Honoured Society by Norman Lewis

despite the strength of the ties uniting both organisations, all attempts by the American brothers to bring about a reconciliation failed. Allegra claims to have been disillusioned by the unseemly brawling over the division of loot. It was about this time, too, that his personal interests seemed not to have been fostered by his Mafia connections as well as he would have wished.
    In the last free election to be held in Italy before the installation of Fascism, the Mafia, departing from its usual practice of supporting the party most likely to succeed and then getting a stranglehold on it, had decided on a two-way bet. There had been a division of opinion on the Fascists’ chances of coming to power, so it was arranged that, with Mafia backing, an equal number of candidates from the democratic and Fascist lists should be returned to Parliament. Allegra had been flattered by the suggestion that he should stand as a democratic candidate, but to his mortification his candidature turned out to be a dummy one, and the full organisational support was given to his Fascist opponent who defeated him with an insultingly large majority.
    A worse blow to his prestige was to follow. A vacancy occurred for thepost of medical superintendent of a group of hospitals, and Allegra applied to the counsellor of his particular ‘family’ to assist him in obtaining the appointment. He mentions this in his confession quite flatly, and with almost a kind of innocence. After all, it was taken for granted that such appointments went to the mafioso applicant. Unfortunately for Allegra, there happened to be a second man of honour who had his eye on this particular plum, and although Allegra says that his rival’s qualifications were faked to the extent that he did not even have a medical degree, he was senior to Allegra in the Mafia, so he got it.
    Allegra’s last exploit before he vanishes from sight is an exceptionally grubby one, but it illuminates the limbo into which Sicily fell after Mori had smashed the Mafia, but had failed to substitute law and order for the lopsided Roman peace imposed by the Honoured Society.
    The Mafia had never objected to banditry, but had kept it strictly under control, turning it on and off like a tap as Mafia strategy demanded – and, of course, sharing in the profits of the bandits. But the new crop of bandits – coming up like mushrooms in the compost of a social environment which Mussolini had left unchanged – were unmanageable in the Mafia’s punch-drunk condition.
    A bandit called Ponzio – a petty Giuliano of his day – was terrorising the countryside of Castelvetrano and had even begun to carry out his depredations in the doctor’s home town itself. He was a daring fellow, who went about armed to the teeth, and, surrounding himself with a gang of young ruffians, was ready to turn his hand to any form of criminality from sheep-stealing in the streets of Castelvetrano to kidnapping a carabinieri captain. This last achievement brought on unwelcome police reprisals. As Allegra puts it, ‘Ponzio was a grave nuisance to people’ – such as himself, he suggests – ‘who only asked to be allowed to live in peace.’
    Ponzio’s hide-out was in the neighbouring village of Ghibellina, and Allegra received a visit from a member of the Mafia ‘family’ of that area, who discussed the problem with him. The trouble was that Prefect Mori had left the ‘family’ so weakened that there was little it could do about Ponzio – at least without calling in help. The man from Ghibellina mentioned that they had even been bereft of their chief: ‘He had retiredinto private life.’ It seems, although Allegra does not say so, that a Mafia court was held in his clinic, at which Ponzio was formally sentenced to death. The question that arose was how the sentence was to be carried out.
    Mafia death sentences are normally executed only by the very lowest grades of probationer-members of the association – the picciotti