Silvio Berlusconi is dead, I’m a little sorry. I cannot say that I have known him personally, but I have touched him on several occasions and I have friends who frequented him regularly.
When Berlusconi began his entrepreneurial adventure in the television world, I was a young private detective collaborator who worked for a detective agency in Milan and I was in charge of obtaining informations about him on behalf of a client. Even then he was very popular and people close to him immediately went into “protection mode” when you asked about him.
As soon as he established himself in the entrepreneurial world, he entered the crosshairs of organized crime and had to protect himself with guard and personal protections (rather than colluding with the mafia); I remember he used to shoot a Smith & Wesson Bodygard drum in .38 Special (the same revolver that I also wore at my ankle as a backup weapon) and the bad newspapers on the left portrayed him as a gangster for this.
When Silvio Berlusconi entered politics in 1993, I had just opened my second investigative agency Octopus in Milan and I was commissioned to carry out further investigations to assess the impact that the Cavaliere’s new life was having on his entrepreneurial activities.
It is undeniable that Berlusconi has saved us from the left and it was priceless to see the disappointed faces of certain characters such as Occhetto, D’Alema, Prodi and the bad company robbed of the electoral success they were already anticipating after having demolished their political opponents through the courts.
I voted for Berlusconi and I didn’t regret it, even if the Cavaliere didn’t completely convince me. After his victorious elections, I installed a big screen in my Octopus investigative agency so as not to miss even one of those angry and disappointed expressions of the “leftists” (we had to wait for Giorgia Meloni to see those faces again).
After Silvio’s electoral victory, an unprecedented judicial persecution fell upon him, which is undeniable by anyone with a minimum of intellectual honesty. He probably would have done much more without this ballast.
He was a tireless worker and a person of great humanity even in business, as some mutual friends, clients of my Investigazioni Octopus Agency in Cassano d’Adda, told me; and it showed. Beyond a person’s success and fortune, you understand what he’s made of by how he treats the humble and weak around him and Berlusconi was impeccable in this.
When I was in charge of the safety of Angelo Rizzoli who had just been involved in the ignoble expropriation by judicial lynching from which he would not have come out alive, Silvio Berlusconi was one of the very few to lend him a hand.
I can only reproach the Cavaliere with two things: in the first place, he confused friendship (and sex) too much with politics, favoring inept people.
And secondly, with Mediolanum he had the very bad (for us) initiative of using amateur promoters to persuade friends and relatives to sign up for questionable savings plans. I remember that in the mid-1990s I was literally besieged by friends who wanted to slip me pension provisions and life insurance policies; fortunately, I was able to intercept their intentions and avoid them, because they called me with an unusually solemn air, saying they wanted to talk to me about a very important subject.