Unemployed 54-year-old Marcello Mucci was arrested in a small comune in Florence province on Tuesday morning after he tried to steal copper from the junction boxes of a housing complex.
To fix his financial problems, Mucci worked all night to steal about 20 kilos of copper that he would have worked afterwards into small objects to sell to people door-to-door.
The manager of the housing complex, Paolo Pedrotti, however, was woken up by the commotion caused by Mucci and went to investigate. He found Mucci tearing off copper wires from a junction box in the house next door.
Weilding a knife, Pedrotti threatened to call the police. The two had a small scuffle, in which Mucci sustained a superficial injury on his chest, but managed to escape.
He then took his car and tried to run over Pedrotti who defended himself by throwing a rock to the car's windscreen.
Before Mucci could run away police arrived at the scene and arrested him.
The day after the robbery, Pedrotti discovered that Mucci acted out of severe financial stress and decided to offer him a job instead of reporting the theft. He published an article on an Italian newspaper addressed to Mucci in which he offered him a job as a gardener for 8 Euros an hour. He also offered a cleaning job to Mucci's wife. Mucci positively answered to the posting, accepting the offer.
According to La Repubblica, Mucci, who lost his job as a gardener in 2011 after an injury, was living out of his wife's disability pension, a total of 250 Euros a month.
In an interview for Il Tirreno, Mucci said he applied for jobs but didn't find any. To pay debts, he sold his and his wife's gold and their house's furniture on the internet. They also asked for financial support from Caritas, but the organization could only pay one of their electricity bills, for a total of 200 Euros.
