AMSTERDAM CONNECTION OF THE ITALIAN MAFIA ARRESTED IN BRAZIL
THE FALL OF 'THE PIG'
While he was arrested in Brazil on suspicion of drug trafficking, Dutch police raided his home in Amsterdam. For years, Aldo G. was the capital city connection of the mafia from his native region and was seen as 'the pig' within the organization. How a restaurant owner on the canal, once convicted in the Netherlands for a double murder, turned out to be an international coke trader.

TEXT JOOST VAN DER WEGEN, PHOTOS YOUTUBE EA


They are paintings from the crime films The Godfather and Scarfacethose officers found on February 2 of this year in a house of Aldo G. in Amsterdam. The team of the 'Quick Response Unit' is conducting the raid on behalf of the Anti Mafia team of the Dutch police. She is helping to complete a two-year international investigation into a drug line between Brazil, the Netherlands and Italy. Aldo G. himself is not there. In connection with this, it is held on the other side of the world, in Brazil. During the operation - code-named Skipper - 26 arrests are made, most of them in Italy. The police also found 25 kilos of cocaine, 90,000 euros in cash, and several firearms at various locations. She seizes 4 million euros. It is not an innocent group to which G. seems to belong. And apparently he's not a small fish himself.

Aldo looks angry and seems bitter at the images showing how he is taken away by the Brazilian Federal Police after his arrest. For days, agents have been posting for the luxury 'fazenda' in the newly developed development complex by G. in the coastal tourist town of Recife. His villa park is said to have been built with the money laundered from the drug trade.

Due to an extensive video surveillance system, the police officers cannot directly invade their target. But when G. drives out of the gate after a few days by car, it hits the spot. He is being arrested. A column of SUVs takes Aldo G. to the station.

At that time, the Italian extradition request for G. has already been completed on the court's table. He will undoubtedly return involuntarily to his native country soon.

The friendly and Portuguese speaking Mr. Aldo, as he is known in his neighborhood, thought he could do it in Brazil. But apparently he is not as untouchable as he thought he was.

The Fourth Mafia
Alduino G. is born in Italy on April 8, 1962. He grows up in a town in the Apulia region, on the map located at the tip of the heel of the Italian boot. During his childhood, Aldo's family left the poverty-stricken south of Italy to live in Germany.

At the age of 12 something drastic happens in his life. His father is dying of cancer. A year later he leaves high school, after which he goes to work in the factory and later in the hospitality industry. At the age of 20, Aldo leaves for the Netherlands, where he starts working as a restorer in Amsterdam. He runs a Chinese restaurant, and later opens his own Italian trattoria called Le Delizie, on the Vijzelgracht. If that turns out to be successful, he will open another one later, in Amsterdam South. He lives with his wife and three children in Amstelveen.


But G. is not exactly blemish-free then. In the 1990s, he was sentenced to seven years in prison in Belgium for cocaine smuggling. In prison he comes into contact with criminals from his old native region, who later visit him in Amsterdam. At that time, a separate branch of the mafia has just emerged in that native region: the Sacra Corona Unita (SCU), also called the 'Fourth Mafia' (next to the Cosa Nostra in Sicily, the 'Ndrangheta in Calabria, and the Camorra Naples). The SCU is a criminal organization consisting of approximately two thousand members in those years. They are generally guilty of drug smuggling, trafficking in women, arms trade and fraud.

Support Center Amsterdam
When the 'men of honor' of the SCU are increasingly hunted in the fight against the mafia in Italy, they discover Amsterdam as a suitable hiding place in the 1990s. In Amsterdam, Aldo's restaurant quickly became a popular 'point of support' for them.

As a result, Aldo comes into contact with an Italian mafia member who has fled. His name is Giuseppe Lezzi. This one is not doing well with the restaurant owner. He pressures him and begins to take Aldo his money. He also wants to take over his restaurants from him.

For a moment, Aldo's worries seem to have disappeared when Lezzi is arrested and ends up in the Dutch cell. But Aldo then has to deal with an even more violent leader of the organization, named Filippo Cerfeda. A man who goes by the nickname "Saddam" and who says of himself that he kills without a problem. He is said to have killed about twenty people in Italy.

Years later, as a regret in a mafia trial, he does not bother with the Italian justice: "If I wanted to kill someone, it was done in one second." In Amsterdam he lives up to his violent name.

THE GUNS ARE CLEANING THE FIAT PUNTO WITH THE VICTIMS 'BLOOD IN THE ALDO GARAGE. THEY USE BEER WHEN WATER LACK

Sniffed through
Aldo G. is also humiliated in his relationship with Cerfeda. The criminal uses a restaurant owned by G. as a clubhouse, where food is not always paid for, and sometimes a check is made in the till. G. later declares to a court that he was afraid of the ever-sniffed Cerfeda and his entourage. He calls it dangerous and poisonous. "I had better keep him close because he was insane."

The members of the SCU cannot be happier in the Netherlands at that time. They visit brothels on the assembly line, keep several girlfriends, while the Dutch judiciary does not stand in the way of their criminal activities.

In interrogations of the later 'pentito' Cerfeda, the Italian judges are also surprised that the criminals simply keep the coke they trade in in bags, without having to be afraid of raids. The only practical problem that mafiosi describe at the time is the Amsterdam wheel clamp. The criminals complain that they have to constantly change parking places in which they hide weapons or drugs, in order not to be dragged away and caught by the parking police.


The villa park of Aldo G. in Recife.
New drug lines
It is around 2000 that G. makes a trip to Brazil with Cerfeda, where he makes the first contacts for the later drug lines.

The Portuguese speaking G. loves the exotic atmosphere in that country.

He comes to rest there, but also does 'whores and cords'.

It will not be long before the first drug shipments will be made from Brazil to the Netherlands. But things soon go completely wrong when the violence between the individual Mafia members gets horribly out of hand. First it is Giuseppe Lezzi who is killed in a house on the Churchilllaan by the seconds of Cerfeda. Just before that, Lezzi had been freed from prison in Veenhuizen by his clan mates. His sentence was almost over, but he feared being extradited to his motherland, and so he escaped.

Cerfeda is not happy with Lezzi's return to the city.

Because the latter is trying to reclaim his position, including the cocaine line that Cerfeda ran.

But Lezzi's comeback does not last long. He is ambushed and shot in his house, with a pistol with a silencer.


During Operation Skipper, the police find coke, cash and weapons.
"He just didn't die," Cerfeda would later explain to the Italian justice of the murder.

The mafia boss even says that after this massacre he helped mop up the blood in the house. His body is said to have been buried in the Amsterdamse Bos after the murder, but his remains have never been found.

Aldo is not unhappy with Lezzi's violent end of life. He sees his death as one less problem in his life. But he is not getting rid of Cerfeda for the time being. Together they make another trip to Brazil, about which Aldo claims afterwards that it was not voluntary. Aldo knows people in the city of Santos, and as mentioned, speaks fluent Portuguese. That suits Cerfeda well. But their visits eventually lead to a drug deal that is almost fatal for Aldo.

Stealing drugs
It's all about twenty kilos of cocaine arriving by ship from Brazil to the port of Antwerp on February 21, 2002. The two Brazilian criminals who accompany the drug transport will not retell the story. Cerfeda has decided that he will make a rip deal.

He wants the drugs, but is not going to pay for it. And no one is allowed to retell it.

Cerfeda lives up to its name.

On the A12 Near Woerden, two Italian soldiers from 'Saddam' shoot the Brazilians at close range. They leave the bodies on the roadside and also forget to bring the murder weapon.


The Fiat Punto, which still has the brains and blood of the victims on it, is cleaned by the gunmen in Aldo's garage in Amsterdam. In the absence of water in the garage, beer is used. One of the two perpetrators has to vomit during the job. For Aldo, the shooting gets a very nasty ending.

The bodies are found the next day, and the police start an investigation. But still without result. When Cerfeda is arrested and extradited two years later by the Italian judicial authorities as the head of the SCU, he starts to state about it. As a so-called regret he claims that Aldo G. was guilty of the liquidation of the two Brazilians in the Netherlands. G. would have ordered the double murder.

And although there is only one means of evidence, and there are also indications that Aldo was not involved - for example, he called the number of one of the victims several times at the request of a wife, while he had already been killed - he is prosecuted by the Dutch judicial authorities. G. is transported to court like a real capo in our country: handcuffed, in a car with blinded windows, complete with taped ski goggles. It leads to the worst outcome imaginable for Aldo G. The court in Utrecht sentenced him to life imprisonment.

NOT RARELY HAD ALDO TOGETHER TEN THOUSANDS OF EUROS. 'I TRIED TO DISTANCE, BUT IT WASN'T WORKED . I'M AN FEARED HILL '

Blackmailed
It is the lawyers Geertjan van Oosten and Wim Anker who later successfully challenge this rather remarkable legal decision by Dutch jurisprudence. She succeeds by disproving Fillipo Cerfeda's statements. They discover that this 'bad mafia movie villain' as they call Cerfeda is not very precise in confessing an endless series of crimes. He often tends to exaggerate. He also only comes with his accusation against G. after he has been granted the status of regret, which gives him an interest in accusing as many people as possible as seriously as possible. The Court of Appeal in 2008 also understands this. On appeal, she acquits Aldo G. He told the judges that he had been used and extorted for years by members of the SCU. Unfortunately for G. he is not allowed to leave prison after his victory in court. He is not acquitted for drug trafficking: he is sentenced to seven years in prison. The judge accuses him of acting as a mediator for the Italian drug mafia. So G.'s name is not purified in that area. During an interview in prison in 2009, Aldo told journalists Koen Voskuil and Stan de Jong that he is particularly sorry that he has lost his beloved and successful restaurants in Amsterdam. He can cry about it, and blames the SCU 'scum' that left a trail of death and destruction for years. The judge accuses him of acting as a mediator for the Italian drug mafia. So G.'s name is not purified in that area. During an interview in prison in 2009, Aldo told journalists Koen Voskuil and Stan de Jong that he is especially sorry that he has lost his beloved and successful restaurants in Amsterdam. He can cry about it, and blames the SCU 'scum' that left a trail of death and destruction for years. The judge accuses him of acting as a mediator for the Italian drug mafia. So G.'s name is not purified in that area. During an interview in prison in 2009, Aldo told journalists Koen Voskuil and Stan de Jong that he is particularly sorry that he has lost his beloved and successful restaurants in Amsterdam. He can cry about it, and blames the SCU 'scum' that left a trail of death and destruction for years.

Fled to Milan
But the police in the Netherlands will have known for a long time about the large-scale drug trade that Aldo has been involved in for years. With the proceeds he would even have financed his second restaurant, on Amsterdam's Scheldestraat.

The question therefore arises whether Aldo has indeed fallen victim to the intimidations of the Sacra Corona Unita. In his statements to the police, he admits that, in addition to the earnings from his restaurants, he sometimes traded a kilo of coke, but that he was mainly threatened and intimidated by the mafiosi from his motherland.

Which he says he only provided 'services', such as dinners, cars and houses. Aldo was even seen as 'the pig' within the organization by the Italian gangsters. This is the lowest status imaginable in mafia circles.

G. also says that these men knew where his mother and sister lived and threatened to harm them if he did not cooperate. G. was further known as 'the bank': if one of the mafiosi needed money, they would pay it off from G. Not infrequently this involved tens of thousands of euros. “I tried to distance myself, but that didn't work. I'm a scaredy-cat. ”


Aldo G. in conversation with his lawyers Geertjan van Oosten (left) and Wim Anker.
Aldo states that he could not even morally make a decision to kill people, such as the two Brazilian drug dealers. During the trial, one of his lawyers stated that after hearing the news of the double murder on the radio, he burst into tears and fled to relatives in Milan in fear of Cerfeda.

Life destroyed
To the two journalists who visit him, G .: “My life has been destroyed. What I have built with those restaurants is gone. For good. Fortunately, I have a wonderful wife who supports me, just like my children. ”

When visiting time is over, G. wants to say the following to the two: “I became a Buddhist. I meditate every day. ”

He would have returned to work in restaurants when his sentence was over. Until the police arrest him on February 2, 2020 as part of the extensive Italian drug investigation in Recife, Brazil, and raid his premises in Amsterdam. The paintings of world-famous figures from gangster films in his house illustrate what has become of 58-year-old Aldo G. Whether or not he was intimidated by his criminal compatriots, he will be remembered as a man who has been involved in drug crime for most of his life. Aldo G. was the Mokum connection of the Italian mafia. 

FROM LIFE TO ACQUITTAL FOR ALDO G.
It was a milestone in Wim Anker's career, but also a historic event in crime history. The well-known Frisian criminal lawyer still remembers well how, together with colleague Geertjan van Oosten, he managed to get Aldo G.'s life sentence reversed in court on appeal to an acquittal. The lawyer was responsible for the plea about the lifelong nature of the sentence. Anchor about this:

"I had often been nibbled by a high conviction, but this was really spectacular."

The sentence of life had been imposed on Aldo G. by the court in Utrecht for the alleged double murder of two Brazilian cocaine smugglers. "The evidence wasn't exactly abundant," says Anker. With his colleague, and the Attorney General of the Court, he traveled to Italy to interrogate witness and mafia regret Fillipo Cerfeda in the case. "He seemed icy and creepy," the two counsel later explain during the appeal.

After that, the Court in Amsterdam acquitted Aldo G.

He found Cerfeda's testimony in his role as an agent of regret implausible. This is evident from the testimony of Cerfeda's right-hand man, Fabio Franco, who indicated that Cerfeda was greatly exaggerating in his statements. The Court also does not believe the stated motives for the murders.

The story was that G. would want to erase traces and he would also have been in need of money.

But none of that was the case.

Wim Anker remembers his client Aldo G., but he did not get to know him well during the trial: "He was a closed man, who did not show the back of his tongue."