Book excerpt: FINALIST at 2015 LONDON BOOK FAIR's THE WRITE STUFF prize. Can a non-fictional book be as interesting as a page-turner fictional plot?Can it be at the same time a tycoon's biography, a mafia tale, a gangster story, a political thriller, an essay on democracy, a dystopia, a sociological analysis of a nation, a scandalous sex story? If the subject-matter is Silvio Berlusconi's incredible story and Italy, the answer is yes. This book, in fact, is a unique portrait of Italy's godfather and also a detailed picture of Italian society, an attempt to allow the foreign reader to understand how it has been possible for an alleged mafia-linked business magnate and media tycoon, constantly in trouble with justice and drenched in vice, to become the most popular political leader, Prime Minister and the absolute master of the country for the last twenty years. Berlusconi is often considered the personification of corruption, of disrespect for the law, of the liaison between organized crime - politics, of immoral behaviour, typical features of that 'immoral majority' of the country. Still, there are many open questions that this book tries to answer: How come Berlusconi grabbed complete control of all Italian information and used it as a Weapon of Mass Deception that turned viewers into faithful voters? How was he able to pass laws ad-personam that made him almost untouchable by the Judicial Power and favoured his business and financial activities in an unfair game? Can we say that Berlusconi is the very symbol of a concentration of political, economic and media power in one single person never seen before, a fact that has created the greatest conflicts of interests in the Western World, or is he just another pawn in a bigger game? What is hidden under Italy's well-known surface beauty, artistry and creativity? Does Dante's underworld Inferno still exist today? Is the erosion of democracy in Berlusconi's period a trend of modern capitalism, as some 'dystopian' writers predicted?