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 Dell'Utri, a Senator from Sicily who is on trial in Palermo for alleged Mafia association, both sternly deny any organized-crime connections; they blame the media for encouraging violence by publishing details of the secret document. Previti denounced the left-leaning La Repubblica, saying he was forced to accept a police escort this month after the Rome daily reported that the Mafia was angered by the center-right government's efforts to rush through the change-of-venue law that would aid his defense in the Milan trials.

Mafia investigators believe there is a tug-of-war within Cosa Nostra over whether to return to a strategy of taking out public figures. Current top boss Bernardo Provenzano, who has been on the lam for nearly 40 years, reportedly wants to maintain the current relative calm as he seeks to transform the Mafia into a quasi-legitimate business empire. Provenzano's former boyhood friend from Corleone and onetime boss of bosses Salvatore "Toto" Riina is believed to be orchestrating the return to violence while serving multiple life sentences under recently renewed "hard time" laws applied only to Mafiosi.

Palermo prosecutor Antonio Ingroia, who is leading the case against Dell'Utri, says he has been concerned for several months about impending Mafia retribution. Plate-clanking prison protests, hunger strikes and an angry courtroom declaration in July by jailed Mob boss Leoluca Bagarella that the Mafia was "tired of being manipulated by political forces'' were clear signs that Cosa Nostra is fed up with what it sees as unfulfilled promises, Ingroia told TIME. "It's a historic fact that the Mafia seeks to maintain stable relationships with political power,'' he said. "And in this particular phase, we see a Mafia that is growing more and more impatient.''