A close aide of Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi allegedly negotiated with former boss of bosses Bernardo Provenzano, the son of Palermo's deceased former mayor told a court Tuesday. Marcello Dell'Utri, the architect of Berlusconi's first political party, allegedly took over Palermo mayor Vito Ciancimino's role as intermediary between the State and Cosa Nostra in trying to stop a bombing campaign by Provenzano's co-boss Salvatore (Toto') Riina, Vito's son Massimo said at a trial against a former intelligence chief. "Marcello Dell'Utri and Bernardo Provenzano had a direct relationship," Massimo Ciancimino alleged, in the latest of a string of unsubstantiated claims.

Testifying at the trial of former domestic intelligence chief, Carabinieri General Mario Mori, accused of letting Provenzano escape in 1995, Ciancimino's son showed the court a note from Provenzano to his father in which he told Ciancimino he had spoken to "our friend the Senator" about a possible amnesty for the ex-mayor. Massimo Ciancimino said his father, who died in 2002 at the age of 88, was convinced that after his arrest in December 1992, "the Carabinieri betrayed him and found a new talking partner, probably with Provenzano's approval". According to Ciancimino, his father was until then the linchpin in alleged negotiations with Riina to stop a bombing campaign that claimed the lives of anti-Mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992.

After police rejected Riina's demands as unreasonable, Vito Ciancimino got his fellow Corleone native Provenzano to betray their townsman Riina in January 1993 so that the bombings would stop and a new 'pax mafiosa' could reign under Provenzano, Massimo claimed. In return, Provenzano received "impunity" until the ailing boss was arrested in 2006 after 43 years in hiding, the late mayor's son said. The failure to search Provenzano's hide-out after a 1995 raid - the offence for which former Carabinieri ROS security chief Mori is on trial - was "agreed between my father and Provenzano and communicated to the Carabinieri" beforehand, he claimed.

While the Palermo mayor was still acting as intermediary, his son claimed, the talks examined the need for a new political party to take over from the long-dominant Christian Democrats (DC), whose Sicilian chief Salvo Lima had been gunned down after apparently reneging on agreements before the Falcone and Borsellino bombings. "It was 1992, the year of the political advance of the (Sicilian anti-Mafia party) La Rete and the (Northern) League and they talked about the importance of not squandering the enormous electoral patrimony of the DC, to seek a talking partner in another political entity," Ciancimino said. Massimo Ciancimino also claimed that a powerful, unidentified figure had put pressure on Riina to continue his bombings even after the police's first secret overtures, following Borsellino's death in May 1992. He called this figure "the great architect".

Dell'Utri played a leading role in creating Berlusconi's Forza Italia party in 1993, with which the media magnate won a landslide in early 1994 on a ticket appealing to supporters of the now-shattered political parties brought down by the Bribesville scandals. He is currently a Senator for the People of Freedom party which was created last year when Forza Italia merged with the right-wing national Alliance. Dell'Utri is appealing a 2004 nine-year sentence for allegedly acting as a go-between for the Mafia with politicians, businessmen and other powerful figures in Milan. In that trial, Ciancimino alleged that Dell'Utri managed money for late Cosa Nostra top boss Stefano Bontade. On Monday Ciancimino claimed his father, who was the first major Italian politician to be arrested on Mafia charges, invested in the break-out project that turned Berlusconi into a construction magnate in the early 1980s, a garden surburb of Milan called Milano 2.

Berlusconi's lawyer Niccolo' Ghedini said he would sue Ciancimino, saying "his statements on Milano 2 are devoid of all basis in fact". Ciancimino has himself been convicted for money laundering and is appealing a three-year, four-month sentence. A Cosa Nostra turncoat, Gaspare Spatuzza, told the Dell'Utri appeals trial in December that he was told by a Palermo boss in 1994 that Berlusconi and Dell'Utri "practically placed the country in our hands". But Spatuzza's claim was subsequently not confirmed by the boss.