25. The Man Who Curbed the World’s Most Influential Crime Syndicates
Italian dictator Benito Mussolini has gone down in history as a blowhard and a buffoon. He had vainglorious delusions of restoring Italy to the glories of Ancient Rome, and of creating a modern Italian empire to rival that of the Caesars. He ended up biting more than he could chew, and plunged his unprepared country into World War II. It ended in disaster for Italy, for Mussolini’s Fascist regime, and for Mussolini himself. He was captured by Italian Partisans at war’s end, was tried, executed, and his body was strung up by the heels for angry crowds to jeer at.
However, one thing that Mussolini did right was to curb the mafia and organized crime – a feat that no Italian government before or since has pulled off. The Sicilian Mafia and Camorra throve – and still do – in Italy’s corrupt political culture. They worked the system and mastered its intricacies, subverted politicians, police, and judges by bribes or threats. They bent officials to their will until organized crime became a state within the state. Mussolini crushed those crime syndicates.