The appeal trial for collusion with the Mafia in which is the defendant Marcello Dell'Utri, a founder of Forza Italia and a close friend of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, is telling us the history of relations between the Mafia and politics in recent decades. A very bad story for our country.Today deposed Gaspare Spatuzza, a repentant murderer and mobster, which indicated Berlusconi and Dell'Utri as the political instigators of the Mafia bombings in 1992-1993.
"Graviano told me the name of Berlusconi, and said that thanks to him and to our countryman (who would be the sicilian Dell'Utri) we had the country in our hands. Graviano told me we'd get everything and this is due to the seriousness of those people who carried this story, who were not like those four 'Crasti' socialists who had taken our votes in 88 and '89 and then made a war against us ", said the informant.
These words and what we know from previous trials enable us to reconstruct the history of relations between the mafia and politics for many years back. We know that at least until 1980 the Christian Democratic party was the main political reference of the mafia. We know this because Giulio Andreotti in 2003 was sentenced for external collusion with the Mafia, "concretely apparent until the spring of 1980," a crime extinguished by statute of limitation. For subsequent events Andreotti was acquitted. We can reasonably assume that over the 80s the Christian Democrats, also because of severe events like the murders of Pio La Torre and Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, were forced to do something to fight the Corleonesi mafia of Riina, bloody and involved in international drug trafficking. The Mafia therefore tried to contact other political parties, especially the socialists, and in that period Silvio Berlusconi was just a businessman close to the Socialist leader Bettino Craxi. On the money with which Berlusconi has made his fortune in fact there are serious suspicions of mafia origin. The socialists in the end turned out to be bad allies to the Mafia and were destroyed by the investigations of Clean Hands, and so the criminal organization needed other allies, and went to the nascent political party Forza Italia. 
The fact that Spatuzza, unlike other mobsters turned informants, hasn't been sentenced to death by the Mafia and his family have not been threatened, suggests that the organization has no objection to his collaboration with justice. According to Berlusconi and Dell'Utri this is proof that he is not a true repentant, but a mobster who wants to hit a government that has never helped the Mafia. But it may also simply be that the Mafia is not happy with the outcome of its 1993 agreement with politics. Maybe the mafia think that Berlusconi has done so much to save himself from his trials and very little for the trials of others. The testimony of the informant rather than dispel the shadows it creates many others: "When occurred Capaci and via D'Amelio bombings, we cowardly enjoyed them. Those massacres belonged to us. While the bombing of Florence was not ours." If mobsters are not the only ones responsible for bombings in Florence, Milan and Rome in 1993 which killed 10 innocent people, to whom those attacks belong? Rogue elements of the italian state, as was often suspected of terrorism in the 70s and the 80s? The accusation of the informant here is not only that Berlusconi's party has promised favors to the Mafia in exchange for votes and the end of the massacres, but even that he and Dell'Utri, as said also another informant, have been among the instigators of these murders, to facilitate the rise to power of the Prime Minister.
What seems certain is that Italian politics for decades had friendly relationships with the Mafia while judges, journalists, honest politicians, policemen and many ordinary citizens were murdered by those same criminal organizations. Their plots, their dirty games, our lives and our blood.
Probably the Dell'Utri trial will not be enough to shed light on all this, apart from a certainty that many people in Italy have already figured out long ago. That a premier as Berlusconi, suspected in such serious crimes, should resign immediately. But he still doesn't.
Francesco Defferrari
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