Cesare Mori

The Honourable
Cesare Mori
Member of the Italian Senate
In office
10 January 1928 – 5 July 1942
Monarch Victor Emmanuel III
Prefect of Palermo
In office
1 November 1925 – 1 June 1929
Prefect of Trapani
In office
2 June 1924 – 12 October 1925
Prefect of Bologna
In office
8 February 1921 – 20 August 1922
Police commissioner of Castelvetrano
In office
1909 – January 1915
Personal details
Born (1871-12-22)22 December 1871
Pavia, Kingdom of Italy
Died 5 July 1942(1942-07-05) (aged 70)
Udine, Friuli, Kingdom of Italy
Nationality Italian
Political party National Fascist Party
Spouse(s) Angelina Salvi (m. 1897–1942); her death
Alma mater University of Palermo (Hd)
Profession Soldier, police officer, politician
Religion Roman Catholicism
Military service
Nickname(s) "The Iron Prefect"
Allegiance  Kingdom of Italy
Service/branch  Royal Italian Army
Years of service 1895–1898
Rank Soldier
Battles/wars None

Cesare Mori (Pavia, December 22, 1871 – Udine, July 6, 1942) was a prefect (prefetto) before and during the Fascist period in Italy. He is known in Italy as the "Iron Prefect" (Prefetto di Ferro) because of his iron-fisted campaigns against the Mafia on Sicily in the second half of the 1920s.

Early years

Mori was born in Pavia and grew up in an orphanage and was only recognised by his natural parents in October 1879 at the age of seven. He studied at the Turin Military Academy. However, he married a girl, Angelina Salvi, who did not have the dowry stipulated by military regulations of the time, and had to resign.[1] He joined the police, serving first in Ravenna, then Castelvetrano in the province of Trapani (Sicily) – where he made his name capturing the bandit Paolo Grisalfi – before moving to Florence in 1915 as vice-quaestor.[2]

At the end of the First World War, the situation of Sicilian criminality got worse when war veterans joined gangs of bandits. In 1919 Mori was sent back to Sicily as the head of special forces against brigandage.[3] In his roundups, Mori distinguished himself for his energetic and radical methods. At Caltabellotta he arrested more than 300 people in one night.[4] The press wrote of a "lethal blow to the Mafia", but Mori said to a member of his staff :

These people haven't understood yet that brigands and the Mafia are two different things. We have hit the first, who are undoubtedly the most visible aspect of Sicilian criminality, but not the most dangerous one. The true lethal blow to the Mafia will be given when we are able to make roundups not only among Indian figs, but in prefectures, police headquarters, employers' mansions, and why not, some ministries.[4]

In 1920, he returned to the mainland and served in Turin as quaestor, followed by Rome and Bologna. In 1921 he was prefect of Bologna, and was one of the few members of the forces of law and order to oppose the organised thuggery (squadrismo) of the Fascist movement. Mori was removed and sent to Bari. He retired with his wife to Florence in 1922, when the Fascist leader Benito Mussolini took over the government after the March on Rome.[5]

Appointed in Sicily

Due to his reputation as a man of action, he was recalled to active service in 1924 by the Minister of the Interior, Luigi Federzoni. In the same year Mori adhered to the fascist party.

He was successively appointed prefect of Trapani, arriving there in June 1924. He stayed there until October 20, 1925, when Mussolini appointed him prefect of Palermo, with special powers over the entire island of Sicily and the mission of eradicating the Mafia by any means possible. In the telegram, Mussolini wrote to Mori:

Your Excellency has carte blanche, the authority of the State must absolutely, I repeat absolutely, be re-established in Sicily. If the laws still in force hinder you, this will be no problem, as we will draw up new laws.[6]

Mussolini’s drive against the Mafia, the story goes, followed an official visit to Sicily in May 1924 during which he felt insulted by the Mafioso Francesco Cuccia, who publicly proclaimed that Mussolini did not need a police escort because the mere presence of Cuccia would protect him. Mussolini felt humiliated and outraged.[7][8] However, according to scholar Christopher Duggan, the reason was more political rather than personal: the Mafia threatened and undermined his power in Sicily, and a successful campaign would strengthen him as the new leader, legitimising and empowering his rule.[9]

The fight against the Mafia

Mori in Black shirt

Mori took up his post in Palermo in November 1925 and remained in office until 1929. Within the first two months he arrested over five hundred men, a number that would only grow in the following years.[10] In January 1926, he undertook what was probably his most famous action, the occupation of the village of Gangi, a stronghold of various criminal gangs. Using carabinieri and police forces he ordered house-to-house searches, picking up bandits, small-time Mafia members and various suspects who were on the run. He did not hesitate to lay siege to towns, use torture, or take women and children as hostages to oblige suspects to give themselves up. These harsh methods earned him the nickname of "Iron Prefect".

Mori understood the basis of Mafia power. In order to defeat the phenomenon, he felt it necessary to "forge a direct bond between the population and the state, to annul the system of intermediation under which citizens could not approach the authorities except through middlemen..., receiving as a favour that which is due them as their right."[11] Mori’s methods were sometimes similar to those of the Mafia. He did not just arrest the bandits, but sought to humiliate them as well. If he could exhibit a strong central authority to rival the mafia, the people would see that the Mafia was not their only option for protection.[10]

Mori's inquiries brought evidence of collusion between the Mafia and influential members of the State apparatus and the Fascist party. His position, however, became more precarious. Some 11,000 arrests are attributed to Mori’s rule in Palermo.[12] That led to massive amounts of paperwork in order to prepare for the trials, which may have been partially responsible for his dismissal.[13][14]

Mussolini had already nominated Mori as a senator in 1928, and in June 1929 he was relieved of his duty. The Fascist propaganda proudly announced that the Mafia had been defeated.[15]

Final years

As a senator, Mori continued to follow Sicilian affairs closely, and made sure he was always well informed. However, he no longer had any influence and was essentially a marginal figure. He wrote his memoirs in 1932. In 1937 Mori expressed concerns about Mussolini's new alliance with Hitler and was isolated inside the fascist party since then.

He retired to Udine in 1941 and died there one year later, a forgotten figure in a country by then in the throes of the Second World War.

Mori’s impact

At the time and since, the general perception was that Mori had smashed the Mafia. Sicily's murder rate sharply declined in the early 1930s.[16] The Mafia turncoat Antonio Calderone said the Mori's crackdown had hit the Mafia hard.[17] Some Mafiosi escaped and moved abroad (especially to the United States), such as Joseph Bonanno. Other remained in Sicily and either turned over their fellow Mafiosi (or low-level bandits) to the police or simply went quiet, seeking accommodation with Fascist authorities until the end of the Fascist regime in Italy.[18]

With the invasion of Sicily in 1943 and the collapse of the Fascist regime, the Mafia restored itself, sometimes with the help or ignorance of the Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories (AMGOT). AMGOT needed the support of local elites in order to govern. Because of their local authority, their record of persecution under the Fascist regime, and their willingness to cooperate with the Allies, noted Mafiosi – such as Calogero Vizzini and Giuseppe Genco Russo – were appointed to head local administrations in many of the towns in western Sicily.[11]

According to the post-war journalist Michele Pantaleone:

By the beginning of the Second World War, the Mafia was restricted to a few isolated and scattered groups and could have been completely wiped out if the social problems of the island had been dealt with ... the Allied occupation and the subsequent slow restoration of democracy reinstated the Mafia with its full powers, put it once more on the way to becoming a political force, and returned to the Onorata Societa the weapons which Fascism had snatched from it.[19]

In Leonardo Sciascia's novel The Day of the Owl ("Il giorno della civetta"), published in 1961, the main character, a captain of the Carabinieri, recalls the great popularity of Cesare Mori's results among Sicilian common people, and the widespread nostalgia for Fascism among Sicilians at the time.[20]

However some writers today have questioned the effectiveness and value of the methods used by Mori against the Mafia. While his methods were certainly effective, at least in the short term, Newark has written that they mainly targeted the small-time criminals of Sicily and left the big-timers, the real Mafia bosses, relatively unscathed, driving the Mafia underground, but not stamping it out.[21] Judith Chubb says, “Fascism succeeded in stamping out the Mafia as a criminal organization by providing a more efficient substitute. It succeeded in monopolizing political power and the use of violence without, however, transforming the social and economic conditions in which the Mafia had flourished. It was thus no surprise that the Mafia re-emerged as soon as Fascism fell.”[11] However politicians like Giorgio Almirante wrote on Il Borghese in the 1970s that the Sicilian society was really transformed by the full destruction of the Mafia in the 1930s, but the destruction of World War II and the imposition of the "antifascism" (that criticized everything obtained by fascism, even against "Mafiosi") together with the return of the (Allies-sponsored) mafia bosses -who took refuge in the USA- was the culprit of the new flourish of Mafia in post-war Sicily.

In popular culture

Mori's campaign against the Mafia was the subject of a 1977 film, Il prefetto di ferro, directed by Pasquale Squitieri, starring Giuliano Gemma and Claudia Cardinale, with music by Ennio Morricone.[22]

Biography

See also

References

  1. ↑ Newark, Mafia Allies, p. 28
  2. ↑ Dickie, Cosa Nostra, pp. 176-78
  3. ↑ Newark, Mafia Allies, p. 17
  4. 1 2 Petacco, Il prefetto di ferro, p. ?
  5. ↑ Newark, Mafia Allies, pp. 20-21
  6. ↑ Petacco, L'uomo della provvidenza, p. 190.
  7. ↑ Newark, Mafia Allies, p. 23
  8. ↑ Dickie, Cosa Nostra, p. 182
  9. ↑ Duggan, Fascism and the Mafia, p. 119
  10. 1 2 Governmental Floundering and the Survival of the Mafia, by Dominica Tarica, The Florence Newspaper
  11. 1 2 3 The Mafia and Politics, by Judith Chubb, Cornell Studies in International Affairs, Occasional Papers No. 23, 1989
  12. ↑ Duggan, Fascism and the Mafia, p. 245
  13. ↑ Duggan, Fascism and the Mafia, p. 225
  14. ↑ Newark, Mafia Allies, pp. 45-46
  15. ↑ Newark, Mafia Allies, pp. 47-48
  16. ↑ Lupo, History of the Mafia, p. 186
  17. ↑ Dickie, Cosa Nostra, pp. 175-76
  18. ↑ Duggan, Fascism and the Mafia, p. 189
  19. ↑ Pantaleone, The Mafia and Politics, p. 52, quoted in The Mafia Restored: Fighters for Democracy in World War II Archived April 17, 2011, at the Wayback Machine., The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, Alfred W. McCoy.
  20. ↑ Sciascia,The Day of the Owl, p. ?
  21. ↑ Newark, Mafia Allies, p. 203
  22. ↑ Il Prefetto di Ferro (1977), New York Times Movies

Sources

External links

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