History in the Courts: Andreotti’s Two Acquittals

Abstract

Twice in just one month – on 24 September by the court in Perugia and on 23 October by the one in Palermo – Giulio Andreotti was cleared of charges that had hung over him since the first allegations by pentiti (repentant mafiosi) of his involvement with the Mafia. The first of these charges was that he had commissioned the mafia killing of the journalist Mino Pecorelli, who had threatened Andreotti and members of his entourage that he would reveal compromising facts concerning the political and financial Italcasse scandal of the late 1970s. The second accusation – less serious from the criminal point of view but certainly more significant from the political one – was that since the 1960s Andreotti had established a ‘pact’ with Cosa Nostra, either directly or through his political allies in Sicily. In both cases, the verdict rekindled the controversy on the political ‘activism’ of certain public prosecutors’ offices, and on the role played by the investigating magistrates in the collapse of the so-called First Republic. The verdict, in fact, has been hailed as Andreotti’s political absolution and, more generally, as rehabilitating the Democrazia cristiana (Christian Democrats: DC) and the ‘regime’ with which he has been identified for almost fifty years. The sentence has also been used to accuse certain magistrates of using criminal investigations for political ends, and of trying to impose a simplistically ‘criminal’ view of Italy’s recent history.