The Surveillance Office of the court of Santa Maria Capua Vetere (Caserta) has ordered house arrest for health reasons for Michele Zito, exponent of the 'Ndrangheta sentenced to 20 years in prison with a final sentence because he was considered a drug trafficker of the gangs operating in Gioia Tauro, responsible for the importation into Italy of large quantities of drugs from South America.
The request for house arrest was made by Zito's lawyer, a lawyer Angelo Librace, who produced to the San Marino surveillance office – Zito is detained at the Santa Maria Capua Vetere prison – the documentation relating to a whole series of clinical pathologies to which he is suffering, which are incompatible with continued detention in a cell.
The lawyer had asked for Zito to be placed under house arrest in a place of hospitalization suitable to ensure the necessary medical treatment and care also following the various health reports which considered it absolutely essential to place the prisoner in a structure outside the penitentiary circuit, also pointing out the damage, due to illness, to the sense of humanity and the principle of health protection, guaranteed constitutionally. Zito was then sent under house arrest to a therapeutic community located in the Calabrian area.
The 'Ndrangheta exponent was arrested in August 2016 with 17 other people as part of the investigation by the DDA of Reggio Calabria called “Operation Vulcano”. The trial revealed the existence of an organization operating between Italy, South America and the Netherlands, of which Zito was the top, and that the drugs also arrived thanks to the complicity of the commander of a container ship coming from from South America, who, in the pay of drug traffickers, once arrived near the Italian coasts, allowed the transshipment of the narcotic substance to small boats, in order to evade customs controls at the port of Gioia Tauro.