(By Denis Greenan) (ANSA) - ROME, JUN 12 - Silvio Berlusconi, who died at the age of 86 on Monday, was a flamboyant and larger-than-life figure whose long dominance of Italy's public life was not limited to the political sphere.
The charismatic and seductive but divisive and controversial centre right Forza Italia (FI) leader's fans and detractors were split fairly equally on his business, economic, sporting and political accomplishments and his long history of legal woes, including most recently the alleged bunga bunga sex parties he always insisted were elegant, tasteful soirees.
The former cruise ship crooner, who first showed his precocious business nous by selling homework to his schoolmates, had been making waves since the heady early days when, as a young and buccaneering property developer in the swinging 1960-70s in his native Milan, he built the space-age 'Milan 2' residential complex with funds whose provenance has never been cleared up.
He then used the proceeds from his property portfolio to create Italy's first and still far biggest commercial TV network with the help of his close friend, Socialist leader Bettino Craxi, later to die in exiled disgrace after being laid low by the Bribesville probes.
The three-channel Mediaset network was an immediate hit with viewers who welcomed its Berlusconi-influenced offering of American-style glitzy light entertainment, sitcoms and punchy news that was seen as a breath of fresh air after the sometimes staid fare available on state broadcaster Rai.
He was criticised at home and abroad for spotlighting allegedly scantily clad girls and running a strip game show which was in fact the product of a much smaller, different station. Much of his network's output was a hit with housewives, a key demographic.
Bulk-buying hit US shows and sitcoms whose huge advertising revenues would eventually flow into FI's coffers, Berlusconi was accused of peddling vulgar trash and dumbing down Italian TV audiences, but he also presided over the birth of some of Italy's biggest and longest-running satirical and exposé shows.
While he was shaking up the Italian TV world, Berlusconi was also braodcasting ads, and lots of them, so much so that Mediaset's earnings jumped from the millions to the billions in a matter of years, making Berlusconi Italy's richest man for a time, and also its biggest taxpayer, although he often winked at tax evasion by Italians, with self-employed artisans and small businesspeople making up another crucial demographic.
But his TV revolution also forced Rai to up its game in all areas to compete with the cocky upstart from Milan, whose ratings burgeoned to eclipse the state broadcaster's.
As well as revolutionisng TV, the magnate's other chief cultural achievement was the Medusa film production company, which bankrolled some of late Neapolitan comic Massimo Troisi's hits as well as Oscar winners from two of Italy’s great left-wing directors: Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty, and Gabriele Salvatores’ Mediterraneo.
Another key element to Berlusconi's popularity was his successful management of Italian soccer giants AC Milan.
He owned the club from 1986 until 2017 and, in that time, they were crowned European champions five times and won eight Serie A titles on the way to collecting a total of 29 trophies, after Berlusconi recruited a host of soccer greats including Franco Baresi, Paolo Maldini, Marco Van Basten, Ruud Gullit and Frank Rijkaard, as well as master tacticians Arrigo Sacchi and Fabio Capello.
A Rossoneri fan from a boy, this was his real passion product and helped boost his nationwide and international status as a business and sporting success story with the Midas touch.
But Berlusconi made his biggest splash when as a youthful (57) and dynamic exemplar of the can-do Milanese businessman he 'took the political field' by forging FI - the soccer chant "Come on Italy" - mostly out of media staffers and going on to spectacularly fill the centre-right void left by the Bribesville scandals and triumphantly demolish a post-Communist 'joyous war machine' touted to take power, for the first of three election wins in 1994.
Berlusconi was accused by critics of getting into politics solely to protect his business interests, and he openly acknowledged that his fears had been ignited when former Communist Massimo D'Alema, later to become premier, said he would like to see the magnate begging in the streets of Milan.
Blessed with a direct, folksy and ironic style, and with a fund of jokes for every occasion, he wooed voters at oceanic rallies that turned into apotheoses.
Berlusconi had, in fact, already made a prominent and controversial foray into national politics saying he would vote for a post-fascist rather than a leftwing candidate in a Rome mayoral race - Gianfranco Fini, a precursor of today's rightwing Premier Giorgia Meloni, and a canny politician who would go on to become a key ally and his foreign minister.
The high-profile and widely respected billionaire was credited with conferring an aura of respectability on a once pariah-like party.
Berlusconi's own reputation had been dented a few years earlier when he was revealed to be one of the very many high-profile political, business and security figures on the secret rolls of the subversive para-Masonic Propaganda Due lodge, run by Licio Gelli, a shadowy rightist puppetmaster later convicted for his part in the 1980 Bologna train station bombing that killed 85 people.
But Berlusconi shrugged off the incident with typical nonchalance, saying he thought the lodge was "a kind of social club, like the Lions or the Rotary".
As well as with Fini, Berlusconi also forged a long-running alliance, still active today, with the then Northern League, despite its controversial secessionist platform. Both Fini's party and the Northern League - which has since become nationalist as simply the League - were scrappy, anti-system parties, not unlike FI, that helped Berlusconi in beating the post-Communist establishment Left.
In Berlusconi's short first term as premier, brought down by the League, and two subsequent ones - though some say three as he technically resigned for a reshuffle on one occasion - in which he became Italy's longest serving postwar prime minister, Berlusconi grasped the nettle of reshaping the Italian economy and recalcitrant public administration but often said he "was in the control room but couldn't find the buttons".
Despite never really achieving the Thatcher-like "liberal revolution" he had promised voters, he is nonetheless credited as being among the most business-friendly of Italian postwar leaders, repeatedly enacting growth-boosting tax cuts and framing a reinvested profits bonus that helped countless businesses retool in an ever more competitive environment.
And he was an infallible vote getter, boasting a charisma and common touch his opponents envied, as well as employing a direct and down-to-earth businessman's language that contrasted with the opaque and convoluted political jargon of many predecessors and rivals.
All the while he kept the headline writers happy with his snappy one-liners, gaffes, purges of unsympathetic TV journalists, and battles against the "red" judges allegedly persecuting him in a string of legal woes and, increasingly, sex scandals.
The biggest furore on this last front was when he was found guilty of paying for sex with an erotic dancer with the stage name of Ruby Heartstealer, only to be acquitted after judges found he could not have known she was just 17.
In all his run-ins with the law, Berlusconi was only definitively convicted once, for tax fraud, but that lone four-year sentence, later commuted to a year of community service working with elderly dementia sufferers, earned him a ban from public office that ended with his election to the European Parliament in 2018 and, last year, with his triumphant return to the Senate after nine years away.
With his political base eroded by the years of scandal and the powerful rise of his one-time sports minister Giorgia Meloni to become Italy's first woman premier, Berlusconi was reduced to playing a bit part in the new right-centre-right coalition spearheaded by Meloni's rightwing Brothers of Italy (FdI) party.
But he still saw himself as a kingmaker, and could not resist embarrassing the fiercely pro-Ukraine premier with recent statements of support for his old friend, Russian President Vladimir Putin.
The dynamic Italian leader seemed to have an affinity with strongmen like Putin, Turkey's Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Libya's Muammar Geddafi. He was also an open and avid admirer of United States President Donald Trump.
Before being received at one NATO summit, Berlusconi kept former German Chancellor Angela Merkel waiting in visible puzzlement while he took a long phone call, which he later claimed was to firm up Erdogan's support for NATO Secretary-General designate Jens Stoltenberg.
And when Geddafi visited Rome in 2009 to cement newly boosted economic ties, Berlusconi laid on hundreds of young women "from the worlds of culture, politics and industry" to listen to one of the Libyan president's famed rambling monologues.
Berlusconi's own evergreen vigour was shown most recently when he acquired a new, 33-year-old girlfriend, FI MP Marta Fascia, two years ago.
He had a 'symbolic' wedding ceremony with her last year but quashed reports she would become his third wife after Carla Elvira Dall'Oglio, whom he married in 1965 and by whom he had two children, both media executives, and actress Veronica Lario (born Miriam Bartolini), who he was smitten by after seeing her play topless in a Milan play called the Magnificent Cuckold, by whom he had another three kids. Lario, who also had her arm chopped off in a Dario Argento shocker, divorced Berlusconi in 2009 after accusing him of pursuing young women and after he attended the 18th birthday party of an 18-year-old Neapolitan model, Noemi Letizia, whom ill-disposed critics suggested may have been the product of an extramarital affair.
Lario had previously forgiven her husband's roving eye when he told young party colleague Mara Carfagna "if I weren't already married I'd marry you". He would go on to say the same thing to Michelle Obama, to the amusement of the American president standing beside her.
But Berlusconi was also a great family man, who revered his bank manager father and homemaker mother and who loved his children with a fierce pride.
Berlusconi's five children gave him 16 grandchildren and one great grandchild, with whom he often posed as a doting granddad for frequent lifestyle pics in his gossip mags.
Despite often promising to, he never resolved the huge conflicts of interests between his political and business interests - though he always claimed to have had no active role in his media empire since forming FI.
Before Fascia, after Lario left him, and amid the necessity to put his love life in some order after the Ruby imbroglio, Berlusconi was in a decade-long relationship with showgirl and Naples FI councillor Francesca Pascale, now a 37-year-old LGBT activist.
Berlusconi's latest legal case was his acquittal in mid-February in the Ruby III trial where he was accused of bribing witnesses to lie about the real nature of his bunga bunga parties.
Ruby, whose real name is Karima El Mahroug, was also acquitted, as were all the 29 young female defendants - but the case was dismissed on a technicality, with judges saying the women could not have been witnesses since they had never been deposed.
Berlusconi's middle daughter Barbara told ANSA that her father, who first faced widespread criticism for allegedly bribing a judge in the notorious battle with his business rival Carlo De Benedetti for control of the Mondadori publishing giant, a case solved by late Christian Democrat statesman Giulio Andreotti with a Solomon-like split of the empire, was "the most persecuted man in the world, with 86 trials and more than 4,000 hearings".
In his legal run-ins, many of which were dismissed due to laws he himself passed or were timed out by the statute of limitations, he also faced mafia probes which did not go anywhere, although his former right hand man Marcello Dell'Utri, an FI Senator, is serving time for mafia association, with the high court ruling in 2014 that he acted as a go-between for Cosa Nostra and the Milanese business elite.
Berlusconi also famously hired a Cosa Nostra boss and later convicted murderer, Vittorio Mangano, ostensibly as a stable manager but in reality, critics said, to protect his then young kids from the kidnappings that were a feature of Italian life in the 70s.
In the Ruby case, Berlusconi once got his parliamentary majority to back his claim that he believed the teen Moroccan runaway was actually the niece of late Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak.
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(ANSA).