Rome — Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, one of the country's most charismatic and controversial contemporary leaders, has died in Milan at the age of 86, his lawyer confirmed to CBS News. Berlusconi's doctors said when he was hospitalized in April that he was battling a rare form of leukemia, and the Reuters news agency said he recently caught a lung infection.

The country's defense chief Guido Crosseto lauded Berlusconi in a tweet, saying his death had left "a huge void because he was great. An era is over, an era is closing."

The former cruise ship singer reinvented himself as a real-estate tycoon and a television media mogul before entering Italian politics and becoming prime minister, for the first of his three terms, in 1994. 

He went on to dominate Italian politics and culture for two decades despite — or perhaps in part because of — seemingly endless gaffes. He once referred to former U.S. President Barack Obama as "sun-tanned," for instance, and quipped that it was "better" to like girls than be gay.

Berlusconi long painted himself as a victim of "political correctness," but his penchant for the seedier side of wealth and power, including the notorious "Bunga Bunga" sex parties he hosted at his mansions in Milan and Sardinia, and his financial dealings, eventually brought legal repercussions.

He ended up in court accused of paying an underage girl to sleep with him and was sentenced to seven years in prison. Those charges were ultimately overturned, but similar scenarios played out in more than 20 separate trials, most of them on corruption, embezzlement and bribery charges.

He once claimed to have attended at least 2,500 court appearances.

In six of the cases, the charges were dropped because of new financial laws he helped pass as the nation's leader, decriminalizing the actions involved, or because the statute of limitations had run out.

"All fiction," he would claim in court, railing against "liberal elites," "leftist" judges, and a "hostile media" — despite owning TV channels, magazines, and newspapers himself.

But in 2013, charges against Berlusconi finally stuck. He was convicted of tax fraud and sentenced to four years in prison, though the sentence was commuted to just one year of community service at a nursing home due to his age.

It marked the end of his foothold on the political center stage in Italy, but his populist legacy was to show the world that people with more star power than political experience could rise to the highest offices of state.

In:
• Italy
• Silvio Berlusconi

Chris Livesay

Chris Livesay is a CBS News foreign correspondent based in Rome.

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