Confessions of Signor Sleaze
He’s the scandal-soaked ex Italian PM accused of an affair with an underage prostitute. Now, in a new book, Silvio Berlusconi tells HIS brazenly defiant side of the story . . .
job was as a cruise ship crooner, singing his heart out in a natty jacket and straw boater.
During his summer holidays at university (where he read law), he entertained blue-rinsed grannies and honeymooning newlyweds on board ship.
‘I played in the five-man orchestra and sang while the passengers danced,’ he says. ‘But from midnight until 3am I was on my own as Une Voix et Une Guitare (One Voice and One Guitar). That was me!’
Sinatra was a favourite of his, and still is. An apt choice, for like Ol’ Blue Eyes, Berlusconi has faced accusations of links with organised crime. When mention of the Mafia is made, Friedman notices ‘the slightest hint of discomfort’ at the line of questioning.
Why did he hire a man l ater convicted as a Mafia killer and drug trafficker as his country estate manager? Berlusconi denies knowing of the connection. Where did he get the capital to launch his many businesses?
These issues have been endlessly investigated and ‘nothing irregular has ever been turned up,’ he insists, falling back on his favourite argument — that he has been targeted over many decades by judges, prosecutors and militant magistrates determined to get him. They have spied on him, wire-tapping his homes and his friends, he declares, incensed at the violation of privacy.
The Bunga-Bunga case, he notes, is one of 61 trials he has had to go through in the past 20 years.
His outrage, however, has to be balanced against the questions that still hang in the air. How come, for example, that the first member of Italy’s tax police to investigate him found nothing and then left the police to work for Berlusconi?
‘I liked him,’ says Berlusconi and dismisses any suspicion as ‘far away from reality and absolutely false’.
What, then, of the fact that his various governments introduced laws that seemed tailor-made to suit his personal legal problems? One decriminalised the charge of false accounting, another allowed the prime minister and other top officials to avoid court appearances because of their busy schedules and high office.
This, too, is dismissed with a laugh: ‘Complete and utter nonsense.’ But the suspicion remains.
For many years, he saw off what he calls his ‘persecutors’ (though at vast cost in legal expenses), but t here have been numerous close shaves.
Which bring us back to Bunga-Bunga. Faced with charges of having sex with an under- age prostitute and for abuse of office relating to her release from detention,
Aged 79, he is plotting his comeback
Berlusconi was found guilty, sentenced to seven years in prison and banned from public office for life. He looked a goner.
But he appealed and, after three years, the conviction was quashed on the grounds that he could not have known the exact age of Ruby at the time, and the courts had been unable to prove they had ever had sex.
He was off the hook, but only for a while. The tenacious Milan prosecutors have upped the ante and are now claiming that Berlusconi bribed dozens of girls to commit perjury on his behalf.
His reply is that he paid them as an act of generosity and not a payment for any ulterior motives. That issue has yet to be resolved.
But a conviction for tax fraud has stuck, and only the fact that he is over 70 kept him out prison. For a year he had to live at his sumptuous 70-room Villa San Martino in a semi- curfew and semi-imprisonment, his passport confiscated, doing community service in a home for Alzheimer’s patients as recompense.
He has been thrown out of the Italian senate and been banned from public office until 2019. The verdict was a bitter blow to his psyche from which, says Friedman, he has not fully recovered.
Yet still the Great Survivor is not giving up, but plotting his latest political comeback. Friedman is a spectator at San Martino as he talks electoral politics and the resurgence of Forza Italia with members of his inner team, his so-called Magic Circle, at the centre of which is Pascale, his girlfriend.
The Italian Press see her as the villain, manipulating Berlusconi, isolating him from the world, doing irreparable damage to him with her inexperience, bad judgment and ambition.
This doesn’t ring true to Friedman. Those who know Berlusconi even a little, he says, recognise it is not easy to manipulate him. In the autumn of his years, he is still most definitely the boss.
His Bunga-Bunga days may be finished, but we haven’t heard the last from Silvio Berlusconi, the natural born seducer.
MY WAY: Berlusconi In His Own Words by Alan Friedman (Biteback, £20). © Alan Friedman 2015. To buy a copy for £14.24, visit mailbookshop. co.uk or call 0808 272 0808. Offer until October 24. P&P free on orders over £12.