Word: scelba
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Mario Scelba, Italian Minister of the Interior, gripped the white steering wheel and stepped on the gas. His jet-black car shot ahead along the die-straight highway at 80 m.p.h., leaving his escort of police motorcycles and official limousines far behind. Scelba was racing into the "triangle of death," a section of Emilia in northern Italy, the notorious Red stronghold where scores of men have been killed in violent flare-ups between Communists and antiCommunists. There were plenty of Reds who would have liked to kill Minister Scelba himself...
...Scelba reached Modena, he got out of his car to look carefully at a poster. Under the caption "Scelba is in Emilia. He mustn't get out!" a cartoon showed a mouse with Scelba's face caught in a trap. Grimly Scelba climbed back into his car and drove on-still further into the trap...
...mouse is Sicilian Mario Scelba. A lawyer and Popular Party worker before the war, he has emerged as the strongest anti-Communist force in Premier Alcide de Gasperi's coalition cabinet. He has rebuilt Italy's police into a wellarmed, well-disciplined force nearly a quarter-million strong; his famed celere, or motorized police, whizz through Italian cities in jeeps, cracking down relentlessly on Communist street brawlers. To Communists, he is Public Enemy Numero...
Twenty yards behind the first rampart Scelba's men were confronted by another. In seven hours of fighting, they dismantled five successive barricades, surrounded and crashed into Red headquarters, hauled its last-ditch fighters off to jail...
...week's end the Cominform's offensive seemed well slowed down. "Western democracy," commented Milan's Corriere della Sera, "is proving efficient." But Mario Scelba knew that it was probably only the first, probing phase of igso's big Red push...