Leonardo Messina - Mafia and Politics

Mafia and Politics

Perhaps Messina's most devastating revelations were about the relations between Cosa Nostra and Italian politics. He was the first pentito to name Giulio Andreotti as the ultimate point of reference of a chain of political exchanges that should have adjusted the sentence of the Maxi Trial that had established Cosa Nostra a single hierarchical organisation ruled by a Commission and that its leaders could be held responsible for criminal acts that were committed to benefit the organisation (the so-called Buscetta theorem). The Mafia counted on judge Corrado Carnevale of the Supreme Court to modify the sentence. And Salvo Lima – Andreotti’s pro-consul on Sicily – "acted as the liaison with (…) Andreotti for the needs of the Sicilian Mafia," said Messina.

However, one of the architects of the Maxi Trial, judge Giovanni Falcone, had moved to the ministry of Justice in Rome and managed to prevent that Carnevale would preside the section that would judge the Maxi Trial sentence. According to Messina, there was widespread resentment within Cosa Nostra toward the Andreotti faction of the Christian Democracy and the Craxi group of the Italian Socialist Party.