The Italian statesman Bettino Craxi (1934-2000) was the youngest person and the first socialist to become prime minister of the Italian republic. He resigned after three and a half years in office due to problems with his coalition government. In the 1990s he was one of the targets of the largest corruption investigation in Italian post-war history and sentenced to 21 years in prison for his crimes. He went into self-imposed exile in Tunisia

Bettino Craxi was born February 24, 1934, in Milan, Italy, where his lawyer father, a Socialist politician, had migrated from his native Sicily. Christened Benedetto, but known by the diminutive "Bettino" ever since he was a child, Craxi as a teenager once thought of becoming a priest. Instead, he turned to politics. At 14 he worked in his father's unsuccessful 1948 campaign for the Chamber of Deputies. At the University of Milan he enrolled to study law, but because...