The mob boss also pointed out the sheer hypocrisy of the proceedings, knowing how the father of his main inquisitor had amassed his fortune. “The only mob I know of are the Irish hoodlums,” Patriarca announced in a veiled reference to Joseph P. Kennedy, who had acquired much of his wealth as a bootlegger. No doubt this comment angered and embarrassed RFK. But Patriarca didn’t want only to embarrass young Kennedy; he wanted to hurt him deeply. At the close of testimony, a confident Patriarca strolled by the committee table where Kennedy was still seated. With his ever-present cigarette dangling from his lips, he leaned close to RFK and said sotto voce, “Your [retarded] sister has more brains than the two of you [RFK and JFK] together.”
Raymond Patriarca was referring to Rosemary Kennedy, the third child of Joseph and Rose Kennedy, who had undergone a prefrontal lobotomy at age twenty-three and was kept far out of the public eye in a mental institution in Wisconsin. For years to come, Robert Kennedy would call Patriarca “that pig on the hill” in reference to the gangster’s headquarters on Federal Hill in Providence. Kennedy also vowed to his closest confidantes that one day he would bring Raymond Patriarca down.
At the time, there was no way for Patriarca to forecast the impending storm that would build between Bobby Kennedy’s Justice Department and the mob. Until now, Patriarca had been both lucky and smart.
Raymond Salvatore Loredo Patriarca was a first-generation Italian-American born on March 17, 1908, on Shrewsbury Street in Worcester, Massachusetts, about forty miles west of Boston. He did not stay in the City of Seven Hills (as Worcester was known) for long. As a toddler, young Raymond moved with his family to Providence, Rhode Island, where his father, Eleuterio, ran a liquor store. Unlike Barboza, Patriarca grew up in a loving family, and his early childhood offered no indication of his future life of crime. The family lived on Atwells Avenue, where his mother, Mary Jane (DeNubile) Patriarca, kept a tidy home. Although considered a bright student, Patriarca left school at the age of eight to help support his family as a bellhop and shoeshine boy.
Raymond Patriarca stayed out of trouble until the earth crumbled under his feet with the death of his father in 1925. Raymond was just seventeen years old at the time. Without his father’s moral compass to guide him, Raymond’s focus shifted quickly to the dark side. Shortly after Eleuterio’s death, his son was arrested for the first time for bootlegging. Raymond had talked his way into the mob as an associate and was given a low-level job as a guard for liquor shipments. What his bosses did not know, however, was that the enterprising and fearless Patriarca had often arranged for the hijacking of liquor shipments that he had been hired to guard. The bosses never questioned the coincidence, or at least had never raised their suspicions directly to Patriarca. Eventually, Raymond was picked up by police in Connecticut for violating the state’s prohibition laws. He offered investigators a phony address—Bonodow Street in Worcester—but other than that, he didn’t say a word. The teenager proved to be a devout follower of the mob’s cardinal rule—Omerta—“Keep your mouth shut.” Four years later in 1929, at the age of twenty-two, Patriarca would find himself in jail again, this time on a litany of charges including conspiracy to commit murder, armed robbery, auto theft, violating the White Slave Act (prostitution), breaking and entering in the night time, and even adultery.
During that same year, Raymond L. S. Patriarca would also be formally inducted into the Mafia. It was the era of Prohibition, and the mob had no shortage of young soldiers ready to cheat, rob, and kill their way up La Cosa Nostra’s corporate ladder. Raymond Patriarca proved to be an adept pupil and an eventual master of the mob’s criminal techniques. He was a methodical, strategic chess player who could also jam a rook in a man’s eye if the situation called for it.
In 1932, Patriarca and two others were charged with robbing the Webster National Bank in central Massachusetts. Raymond and his men held the manager, tellers, and customers at gunpoint while they coolly robbed the safe of $10,000. Patriarca was later identified as the culprit by scores of eyewitnesses. But by the time he went on trial, those witnesses had suddenly been overcome by a case of mass amnesia. They recanted their testimony, and the young gangster walked.
Patriarca’s luck continued until 1938, when he walked into a factory in Brookline, Massachusetts, brandishing a pistol and pressed it against the owner’s head. Raymond ordered the man, Clarence A. Wallbank, to open the company safe, which was believed to hold a small fortune in jewelry. Patriarca and his men ordered the owner and two employees to strip naked while they looted the safe of $12,000 in necklaces, rings, and at least one oddly shaped gold pin. Patriarca and his crew then stole the factory owner’s car and, for good measure, dumped the men’s clothes. This was a particularly brazen robbery, as it occurred only a few blocks from a police precinct.
The heist had investigators stumped until just a few days later, when they learned of a similar crime in Webster, Massachusetts, the same town that Patriarca had targeted years earlier. Thanks to a barking dog, police were alerted to a burglary at the United Optical Plant. The plant stored an estimated $8,000 in gold, which was used to manufacture gold eyeglass frames. While the robbers were still inside, six local police officers surrounded the factory and ordered the men out with their hands up. The robbers complied, walking out into the frigid February night with their arms raised toward the stars above. Patriarca gave police a fake name: John Roma. The police discovered his true identity, however, when they searched his car. They also discovered what was then described as “one of the most complete set of burglary tools ever seen in this part of New England.”10 A suitcase found in Patriarca’s automobile held a drill, hammer, pinch bar, sets of gloves, and other assorted burglary tools. Also in the suitcase was that oddly shaped gold pin stolen in the Brookline heist earlier in the week. Clarence A. Wallbank, the factory owner who had been left naked and humiliated by Patriarca and his gang, was all too ready to get even. He identified several of the stolen items found in Patriarca’s car and fingered the gangster as one of the men who had robbed him.
Wallbank was the type of witness prosecutors had longed for. He was a credible business leader who proved completely resistant to Patriarca’s strong-arm intimidation tactics—or so they thought. In December 1938, at the urging of a corrupt Irish politician and a member of the Governor’s Council named Daniel H. Coakley, Raymond’s brother Joseph visited Clarence Wallbank on two occasions. Joseph Patriarca offered the factory owner $7,000 in cash and his life if he would recant his testimony. Wallbank responded by writing a letter to the Governor’s Council urging the panel to pardon Raymond Patriarca. When the letter landed on Daniel Coakley’s desk, the former defense attorney argued that it wasn’t powerful enough to sway then Massachusetts governor Charles Francis Hurley. Coakley tossed the letter away and wrote his own version, which Wallbank signed. Coakley delivered the new letter to Governor Hurley, who signed it without any fuss. Coakley’s fellow Governor’s Council members did the same. With a pardon in hand, Raymond Patriarca was a free man once again, after having served less than three months behind bars. Soon thereafter, Daniel Coakley deposited $28,995 into his bank account. Both Coakley and Wallbank proved that their integrity could be bought for the right price. Fortunately, the same could not be said for local reporters, who blasted the pardon on the front pages of newspapers across the region. The Patriarca pardon stirred one of the largest political corruption cases in New England history. Pressure from the fourth estate and the public at large triggered a lengthy investigation that resulted in Coakley’s impeachment.
The pardon petition, as revealed by the fourteen articles of impeachment, displayed several irregularities, including the fact that Coakley’s document contained the support of three priests, two of whom insisted that their signatures had been obtained by fraud. The third priest named in the petition did not exist. Coakley also wrote that Patriarca, as admitted by all, was “wholly guiltless” of armed robbery. Coakley had failed to disclose the fact that the gangster had actually ple
aded guilty to the crime.
The rogue politician also called Raymond “a virtuous young man eager to be released from prison so that he might go home to his mother.”11 Investigators later found out that upon his release Patriarca did go home, but only for a change of clothing. The mobster then took off for Miami Beach with a beautiful blonde in tow.
The Massachusetts state senate voted to remove Coakley from the Governor’s Council in October 1941. He was the first state official have been impeached in more than a century.
By this time Patriarca was newly married to Helen G. Mandella, a nurse whose sister worked for Leverett Saltonstall, the successor to Massachusetts governor Hurley and a future U.S. senator. Helen would give birth to the couple’s first and only child, Raymond J. Patriarca, a few years later. The baby’s father would soon gain a growing reputation as a man to be feared and respected. He had shown that he had the requisite political skills to corrupt susceptible lawmakers and had also proved willing to remove his rivals with brutal efficiency.
In 1952, Patriarca took out his last remaining rival in Providence. Forty-nine-year-old Carlton O’Brien was a former bootlegger and armed robber turned racketeer who competed directly with the Mafia for the city’s lucrative race wire services rackets, which gathered horse racing results from tracks around the country and transmitted them to bookmakers for a price. At first O’Brien worked hand in hand with the Italians. He bought into the Ferrara-Rossetti wire service, which operated in East Boston. But the Ferrara-Rossetti operation was constantly on the move in order to elude the watchful eyes of law enforcement. New locations meant new telephone equipment, which drove up the fee for the service. Carlton O’Brien refused to pay higher prices, so he started his own race wire service, a move that did not sit well with the Mafia. But O’Brien was not about to hand over his golden goose without a fight. He was a tough Irish gangster who had once been given the dubious distinction of “Public Enemy Number One” by Rhode Island law enforcement officials. There was no way for the two wire services to coexist. Two is always a crowd in the underworld, especially in a small city like Providence, Rhode Island, located in the heart of the smallest state in the union. Raymond Patriarca was given the order to bust up O’Brien’s operation. Patriarca trashed O’Brien’s betting parlors, robbed his bookies, and savagely beat his runners. Still, the stubborn Irishman would not budge. At this time, O’Brien was fighting a war on two fronts. A jailhouse informant had recently fingered him as the “mastermind” behind the infamous 1950 Brink’s Job in Boston. The story made sense, as O’Brien was a close friend and associate of Joseph “Specs” O’Keefe, a former Lyman School delinquent who was now a key suspect in the $2,775,395 heist, at that point the largest in U.S. history. It would only be a matter of time before his Brink’s cohorts turned up to ensure his silence.
Raymond Patriarca would get to him first. His men delivered their death notice to O’Brien with murderous zeal as the Irish gangster returned to his Cranston, Rhode Island, home one night after spending several hours at a local roadhouse he owned. Patriarca’s gunmen welcomed O’Brien home with two shotgun blasts to the chest. The hoodlum was dead before he hit the ground. When his body was discovered, O’Brien was lying on his back with both arms stretched wide. His legs were also positioned outward in an unnatural state. The gangster’s blood was everywhere. Police believed O’Brien had been murdered in connection with the Brink’s robbery. No one suspected Patriarca. Carlton O’Brien’s killers were never found. Raymond L. S. Patriarca was now the undisputed king of Providence, and soon the other New England states would fall like dominoes under his control in a seismic shift of power radiating from the tight, crowded streets of Boston’s North End to Federal Hill in Providence.
From the early 1930s through the late 1950s, the rackets in New England were controlled by two men, Felippo “Phil” Buccola and his second in command, Joe Lombardo. The pair had killed their way to the top on a brisk December day in 1931 when Lombardo lured the boss of the powerful Gustin Gang to the third floor office of his importing business on Hanover Street in Boston’s North End. The Gustin Gang, which took its name from a street just a block long in the heart of their own territory in South Boston, was led by the Wallace brothers—Steve, Jimmy, and Frank. The mob had formed just before World War I and, like any gang, its members started small, targeting delivery trucks at city intersections. By handing down a serious beating to the driver, or simply by the mere threat of one, the Wallace brothers had terrorized South Boston and then spread fear to other city neighborhoods. Known originally to police as the Tailboard Thieves, the Gustin Gang grew and diversified during Prohibition to the point that they controlled much of the illegal booze coming into New England. What shipments they didn’t control became theirs through other means. Armed with fake badges of the kind used by government agents, the Gustin Gang confiscated cases of liquor from rival bootleggers and then sold them through their distribution network in Southie.
The Wallace brothers had far-reaching political influence in the city, making the Gustin Gang the most powerful in all of Boston, which is why they were shocked and angry to learn that the Italian upstarts wanted in on their business. The Gustin Gang owned and operated more rum running boats than most of their rivals combined. Their vessels would steam out of Boston Harbor several times a week to rendezvous with liquor ships stationed three miles offshore in international waters. The bootleggers would stock up along “Rum Row” and head back to Boston, where eager patrons were happy to plunk down twenty-five cents for a watered-down beer that would have cost only a nickel before Prohibition.
At first, Joe Lombardo offered a compromise. He sent word that the Mafia was willing to divide territories along Boston’s waterfront with the Gustin Gang. This was a bold request, since the Italians had no real power to leverage in the city. The Wallace brothers thought so, too. Negotiations got heated and threats were exchanged until, finally, Frankie Wallace was invited to a meeting in an effort to clear the air. Wallace quickly accepted the offer and planned to tell the Italians exactly where they could stick their deal. The first tactical error made by the Irish mob boss was to agree to a meeting at his enemy’s headquarters. Wallace arrogantly thought that his political power would protect him against assassination in his own backyard. Who would dare make a run at the Gustin Gang, knowing all the cops they had in their back pocket? To attempt such a move would be to write your own death warrant.
Still, Wallace traveled to the meeting with two bodyguards, fellow Gustin members Barney Walsh and Timothy Coffey. The second tactical error was made when Wallace failed to position a lookout outside the meeting place. Had he done so, the lookout might have noticed seven rough looking Mafiosi entering the building in the hour or so leading up to the sit-down. Instead, Wallace and his bodyguards marched confidently into the Testa Building on Hanover Street and quickly climbed three flights of stairs to the office of C and F Importing, which was owned by Lombardo. With Christmas just three days away, the mood inside the building had been festive up to that point. On the floor above C and F, a group of veterans of the Great War were busy stocking Christmas baskets for neighborhood children. The holiday cheer was interrupted by loud pounding on Lombardo’s office door. His men responded by unleashing a barrage of gunfire in the direction of the sound. Wallace was struck once in the heart, causing him to stagger into a nearby law office where he collapsed on a chair and died. Lombardo’s men chased Barney Walsh down to the second floor landing while shooting in midstride. Their bullets hit their mark, and Walsh crumbled to the floor, his lifeless face pressed against the worn tile. Timothy Coffey, the third member of the Gustin Gang, escaped to an office down the hall, where he hid quivering until police arrived.
Joe Lombardo went on the lam for over a week before turning himself in at Boston police headquarters on New Year’s Eve. He respectfully declined to discuss his whereabouts on the day of the shootings and was held on probable cause along with two other men, Salvatore Congemi and Frank Cucchiara,
both of the North End. The charges were quickly dropped, however, after Timothy Coffey refused to testify before a grand jury.
The explosively bold ambush elevated Lombardo’s reputation in the Boston underworld, which was largely fractionalized at the time. The Gustins had been top dog up until that point, but their position had been precarious at best. The Mafia had accumulated power in the North End, and that power began slowly to grow. Lombardo may have been second in command to the older Buccola in the eyes of local cops and the public, but he was certainly the power behind the throne. Lombardo was the fist inside Buccola’s velvet glove.
Felippo “Phil” Buccola had immigrated to the United States from Palermo, Sicily, in 1920. He was an unlikely Mafia don from the very beginning. Born into a respected, wealthy family, Buccola was a highly educated world traveler. He attended school in Switzerland and the Universita degli Studi in his home city of Palermo before he was ordered by the Sicilian Mafia to Boston to organize underworld activities in the North End. Buccola was no Edward G. Robinson, and he certainly did not look the part of mob boss. With his bow ties and rimless glasses, Buccola dressed and carried himself like something of a college professor. He was a self-described “sportsman” who managed a stable of hungry prize fighters in and around the city. Buccola had also been anointed as leader of the New England Mafia in 1932 by Charles “Lucky” Luciano’s mob commission in New York.
With the Gustin Gang no longer a threat, Buccola and Lombardo set their sights on another local mob rival, Charles “King” Solomon, a Jewish gangster, bootlegger, and narcotics trafficker who, like Buccola, also managed local boxers. Solomon was the Boston equivalent to Dutch Schultz. Like the Dutchman, “King” Solomon was brash and flashy. He was one of the most powerful Jewish mobsters in the country and arguably the most important bootlegger in Boston. Solomon was also an original member of the Seven Group, a precursor to Luciano’s Commission. The Seven Group, which included Luciano, Meyer Lansky, and Frank Costello, gathered in Atlantic City in May of 1929 to add organizational structure to crime syndicates around the U.S. “King” Solomon literally helped organize organized crime. He was head of the dope racket and also ruled the Boston nightclub scene, where he operated several of his own including the Coconut Grove, scene of one of the deadliest fires in American history where, in 1942, 492 people were killed and hundreds more were injured. Solomon’s own demise had come nine years earlier inside another one of his nightclubs, the Cotton Club in the South End. The year was 1933 and Solomon had recently been indicted with three others on bootlegging charges. Running dope and pimping girls turned a nice profit, but booze smuggling was far and away the biggest cash cow during Prohibition. Authorities estimated that at least five thousand bootleggers operated in the Boston area alone, servicing about four thousand speakeasies. The annual spend for bootleg booze in Massachusetts was said to be a whopping $60 million per year.
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