Andreotti: Masquerade Of Century?

For more than a generation, Giulio Andreotti, now slated to go on trial as a godfather of the Sicilian Mafia, was ranked among the West’s most respected political leaders, a major player during the Cold War and a figure from whom U.S. presidents from Eisenhower to Bush sought advice.

After months of speculation, the 76-year-old Andreotti was indicted Thursday, accused of collusion with Italy’s criminal bosses and, on at least one occasion, conspiring in a murder. He will stand trial in Palermo, Sicily’s capital, in September.

European officials who know him well say that if the accusations are true, the one-time chief of Italy’s Christian Democratic Party who served as prime minister seven times and as foreign minister in 11 post-war governments, carried out the political masquerade of the century.

Maurice Couve de Murville, a former French prime minister and foreign minister who worked with him closely for over a decade, said in an interview Friday that if Andreotti did lead a double life, divided between international politics and criminal conspiracy, he “practiced an incredible deception - greater than any I can think of in recent history.”

Andreotti’s trial may reveal the extent to which worldwide Mafia operations were helped by crooked Italian officials.

Authorities say it could also cast new light on the most sensational Italian murder case of modern times: the 1978 killing of Aldo Moro, a leading Christian Democrat.

In importance, Andreotti’s case is light years ahead of the accusations leveled at other top Italian politicians in scandals since the early 1990s, which have destroyed the old political status quo.

Figures like former Socialist Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, now a fugitive from justice in Tunisia, were accused of accepting huge bribes for political favors.

But only Andreotti among Italy’s senior leaders is alleged to have had direct ties to the Mafia - to have plotted with ringleaders like the late Salvo Lima, the Christian Democrats’ bagman in Sicily who was known to the police as a Cosa Nostra member.

The prosecution is expected to try to implicate Andreotti in Lima’s murder in 1992, supposedly because he had become an encumbrance to both the Mafia and the party.

At the core of the accusations against the former prime minister is the charge that he masterminded a longstanding arrangement by which the Mafia delivered large majorities to the Christian Democrats in Sicily in national elections in exchange for huge payoffs in the form of government contracts to companies controlled by the crime organization.

In 2,000 pages of evidence compiled by the state prosecutor, Andreotti is described as the “principal political partner of the Mafia.”

The thick file includes the claim by an ex-Mafioso that he saw Andreotti and Salvatore “Toto” Riina, the Mafia’s “boss of bosses” who is now in jail, embrace in a “ritual kiss” at a secret meeting in 1987.

According to Manfredo Tommasi, a specialist on the influence of organized crime on Italian political and economic life, the trial should reveal the extent of the connection between the Mafia and the Christian Democrats, who for most of the past 45 years ran the country, and whether their links went beyond Sicily.

Moro, who was Andreotti’s chief rival for leadership of the Christian Democratic party in the 1970s, was kidnapped and later slain by the Red Brigades, a then-powerful leftist terrorist group.

Rumors at the time suggested that Andreotti had blocked efforts to negotiate with the terrorists to free Moro, a charge he has vigorously denied.

The accusations against him rest on the testimony of 17 so-called “pentiti” or repentant Mafiosi. In a TV appearance this week, Andreotti rejected the charges as “consisting solely of suppositions and deductions that are based on nothing. … There is no tangible proof against me.”

Andreotti, who has projected an image of Catholic piety, declared he “suffered greatly morally from the charge I have had relations with the Mafia.”

Some of his closest associates insist the accusations are preposterous. One former aide declared recently that he would “swear on the heads of my children he is innocent.”

But another one-time associate told an Italian radio reporter that he was “an old hypocrite who is getting his just deserts.”