Berlusconi is the third richest man in Italy and the 74th wealthiest person in the world. His personal fortune lies in real estate, his influence cemented through a vice grip on the country’s media landscape. His BFF is Vladimir Putin. And he’s an alleged sex addict. 

The list goes on and on. Currently, the prime minister is under investigation on charges that he paid for sex with an underage prostitute named Ruby the Heart Stealer. The septuagenarian allegedly showered the teenage belly dancer with gifts and cash during many elaborate orgies, colloquially referred to as “bunga bunga” sex parties. The country is up in arms over these latest allegations. The Italian mafia is shopping photographs to further corroborate claims of Berlusconi’s misbehavior. And last weekend, protesters lined up outside the prime minister’s Milan home armed with condoms to stage a “panty protest.” Formal charges are expected any day now. 

Ladies and gentlemen, this is the prime minister of Italy.

Alexander Stille is a professor of international journalism at Columbia University and author of the book “The Sack of Rome: How a Beautiful European Country With a Fabled History and a Storied Culture Was Taken Over by a Man Named Silvio Berlusconi.” We spoke with Stille recently about Berlusconi, his current conundrum and his impact on Italy.

Berlusconi is being investigated on allegations that he used his power to sweep a teenage prostitution scandal under the rug. How much trouble is Silvio Berlusconi in?

He’s in quite a lot of trouble, but he’s also in a far stronger position than someone in another country observing these developments would imagine. I think this crisis and this last set of scandals have hurt him a lot, but he has several major assets in his favor. He still has a slender majority in parliament, which essentially means he can continue governing — although not enough to govern very effectively, so it’s created a real crisis in the country. But one of the peculiarities of Berlusconi’s type of government is that the majority he has in parliament is an unusually reliable and solid majority because a great many of these people owe everything to him.

So, he has this parliamentary majority on the one hand, and rather incredibly, his public opinion numbers are much better than you might expect for someone who is on his 79th major scandal. And who has been revealed to have cavorted with prostitutes — minor or adult, 20 at a time in the presidential palace — with them on his payroll. The poll numbers I saw show that his scandals bumped his approval rating down from 40 to 35 percent. It’s not high, but it’s actually surprisingly high given the kind of shape he’s in. It shows that there’s a very solid third of the country that doesn’t care what comes out. They’re loyal Berlusconi people. They feel that the more dirt that’s thrown at him is a sign that he’s being persecuted. So they’re basically immune to any new information that comes out.

One thing is clear, though: Silvio Berlusconi will not go to jail.

Berlusconi was a very successful businessman before he was prime minister. Was it all on the up and up?

His original fortune was made in real estate and then in television after that. What is interesting is that his career as a businessman has sort of two aspects to it. There’s no question that he is a shrewd businessman with a talent for making money, but it’s also true that in every field that he’s entered, bending or breaking the law and using political connections have been key ingredients to his success. It’s not sheer financial brilliance or entrepreneurial genius. For example, in his real estate dealings, the project that he made a lot of his money on was building an enormous gated community outside of Milan, something that had never existed in Italy before that. He bought the land very cheap, partly because the land was right near a major airport and the sound from the airplanes taking off and landing was deafening. Nobody valued the land very much.

So Berlusconi bought and planned this development and then managed to use his political connections in Rome to get the routes of the planes changed so that they no longer took off and landed over his property, but over, in fact, an area he had developed before and already sold off. So those people’s lives were ruined, and the value of the land he had bought and was building on quadrupled overnight. So, like I said, political connections and a certain amount of chicanery have always been central to his success. It tells you a lot about him as a politician because a lot of the same themes run through his political life.

What are Berlusconi’s politics?

The truth is that when he began his political career, he positioned himself as a kind of an Italian Margaret Thatcher — a free market businessman à la Ross Perot who was going to come in and take an ossified, bureaucratic, statist society like Italy and make it work and be as successful as his business had been. This was a very attractive promise. And, had he actually followed through on that, it might have been successful.

The problem with that is that Berlusconi isn’t a free market person. He’s a monopolist. When he got into power, he didn’t do any of these reforms to the Italian economy. He didn’t liberalize it. Paradoxically, the center-left governments that have been in power have done more to privatize state-owned business and open up markets than he has. Because, the intervention of government in the Italian economy is extremely useful if you want to reward your friends and punish your enemies as a form of political power and control, which is of great interest to Berlusconi. The kind of crony capitalism is the kind of capitalism he grew up in.

Your initial question was “What are his politics?” And, since they’re clearly not free market, well then what are they? I think the truth is that Berlusconi’s politics are Berlusconi.

It’s his deepest conviction that the best thing that could happen to Italy is if they let one man — Silvio Berlusconi — control as much as possible. And because he is so smart and generous and good, he will make everything right if they will just give him enough power. He’s extremely impatient with and contemptuous of laws, limits, rules, other powers of government, traditional institutions that exercise accountability and control on him or on anyone holding power. So what you have is a constant institutional crisis, where he keeps trying to bend the rules and arrogate more power to himself and institutions pushing back.

I want to take a left turn here for a moment. What are “bunga bunga” parties and what do they have to do with Silvio Berlusconi?

Well, the term “bunga bunga,” the origin of it, seems to be in one of Berlusconi’s favorite jokes, which also tells you something about his personality. He likes telling this joke, which people have repeated and he’s continued to say openly he thinks is very funny — basically it involves one of his political opponents is captured by a tribe in Africa and they offer him two options. One is being raped through anal penetration, which is “bunga bunga.” The other is being beaten up or something. So he takes the second. And they say, “OK, we’ll beat him up and then we’ll do the bunga bunga to him.” That’s the punch line to the joke. Berlusconi thinks this is enormously funny, even though most of us would find it offensive and racist.

And, it seems to have been transmogrified into a reference to these wild orgy parties that he seems to have — not seems to — has been holding both at the presidential palace in Rome and in his pleasure palace north of Milan. There seems to be a room, which is referred to as a bunga bunga room that is outfitted like a strip club with things like poles for women doing stripteases and lap dances. The practice — which seems to be pretty well documented by women who have participated in these events — is that he seems to like to have around 20 handsome young women in their teens or early 20s. The only men are men who are effectively eunuchs who have been procuring women for Berlusconi but don’t play an active role in these orgies. The women start taking off their clothes and dancing for him and they touch him and he touches them. That’s all the excitement. Then there is usually another phase where he chooses one or two or three of these people to go off and have sex with. That seems to be the pattern and it does seem to be pretty well substantiated.

This is a prime minister who’s been accused of embezzlement, tax fraud, false accounting, bribery, teenage prostitution, these crazy sex parties — basically of abusing his position for power. And yet he’s been reelected several times and he’s never been convicted. Is Silvio Berlusconi invincible? 

He is a very strange character. I do think that until he is physically unable to — as long as he’s drawing breath I think he will be a force on the Italian scene, effectively until they drive a stake in his heart. I don’t know about invincible, because he did actually lose two democratic elections — one in 1996 and one in 2006.

But what I think the Italians didn’t understand at all when they allowed him to get into political life without divesting himself of his media holdings is that when you allow a charismatic figure like this who is the richest person in the country and the largest media holder, and he takes hold of the political system, you’ve created a Frankenstein. It’s not a question of ideology, of whether you find him likable or dislikable. It’s a concentration of power. I once referred to it as Citizen Kane on steroids.

It’s a totally out-of-control phenomenon. Every time he finds himself in trouble, as now, his media empire revs up and begins creating in many cases phony scandals about anybody who dared to criticize Berlusconi. So it becomes, people here have seen what one single network — yes, I’m thinking of Fox News — can do if they want to make an issue out of something. You can actually convince people that the Black Panthers and ACORN stole the 2008 election, for instance. It’s a total non-story, and there’s no evidence behind it. But you can move tens of millions of people into a state of fibrillation about something that didn’t happen. Berlusconi has this media empire that is in relative terms much bigger than Fox News, and you can see how powerful that would be when it’s mobilized as it is — particularly in times of emergency like this, in confusing people, printing false stories, making something out of nothing.

They are always creating these false equivalences. The appearance is that other people are doing what Berlusconi is doing, only worse. So you have this media empire that is responding to every single thing but just kind of generating these stories that end up creating an electorate that is unbelievably cynical and confused. They then decide — because there are all these counter-charges to every charge — to remove every ethical or moral judgment from political realms.

This is the first jarring stop on the tour of Lobert’s battle wounds from more than a decade of hooking in Las Vegas, and it’s this ugly side of the sex trade that she helps to expose in Investigation Discovery’s reality TV series “Hookers: Saved on the Strip.” The show, which wraps Wednesday at 10 p.m., follows Lobert as she reaches out to Sin City prostitutes and offers to help them escape abusive pimps, just like she did. There is just one catch: She offers harbor in a transitional home run by her organization, Hookers for Jesus, and the Church at South Las Vegas. It’s a human rights mission, and a religious one, too.

Over lunch at a sushi restaurant, she continues mapping her scars. Pulling back her bangs, she reveals a thick white line along her hairline. “He did that to me, too,” she tells me. “Another time, he took a hot fire poker and just — boom, boom.” She slams her fists on the table. “Girl, I could not walk. I have never seen anything so grotesque. My thigh was black.” That’s just the abuse that left physical scars — he called her every name imaginable and shoved her face in dog shit. There were clients who beat and raped her at gunpoint, and friends, fellow working girls, who died. “Their bodies were chopped up,” she says matter of factly between bites of sashimi. “They were strangled, shot in the head by tricks, or ‘disappeared’ by their pimps.”

The dissonance of eating raw fish while in the middle of the desert (or while talking about dismemberment) is nothing compared to the experience of going to Sunday services with Lobert — the least of which is because I’m an atheist who has never attended church. The members of her congregation are no strangers to sex work or any of the other “un-Godly” things going on 20 miles away on the strip. After the preacher’s raucous and very Vegas sermon — during which he exclaims, “God loooves sex!” — Lobert introduces me to a couple of  churchgoers who used to turn tricks just like her. One friend — let’s call her Cameron, thanks to a resemblance to a certain blond actress — managed to tear herself away from her pimp, and the sex trade, when he landed in jail (she was carrying his baby at the time).

Another woman, let’s call her Julia, seems at first to have the sort of “happy hooker” story that we so often see in pop culture: She was swept off her feet by one of her clients, à la “Pretty Woman,” she says. But then she introduces me to her newly adopted daughter: A shy 16-year-old with long brown hair who recently escaped life on the street, and whose 13-year-old sister is currently being exploited downtown by child sex traffickers; she hears from her occasionally but has no idea how to find her. Neither do the police, apparently.

It isn’t an unusual story, but it’s bracing to me, in particular because I am one of those young feminists who philosophically believes that prostitution should be legal. For the first time, though, I viscerally understand the anti-legalization stance. I can’t say my position has changed, but seeing the scars and tears firsthand makes the issue appear infinitely more complex. Too often, I have focused on the best-case scenario: the “high-class” hooker who is a free agent. These women, and men, do exist, but they are not the majority. Of course I already knew this, but talking to a teenage girl whose kid sister is being sold for sex puts your political priorities in check.

When Lobert lived with her pimp, he would bring home underage girls. “I had 12-year-olds in my house,” she says. Some of them barely spoke English and they all had fake IDs; whenever she found out their real age, she would try to run them off, sometimes even buying them a bus or a plane ticket out of town. Lobert drives me down a shadowy street right off the strip and points with one of her glittery pink acrylic nails. “That’s where all the underage girls walk.”

It isn’t just the underage girls that are being forced into the trade, either. “These women leave and they die,” she says. Lobert left her pimp several times, “but he always found me,” she says. She was kidnapped, had her hair cut off (so that she couldn’t make money for another pimp) and beaten close to death. Now she simply refers to most sex work as trafficking. “When it’s ‘prostitution,’ no one wants to talk to you, but it’s the same thing. You’re being trafficked. You’re being enslaved. You might not see the chains, but they’re there.”

When it comes to sex workers who say they enjoy their work, Lobert is unyielding, even when pressed: “They’re either in the honeymoon phase, or they’re in total denial.” She concedes that there are prostitutes without pimps, but claims that they’re the exception to the rule. “Eventually, you run into a pimp, or you meet a girl in the business who will lure you home to their pimp, ” Lobert says. “No matter whether he’s a hardcore pimp that’s beating you down or someone who is taking part of your money so you can make money, someone along the line is making money off of you.” And when it comes to clients: “High-class, low-class, it doesn’t matter. If a trick’s gonna strangle you and kill you, he gon’ take care of bidness,” she says, revealing a sudden glimpse of the streetwise young woman she was on the strip.

This is where Lobert’s religious message becomes secondary. She may broadly preach against prostitution as a “perversion” of sex’s intended purpose as a “beautiful representation of a union between a man and a woman,” as her husband, a Christian rock musician, passionately puts it — but she’s fundamentally speaking out against the coercion and exploitation that she experienced firsthand. “I just want justice, and this is what it looks like,” she says, tapping my tape recorder. “It’s bringing awareness.”

I picked prostitutes as victims because they were easy to pick up without being noticed. I knew they would not be reported missing right away and might never be reported missing. I picked prostitutes because I thought I could kill as many of them as I wanted without getting caught.

Since they’re doing illegal work, sex workers have to be secretive and discreet. They often work in isolated and industrial areas. They get in cars with strangers. There are rarely detailed records of transactions. Many are drug addicts and estranged from their families, so they are less likely to be reported missing. Anyone who knows anything about a girl’s whereabouts is likely involved in the trade themselves, so they aren’t super eager to speak with police. What’s more, as we saw with the Robert Pickton case in Vancouver, police sometimes discount tips from working girls (all the more reason to not risk talking to them in the first place).

It just so happens that Friday is International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, which was created in memory of the victims of Gary Ridgeway, a.k.a the Green River Killer. Similar to the Pickton case, local sex workers knew Ridgeway’s identity, but, as prostitute-turned-performance artist Annie Sprinkle puts it, they “were afraid to come forward for fear of getting arrested, or the police didn’t believe those that did come forward, or the police didn’t seem to care.”

There’s no doubt that having real-life human beings pose as prisoners of sex trafficking is an effective way to stop people dead in their tracks. On that front, the “Women To Go” campaign certainly succeeds. The ultimate aim, though, is to get enough signatures to push forward a measure that would criminalize johns. Uri Keidar, one of the Working Group’s founders, argues that “the law will cause a reduction in the demand for prostitution, and therefore also a reduction in the trafficking of women.”

That is the approach taken by Sweden, which is largely considered the model for success. In 1999, the country criminalized johns and trafficking has since been significantly reduced. (Note, though, some argue that when you target johns, the industry as a whole is pushed underground, putting sex workers at greater risk.) If Working Group can follow-up its shock-tactics with some cold-hard facts, it just might have an effective campaign on its hands.