Are Mob Hits Bad for Business?
Cesare Previti Silvio Berlusconi’s former Defense Minister and current co-defendant may have more to worry about than just the bribery charges he and the billionaire Prime Minister are facing. According to Italian secret service documents, Previti and fellow Berlusconi ally Marcello Dell’ Utri are potential assassination targets of the Sicilian Mafia. The intelligence dossier, leaked recently to several Italian newspapers, reportedly warns that Cosa Nostra feels betrayed by its political protectors in Rome, who had promised to help pass laws to ease prison conditions and reduce sentences for its jailed members in exchange for Mafia support at the polls. The report says Mob bosses believe that hits on either of the two embattled members of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia party each under separate criminal indictments would be less likely to provoke the kind of public outrage and police crackdown that followed the 1992 gangland murders of two widely admired Sicilian prosecutors. Previti and De
