Grillo accused of 'pandering' for mafia votes

(ANSA) - Palermo, October 27 - Anti-establishment politician Beppe Grillo's 'pro-mafia' comments at a political rally in the Sicilian capital Palermo met scathing backlash among Italian political leaders Monday.
    "Beppe Grillo is now a barbaric politician seeking Mafia votes in order to gain power," said Sicilian Governor Rosario Crocetta, who campaigned on an anti-mafia political platform and is openly homosexual. "For Grillo, politics does not need to transform society and make it grow, but must chase only votes, including those that are racist, homophobic and even (belonging to) the mafia," Crocetta added.
    On Sunday, the controversial leader of the Five-Star Movement (M5S) said the Sicilian Mafia once "had a moral conduct of its own" and should be quoted on the bourse at a demonstration dubbed Distrust Day staged against the Sicilian governor.
    "The mafia was corrupted by finance. Before it had a moral conduct of its own and didn't dissolve children in acid. There is no difference between a businessman and a mafioso. Both do business, but the mafioso gets convicted and the businessman doesn't," Grillo told the crowd.
    "To say that the Mafia had values, did not kill children and tainted itself with business is an unprecedented idiocy," said Crocetta.
    The governor explained that the Sicilian Mafia's first murder victim, killed in 1893, was a Bank of Sicily executive who understood the links between business and organized crime.
    Crocetta added that in the immediate postwar period, the Mafia took the life of a hospitalized 12-year old because he was the only witness to a Mafia hit. The head of Italy's centrist UDC party, Senator Giampiero D'Alia, said Grillo's comments "are delusional statements that speak by themselves". "Is he asking the Cosa Nostra for votes in an old fashioned way?" D'Alia asked. Criticism also poured from the lips of deputy whip for centre-left Democratic Party (PD) senators, Claudio Martini. "We would willingly leave Grillo to his ravings if it wasn't for the fact that we can not accept his continuous insults to institutions and to the head of state," Martini said.
    Grillo took aim at President Giorgio Napolitano and at Sicilian anti-mafia magistrates regarding an on-going trial over alleged Mafia-State negotiations in the 1990s.