CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Guilty

Silvio Berlusconi was sweating. He had already changed his shirt twice today. Yes, it was partly due to the weather. It was a sweltering summer day in Rome, the first day of August of 2013.

More than twenty months had passed since Berlusconi’s humiliation at Cannes and his replacement as prime minister by Mario Monti amid the international intrigue involving Merkel, Sarkozy, and Napolitano. For Berlusconi things had gone from bad to worse, especially on the legal front.

Inside the Palazzo Grazioli, Berlusconi’s Roman headquarters, it was hot, muggy, and humid. The air-conditioning was not working too well, but that was not surprising in a seventeenth-century palace with thick stone walls and eighteen-foot-high ceilings. The mood inside was funereal. A vigil of sorts was under way; it was a painful period of waiting, for a sentence, for a ruling. Aides were scurrying in and out of Berlusconi’s office on the second floor of the imposing baroque palace just a stone’s throw from Rome’s fabled Piazza Venezia. Liveried manservants were busy carrying small silver trays with servings of espresso and mineral water for each of the many guests. Berlusconi was hunkered down inside the ornate chamber, receiving a virtual parade of visits from political delegations and top aides and advisers and lawyers and friends and family.

Berlusconi had been there for days, barricaded inside his presidential-style office, the one with the gilded consoles that featured his memorabilia and photographs of himself with his friends Bush and Putin and walls that were covered in golden damask silk. He sat there receiving his guests, one after the other. His staff was in a state of high agitation, fearing the worst, but Berlusconi looked melancholic and pensive, uneasily still. If he was nervous about the verdict, he was doing his best to hide it.

On this first day of August in 2013, a Thursday, however, something changed. He might have seemed strangely calm to those around him, but today Silvio Berlusconi was on the edge as never before. Today his whole life was on the line.

Today was the day that the supreme court would hand down its final verdict in a long-running tax fraud case. Everyone in Italy expected the supreme court to uphold two lower court convictions and that would make Berlusconi officially, in the eyes of the law, a convicted criminal with a prison sentence, guilty of tax fraud and barred from elective office. This was it. This was his last stand, the last stop, the make-or-break moment for Berlusconi. For twenty years he had always escaped final conviction, but this time things were looking dicey.

A crowd of supporters began milling about in the street below in front of the palace. Some of them were hoisting placards and wearing Berlusconi buttons in a show of solidarity. A phalanx of camera crews, working for CNN, Fox, and the BBC as well as the local Italian channels, was lined up outside, kept at bay by machine-gun-toting carabinieri and by policemen who had transformed this busy thoroughfare in downtown Rome into a high-security red zone, with traffic blocked off at the Piazza Venezia.

Marina Berlusconi arrived at the Palazzo Grazioli just before three o’clock that afternoon, having flown down from Milan, where she was running the family-owned Mondadori publishing group. She was effectively the heir apparent to Berlusconi, being his eldest child and the daughter from his first marriage. She went straight to her father’s office, and found him sitting there with his lawyer of many years, Niccolò Ghedini.

Francesca Pascale, Berlusconi’s Neapolitan girlfriend, had decided to cope with the stress by venturing out of the palace for some retail therapy, or at least to walk her dog. Each time she emerged, she put on a veritable fashion show for the camera crews gathered outside. The former showgirl was seen gliding in and out of the palace several times that day, in the morning clad in cool, pale pastel shades of yellow, with matching Ferragamo ballet slippers and oversize Fendi sunglasses, and in the afternoon in a powder blue outfit, each time carrying Dudù, her cuddly white poodle, in her arms.

Upstairs it was like a war room. Berlusconi’s political lieutenants were trying to figure out what the damage would be if he received a guilty verdict. The issue was threatening to tear apart Berlusconi’s party and to bring down the government. There was no Plan B for Berlusconi. There was no succession plan. He had a sidekick in the party, a former Christian Democrat from Sicily named Angelino Alfano, who was his number two, but the man lacked charisma. As the debate raged about who might lead his party into the next election if Berlusconi were to receive a prison sentence, the name of Marina Berlusconi was invoked by several party loyalists.

“The alternative to Berlusconi,” tweeted the party stalwarts, “is Berlusconi.”

This was the atmosphere that Berlusconi’s daughter Marina walked into when she arrived that afternoon. By four p.m., Berlusconi’s chief political adviser, a long-serving lobbyist and Fininvest vice president named Gianni Letta, had left the Palazzo Grazioli. As he left the meeting, Letta was sporting a deep frown, and then a look of resignation at what was about to happen. Berlusconi’s right-hand man at Mediaset, Fedele Confalonieri, and his son Pier Silvio were still up at the TV network’s headquarters on the outskirts of Milan, following it all from a distance.

For more than an hour, Berlusconi sat alone in his office with his daughter Marina. They spoke first about the two alternative scenarios that were possible that day, either an acquittal or a conviction. Berlusconi was meanwhile working on a statement. He was writing it all out in longhand, with good old-fashioned pen and paper. When Marina realized that Berlusconi was drafting the text of a video message that he would broadcast on his channels in case of conviction, she begged her father to drop it, to leave it alone. Berlusconi kept on writing.

According to those who were in the room with him that afternoon, he looked like a man who was resigned to the worst, yet serene. His family members and aides remembered he had displayed the same kind of almost surreal calm just a few weeks before, in mid-June, when a Milan court had handed down a guilty verdict in his bunga-bunga trial. He had prepared a video message on the day of that conviction as well, swearing to the Italians that he was not guilty of having had sex with an underage prostitute.

Shortly after five p.m., Marina watched her father finish writing the statement. The supreme court sentence had still not been announced; that was more than two hours away. Berlusconi called in his top image maker, a television veteran named Roberto Gasparotti. As he had on many other occasions, Gasparotti recalls having to scramble to set up the lighting, get the cameras in position, and watch the makeup lady finish patting down Berlusconi’s forehead. Berlusconi was miked up, in his chair, behind the desk, the flags of Italy and Forza Italia behind him, as on sober occasions. It was the full Berlusconi presidential address setup, with Berlusconi looking directly into the camera.

Berlusconi finished taping the nine-minute address and retreated from his office to a nearby living room in the company of his daughter. On the grand “Noble Floor” of the Palazzo Grazioli, which served as both his political headquarters and his Rome residence, was a living room with a sixty-inch LCD TV screen, a circle of beige couches, a liquor cabinet brimming with rare whiskies and cognacs, a gilded Napoleon Troix console with marble pedestals, golden tapestry wall coverings, more memorabilia, and in one corner of the room, as though set up for year-round Christmas, a large Swarovski crystal Christmas tree. On this occasion it was not turned on.

At seven-forty that evening, father and daughter sat on the living room couch, staring at the screen. Live on national television, the supreme court judges rose to read the verdict. For the Italians this was a moment of historic proportions. Berlusconi’s political staff and lawyers gathered in an adjoining room to watch the verdict. After nearly twenty years of court proceedings, Berlusconi’s fate was decreed in just one minute and fifty-six seconds by the chief justice. Berlusconi remembers these as the worst two minutes in his life. Across Rome, jubilant anti-Berlusconi crowds took to the streets to cheer the court sentence, popping open bottles of Champagne and rejoicing in this, the first definitive and binding guilty verdict ever handed to the billionaire former premier.

Pier Silvio and Confalonieri left their Milan office, headed to the civil aviation zone at Linate Airport, and boarded the Mediaset private jet for the short flight to Rome. By now other family members were turning up at the Palazzo Grazioli, including two of his children from his second wife, Barbara and Luigi. So was another lengthy line of pilgrims from Berlusconi’s party, ministers, members of parliament, and assorted party hacks and strategists. They had come to pay homage and Berlusconi kept receiving them long after midnight. The guilty verdict was about to unleash a political tsunami from which Berlusconi would find it hard to recover. It marked a seminal turning point in Berlusconi’s political career, and would lead to his being expelled from the senate and declared ineligible for public office. The full horror of his situation was just beginning to sink in. The nervous faces of Berlusconi’s army of party supplicants and opportunists said it all as they came and went, followed incessantly by the paparazzi and TV crews outside.

Early the following morning, after less than four hours of sleep, Berlusconi awoke to the news that a couple of embarrassed carabinieri in full uniform were waiting in the living room. They apologized to Berlusconi, but they had come to confiscate his passport. This was a detail of the conviction, while he was awaiting sentencing. While his enemies celebrated across Italy, Berlusconi felt humiliated. Yes, this was true disgrace.

Guilty. Silvio Berlusconi had finally been convicted of a crime. The man who had dominated Italian politics since 1994 had been declared a criminal, and by the highest court in the land.

How did Berlusconi feel when he heard that guilty verdict? What kind of emotion did he experience in that moment?

“More than an emotion, I experienced a kind of incredulity that the judges had managed to stack the cards against me. That verdict is a disgrace for the Italian judicial system. It is a deep wound, an injury inflicted not just on me but on the entire judiciary.”

Now Berlusconi pauses ever so slightly and looks down for a moment. When he looks up again, his face betrays the slightest twitch. His left leg starts bobbing nervously up and down beneath the table. When he speaks again, his voice is low and carries the slightest tinge of conspiracy.

“I know,” says a tremulous Berlusconi, “that one of the justices who handed down the verdict now regrets his decision. In fact, he has said that this was not really a panel of judges but a firing squad, with its guns trained on Berlusconi as the political adversary. One of the judges who ruled has said this.”

He ends up insisting on one very simple point, and he bangs it home with increasing irritation.

“The law under which I was convicted says that in order to be convicted of this crime, you need to have personally signed the tax return. You need to have had signing power over the company’s accounts, meaning you had to be either a company executive or a board member. I never signed a single account at Mediaset. I am the owner of a financial holding company that controls sixty percent of another financial holding which in turn owns thirty-four percent of Mediaset. I never signed anything at Mediaset,” says a defiant Berlusconi.

It is true that when the fraud took place, in 2001 and 2002 according to the court sentence, Berlusconi was prime minister, fending off attacks from his political rivals who were accusing him of having a massive conflict of interest. While he had resigned his Mediaset positions back in 1994, he had never put the media empire into a blind trust. So most of his political opponents, and numerous magistrates, tended to operate not so much on documented evidence of the crime but on the thesis that he could not have not known what was going on at Mediaset, having his best friend running it and his children as top executives in his business. Confalonieri, who did have signing power at Mediaset as the company’s president, had been acquitted. Yet Berlusconi, who insisted again that as prime minister he had never signed the tax returns at Mediaset, had been charged with fraud and convicted. How on earth could that be, Berlusconi demands, his voice now rising to full-throated tenor.

As far as the supreme court judges were concerned, Berlusconi’s argument held no water because he was “the brains” behind the entire operation. He was the architect, the court claimed, of the fraud. Berlusconi’s lawyers lodged an appeal with the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, hoping to overturn Italian law and allow Berlusconi to continue to be eligible as a political candidate, and in the turbulent months that followed Berlusconi would cling to this hope of final redemption like a drowning swimmer.

“What I want,” says a dreamy Berlusconi, as though he is speaking to some higher power, “is a full and complete declaration of innocence from a court that is truly above suspicion, the European Court of Human Rights.”

While his critics would later smirk at Berlusconi’s European court petition, it was the only way he could hope to have his ban on holding public office reversed. That was the big problem he was now facing. How could he lead a political party if he was about to be expelled from the senate and banned from running in elections for the next six years? By now Berlusconi was nearly seventy-seven years old, and six years seemed like a very long time.

The truth is that by the summer of 2013, after the supreme court ruling, Berlusconi was facing the risk of political extinction. He called the verdict a “judicial coup” and went on passionate rages against the magistrates of the left, in public and in private. It was futile. His personal and political problems were beginning to converge in a way that would threaten everything he had built. To Berlusconi, it looked as though it might all come tumbling down. He complained to friends about his “personal liberty” being taken away. He complained that if he were expelled from parliament he would lose his immunity from arrest, and he feared that some activist judge would put out a warrant for his arrest. “They can do it. They can come and get me,” he assured friends. “They will not be satisfied until they see me behind bars.”

Berlusconi was now fearful and suffering from bouts of depression. He was feeling constantly humiliated—the court ruling also meant that he would be stripped of his Italian knighthood, for service to industry, which he had collected back in 1977, in the heyday of his career as a real estate developer. He was proud of that honorific and the nickname-loving Italian press had long called him the “Cav” in print. That was short for “Il Cavaliere,” the Italian expression for “The Knight.” Now the newspapers made fun of him, calling him the “Ex-Cav.”

Berlusconi had plenty of other worries that summer, especially on the political front. If he were taken out of circulation for a year of house arrest and banned as a candidate for the center-right, how would he keep his party together? In the twenty-one months since he had resigned as prime minister, Italy had been bumping along the bottom, ravaged by a deep recession and high unemployment, and now it looked like the government that President Napolitano had installed to take the place of Berlusconi was on its last legs.

Mario Monti, the mild-mannered economist whom Napolitano had groomed for the job, had proven a disappointment. His appointment had helped to stabilize the economy for a while, and he had pushed through important pension reforms, but Monti soon ran out of steam, and fresh elections were held in February 2013. With Berlusconi still free to campaign, his center-right coalition came a close second to the center-left Democrats. It was as close to a tie as Italy had ever seen. Berlusconi managed to win 29.4 percent of the national vote, with the Democrat-led coalition coming first with 29.8 percent. A new third party, unbelievably headed by a former stand-up comedian with a talent for social media, had managed a huge protest vote, a 25 percent share that made it the third-largest party in the country. This was itself an earthquake in Italian politics. Then, under an Italian election law that would soon be declared unconstitutional, the Democrat-led coalition was given a 150-seat bonus in the lower house. The problem was that they were still a few votes short in the senate. Meanwhile, President Napolitano’s term in office was expiring, and he was about to turn eighty-eight years of age. It was all pure Fellini.

The result of the February 2013 election and the haggling over a successor to Napolitano wreaked such havoc that Italy actually went without a new government for two full months. At the end Napolitano was asked to serve a second term as president, but only on his terms. The president then insisted on forming a Grand Coalition of left and right, practically all the parties except for the followers of the comedian. Berlusconi gave his support to the new government, and so at the time of his guilty verdict in August 2013 he was the leader of a center-right coalition that had five cabinet seats and whose votes were crucial to keep the government afloat. Unfortunately, the government was again in the hands of a political lightweight, a prime minister who, as things would have it, also happened to be the nephew of Berlusconi’s chief political fixer, Gianni Letta.

Prime Minister Enrico Letta, also known as “Letta Junior,” was already floundering when Berlusconi received his guilty verdict that summer. As soon as Berlusconi was convicted, his government teetered further. Would Berlusconi pull the plug on the coalition government as revenge for his conviction? Did he now hope that President Napolitano might give him a pardon?

The octogenarian former Communist put his foot down right away. The government would continue, he declared, and Berlusconi’s legal problems were his own business. Case closed.

That autumn, when it looked like things could not get any worse for Berlusconi, they did. Another supreme court ruling was handed down, another verdict against him. Another old problem come home to roost. This time it was a civil suit that had been making its way through Italian courts for more than twenty years. This was a court ruling that nearly brought Berlusconi’s empire to its knees. The family company, Fininvest, had to pay a whopping $700 million in damages to his archrival Carlo De Benedetti, on the basis that Fininvest had illicitly gained control of the Mondadori publishing house back in 1991 by bribing a judge to swing a key decision. Berlusconi had been acquitted in the criminal bribery case years ago, but the civil lawsuit brought against him resulted in a sting of huge dimensions. The payment drained Berlusconi’s company of nearly all of its cash at the time, adding serious financial worries to his legal and political troubles.

The decision came in the middle of September, on the same day that Berlusconi was preparing to relaunch his Forza Italia party, having decided he would reinvent himself politically by shelving his existing center-right coalition, which he had called the Freedom People Coalition, and going back to basics. His old party was in serious disarray. The issue was Berlusconi’s looming expulsion from the Italian senate, and his future as a political leader. The prime minister, Enrico Letta, was standing firm, saying that he would not allow Berlusconi’s legal travails to dictate the longevity of his struggling coalition government. President Napolitano was chiming in, letting it be known in no uncertain terms that he would not countenance any new elections and calling upon Berlusconi to be responsible, which was a way of telling Berlusconi not to bring down the government as a protest against his guilty verdict. Berlusconi was meanwhile wondering aloud whether there was still a chance he might win a pardon from Napolitano, and hesitated about causing the government to collapse.

All through September, Berlusconi shuttled between Arcore and the Palazzo Grazioli in Rome, Francesca Pascale in tow, trying to hold things together but facing a wall of opposition, especially in his own party. The so-called hawks in his party wanted him to pull out of the government and force elections. The doves wanted to keep supporting the government and they were resigned to seeing Berlusconi being kicked out of the senate. These rebels against Berlusconi included his number two man, Deputy Prime Minister Angelino Alfano, who was quite happy in his job as deputy prime minister and did not want to bring down the government at all.

At the end of September, as Berlusconi’s expulsion order passed through a key senate committee, the billionaire finally showed his anger. He ordered his five ministers in the cabinet to resign, and that included Alfano. The ministers hemmed and hawed, and for a moment it seemed they would stand up to Berlusconi. They did hand in their resignations, potentially opening up a government crisis. Berlusconi now seemed bent on bringing down the government, but actually he had lost control of Alfano and the other cabinet ministers—all of whom loved their jobs and perks—plus nearly thirty members of parliament. So the resignations were taken back in a matter of days and the rebels remained part of the government. By November, when the full senate vote on Berlusconi’s expulsion was just days away, Berlusconi held a celebration to relaunch his beloved Forza Italia. On the same day Alfano and the other doves left Berlusconi for good. They formed a new micro-party that immediately pledged its continuing allegiance to the center-left government of Prime Minister Letta, in return for keeping five cabinet posts.

The betrayal had come quickly, and by this point Berlusconi was not surprised. Weeks before, he had told friends that Alfano was a traitor, that he was an ungrateful prodigal son, that he would end up as a political failure if he left the party that had given him everything. By the time he was voted out of the Italian senate in late November 2013, Berlusconi had already lost one-third of his party in parliament. He had decided to vote against the government, and for the first time in years his party was back on the opposition benches. He was out of parliament and out of power.

He was also facing yet another indictment, this time for allegedly paying millions of dollars in bribes to a senator from Naples to buy his vote in parliament as part of a scheme to bring down a center-left government at the end of 2006. Berlusconi naturally denied everything, even after the senator in question admitted receiving the money. Berlusconi was increasingly bitter. Things were not going his way, not at all.

On the day that Berlusconi was voted out of the senate in Rome, a lesser known politician was sitting in the Palazzo della Signoria in Florence, giving an interview. The youthful mayor of Florence, the thirty-nine-year-old Matteo Renzi, was extolling the economic policies of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair and explaining why he was running to become party leader of the Democratic Party in Italy. He was making all the right noises, pledging modernizing reforms and articulating a vision of a post-Berlusconi Italy that he wanted to build. Renzi was known as the most ambitious man in Italy. He was also becoming the most popular politician. A few days later, Renzi would win the primaries in his own party and try to whip the lethargic Premier Enrico Letta into shape and re-energize the government, which was floundering again. Renzi was a Tuscan, which in Italian terms means that he is stubborn, has a strong character and quite a tongue. For a while, though, Renzi emitted only reassuring noises to the hapless Letta, reassuring him of his support and promising party unity. This was the state of affairs at the beginning of 2014, with Renzi as party leader and Letta as prime minister. If Letta was the symbol of everything that was old and archaic about Italy’s Old Left, then Renzi was the future.

The hard-charging and social media–savvy Renzi came onto the national scene like a hurricane. One of his first acts after taking over the center-left was to hold a most unusual powwow with Silvio Berlusconi, inviting the archenemy to visit the headquarters of the Democratic Party. When Berlusconi’s Audi A8 powered through the narrow cobblestoned alleyways of Rome and pulled up on January 18 in front of Renzi’s party office, jaws dropped. What was Renzi up to? Why would he deign to meet with Berlusconi? And how could this be Silvio Berlusconi, walking into the headquarters of a party that for twenty years had advocated his annihilation? The answer was not complicated. For months now, Berlusconi had been languishing in disgrace and embarrassment, and being invited by Renzi to this meeting was like a political rehabilitation. What emerged from their ninety-minute conversation would, for the first time in a long time, give Berlusconi fresh hope. He had met a politician who seemed willing to do business. He had met a pro-business politician from the center-left, which was quite a novelty in Italy, a man with as much empathy as he had himself, a charmer, a schmoozer, a good fellow. What Renzi was offering may have rekindled Berlusconi’s hopes of a presidential pardon. He was offering him a seat back at the table, a piece of the action, a bipartisan pact on key reforms.

On January 18, 2014, Renzi and Berlusconi agreed to cooperate in parliament on a set of constitutional reforms and a new election law to replace the existing and by now unconstitutional law that was still on the books. The deal became known as the “Pact of Nazareno,” a reference to the Democratic Party’s offices on Largo Nazareno in Rome. Nothing in the recent past had cheered Berlusconi as much as his meeting with Renzi, who had faced the cameras afterward and spoken of a “profound harmony” of views with Berlusconi. What was strange was how much Berlusconi seemed to genuinely like Renzi. In fact, the Italian press had already started commenting on the odd couple, noting that the thirty-nine-year-old left-of-center politician seemed to be the most natural heir to Berlusconi that anyone had ever seen.

“Renzi is certainly a new protagonist on the scene,” Berlusconi would say a few days after the meeting. “He is trying to reform and modernize the Democratic Party, and he has announced with a bit of courage and a bit of arrogance that he is going to get rid of the Old Guard of his party. And he is actually doing it. So I hope he continues going in the same direction.”

It was a pretty big pat on the back for the man who was supposed to be on the opposite side of the political spectrum. Renzi had charmed Berlusconi, at least momentarily. There would be plenty of time later on for Berlusconi to claim that he had been cheated and misled by Renzi. For now, he was back in the game, even back in meetings at the presidential palace, once again a player. For Berlusconi, being able to reclaim a semblance of dignity mattered, no matter how many of his enemies were beginning to write him off as a political has-been. So, throwing caution to the wind, Berlusconi embraced the new alliance-friendship with Renzi and throughout the year the two men met on eight separate occasions and had numerous phone conversations. Their aides met dozens of times, preparing the way, sorting out disagreements, renegotiating pieces of the deal. A number of Berlusconi’s remaining supporters were beginning to question his strategy. What was the point of doing a deal with Renzi to vote together on certain reforms if they were supposed to be in the opposition? Berlusconi brushed aside the complaints by saying he was doing the responsible thing by cooperating on such important reforms. According to those who were with him in that spring of 2014, in his heart of hearts he was still hoping for a pardon.

The result of Berlusconi’s support for Renzi’s reforms was about to prove disastrous; it would in fact boomerang in electoral terms. He was still barred from participating in any election. Forza Italia’s numbers were crumbling in the polls, and Berlusconi’s remaining party loyalists were worried they were about to take a beating in upcoming European parliamentary elections.

It was on April 15, 2014, amid this general sense of decay and despair, that Berlusconi was finally informed when he would begin serving his sentence. The supreme court had sentenced him to four years in prison, of which three were annulled, thanks to a partial amnesty that had been proclaimed in order to deal with Italy’s overcrowded prisons. The remaining twelve months, a Milan tribunal now decided, would be served doing community service at a Catholic-run old-age home on the outskirts of Milan, the Fondazione Sacra Famiglia. There, every Friday morning, the former prime minister was to work in the section dedicated to caring for people with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease.

The sentence was not among the most onerous, but Berlusconi’s world continued to implode. Next up on the docket would be the sentence of an appeals court on his bunga-bunga conviction for abuse of office and sex with an underage prostitute. Meanwhile, he had been indicted in Naples on charges of buying votes in the Italian parliament, and he was being questioned by more magistrates. Still other magistrates were developing new charges to file in connection with allegations that he had paid millions of dollars of hush money to some of the girls from the bunga-bunga nights in exchange for perjured testimony. To make matters worse, the results of the European elections that spring would soon trigger an open rebellion inside the newly re-established Forza Italia.

For Berlusconi, that guilty verdict was more than just a defeat for a man who was always used to winning. For Silvio Berlusconi it was the beginning of the end.