Editing Gerlando Alberti (section)

==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: