This month, Silvio Berlusconi was sentenced to three years in prison for bribing an Italian senator, just one of the numerous corruption trials the former prime minister faces. But it was the affair of Karima El Mahroug, a k a Ruby the Heart Stealer, that truly humbled the longtime political figure and eventually led to his resignation. In this excerpt from his new book, “Being Berlusconi,” journalist Michael Day explains how the leader of a G7 nation entertained himself with orgies straight from ancient times.
Reporters in Italy looking for an amusing quote to liven up a story don’t usually consider the country’s judiciary as the first port of call. But for Milan’s juvenile crime magistrate Annamaria Fiorillo, they might make an exception.
On the fateful night of May 27, 2010, a 17-year-old exotic nightclub dancer, nome d’arte Ruby the Heart Stealer, left police custody in Milan after Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi had called surprised officials to say that Ruby, née Karima El Mahroug, should be released because she was none other than the granddaughter of the Egyptian president.
“If she’s the granddaughter of President Mubarak, then I’m Queen Nefertiti,” scoffed Fiorillo.
But before Fiorillo was able to take charge, the belly-dancing “Egyptian” runaway, held for suspected theft, was released into the care of one of the prime minister’s associates.
This pillar of the community was the regional councilor Nicole Minetti, a member of Berlusconi’s PDL (People of Freedom) party, who also pimped for the mogul and performed explicit lesbian floorshows in a nun’s costume. She took El Mahroug back to a flat she shared with a Brazilian prostitute for safekeeping.
With magistrates’ interest understandably piqued, the probe into the Rubygate affair began. And Berlusconi, a modern day Caligula who had survived countless scandals, would have finally met his match.
The ‘Talent Spotter’
El Mahroug was not born in the upper echelons of Egyptian society but to a poor family in Morocco in 1992. When she was nine years old, they moved to Messina, in Sicily. At the age of 14, she fled what she said was a very unhappy home, where she suffered beatings from her father and rigid Islamic restrictions on her dress and lifestyle. After she’d run away, her existence seemed to be a depressing and unrelenting participation in the flesh trade.
In September 2009, at 16, she participated in a beauty contest near Messina. In the jury was none other than Silvio Berlusconi’s “talent spotter” Emilio Fede, the Sicily-born crony and newsreader. Fede said he was moved by her story and longed to help her.
The fact that Fede was a judge was to be important in the eventual prosecution: as one of the judges, prosecutors say that Fede would have known her age then — and almost certainly would have revealed it not long after to Berlusconi.
Not long after being discovered by Fede, El Mahroug moved to Milan. Many reports said she was already in the game — she certainly never appeared short of cash. When the then unknown El Mahroug was mugged in the Corso Buenos Aires shopping district in 2010, officers who recovered her stolen handbag reported it contained the equivalent of $5,000. The cash was probably a handout from the prime minister.
It was an accusation of theft leveled against El Mahroug that brought the whole squalid theater of what would be called Berlusconi’s “bunga bunga” parties into the open.
Katia Pasquino, a young woman who’d put El Mahroug up for a few weeks, said the young Moroccan had stolen $4,000 from her apartment. Pasquino called the police. El Mahroug ended up at the city’s main police station in Via Fatebenefratelli.
Magistrate Fiorillo gave arresting officer Ermes Cafaro clear instructions for her to be taken to a safe unit for juvenile suspects. But then, out of the blue at 11:49 p.m., Silvio Berlusconi, who was on an overseas trip in Paris, called the police station. The prime minister spoke to the duty officer in charge, Pietro Ostuni, telling him that the young suspect was actually the granddaughter of the Egyptian president, and he would send around one of his associates, Nicole Minetti, to collect her.
Why were Berlusconi and his minions showing such a keen interest in this 17- year-old belly dancer? The answer wasn’t long in coming.
Seven months later, on May 31, 2011, he found himself on trial at Milan’s Palace of Justice, not for the usual white-collar crimes — but for paying for sex with a minor and abuse of office.
The ‘Bunga Bunga’
El Mahroug was nominally the victim, but she didn’t look like an ingénue.
Magistrates estimate she pocketed hundreds of thousands of dollars, possibly millions, in jewels and cash from 74-year-old Berlusconi. The prime minister has always denied the charges of paying for sex with a minor and insists the evenings that El Mahroug attended were in fact “elegant dinners.”
But participants say they weren’t even edible dinners. A couple of girls I spoke to said the food — usually overcooked pasta tricolore — was an afterthought, and they learned it was best to eat before they got there.
“[Berlusconi] found himself on trial at Milan’s Palace of Justice, not for the usual white-collar crimes — but for paying for sex with a minor and abuse of office.”
Investigators were already hot on the trail, thanks to a series of illuminating interviews with El Mahroug herself over the summer of 2010. It was during these four interrogations that El Mahroug told prosecutors that the prime minister regularly held X-rated soirees at his principal home, Villa San Martino in Arcore, just outside Milan.
El Mahroug also introduced them to the exotic phrase “bunga bunga,” which they learned referred to a sort of extreme lap-dancing competition with added groping, in which the winner or winners got to sleep with Berlusconi.
Interviewed by prosecutor Antonio Sangermano on August 3, El Mahroug described what she said was her first dinner at Arcore, on February 14, 2010, when Fede sent a limo around for her and whisked her to Villa San Martino.
“That evening Berlusconi explained to me that bunga bunga consisted of a harem that he copied from his friend Khadafy [the former Libyan dictator], in which the girls take their clothes off and have to provide physical pleasures.”
She added that she had refused outright to participate and was driven home at 2:30 a.m. El Mahroug has insisted she never had sex with Berlusconi.
‘Thank goodness for Silvio!’
Of the scores of young women who had partied hard at Arcore, a large group came to be known as the Olgettine — after their residence, Via Olgettina, in the apartment complex Berlusconi had built as a real-estate developer. The gossip magazine Oggi listed 130 young ladies, including El Mahroug, who were on call to satisfy his lust and ego.
On August 22, Berlusconi’s talent spotter Fede brought to Arcore two new and beautiful young women, Ambra Battilana and Chiara Danese, whom he had wooed with promises of jobs as meteorine — the completely unqualified but sexy girls who presented the weather reports on his TG4 news show.
The account Battilana and Danese gave to magistrates of their evening at the mogul’s mansion provided some of the most eye-opening and probably most credible descriptions of Berlusconi’s “elegant dinners.”
Ambra: Fifteen minutes after we’d sat down, some of the girls uncovered their breasts, offering them to Berlusconi so he could kiss them. They also touched the prime minister’s intimate parts and made him touch theirs. While this was happening, the girls were still singing “thank goodness for Silvio!” and calling the prime minister “Papi” and Berlusconi called all of us “my little girls, my little girls.”
Chiara: After the umpteenth obscene joke, Berlusconi brings in a statue, it’s in a kind of case. From it emerges a little man with a huge penis. The statuette is the size of a half-liter bottle of water. Its penis is disproportionately big. Berlusconi begins passing it around among the girls. And he asks them to kiss the penis. They kiss it and simulate oral sex with it, or they approach him with bared breasts. They all laugh. . . . At a certain point, the prime minister, visibly content, asks: “Are you ready for bunga bunga?” The girls shout together: “Yessss!!!”
Chiara: Fede and Berlusconi encouraged the girls to involve us in the game, saying: “Go on, take your clothes off, go, take them off, dance.” At this point we were literally terrified. We wanted to leave, but didn’t know how to. Our discomfort was obvious. Building up the courage, we said to Fede: “We really want to go.”
Fede gave it to them straight: “If you want to go, fine. But don’t think you’ll be a meteorina or Miss Italia.” They left anyway.
‘I need 5 million’
Before long the public found out how the Arcore soirees proceeded after the bunga bunga stage — not that it was difficult to guess. One of the Papi girls, Diana Gonzales, was heard on the magistrates’ recordings talking about a particularly rowdy night on October 2. “There was a stack of girls — there was nowhere to sleep. And that scoundrel didn’t take me to his room to sleep.”
The mountains of recordings and witness statements suggest the dinner guests, who merely pushed their food around the plate before stripping and fondling the prime minister, got an envelope stuffed with $2,600– $4,000 for their trouble. But an overnight stay bagged them at least $6,500.
According to Piero Colaprico, the reporter for La Repubblica who broke the Rubygate story, Berlusconi’s people (it’s not sure exactly who) met with El Mahroug on October 6, 2010, in an attempt to win her silence.
But when the scandal hit the front pages and Berlusconi realized the gravity of the situation, he instructed a team of lawyers to put the young Moroccan on a leash. She continued to act unpredictably, however.
She was also getting greedy. “I spoke to Silvio and I told him that I expect to come out of all this with at least something,” she told a friend. “I mean getting €5 million.”
Berlusconi had already given her $65,000 to help her open a beauty salon, and probably $325,000 worth of gifts, including a diamond necklace.
But a when a teen from a troubled background finds herself with what one of her lawyers would later describe as “the opportunity of a lifetime,” what did the prime minister expect?
Berlusconi continued to deny that he’d ever paid for sex. He even attempted to brazen things out and relieve the political pressure with a few lame jokes. While on a tour of the island of Lampedusa in the spring of 2011, he exhumed an old gag, in which pollsters supposedly ask women if they would have sex with him: “30% said ‘yes,’ ” he said, “while 70% replied, ‘What, again?’ ”
Berlusconi is not well
What on earth was he doing? The phrase uttered by Berlusconi’s estranged wife, Veronica Lario, comes to mind: Berlusconi is not well.
It wasn’t only his critics who began to say so. Despite the mountain of trouble he was in, the emperor with increasingly few clothes continued to indulge himself.
In April 2011, three months after his indictments for Rubygate, two loyal friends were recorded discussing the prime minister’s psychological state — and his fitness for running the country.
Flavio Briatore, the Formula One racing tycoon, was on the phone with Berlusconi ultra-loyalist Daniela Santanchè. Briatore told her that Lele Mora had just informed him the prime minister’s bunga bunga nights were still going strong.
Briatore: Yes, yes, everything’s going on as if nothing has happened; everything as it was before.
Santanchè: But that’s madness.
Briatore: Not there — but in the other villa. He’s not changed a f – – king thing.
But the pathetic figure he cut wasn’t the only thing weighing on his friends’ minds. Briatore, a conservative businessman, saw a country going to the dogs. To everyone but the distracted and deluded leader of Italy, it was clear the economic collapse that began in the US in 2008 meant that a financial storm was coming, the like of which Italy — and the rest of Europe — had never seen.
“If I were in his [Berlusconi’s] position, I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night,” said Briatore. “But not because of the whores. I wouldn’t be able to sleep due to the state that Italy is in.”
Following the scandal, Berlusconi’s party was hit hard at the polls and he resigned as prime minister in November 2011. He was initially found guilty of the Rubygate charges, but successfully appealed — making him eligible to run for office again.
Excerpted from “Being Berlusconi: The Rise & Fall From Cosa Nostra to Bunga Bunga” (Palgrave MacMillan) by Michael Day, out now.