It was not a reality, it was not a fact, but a feeling; yet the past was infected and dominated by it until the day when, on the coming of Fascism, the Duce in person broke the evil spell.

[2][3] The 1977 film Il prefetto di ferro, directed by Pasquale Squitieri, is about his fight against the Mafia when he was prefect in Sicily.

[4] 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.

The true lethal blow to the Mafia will be delivered when we are able to make roundups not only among Prickly Pears, but in prefectures, police headquarters, employers' mansions, and why not, some ministries.

Arriving in June 1924, he stayed there until 20 October 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.

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.

As he poetically states, "These operations were carried out in considerable numbers and on a large scale: and the rapidity with which they succeeded one another and the exactness of evidence on which they were based completely strangled the criminal associations which for so many years had flourished with impunity.

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 mediation under which citizens could not approach the authorities except through middlemen..., receiving as a favour that which is due them as their right.

[18] As a senator, Mori continued to follow Sicilian affairs closely, and made sure he was always well informed; but he no longer had much political influence.

Five years later he openly expressed concerns about Mussolini's new alliance with Adolf Hitler,[citation needed] and was isolated inside the Fascist Party from that time on.

[21] With the invasion of Sicily in 1943 and the collapse of the Fascist regime, the Mafia re-established itself, sometimes with the help or ignorance of the Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories (AMGOT).

[15] According to the journalist Michele Pantaleone: By the beginning of the Second World War, the Mafia had dwindled 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 Società the weapons which Fascism had snatched from it.

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

[24] 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.