses'. That was his privileged observation point when he was arrested last April. 

Giuffre was feeding investigators priceless information even before he agreed to turn state's evidence in June. Like most bosses on the run, he didn't use telephones, to avoid the risk of interception. 

Security-conscious bosses prefer isolated houses without electricity, making it more difficult for investigators to power mini-cameras and bugging devices. Giuffre communicated on slips of paper delivered by runners. 

Giuffre is the first senior mafioso to cross the line in years. His collaboration has updated investigators' knowledge and provided a new interpretation for the sensitive issue of Cosa Nostra's relations with politics in the early Nineties. 

'It's very simple: we are the fish and politics is the water,' Giuffre said. 'I will tell you a little story which happened in my town some time ago and which no one has ever spoken of. Once there was a coach that would take Christian Democrats to vote. They were told who to vote for, voted dutifully and were taken home. Was there ever a communist who wanted to get on? Well, they wouldn't let him. He started to make a bit of a fuss, after a while he was killed. Someone was sentenced to life imprisonment who had nothing to do with the crime. I don't know if he's still in prison.' 

In the early 1990s the mafia toyed with creating its own party, opting in the end to support the movement created by Berlusconi in return for guarantees that the confiscation of its property and harsh prison conditions for mafiosi, would be addressed. The jailed godfathers are still waiting. 

Giuffre shed light on the bombings that killed two top anti-mafia investigators in Sicily and damaged cultural sites on the mainland - probably the most sensitive aspect of his collaboration. 

The supergrass tackled the issue of politics for the first time in public on Tuesday, when he gave evidence to a Palermo court trying one of Berlusconi's aides for alleged complicity with the mafia. 

Marcello Dell'Utri, a Sicilian-born senator for Berlusconi's Forza Italia party, had promised to help alleviate Cosa Nostra's judicial problems in exchange for electoral support, he said. 'Dell'Utri was very close to Cosa Nostra and a very good contact point for Berlusconi'. 

He gave evidence from a secret location, only the thinning grey hair on the back of his head visible on the video screens around the courtroom, as his dark tales arrived eerily from tinny loudspeakers. The authoritativeness of his account was measured in the increasing discomfort of Dell'Utri and his defence team. Forza Italia, he said, had given guarantees that the mafia's legal problems would be resolved within 10 years. 

One mafia boss, Stefano Bontate, he said, was in the habit of visiting Berlusconi at his country estate. With other 'men of honour', he used the presence of a mafioso working there as a stablehand as an excuse to call on the media magnate. 

Both privately to prosecu tors and in court, Giuffre has provided a map of mafia power structures and chilling accounts of its practices. 

'I noticed a strong smell one day in Nardo Greco's ice factory in Bagheria,' he said. 'They told me the corpse of Piddu Panno was there, wrapped up in a sack.' Panno had been strangled in the mafia war of the Eighties, Giuffre said. 

In another building in Palermo, he told investigators, the organisation had the equivalent of a police flying squad headquarters: batteries of telephones and a dozen armed men. Calls would come in to alert the squad to potential targets - for murder. 

Much still remains to be learnt about the political background to the murders of anti-mafia magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992 and the bombings the following year that damaged the Uffizi in Florence and the Basilica of St John the Lateran in Rome. 

Giuffre has been completing the picture of the political background to these events, at a time when the mafia was withdrawing its support from the Christian Democrats and infiltrating the new political formation that would become Forza Italia. Top bosses were negotiating with representatives of the state and, Giuffre says, with representatives of Berlusconi. 

Berlusconi and Dell'Utri dismiss the allegations as monstrous slurs. 

Guardian Unlimited Observer | Special reports | Mafia supergrass fingers Berlusconi 
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