Brusca’s rehashed story

Giovanni Brusca returned to a courtroom yesterday, for the first time as a free man, to speak about the alleged links between Silvio Berlusconi, Marcello Dell’Utri and the Cosa Nostra. And, as previewed in these pages, he served up the usual rehash of old stories, which were hardly credible. Testifying at the Florence court in the trial against Salvatore Baiardo, the former Mafia boss (responsible for the Capaci massacre), he stated that the massacres of 1992–1993 were to be used “as a political tool, as if they had been suggested by the left”, so as to “facilitate Berlusconi’s entry into politics”. To get in touch with Berlusconi, Brusca explained, he had been contacted by Vittorio Mangano, “to give him the assignment”. “Mangano then let us know that he had been in contact with someone who had passed the message on to Berlusconi – either via Dell’Utri or through other channels – and he reported back to us that Berlusconi had expressed his thanks and would give us a hand as soon as possible”.

Brusca then added that “at a later stage, we also sent him a veiled threat in case the help did not materialise: we would have planted more bombs to put him in political difficulty”. In short, rather than by mafiosi, the leadership of Cosa Nostra would have been run by sophisticated political strategists. However, Brusca’s testimony presents two significant issues. On the one hand, it remains unclear how the notion of using the massacres to ‘facilitate Berlusconi’ can be reconciled with the subsequent intention of employing them to ‘put him in political difficulty’. On the other hand, as we noted yesterday, Brusca’s ‘revelations’ regarding contacts between Cosa Nostra and Berlusconi have already been deemed unreliable by numerous judges. The harshest criticism came from the investigating judge who acquitted Mannino in the trial concerning the state-Mafia negotiations: Brusca, he pointed out, tends to “enrich his statements with connections between facts he is aware of and facts learnt from trials and the media”. Not exactly testimony one can rely on.