(By Denis Greenan) Silvio Berlusconi, who died at the age of 86 on Monday, was a larger-than-life figure whose long dominance of Italy's public life was not limited to the political sphere.
The 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 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.
He 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.
A 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.
Berlusconi made an even bigger splash when as a youthful (57) and dynamic exemplar of the can-do Milanese businessman he 'took the political field' by forging FI mostly out of 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 in 1994.
In that short first term and two subsequent ones in which he became Italy's longest serving postwar prime minister, he 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".
Nonetheless he is credited 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.
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 the elderly, 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 politically 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.
His evergreen vigour was also shown when he acquired a new, 33-year-old girlfriend, FI MP Marta Fascia, two years ago, recently quashing reports she would become his third wife after Carla Elvira Dall'Oglio, whom he married in 1965 and by whom he has 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, and who divorced him in 2009 after accusing him of pursuing young women and after he attended the 18th birthday party of an 18-year-old Neapolitan woman, Noemi Letizia, whom his critics claimed may have been the product of an extramarital affair.
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 an 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 ginat, a case solved by late Christian Democrat statesman Giulio Andreotti with a Solom-liked 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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