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An Italian police handout of nine
suspected Mafia members accused of
drug trafficking in Sicily. The handout
was part of a 2008 international
operation codenamed “Old Bridge”,
which targeted 50 suspects in New
York and 30 in Sicily.Fascist enforcers
The most successful efforts to
quash the Sicilian Mafia were
initiated in 1925 by Cesare Mori,
a prefect of Palermo operating
under the Fascist government of
Benito Mussolini. His tactics were
simple – the use of authoritarian
power in conjunction with strong-
arm tactics. Mori, who did not
believe that the Mafia was a
unified structure, set up an
“interprovincial” anti-Mafia police
force and arrested 11,000 Sicilians,
including many mafiosi and bandits
but also innocent civilians. He
processed them through mass
trials, which he concealed from
the press. Eventually, Mussolini
could proclaim to the nation that
organized crime had been crushed
in Italy. During this time,
approximately 500 mafiosi fled to
the US, where they established the
Sicilian mob in America.
The Allied invasion of Sicily in
1943 inadvertently restored the
Mafia to power. When the fascist
government was overthrown, a
power vacuum ensued, particularly
at municipal levels. This allowed
the Mafia to step back into the
positions they had occupied before
Mussolini’s rise.Resolving disputes
During a 1957 trip to Sicily,
New York mobster Joe Bonanno
suggested that their European
counterparts establish a committee
to resolve disputes. Prominent
mafiosi Tommaso Buscetta,
Gaetano Badalamenti, and
Salvatore Greco began drafting the
rules, and the following year, the
first Sicilian Mafia Commission
was formed in Palermo. The
commission intended to resolvedisputes among families and
individuals, to determine
punishment for breaching the rules
of the Mafia, and to control the
use of violence against members
of government, lawyers, and ❯❯See also: The Triads 146–49 ■ The Beer Wars 152–53 ■ The Yakuza 154–59ORGANIZED CRIME
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