Mussolini vs. the Mafia

From Sicily: An Island at the Crossroads of History, by John Julius Norwich (Random House, 2015), Kindle pp. 312-314:

On January 3, 1925, the Duce declared himself dictator. Now at last he was ready to tackle the Mafia. He was not the sort of man who could tolerate any challenge to his own authority, least of all from an organization so mysterious and so powerful. Moreover, he had been conscious, during his two visits to Sicily, that the local bosses were distinctly disinclined to show him the respect to which he was generally accustomed. On one of these visits he took mortal offense when the boss of Piana dei Greci, Don Ciccio Cuccia, publicly proclaimed that his visitor needed no police escort—since Cuccia’s own presence offered protection enough. By now too the Honored Society had acquired an international reputation. It was plain, in short, that Sicily was not big enough for Mussolini and the Mafia. For the sake of his own self-esteem, one of them would have to go. He summoned Cesare Mori.

Mori was a northerner, born in Pavia, and was already in his middle fifties. He had grown up in an orphanage and had studied at the military academy in Turin. Having joined the police, he could already look back on two periods of service in Sicily, the first in Castelvetrano—where he had distinguished himself by capturing the notorious bandit Paolo Grisalfi—and the second in 1919 when, in Caltabellotta, he had made more than three hundred arrests in a single night.

...

In 1924 he was appointed Prefect of Trapani; but his power in Sicily really began only on October 20, 1925, when Mussolini transferred him to Palermo, with special powers over the entire island. His job could be simply stated: to eradicate the Mafia.

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Mori started as he meant to go on. In his first two months he made another five hundred arrests, and in January 1926 he moved against the little hill town of Gangi, surrounding it, cutting off its communications with the outside world, making some 450 more arrests, and butchering all its cattle in the town square. This was to be the pattern for the next three and a half years, all over western Sicily. “The Iron Prefect,” as he was called, was fighting the Mafia, and he did not hesitate to use Mafia methods. He cheerfully ordered torture when he considered it necessary, and thought nothing of holding women and children hostage until their menfolk surrendered.

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It was another two years before Mori was recalled to Rome. After well over 11,000 arrests, he had left the judiciary with a huge task. The subsequent Mafia trials—one of which numbered 450 defendants—were to continue until 1932. Meanwhile, Mori published a book of memoirs in which he declared that the Mafia had been finally destroyed, and that Sicily had won its last battle against organized crime.

He was wrong, of course. He had indeed dealt Cosa Nostra a heavy blow, but it was not dead—far, far from it.