Forza Italia co-founder and former senator had been ruled a fugitive before the final verdict in a trial for mafia collusion

Marcello Dell'Utri – king-maker to the disgraced former Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi, and his alleged connection to the Sicilian Mafia – was apprehended in the Lebanese capital Beirut early yesterday on an Interpol warrant, having fled Italy as a fugitive a day beforehand.

Dell'Utri – a senator and founder-member of Berlusconi's party 'Forza Italia', first victorious in elections of 1994 – had been convicted twice of 'mafia association' and faces the highest level of appeal on Tuesday.

His re-arrest was ordered by judges in Palermo on April 7.

The flight and initial convictions followed many years during which magistrates in Palermo and Milan had investigated charges that he was an ambassador for Cosa Nostra to the premier's party and media empire, and vice-versa.

He was known always as Berlusconi's 'left hand man' at both the Fininvest corporation and political party, the right being Berlusconi's original lawyer and later defence minister, former neo-fascist Cesare Previti, convicted for corruption in 2006.

Dell'Utri has been, for more than two decades, the dark, guiding hand behind, and at the core of, Italian politics. When, in the early 1990s, Italian magistrates put virtually the entire political class under arrest during the so-called 'Clean Hands' operation, their enquiries seemed to hone in on Berlusconi. It was Dell'Utri's idea that the then media mogul's best form of defence was attack in the form of a political career which, in the event, protected him from justice for decades.

The two men had met playing football together in Milan during student days. Dell'Utri, arrived North from his native Sicily, was a severe youth, mixing in Mafia circles and a member of the ultra-orthodox Opus Dei; Berlusconi was a crooner on cruise liners. The two men met again 20 years later when Berlusconi, embarking on ambitious construction and media projects, was sailing in Sicily.

Dell'Utri was by then a banker, back down South – but moved to join Berlusconi's construction company Edilnord in Milan, and later 'Publitalia' and Fininvest. He installed a mid-ranking Mafia operative, Vittorio Mangano, as stable manager on Berlusconi's estate at Arcore. When Mangano was later convicted of murder, Del'Utri stood by the aide he called "a man of goodness". Peter Gomez, one of Italy's leading journalists, calls Dell'Utri: 'the black figure of the Second Republic' in a book that also contains an allegation that Dell'Utri introduced the Cosa Nostra Godfather Stefano Bontate to Berlusiconi. The incident was described by a Mafia Don, Antonio Giuffre, who turned state witness and testified to having been assured by the 'Boss of Bosses' Bernado Provenzano that Cosa Nostra was "in good hands" by trusting Dell'Utri. Berlusconi and Dell'Utri have challenged Guiffre's testimony.

Since 2004, Dell'Utri has been fighting a conviction for Mafia collaboration, and a jail sentence of nine years. But Dell'Utri's name has featured ubiquitously in other trials seeking to penetrate what can be seen as the strange transition of power in Italy after 'Clean Hands', from a relationship between the old-guard Mafia and Christian Democrat machine of Giulio Andreotti – a sombre combination based on church and dour conservatism – and the new order, between a modernised Mafia and the power apparatus headed by a man whose rise to wealth was characterised more by topless dancers and striptease quizzes on TV.

Parallel to this mutation, Dell'Utri was prominent in the case of the 'P3 Lodge', heir to the infamous P2, of which Berlusconi had been a member and which – in another generation of Italian history – had been involved with neo-fascist bombings and the murder of Roberto Calvi in London.

P3 is being revealed in serial trials as a different creature, funding Berlusconi's cause – and more adept with markets than bombs, and at eroding any line thought to exist between the legal and illegal economies.