Free Honoured Society by Norman Lewis

point Don Ciccio asked in a loud voice, ‘Excuse me, Captain, but why all the coppers? Nothing to worry about so long as you’re with me. I’m the one who gives the orders round here!’ It was then that the Duce at last realised that things had reached such a pass in Sicily that even his own chief of police had thought it advisable to place him, the Head of the Government, under Mafia protection.
    Mussolini refused Don Ciccio’s suggestion that he should dispense with his escort – a ‘lack of respect’ which Ciccio Cuccia punished to his own undoing by ordering the town piazza to be emptied when Mussolini made his speech. But where the King had been sulky, Mussolini was grim. As they stood on the balcony of the town hall together, Don Ciccio placed an arm on the Duce’s sleeve, bared a row of black fangs, and signalled to the photographers to expose their plates. When Mussolini began his harangue he found himself addressing a group of about twenty village idiots, one-legged beggars, bootblacks, and lottery-ticket sellers specially picked by Don Ciccio to form an audience. The fearful jutting of the Dictator’s jaw had not yet become a familiar danger-sign, so Don Ciccio had no warning of what was in store for him. It is unlikely that he even bothered to listen to what Mussolini had to say, although he would have been wiser to have done so, because the Duce’s speech amounted to a declaration of war on the Mafia. Weeks later he repeated in substance in the Fascist Parliament what he had said at Piana dei Greci, but by that time Don Ciccio was already in prison.
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    Of all the bombastic and beribboned figures that strutted on to the Italian stage in the first years of Fascism, none outdid the Prefect Mori, who was given the task of liquidating the Mafia, in terms of pathological delusions of grandeur.
    Cesare Mori had come up in thirty years from being a policeman on a beat to the office of Chief of Police, and second only in importance in the hierarchy to the Duce himself. For all that, he remained at heart a simple policeman, who rated success in an operation such as this purely on thebasis of the number of arrests he could make.
    The Prefect had been present on the fateful occasion of Mussolini’s discomfiture at Piana dei Greci, had been physically pushed aside by the preposterous Don Ciccio, and had heard himself referred to as a sbirro , a term of opprobrium sometimes applied to policemen in Sicily and roughly the equivalent of the French vache .
    Mori, a man with a strong sense of the theatre, gave himself the pleasure of carrying out Don Ciccio’s arrest in person, calling on him one day with a pressing invitation to cocktails at what turned out to be the Ucciardone prison. Thereafter, armed with the Duce’s carte blanche, he put into operation what he sometimes jokingly called his ‘Plan Attila’. Unimpeded by the legal hair-splittings of democratic justice, Mori arrested suspects by the thousand. Victims of hearsay and denunciation were put in chains and sent off by the shipload to the penal islands. The Mori terror provided a never-equalled opportunity for the settling of old personal feuds and for the elimination of rivals in business and in love. In so far as the Fascist courts administered justice at all it was rough, muddled and perfunctory, and there were many instances of two or even three persons being condemned and imprisoned for the same crime. Mori’s descent on a village sometimes meant the arrest and removal of the entire male population, and it was discovered that the only hope of mollifying him when a visit was expected was to erect a triumphal arch bearing the words AVE CAESAR.
    The investigating methods favoured by the Prefect were those employed by the Inquisition, and, although illegal for over a century, still practised in secret in the dungeons of the police. Mori is credited with the re-introduction of the cassetta , employed in hundreds if not thousands of cases, to extort