making Joe Masseria one of the top mafia bosses in New York. Gentile continued his criminal career in New York now aligning himself with the group of Charles "Lucky" Luciano. Gentile became involved with Luciano's narcotics operations. He was arrested in New Orleans in 1937 on drug charges. Soon after his arrest Gentile fled the country while out on $15,000 bail and returned to Sicily. Return to Sicily In Sicily, Gentile rose to a high-level position in the Sicilian Mafia. His power and influence grew after the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943 (Operation Husky as he helped the military set up its civil administration – the American Military Government of Occupied Territories (AMGOT) – in the Agrigento province. He became involved in intelligence and the Sicilian separatist movement. Gentile claimed to have been approached by U.S. special agent Max Brod to support the monarchy in the referendum on June 2, 1946. Later, he became an important canvasser for politicians from the Christian Democrat party (Democrazia Cristiana, DC), who quarrelled for his support. Gentile later supported Christian Democrat Giuseppe La Loggia, who would become president of the autonomous region of Sicily from 1956–58. When Lucky Luciano was extradited to Italy in 1946, he once again teamed up with Gentile in organizing drug routes to the US. Gentile had very good connections with well-known drug traffickers in Sicily. His son was married to the daughter of Pietro Davì, one of the leading figures in cigarette smuggling and illicit drug trade in Palermo in the 1950s. Gentile and Luciano met New York gangster Joe Biondo in 1949. Biondo supervised the Gambino Family's heroin traffic. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Gentile continued to remain a prominent figure in the Sicilian underworld. He was erroneously believed by some to have replaced Calogero Vizzini as the head of the Sicilian Mafia. During the 1960s, Gentile provided information to the KGB, through journalist Leonid Kolosov. Gentile revealed the existence of Piano Solo, a 1964 plan for an anti-communist coup in Italy with the involvement of the Italian intelligence agency SIFAR, the Carabinieri armed forces, and the CIA. Kolosov passed on these revelations to the journalists Eugenio Scalfari and Lino Jannuzzi, who publicly disclosed them in the magazine L'Espresso in May 1967. Memoirs In 1963 Gentile wrote down his memoirs, "Vita Di Capomafia", with the help of Italian journalist Felice Chilanti. The long forgotten book described the