Florence judge drops 1993 mafia bombings case against Berlusconi and Dell'Utri, citing no evidence of Cosa Nostra ties

The ruling

Preliminary investigations judge Patrizia Martucci of the Florence Tribunal signed the dismissal decree on 15 January 2026, but the decision only became public on 4 June. The judge found that "mancano elementi concreti su contatti/rapporti diretti tra Cosa Nostra e Silvio Berlusconi e quindi Marcello Dell'Utri, stretto collaboratore di Berlusconi" — there is no concrete evidence of direct contacts or relationships between Cosa Nostra and Silvio Berlusconi, and therefore his close collaborator Marcello Dell'Utri. This marks the sixth time the case has been shelved after thirty years of investigations.

The prosecution's theory

The Florence anti-mafia directorate (DDA) had pursued the hypothesis that the 1993 bombing campaign in Florence, Milan, and Rome was designed to pave the way for the political rise of Berlusconi and his newly formed Forza Italia party. Dell'Utri was specifically accused of inciting and urging mafia boss Giuseppe Graviano to organise the bombing campaign, allegedly acting as an "indicatore dei luoghi" — someone who pointed out the locations for the attacks — in order to create a climate of terror favourable to the new political project. Dell'Utri's Milan home was searched in July 2023.

The defence position

Dell'Utri's legal team consistently dismissed the accusations as "fantasiose" — fanciful — challenging the reliability of the cooperating witnesses and stressing the absence of corroborating evidence. The judge's dismissal order now confirms that lack of corroboration. According to one report, a decisive factor in reaching the dismissal was a change of leadership at the Florence prosecutor's office, where magistrates who had made the pursuit of Berlusconi-Dell'Utri mafia links their main activity retired or were transferred. The new leadership continued the investigation but concluded that nothing in the vast accumulation of documents, interrogations, and inquiries justified the hypothesis of even an indirect role for either man in Cosa Nostra's bombing strategy.

Marina Berlusconi's reaction

Marina Berlusconi, the former prime minister's eldest daughter and president of Fininvest and Mondadori, issued a forceful statement. She described the investigation as a "teorema giudiziario e mediatico costruito non con il cemento delle prove, ma con il fango del pregiudizio ideologico" — a judicial and media theorem built not with the cement of evidence but with the mud of ideological prejudice.

All this fury over a senseless thesis — that the 1993-94 mafia massacres would have benefited the nascent Forza Italia — has fuelled thirty years of suspicion, insinuation, and delegitimisation campaigns against Silvio Berlusconi and Marcello Dell'Utri. But in the end it produced only a mountain of waste paper, both in court and in the newsrooms of certain newspapers.

She also raised pointed questions about the timing of the disclosure, noting that the decree was signed in January but only surfaced in June, with a justice referendum having taken place in March.

One has to ask: if the outcome had been the opposite, would it have taken five months to read about it in the papers, or would five hours — if not five minutes — have sufficed?

The anti-mafia record

Marina Berlusconi countered the narrative of her father as close to organised crime by pointing to his governments' legislative record. She stated that the Berlusconi governments made the harsh prison regime for mafia bosses permanent, introduced Italy's first anti-mafia code, and established the National Agency for the administration of assets confiscated from criminal organisations. "These are the facts, as concrete as they are irrefutable," she said. She also called the defeat of the March justice referendum "an immense missed opportunity for our country" and urged politicians not to set aside the issue of judicial reform, starting with the absence of genuine civil liability for magistrates.

Now that my father is no longer here, who will ever be able to give him back the time spent under the weight of these terrible and unfounded accusations? And will anyone ever answer for the falsehoods passed off as truth?