Probe secret Mafia-state talks, Italy minister says

ROME (Reuters) - Italy's justice minister on Monday promised a full investigation into allegations that governments in the early 1990s held secret negotiations with the Mafia to try to stop spate of attacks on the state.

Angelino Alfano, speaking during a visit to the Sicilian capital, Palermo, said he hoped investigators would "do everything to ascertain the truth."

Alfano spoke a day after Italy's chief anti-Mafia prosecutor, Paolo Grasso, caused a storm by telling an Italian newspaper he knew of contacts between the state and the Mafia in the early 1990s.

It was the first time anyone of Grasso's level had stated so clearly that contacts took place between the crime group and the state in the early 1990s and his comments prompted demands for investigations and clarifications.

"I am mortified," said Antonio Di Pietro, a former magistrate who now heads the Italy of Values party. "The state was dealing with the Mafia to guarantee public peace while faithful servants of the state were being killed."

Grasso's comments followed weeks of newspaper stories about a recently discovered "wish list" dictated by former Mafia "boss of bosses" Toto "the Beast" Riina before his arrest in 1993.

That 12-point list, written by Riina's son on a scrap of paper while his father was still at large, listed 12 Mafia demands in exchange for stopping its attacks on the state.

In 1992, the year the note was believed to have been written and while the secret negotiations were alleged to have taken place, the Mafia killed two senior anti-mob magistrates, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in bomb attacks.

ARREST OF "BOSS OF BOSSES" ALTERED SCENARIO

Authorities at the time feared more attacks but in 1993 Riina was arrested after nearly a quarter of a century on the run, effectively ending any possibility of a deal.

Victims' relatives expressed outrage at the possibility that the state at the time wanted the deal the Mafia at all.

"What Grasso said shocked me. Why are people only now talking of negotiations with the Mafia, 17 years later?" said Salvatore Borsellino, brother of the slain magistrate.

The contacts were believed to have started after Falcone was killed in March, 1992, and Grasso suggested the Mafia killed Borsellino four months later to up the ante in the negotiations.

Grasso said Mafia bosses at the time likely scrapped plans to kill politicians because they wanted to keep open channels of communications to those who could grant their wishes.

"I am shocked to think that my brother was a sacrificial lamb in deals between the Mafia and the state as part of deal to save politicians," he said.

Some politicians demanded that the parliamentary anti-Mafia commission summon Grasso to testify.

According to the list published in newspapers, the Mafia was demanding that sentences passed against some 400 Mafiosi at a mass trial in 1987 be softened and that a law that imposed a harsh prison regime for Mafiosi be repealed.

Whatever secret negotiations took place between the representatives of state and the Mafia, they came to nothing.

Several months after Rinna was arrested, the crime group planted bombs in Rome, Florence and Milan to show its strength and none of the demands on Riina's "wish list" were ever met.