Inside Silvio Berlusconi's notorious Bunga Bunga parties as ex-Italian PM dies
Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi has died aged 86 following a battle with chronic leukaemia.
Reports in Italy say the ex-politician had been recently re-admitted to San Raffaele hospital in Milan following complications with his illness.
Tributes have been paid to the controversial public figure, who was jailed and banned from office for life when details emerged about the lavish parties he had held at his luxurious private villa.
The billionaire media mogul had his sentence quashed a year after he was sent to prison on appeal.
The parties coined a new term, bunga bunga, first came to light in October 2010, when Berlusconi personally phoned a police station asking for the release of a 17-year-old girl, Karima el-Mahroug, who had been accused of stealing a 3,000-euro bracelet.
Man in 30s dies after being stabbed in park sparking police probe
The Italian PM was jailed but has his sentence quashed on appeal (SCALZO/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)The ex-PM, who once owned football club AC Milan and served as Italy's leader in four governments, told officers the girl was the niece of former Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak.
In fact the teenager was a Moroccan nightclub dancer and prostitute who called herself Ruby the Heart Stealer.
Berlusconi, prosecutors later claimed, was terrified police questioning her would find out that underage Ruby had been attending the ‘bunga bunga’ parties held at his palatial home, Villa San Martino, in Arcore, a small town outside of Milan.
Following the phone call officers released her into the care of one of the prime minister’s associates, Nicole Minetti, a member of Berlusconi’s party who also pimped for the mogul and performed explicit lesbian floorshows in a nun’s costume.
She took Ruby back to a flat she shared with a Brazilian prostitute, Michelle Conceicao, who was also later linked with Berlusconi after it was found she called him on his mobile phone while he was attending a summit in Paris.
But when prosecutors found out about PM’s intervention in her arrest, they began an investigation would culminate in one of the country’s most sensational trials.
A 'Femen' activist stages a bare chested protest against the former Italian Prime Minister (DANIEL DAL ZENNARO/EPA-EFE/REX/Shutterstock)It was Ruby who first introduced the term ‘bunga bunga’, which she said was a lap-dancing competition in which the winner or winners got to sleep with Berlusconi.
In an interview with prosecutor Antonio Sangermano soon after the police station incident, she claimed Berlusconi had sent a limo to her home to take her to the villa for the first time on Valentine’s Day 2010.
She said: “That evening Berlusconi explained to me that bunga bunga consisted of a harem that he copied from his friend Gaddafi (the former Libyan dictator), in which the girls take their clothes off and have to provide physical pleasures.”
While Berlusconi never denied inviting women to his lavish parties, he always claimed they were “convivial” dinners with food, laughter and jokes, after which he would sometimes give them money because he was “generous” and wanted to help them.
Russian model killed after calling Putin a 'psychopath' was strangled by her ex
Prosecution documents listed the names of 33 young women, mostly would-be starlets hoping to break into showbusiness on one of Berlusconi’s television channels, who said were paid to have sex with him at the parties.
They described how the parties always followed the same script, and ended with the prime minister choosing one of the girls to spent the night with.
First, they said, came dinner, a meal often composed of foods in the red, white and green of Italy’s tricolor flag.
Silvio Berlusconi has died aged 86 (AFP via Getty Images)Then followed what has become known as the ‘bunga bunga’ session, “which took place in a disco-like room where the female participants engaged in dressing up, striptease and erotic dances, touching each other or touching and being touched in their intimate parts by Silvio Berlusconi".
Finally, at the end of the evening, Berlusconi would choose “one or more women with whom he spent the night in an intimate relationship", in exchange for money, expensive gifts or rent-free apartments.
Some of the most eye-opening accounts of what happened at the mogul’s mansion came from Ambra Battilana and Chiara Danese, two women who had been wooed to a bunga bunga party with promises of jobs on Berlusconi’s TV channel.
Ms Battilana said: "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".
And Ms Danese claimed the PM asked women to kill the penis of a statue.
She said: “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-litre 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!!!”
The police investigation also used wiretaps of women’s phones to get evidence of what happened during the secretive soirees.
In the transcript of one call, party guest Maria Makdoum told how she did a belly dance in the ‘bunga bunga’ room while a pair of twin sisters, dressed in bra and panties, danced around “in a hard-core way” before Berlusconi and another male guest.
“The other girls also danced, showing their breasts and their bottoms and they all went near the prime minister who touched them in their intimate parts,” she said.
In another leaked transcript Dario ‘Lele’ Mora - a TV impresario accused with others of procuring prostitutes for the premier - asked one woman: “Do you have a nurse’s outfit? Go get one today,” adding that she should wear nothing underneath except white suspenders for a “private health visit.”
He was one of three Berlusconi aides accused of being part of a “vast pimping network” to attend bunga bunga parties with the prime minister.
Police also tapped the calls of women to Berlusconi himself, some of which were leaked to Italian media.
In a blow to Berlusconi’s self-cultivated ‘macho’ image, some of the women who allegedly slept with him for money complain that he is getting old, fat and flabby and should just ‘cough up’ or they will start stealing from his house. Others, speaking to him on the phone, call him ‘love’ before asking for more cash.
Testifying at the trial, Imane Fadil - the woman who died this month - said the parties involved young women, sometimes in pairs, wearing nuns’ costumes and stripping off while performing raunchy pole dances.
She said: “They started to dance like the nuns of the film ‘Sister Act’ and then they took off their clothes.”
At another party, a woman in her underwear stripped for Berlusconi wearing a mask with the face of footballer Ronaldinho, she said.
Karima el-Mahroug, the girl known as Ruby whose arrest first sparked the investigation, also testified at the trial, claiming she first met Berlusconi when she was invited to a dinner party at his private village outside of Milan on Valentines Day 2010 aged 17.
She said the parties took place in a disco in Berlusconi's villa equipped with a lap dancing pole, where women danced and stripped down to their underwear.
She said she also saw women dressed as then-US president Barack Obama or as a Milan magistrate who is leading the prosecution against Berlusconi in the sex scandal, wearing the red wig and black robes worn by magistrates in Italy.
"The girls who were dressed in costumes approached him in a sensual way as they danced. They raised their skirts," El-Mahroug testified, claiming the bunga bunga sessions soon turned into orgies among male and female guests.
But she denied sleeping with the frisky politician, claiming: “It’s the first time in my life that a man has not tried to take me to bed. He behaved like a father, I swear.”
And she said he only gave her 7,000 euros after a party because she had told him she was in trouble.
However in leaked wiretaps of her telephone conversations, however, she told friends that Berlusconi had offered to “cover her in gold” to keep quiet, and that she had demanded 5 million euros.
Mobile phone records placed her at the Arcore villa 13 times between February and May 2010.
In June 2013 he was found guilty of paying for sex with an underage prostitute and of abusing his office, and was sentenced to seven years in prison and banned from holding public office for life.
However, judges in Milan overturned the conviction on appeal a year later.
Read more similar news:
Comments:
comments powered by Disqus
