Marcello Dell'Utri (born 11 September 1941) is a former Italian politician best known for being a senior advisor to former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi. Born in Palermo, he became Berlusconi's secretary in his early 20s and since the 1970s he worked for him at his many companies, including Publitalia '80 and Fininvest Rai. Dell'Utri's life and career have been marred by controversies and legal issues, including a conviction for external complicity in mafia association.
Formerly a member of the Italian Parliament from 1996 to 2013 and of the European Parliament from 1999 to 2004, Dell'Utri was found guilty of tax fraud, false accounting, and complicity in conspiracy with the Sicilian Mafia, also known as Cosa Nostra; the conviction for the last charge was upheld on 9 May 2014 by the Supreme Court of Cassation, the highest judicial court in Italy, which sentenced Dell'Utri to seven years in prison. The conviction is final and cannot be further appealed; it also ruled that Dell'Utri was the mediator between Berlusconi and Cosa Nostra.
In 1974, Dell'Utri introduced Vittorio Mangano, already charged for Mafia crimes, to Berlusconi at the Villa San Martino owned by Berlusconi in Arcore, a small town near Milan. Dell'Utri and Berlusconi denied that they knew of Mangano's links to the Mafia and claimed that he was employed as a gardener and stable keeper to deter kidnappers from targeting Berlusconi's children. Dell'Utri's Mafia conviction sentence stated that Mangano was employed precisely due to his Mafia past.
The Third Criminal Section of Palermo's Appellate Court declared Dell'Utri a fugitive in May 2014, when it was discovered he had fled the country ahead of the final court decision. After being detained in Lebanon, Dell'Utri was extradited to Italy on 13 June 2014. In Italy, he served 4 years of imprisonment and 1 year of house arrest. He was further sentenced in April 2018 to 12 years due to the State-Mafia Pact. This conviction was overturned on appeal in September 2021 for not having committed the facts. In July 2023, he inherited €30 million from Berlusconi's will.
Early life and education Dell'Utri was born in Palermo in 1941. After obtaining his liceo classico high-school diploma in his native city, he went to Milan to study law at university in 1961. It was during his student years at the University of Milan that he met Silvio Berlusconi. In 1964, at the age of 23, he worked as secretary for Berlusconi, who with his Edilnord company sponsored Torrescalla, a small student category football team linked to the Rui Foundation, of which Dell'Utri was coach.
Relations with Silvio Berlusconi In 1965, Dell'Utri moved to Rome, where for a couple of years he directed the ELIS Sports Group in the Tiburtino-Casal Bruciato district at the International Centre for Working Youth, an apostolic initiative of the Catholic Church that the Pope entrusted to Opus Dei. In 1967, he returned to Palermo at the Athletic Club Bacigalupo; during this experience, as admitted by Dell'Utri himself, he met Vittorio Mangano and Antonino Cinà, two mafiosi belonging to Cosa Nostra. In 1970, he worked for the Savings Bank of the Sicilian Provinces in Catania. In 1971, he was transferred to the Belmonte Mezzagno branch. In 1973, he was promoted to the general management of Sicilcassa in Palermo, an agricultural credit service. By that same year, he was also back in Milan, where he began to work for Silvio Berlusconi's building firm Edilnord at the request of Berlusconi, for whom he also acted as secretary; in particular, he followed the renovation work on the villa in Arcore after Berlusconi purchased it from the marquis Annamaria Casati Stampa, of whom Cesare Previti was among the legal guardians.
Later in the 1970s, Dell'Utri went to work at Bresciano Costruzioni. In 1980, he was called by Berlusconi and worked for Publitalia '80, the advertising sales wing of Fininvest's television division, first as a manager and later as the company's chairman and chief executive. On 29 June 1993, alongside Berlusconi, Previti, and the likes of Gianfranco Ciaurro, Antonio Martino, Antonio Tajani, Giuliano Urbani, and Mario Valducci Dell'Utri was one of the founders of Forza Italia! Association for Good Governance. In 1994, Dell'Utri was one of the founders of Forza Italia, together with Berlusconi, Previti, Tajani, and others; Forza Italia was a big-tent centre-right party, with liberal conservative (the right-wing of the Italian Liberal Party), Christian democratic (the right-wing of Christian Democracy), and social-democratic (the right-wing of the Italian Socialist Party) factions, whose aim was to collect all the votes of the disbanded Pentapartito, the governing centrist coalition that was dissolved after the Tangentopoli scandal, or in the words of Berlusconi, "not yet another party or faction born to divide, but a force born with the opposite objective". In 1990, Silvio Berlusconi Editore was founded at the proposal of Dell'Utri, who personally followed its production until 1993.
In 1995, Dell'Utri left Publitalia '80, the advertising company owned by Berlusconi. He was elected to Italy's Chamber of Deputies (the lower house of the Italian Parliament) in 1996. In 1999, he was elected to the European Parliament, of which he stayed member until 2004. Dell'Utri was elected as a member of the Senate of the Republic in 2001, and was re-elected in 2006 and 2008, taking several parliamentary roles. In March 2013, the Appellate Court of Palermo recognized Dell'Utri as a mediator between Berlusconi and Cosa Nostra; he was also deemed by the Supreme Court of Cassation in 2014 as socially dangerous, decisive in Berlusconi's pact with the Mafia, and as having empowered Cosa Nostra; in the words of the final sentence, Dell'Utri's role was of "significant importance for both parties: the Mafia association, which drew a constant channel of significant enrichment; [and] the entrepreneur Berlusconi, interested in preserving his sphere of personal security and economical". In May 2014, Berlusconi's former lawyer Vittorio Dotti stated that Dell'Utri and Fedele Confalonieri were Berlusconi's only true friends. When Berlusconi died in June 2023, Dell'Utri was one of the beneficiaries of Berlusconi's estate by will, from whom he inherited €30 million as a legacy. Between 2021 and 2023, he also received from Berlusconi €900,000 through payments with ten transfers of €90,000 each. In an interview to La Stampa in July 2023 about Berlusconi's will, Dell'Utri stated that Berlusconi "did not buy [his] silence" and that they were "a gesture of affection". Dell'Utri further said: "When I heard about the legacy, I started to cry. In 60 years of friendship, we have given each other everything; it would be vulgar to reduce it to an economic calculation."
Collusion with the Mafia
On 7 July 1974, Dell'Utri brought Vittorio Mangano to Silvio Berlusconi's villa in Arcore who, according to the Court of Palermo, was hired by Berlusconi as "responsible" to prevent the entrepreneur's family members from being victims of kidnapping and not as a groom as was stated. A young mafioso who later became a leading exponent of the Porta Nuova clan in Palermo, Mangano was arrested 3 times, some of which ended up with convictions. Numerous other unsubstiated complaints were made against Mangano and was already considered a "dangerous person" by authorities since 1967. After Mangano's final arrest, both Dell'Utri and Berlusconi declared to the police that they had not been aware of his criminal activities. The Court of Palermo's sentence stated that Dell'Utri knew Mangano's "criminal depth"; referring to the hidden task of personal protection of Berlusconi and his family following explicit death threats received by them if he did not follow up on the Mafia's requests, the Court of Palermo ruled that he had chosen him precisely for this quality. On 24 October 1976, Dell'Utri was together with Mangano and other mafiosi at the birthday party of the Catania boss Antonino Calderone held at the Le Colline Pistoiesi restaurant in Milan.
In 1977, having been made redundant by Edilnord, Dell'Utri was contacted by Filippo Alberto Rapisarda, who had relationships with prominent Mafia figures, such as Vito Ciancimino, Francesco Paolo Alamia, and the Cuntrera-Caruana Mafia clan. Dell'Utri was hired by Rapisarda due to their mutual knowledge since childhood at his construction company; the employment relationship with INIM ended when he was fired on the grounds that he had diverted funds from the company's coffers. In a 1981 Criminalpol report, INISM was defined, together with its sister company RACA, as "a commercial company managed by the Mafia which the Mafia uses to launder dirty money derived from illicit crimes". Dell'Utri then took on the role of managing director of Bresciano Costruzioni, which also ended up in bankruptcy after a few years. Dell'Utri was indicted for fraudulent bankruptcy, although he was at large and once again without a job, while Rapisarda fled as a fugitive to Venezuela, using a passport registered in the name of Dell'Utri's brother. On 19 April 1980, he was in London, where he attended the wedding of Girolamo Maria Fauci, more commonly called Jimmy Fauci, a Mafia boss who managed international drug trafficking between Italy, Great Britain, and Canada.
In 1982, Dell'Utri began his activity in Publitalia '80, the Fininvest advertising collection company founded in 1979 by Berlusconi, from whom he received the appointment of director. In 1983, as part of a blitz of arrests carried out in Milan against the casino mafia, he was found in the residence of the Catania mafia boss Gaetano Corallo. Despite this, he requested and obtained the appointment as managing director of the Fininvest group in 1984. In early 1992, Vincenzo Garraffa, a former senator from the Italian Republican Party and president of Trapani's basketball team, received a visit from the Trapani boss Vincenzo Virga, then a fugitive and murder convict who later went in prison. Virga, who came to collect an alleged illegal loan claimed by Dell'Utri, said that "Dell'Utri sent me. The episode, reported by Garraffa, was ascertained by the Court of Milan, which in May 2004 sentenced Dell'Utri and Virga to two years for attempted extortion in first degree. In 2007, the sentence was confirmed on appeal. Dell'Utri was acquitted by the Supreme Court of Cassation on the grounds that the president of Trapani's basketball team also knew the Virga boss and did not perceive him as a Mafia threat. The sentence stated that Dell'Utri had "mobilized [two] mafiosi of the caliber of Virga and Buffa" to "convince" the Garraffa "to respect the commitment", a refund of money as part of a sponsorship, and he was acquitted because there was not enough evidence that the visit of the two to Garaffa was "capable of instilling fear".