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

The 67-year-old Rosario Gambino arrived at Rome’s Leonardo da Vinci airport on a flight from Miami. Wearing a gray jumpsuit 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.

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