The defense team of Italian General Mario Mori proposed to question Russian President Vladimir Putin during the high profile “Italian state and Mafia negotiations” trial, La Stampa reported.

General Mori has been linked to secret negotiations between high-ranking representatives of Italy and the leaders of the Cosa Nostra. According to the Palermo prosecutor's office, these events took place in the early 1990s.

The former head of Special Forces of the carabineers, General Mori was accused of seeking the patronage of the former boss of Cosa Nostra.

In 2013, he was acquitted on charges that he allegedly interfered with the capture of a mafia boss. The Palermo prosecutor's office appealed this judgment but the Italian Supreme Court of Cassation upheld the acquittal in June 2017.

Mori's lawyer put forward a proposal for Putin's questioning in connection with audiotaped evidence in which one of the Mafia bosses speaks about the murders of two judges in 1992, who started the trial against the Sicilian mafia.

One of the dead judges, Giovanni Falcone, was also investigating the use of the so-called “black cash desk of the CPSU [Communist Party of the Soviet Union]” by the Mafia clans of Italy.

Russian Prosecutor General Valentin Stepankov, who later wrote a book about Falconet's arrival in Moscow, was helping him then.

The former head of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Italy, Nicola Mancino, ex-senator Marcello Del Utrie, who was one of the oldest friends of Silvio Berlusconi, as well as several Cosa Nostra influential bosses, are connected to Mori’s case.

The investigation of possible collusion between the state and the mafia was started by the Palermo prosecutor's office in 2008.

Investigators say that in the early 1990s, when several bloody terrorist acts were committed in Italy by the orders of Cosa Nostra bosses in Italy, secret talks began between high-ranking government officials and mafia leaders that culminated in the achievement of certain agreements.

  Italy, Putin, Cosa Nostra

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