Gerlando Alberti

Gerlando Alberti (Paul Williams referred to as Gerlando Albertini) was born on 18 Septemeber 1927 and died 1 February 2012. Alberti was the son of a fruit seller and was born and grew up in Palermo, in the derelict district of Danisinni. He only went to school for four years. Alberti was initiated into the Mafia by Gaetano Filippone. His first test was to steal an entire cheese. In 1956 he was acquitted of a killing for 'lack of evidence'.

Alberti was considered to be an upstart Mafia boss in the shadow of men like Pietro Torretta, Tommaso Buscetta and the La Barbera brothers. They formed the so-called "New Mafia", which adopted new gangster techniques. Alberti's official business was selling textiles, employing a squad of travelling salesmen, a wonderful cover for both his trafficking operations and smuggling jewels and works of art. In 1961 he set up a textile trading business in Milan and formed a cosca in Northern Italy, with bases in Genoa and Milan which gave him access to all the important financial and business hubs in Italy.

Alberti was indicted in July 1963 with 53 other mafiosi after the Ciaculli massacre, which turned the First Mafia War into a war against the Mafia. Together with Tommaso Buscetta, he was suspected of the attack against Angelo La Barbera, one of the protagonists of the war, in Milan in May 1963. At the "Trial of the 114" he was acquitted but sent into internal exile in a village in Lombardy.[5] Alberti, although living in Milan, had been in Palermo at the time of the bomb attack in Ciaculli. Interrogated, he declared that he had been with a woman and could not reveal her name.

In December 1969 he was again in Palermo (while he was supposed to be in exile) when Mafia boss Michele Cavataio was killed by a Mafia hit squad for his double-crossing role in the First Mafia War. At the time, the Carabinieri began to consider Alberti as the boss of a kind of Murder Incorporated for the Sicilian Cosa Nostra.

Alberti was a rising stars of the Mafia in the 1970s. He lived a luxurious lifestyle with apartments in Milan and Naples, he owned a green Maserati and he and his men spent their evenings at nightclubs with expensive women. His position was confirmed on 17 June 1970, when the traffic police in Milan stopped an Alfa Romeo for speeding. In the car were Alberti, Tommaso Buscetta, Salvatore "Ciaschiteddu" Greco, Gaetano Badalamenti and Giuseppe Calderone. The police let them continue their journey. At the time, they were involved in a series of meetings about the future of Cosa Nostra. They decided to set up a new Sicilian Mafia Commission.

On 5 May 1971, Pietro Scaglione, Chief Prosecutor of Palermo, was killed along with his driver Antonino Lo Russo. It was the first time since the end of World War II that the Mafia had carried out a hit on an Italian magistrate. The police rounded up 114 mafiosi who would be tried in the second "Trial of the 114". Scaglione was killed in the district under Alberti’s command. Alberti had arrived from Naples just before the attack and left immediately afterwards. A barman who had confirmed to the police that Alberti was in Palermo while Scaglione’s murder was taking place was kidnapped and killed.

At the second "Trial of the 114" in 1974, Alberti was convicted and sentenced to six years. Sent to the island of Asinara, he escaped in June 1975 but was arrested again in December that year, hiding among Sicilians in Northern Italy.In October 1977 he became a fugitive again when he was supposed to appear before a court in Naples charged with cigarette smuggling.

In March 1974, Alberti was charged in Rome with heroin trafficking as the result of a 30-month investigation. The inquiry started in September 1971 when US Customs agents seized 84 kilos of heroin in a Ford that was sent from Genoa to New York. Alberti and Gaetano Badalamenti were considered to be among the bosses of the international ring.

On 25 August 1980, two heroin-refining labs were discovered on Sicily; a small lab was discovered first in Trabia and later that day a bigger lab was uncovered in Carini that could produce 50 kilograms a week. Alberti was arrested with three Corsican chemists in Trabia, among them André Bousquet an old hand from the French Connection days, who was sent by Corsican gangster Gaetan Zampa. This was in the aftermath of the Nixon administration's War on Drugs which was actually a war on the Corsican mafia's role in the international drug network to consolidate it into the one controlled by the CIA, in Sicily.

Alberti barely survived an attempt on his life while incarcerated in the Ucciardone prison on 9 February 1983. He received two sentences, one for the heroin lab in Trabia and one life sentence for the killing of a hotel owner who had tipped off the police about the lab. He was arrested several more times, including during Operation Gotha. Each time he was released due to ill health, just not sick enough to quit being a mafia don.

Operation Gladio activity

Per Paul Williams:

"In accordance with the final agreement, the capos (Italian's mafia players in Gladio) agreed to pay the babas (Turkish Grey Wolves) for the morphine with shipments of arms, including Leopard tanks, Cobra helicopters fully loaded with rockets and guns, and RPG-7 rocket launchers. The Turks could then sell the arms to insurgent groups (NATO Stay Behind Networks) throughout Poland, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa.

These munitions were provided by the CIA from NATO arsenals in Western Europe and from Horst Grillmayer, a German arms dealer who worked for the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND-Germany's Secret Service and CIA counterpart). The arms trafficking would be managed by Kintex in Bulgaria. The operation, at the start, was tightly run, with Milan as its hub. T

he heroin base was smuggled into Italy by ethnic Albanians via the Balkan route, which ran from Bulgaria through Kosovo and into Albania, Greece, and Yugoslavia. 12 The route continued to Milan, where Salah Al Din Wakkas and Kahim Nasser, intermediaries for the babas, had set up warehouses. The product was picked up at these locations by Nunzio La Mattina and Antonio Totolo in TIR (Transport Internationaux Routiers) trucks and conveyed to nearby ports for shipment to the Sicilian port of Catania.

In Sicily it passed into the hands of Giuseppe Calderone and Nitto Santapaola, who trucked the morphine to laboratories owned by the Gaetano brothers and operated by Gerlando Albertini and his team of Corsican chemists. Once refined, the heroin was loaded on freighters and shipped to the United States by Stibam International, a Milan-based shipping firm. Stibam was located at Via Oldofredi No. 2, a building owned by Banco Ambrosiano.

The firm was headed by sixty-seven-year-old Henri Arsan, known as the "playboy Mafiosi." Fond of gaudy clothes, gold chains, and loose women, the mysterious Arsan, whom various sources identified as either Syrian or Armenian, wore many hats, including that of a CIA operative." Another leading principal in Stibam was General Giuseppe Santovito, the head of Italy's military intelligence agency and prominent P2 member. (and major Operation Gladio player) Santovito, who played a part in the Moro kidnapping, was later responsible for expunging all traces of the Turkish Mafia's presence in St. Peter's Square after the pope was shot.

Almost overnight, Stibam became a multibillion dollar concern, providing drugs to the American Mafia and arms to a vast array of clients, including AK-47 rifles for the Nicaraguan Contras and American missiles for Khomenini regime in Iran. One of the most spectacular of the Stibam undertakings involved it's sale of thermal nuclear weapons to an Arab nation believed to have been either Syria or Saudi Arabia. This operation involved Glauco Partel, described in the Italian press as being a "missile expert" who worked for the National Security Administration, and Eugene Bartholomeus, a US intelligence veteran who served the CIA at Nugent hand bank in Australia."

We also find this tidbit in Paul Williams book during a raid on Stibam:

"But the damage had been done. Palermo and his investigators now turn their attention to stipend and the day-to-day activities of Henry Arsan. They began to receive reports from Ugur Mumcu that served to confirm their suspicions. The Stibam pipeline flowed from Bulgaria to Sicily and it remained protected by some very powerful individuals, including SISMI (Italian intelligence) and NATO officials.

By keeping Stibam under his watchful eye throughout 1991, Palermo could verify that the seemingly innocuous shipping company had shipped more than 4000 kilos of pure heroine to markets throughout Europe in the United States. The net worth of these shipments was $400 billion (in one year). Making inquiries to the CIA Palermo was told that Arsan should not be taken into custody, since he worked under cover for the US Drug Enforcement Administration (meaning he worked undercover for the CIA). The magistrate opted to ignore this disinformation in order to raid on Stibam's headquarters in Milan on November 23, 1982. The raid resulted in the arrest of Arsan and 200 of his leading accomplices in arms trafficking:

Key People

Glauco Partel, the Director of a research center in Rome, and an agent of the US National Security Agency worked with P2 in providing Exocet missiles to the Argentine government during the Falklands war. Even more alarming was the finding that Partel was involved in the sale of three atomic bombs to an unnamed Arab country.

Colonel Massimo Pugliese, a former SID official, negotiated the sale of weapons to the Middle East with SISMI I had sent to Vito. A prominent P2 member, the colonel worked with the CIA in developing and selling a secret super weapon called the "death ray." Stibam records showed that Pugliese kept in close contact with the Reagan Administration through actor Rossano Brazzi.

Enzo Giovanelli, a key supplier of ammunition and goods to the US base of La Maddalena in Sardinia, had sold aircraft, freighters, and flight simulators, with the assistance of NATO officials, to Libya and other Arab nations. He worked in partnership with two fellow members of P2, Flavio Carboni and Francesco Pazienza.

Angelo De Feo, a black-market arms dealer had been involved in the sale of Leopard tanks and a fleet of ships to Libya, along with missiles to Mauritania. The missiles, he testified, were delivered on CIA cargo planes that departed from the Ciampiro military base. De Feo further said that all of Stibam's trafficking in arms was controlled by SISMI."

THE PIZZA CONNECTION

"Palermo was just getting started with the probe. Leading Sicilian Mafiosi were also collared, including Giuseppe Albertini (brother of Gerlando), Mario Cappiello, and Edmondo Pagnoni. The three Men of Honor were involved with the drug smuggling side of Stibam's operations. With the arrests, Palermo learned that Arsan had imported twenty kilos of morphine base every month for processing by the Sicilians in their laboratories." The refined heroin, Palermo realized, was being shipped to Miami, Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York, and other US ports of call, where it was combined with other drug deliveries, to create the Gambino crime family's "Pizza Connection." Palermo further discovered that a great deal of the arms had been sent by Stibam to Skandaron, a small Syrian enclave that was occupied by Turkey. Based on the testimony of the suspects in custody, Palermo issued an arrest warrant for General Santovito, the head of SISMI. Santovito was not only the key figure in protecting the Stibam pipeline, but also a principal player in the strategy of tension and the attempted murder of the pope..."

Sources

Lodato, Quindici anni di mafia, pp. 47-50

Morto Gerlando Alberti detto 'U paccaré', ADN Kronos, February 1, 2012

"Cheats, shoots and thieves", The Scotsman, January 31, 2004

Servadio, Mafioso, pp. 230-42