US deports mafia boss to Italy

Italian authorities took into custody a top boss from the Gambino Mafia clan today who was deported from the United States after spending more than two decades in jail for drug trafficking.

Rosario Gambino, 67, arrived at Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci airport on a flight from Miami.

Wearing a grey tracksuit and looking frail he sat in a wheelchair as he was escorted out by police officers.

Gambino, an Italian-born New Jersey resident, was considered a top mobster in the New York-based crime family led by his late cousin Carlo Gambino.

In 1984, he was convicted in a multimillion-dollar conspiracy to sell heroin in southern New Jersey and sentenced to 45 years in jail.

Gambino was linked to the “Pizza Connection” probe, which broke a US$1bn heroin and cocaine smuggling operation that used pizzerias as fronts from 1975 to 1984.

He was released in 2007 and transferred to an immigrant detention centre in California to await expulsion, Italian police said in a statement. It was not immediately clear why the sentence had been reduced.

Gambino has been wanted in Italy since 1980 on separate drug and Mafia-connected charges, and he is expected to face trial.

Before being transferred to a Rome jail, Gambino was served the original 1980 arrest warrant signed by Giovanni Falcone, one of Italy’s top anti-Mafia prosecutors.

Falcone was killed by the Sicilian mob in a 1992 bomb attack, and Gambino’s return coincided with the anniversary of the murder, which was being commemorated across Italy.

Salvatore “Toto” Riina, then the Mafia’s boss of bosses, was arrested in 1993 and later convicted with others of plotting the hit.