Gentile fled the country in 1937 while out on $15,000 bail after an arrest for heroin trafficking and returned to Sicily to become a boss in the Sicilian Cosa Nostra.

[2] During Prohibition, Gentile was briefly involved in bootlegging as head of criminal syndicates in Kansas City, Cleveland and Pittsburgh.

[5][6] Back in Sicily, he settled in Palermo, where he ran a fabric shop, and remained there until 1943, when bombings forced him to move to his wife's village, Raffadali near Agrigento.

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 Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories (AMGOT) – in Raffadali the Agrigento province, at first as an interpreter and then from positions of greater responsibility, before returning to Palermo to render his services there.

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.

[14] 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.

[15][16] In 1963 Gentile wrote down his memoirs, "Vita Di Capomafia", with the help of Italian journalist Felice Chilanti.

1][7] The long forgotten book described the internal organization of the Mafia, or "l'onorata società" (the Honoured Society) as Gentile called it, more than 20 years before Tommaso Buscetta emerged as the important first pentito who broke with omertà and told Cosa Nostra's inside story.

[6][17] Gentile's fellow mafiosi did not appreciate his candor and sentenced him to death, but the Catania Mafia clan who had to kill him declined to do so, according to pentito Antonio Calderone.