Political Contacts
Italy’s highest court, the Court of Cassation, ruled in October 2004 that former Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti had "friendly and even direct ties" with top men in the so-called moderate wing of Cosa Nostra, Gaetano Badalamenti and Stefano Bontade, favoured by the connection between them and Salvo Lima through the Salvo cousins.
According to investigating magistrates Andreotti also commissioned the Mafia to kill the journalist Mino Pecorelli, managing editor of a magazine Osservatorio Politico (OP). The murder took place on March 20, 1979. Andreotti feared Pecorelli was about to publish information that could have destroyed his political career, in particular the illegal financing of the Christian Democratic Party and secrets about the 1978 kidnapping and killing of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades.
Mafia turncoat Tommaso Buscetta testified that Gaetano Badalamenti told him it was the Salvo cousins who commissioned the murder with the Mafia as a favour to Andreotti. In 1999 the Perugia Court acquitted Andreotti, his righthand man Claudio Vitalone (a former Foreign Trade Minister), Badalamenti and Giuseppe Calò, as well as the alleged killers Massimo Carminati, one of the founder of the far-right Nuclei Armati Rivoluzionari (NAR) group, and Michelangelo La Barbera. On November 17, 2002, the Appeals Court overturned the acquittal of Badalamenti and Andreotti. They were sentenced to 24 years in prison for ordering the murder of Pecorelli. However, the Supreme Court cleared both on October 30, 2003.
In April 2002, an Italian court convicted him of the 1978 murder of activist radio broadcaster Giuseppe Impastato and sentenced him to life imprisonment. Impastato used humor and satire as his weapon against the Mafia. In his popular daily radio programme Onda pazza (Crazy Waves) he mocked politicians and mafiosi alike. On a daily basis he exposed the crimes and dealings of mafiosi in Mafiopoli (Cinisi) and the activities of Tano Seduto (Sitting Tano), a thinly disguised pseudonym of Don Tano Badalamenti, the capomafia of Cinisi.
Read more about this topic: Gaetano Badalamenti
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