Salvatore Lima - Alliance With Andreotti

Alliance With Andreotti

In 1968 Lima was elected to the Chamber of Deputies (Italian: Camera dei Deputati), suddenly surpassing established politicians in Sicily. The alliance between Lima and Andreotti proved beneficial to both. Although Andreotti had a strong electoral base in and around Rome, his faction had no power base in the rest of Italy. With Lima – who at some time controlled 25 percent of all party members in Sicily – the Andreotti faction turned into a truly national group. While Andreotti had been an important government minister before his alliance with Lima, he now became one of the most powerful politicians in Italy. Andreotti became prime minister for the first time in 1972. In 1974 Lima became Under-Secretary of the Budget. In 1979 Lima was elected in the European Parliament.

In 1981, Palermo witnessed the outbreak of a bloody Mafia war. A new dominant group within the Mafia, headed by Salvatore (Totò) Riina, of Corleone, killed and replaced the traditional bosses of Palermo and their associates. The Corleonesi also turned against state representatives and politicians, such as the communist senator Pio La Torre, the Carabinieri general Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa who had been appointed as the prefect of Palermo to fight the Mafia, and Rocco Chinnici, chief prosecutor in Palermo.

A mounting public outcry demanded the Christian Democrats to clean up its house in Sicily. The mayor of Palermo, one of Lima's protégés, was forced to resign, and Andreotti's Sicilian faction was on the defensive. At the Maxi Trial against the Mafia in the mid 1980s, two of Lima's closest allies, the cousins Nino and Ignazio Salvo, were convicted of being Mafia members. When Lima was in Sicily he was chauffeured around in a bulletproof car of the Salvo’s. Lima himself, however, never became the target of criminal investigation, because of reluctance on the part of both witnesses and prosecutors.

Mafia boss Tommaso Buscetta, whose testimonies as a collaborating witness during the Maxi Trial had been instrumental to convict many Mafia bosses, refused to talk about the relationship between Cosa Nostra and politicians. He told Giovanni Falcone one of the prosecutors at the Maxi Trial: "I have told you repeatedly that I would not discuss it until and if the time is ripe. It would be extremely foolish to discuss this subject - which is the crucial knot of the Mafia problem - while the very people whom we would be discussing remain fully active on the political scene."

The Court of Cassation (court of final appeal) ruled in October 2004 that Andreotti had "friendly and even direct ties" with top men in the so-called moderate wing of Cosa Nostra, Stefano Bontade and Gaetano Badalamenti, favoured by the connection between them and Salvo Lima.