Although a court acquitted Mr. Andreotti in 2003, the accusations further marred his public stature.
And the momentous case against Mr Andreotti may now be much harder to press.
Mr Andreotti took a public anti-Mafia stance from 1980 onwards, the written ruling said.
Mr. Andreotti's longevity in Italy's revolving-door politics earned him the nickname "Mr. Italy" to many foreign leaders.
An American architect, Libero Andreotti, traces the situationists' influence in structures such as the Paris Pompidou Centre.
Mr. Andreotti subsequently served as minister 19 times in a series of conservative governments in the 1950s and 1960s.
Palermo prosecutors had demanded a 10-year jail sentence for Mr Andreotti, based on evidence from jailed Mafia informer Antonino Giuffre.
"Aside from the Punic Wars, which I was too young for, I have been blamed for everything, " Mr. Andreotti once said.
But Mr. Andreotti, who cut an iconic figure with his hunched back and acerbic humor, was also one of Italy's most divisive personalities.
"Andreotti is dead, but the Christian Democrats are alive, " Pierferdinando Casini, a former Christian Democrat and centrist politician, said in a television interview.
Mr Andreotti entered the Italian parliament in 1946 and remained there for more than 60 years, before seeing out his days as a senator-for-life.
In the 1990s, however, a series of claims that Mr. Andreotti had Mafia ties damaged his reputation to such an extent that it never recovered.
But they accepted the testimonies of other turncoats Mr Andreotti had met - including another prominent Mafia boss, Stefano Bontade - in the spring of 1980.
In the 1990s, however, a series of claims that he had ties with Italy's Mafia damaged Mr. Andreotti's reputation to an extent from which he never recovered.
Appeal court judges rejected a testimony from one Mafia turncoat who said he had seen Mr Andreotti kiss the now imprisoned Mafia "boss of bosses" Toto Riina.
Mr. Andreotti was prime minister of that coalition when Aldo Moro, a fellow Christian Democrat leader, was kidnapped in March 1978 by the Red Brigades, a left-leaning terrorist group.
In a separate trial, Mr. Andreotti was accused of ordering the murder of an Italian journalist in 1979 to stop him from publishing material that risked jeopardizing Mr. Andreotti's career.
ROME Giulio Andreotti, a seven-time prime minister who over six decades helped guide Italy out of the wreckage of World War II and into a period of economic prosperity, died Monday.
Meanwhile, the war against the Mafia has suffered a major blow: Mr Andreotti's acquittal (see article) has probably put paid to the use of pentiti, supergrasses, to gain convictions.
Mr Andreotti had been facing charges for "organised crime" prior to this, but the court ruled that the charges had expired under the statute of limitation before the new laws were introduced.
Mr. Andreotti's power was already on the wane when a major corruption scandal wiped out Italy's political class in the early 1990s, leading to the dissolution of all major parties, including the Christian Democrats.
Bristol chief executive Lamberto Andreotti, 60, who took over last May, has built on the strategy put in place by drug-and-medical-device industry veteran James Cornelius, who ran the company for four years starting in 2006.
In a 1993 court appearance that shocked Italians, a Mafia turncoat testified he saw Mr. Andreotti kiss the hand of Italy's top Mafia don in a sign of respect an allegation Mr. Andreotti promptly dismissed as slander.
Parliament elected him to the presidency in the spring of 1992, hours after the killing of a top Mafia prosecutor, Giovanni Falcone, had smashed the chances of the favourite, Giulio Andreotti (now on trial on charges of links with the Mafia).
The judiciary is still vilified, both because Mr Berlusconi has been convicted of various crimes (evidence, it is said, of judicial bias) and because Giulio Andreotti, a veteran politician of the old order, has been acquitted of colluding with the Mafia (further alleged evidence of bias).
"Although Kohl, Andreotti, and Mitterand have passionately argued that heavy infusions of Western cash are needed to save perestroika and strengthen the reform process, it is increasingly clear that a much less high-minded and cynical impetus is at work: The actual recipients of the bulk of these taxpayer funds are companies of the re respective lending governments, " said Roger W. Robinson, Jr.
应用推荐