Berlusconi call-girl claims her life was threatened

Italian PM Silvio Berlusconi faces further lurid accusations, as Patrizia D'Addario, one of the call girls who says she slept with him, prepares to publish a book about their sexual encounters. But the prime minister is probably more worried about allegations from a former hitman that he had direct links with the Mafia.

D'Addario's latest revelations in the now long-running sex scandal saga come in a book named after a celebrated line spoken by a prostitute to an aristocrat in the Federico Fellini film Amarcord. Prime minister, take your pleasure is released tomorrow and recounts the evenings which D'Addario, 42, spent at Palazzo Grazioli, Berlusconi's lavish Roman mansion.

D'Addario tells how, after being sent to Berlusconi's residence by Giampaolo Tarantini, the Bari businessman currently facing charges of procuring prostitutes, she, along with various other showgirls, was taken to an opulent salon and introduced to the prime minister. There, he first showed the girls a political promotional video, featuring a campaign ballad entitled Thank goodness Silvio is here.

Then the affection began. "I was watching the whole thing with curiosity and my first thought was that I'd found myself in a harem," D'Addario wrote. "He was on the couch and all of us, twenty girls in all, were at his disposition. The younger women were in fierce competition with each other as to who could sit closest to the prime minister.

"The prime minister needs cuddles. Having been an escort I thought I'd seen a fair few things, but this I'd never seen, 20 women for one man. Normally in an orgy you have roughly the same number of men and women, otherwise people get upset. But here the other men had no say. There was just one man with the right to copulate and that was the prime minister."

The second time D'Addario visited Berlusconi, 73, was on November 4, 2008, the night when Barack Obama was elected to power in the US. This time, she says, they slept together, and he was very tender and affectionate, "like a little boy who has won a prize at the fun park". D'Addario says that she jumped with fright when the premier entered the bedroom. "He was all dressed in white – I took him for a ghost. He was in white silk pyjamas, with a white silk dressing gown."

However, since she rose to public prominence, D'Addario says she has been suffered threats and violence. One anonymous telephone caller, during a conversation which she recorded, said that she was 'a whore and a bitch', and told her that he would break her bones and rape her daughter.

Her mother has been assaulted, and, in another incident, D'Addario, says that a man posing as a former policemen forced her way into her flat, ransacked it and tried to rape her. Her possessions, including diaries and underwear, were also stolen, while she was campaigning to become a councillor for Berlusconi's party in local elections this summer.

Then, while driving between Bari and a nearby town called Bitonto, D'Addario says her car was rammed from behind, forcing it to spin off the road. "It was a miracle that I survived," she wrote.

These new revelations about Silvio Berlusconi's sexual peccadilloes, though certainly embarrassing, are something the Italian public has grown accustomed to. But new allegations about his links to the Mafia may prove more damaging.

Gaspare Spatuzza, a former contract killer, who became a pentito (turncoat) last year, has alleged that Berlusconi was one of two political protectors who promised to look after the interests of Giuseppe Graviano, a Mafia godfather.

Spatuzza claims that, in 1994, the year which Berlusconi entered politics and formed his Forza Italia party, Graviano told him that both Berlusconi and his fellow Forza Italia founder, Sicilian politician Marcello Dell'Utri, had agreed to protect him.

In 2004, Dell'Utri was found guilty of associating with the Cosa Nostra. Berlusconi has shrugged off the allegations – but, following a ruling by Italy's highest court, he is no longer immune from prosecution.