retired to Udine in 1941 (though he never formally left the senate), and he died in Udine one year later. By this stage he was a largely forgotten figure in a country preoccupied with the Second World War. 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. The Mafia pentito Antonio Calderone said the Mori's crackdown had hit the Mafia hard. Some Mafiosi escaped and moved abroad (especially to the United States), such as Joseph Bonanno. Other Mafiosi remained in Sicily and either turned over their fellow Mafiosi (or low-level bandits) to the police or simply went quiet and sought accommodation with the fascist authorities until the end of the regime in Italy. 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). 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. According to the post-war 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. 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. 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, Timothy Newark has written that they mainly targeted the small-time criminals of Sicily and left the big-timers, the real