Free Honoured Society by Norman Lewis Page A

confessions – both in his day and much later. The cassetta was no more than a box, roughly three feet long by two feet wide and eighteen inches deep, and in essence formed a platform to which a human body could be secured while the torturer went to work. As with all such barbarities practised on a large scale, a standardised routine had developed, and had in fact been laid down by an ancient Inquisitional manual for the use of interrogators. Brine having first been poured overthe victim’s naked torso, he was scourged; it having been found that this system was more painful yet left fewer marks of violence than a normal flogging. If flogging did not produce a confession, the next stages were the forcing into the victim’s stomach of huge quantities of salt water, the removal of his fingernails, the removal of strips of skin, and the twisting and crushing of the genitals. The Inquisition had been dealing with dissenters in this way since the days of the Albigenses. Mori merely added a modern touch to the medieval procedure by introducing an electric-shocking machine into the sequence of torment. The cassetta often maimed for life.
    Mori was the subject of extravagant whims. Once, having heard that many Mafia victims had been killed by shots fired from ambush from behind walls, he ordered every wall in Sicily to be reduced to three feet in height within twenty-four hours. He was capable of striking illogicalities, making it an offence punishable with a long term of imprisonment for a man to carry a stabbing or cutting weapon, but allowing herdsmen, as they had always done, to continue to arm themselves with a weapon like a tomahawk. An epidemic followed of violent deaths caused by this instrument.
    In 1927 Mussolini assembled the Fascist Parliament to announce the end of his war against the Mafia. Holding up Mori’s arm, and to the tempestuous applause (as it was always called) of his deputies, Mussolini referred to his Prefect as the ‘incarnation of the pure white flame of Fascist justice’. The work with the butcher’s cleaver in Sicily became ‘heroic surgery, performed with a courageous scalpel’. In his enormously prolonged and detailed report of the surgical process it was noticed that the Duce dwelt with particular relish on operations in Piana dei Greci, and with the fate of ‘that ineffable Mayor who always took advantage of solemn occasions to have himself photographed’. It was clear that even after three years, Don Ciccio’s blow to his vanity still rankled. With well-trained enthusiasm the Press agreed with Mussolini’s optimistic forecast for Sicily’s future. As the Resto del Carlino put it (after a hyperbolical passage of the kind much admired at the time which claimed that ‘flowers miraculously bloomed wherever Mori’s caravan passed’): ‘Theextirpation of the Mafia will open the way to the rise of a middle class, based on the modern technical development of Sicily, which feudalism, served by organised crime and its network of political corruption, has always debarred.’
    But the effect of the Mori repression could only be temporary, as at best it scythed the heads off a crop of weeds when what was needed was a change in the soil and climate that produced the crop. All the more astute members of the Mafia – professional men, who were largely lawyers or doctors – were clever enough to put themselves beyond Mori’s reach by joining the Fascist Party. Other men of influence were allowed to emigrate to the United States; still others to Tunisia – in this case in return for an engagement to stir up what trouble they could for the French in that country. It was the unimportant rank and file of the Honoured Society who went to prison.
    Mori’s intervention had one important effect: the deprivation of Don Calò and company of the enjoyment of their newly-won feudal privileges . When next the leases of the feudal estates came up for auction, prices reverted sharply to the original level –