pay. Pirates that were captured were sometimes sold under the table by Verres as slaves, rather than being executed, as Cicero argues was the proper punishment. To camouflage the fact that this was going on, Cicero further accuses Verres of administratively shuffling around the pirates to cities that had no knowledge of them and substituting others in their place on the execution block. Moreover, Cicero alleges that Verres placed a crony of his, Cleomenes by name, as commander of a fleet expedition to destroy a group of pirates in the area (the reason being, Cicero argues, to keep him out of reach as Verres cuckolded him) and that Cleomenes, due to incompetence, allowed the pirates to enter into Syracuse harbor and sack the town. Further, after the abject failure of Cleomenes' expedition, to keep the blame off himself for allowing the fleet to go out undermanned and ill-led, Verres ordered all the ships' captains except for Cleomenes to be executed. More charges were levelled outside of this naval affair. They include: A scheme of extortion centered on the Third Servile War, in which Verres allegedly would accuse key slaves of wealthy landowners of being in league with the rebelling slaves on the mainland, arresting them and then soliciting large bribes to void the charges; He ordered ships that had valuable cargoes impounded as allegedly belonging to the rebel Quintus Sertorius. Passengers and crew on board the ships were then thrown in a prison created out of an old rock quarry by the tyrant Dionysius I in Syracuse, and were executed without trial as alleged sympathizers or soldiers of Sertorius. one prisoner of Verres' scheme, Publius Gavius, a Roman citizen of Compsa, escaped and protested about Verres' treatment of Roman citizens. Verres had the man flogged, and then he had him crucified, both punishments not to be inflicted on a Roman citizen without a trial in Rome (and even then, an execution by crucifixion was never to be performed on a Roman citizen). To add to the humiliation, Verres was alleged to have placed the cross bearing Gavius on a spot where the coastline of mainland Italy (symbolically the border of Verres' power) could be seen by him as he died. He ordered his lictors and his chief lictor, Sextus in particular, to beat an elderly man of Panormus, a Roman citizen named Gaius Servilius, to near-death for criticizing Verres' rule.