Raymond L.S. Patriarca was the son of Italian immigrant parents. He began compiling a lengthly arrest record while still a teenager. The police took him in for hijacking, armed robbery, assault, safecracking, auto theft, being an accessory before the fact to murder, and in a number of other infractions. He was convicted five times and had spent 10 years in jail by the time he turned 30. After one conviction he broke out of jail, but he was soon recaptured. In 1930 his efforts to free some friends from prison cost four lives in an aborted breakout. The violent spirit behind these deeds themselves, captured the notice of New England's Mafia boss, Phil Buccola, and Patriarca was soon given capo status in the local mob.
Buccola's choice proved sound, for Patriarca was more than just a strong arm; he was also a masterful corrupter, without honor even among fellow thieves. During Prohibition, Patriarca arranged to hijack shipments of alcohol that he'd been hired to guard. As a capo, he once forced his own men to restore lost profits to him after a load of stolen cigarettes was seized by the FBI. Convicted of burglary, Patriarca won a full pardon from Massachusetts governor Charles F. Hurley in 1938, even though the FBI had once designated the mobster Public Enemy Number One in his home base of Providence, Rhode Island, and had ordered agents to arrest him on sight. It turned out that the governor had been prompted to his act of mercy by a personal secretary, actually a mob tool who concocted an emotional plea for clemency from a nonexistent priest.
In 1954 Phil Buccola retired to Sicily, and Patriarca rose to bossdom. He moved smartly to expand mob operations in his sprawling minion of Rhode Island, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Maine. Besides gambling, loansharking, hijacking, and other crime staples, the mob extracted profits from an ever-growing list of restaurants, resorts, vending businesses, linen services, and garbage collection companies. Patriarca's power became so complete that he could insist on approving in advance crimes planned by nonmob thugs. Anyone trying to compete on his turf was killed.
Patriarca was uncommonly rough on people who failed to pay their debts to his loan sharks. Rather than suspend interest payments when the debtor was hopelessly broke, Patriarca often preferred to kill the deadbeat and accept the loss of the principal. One expert on organized crime, perhaps overstating patriarca's clout, estimated that this vengeful impulse lay behind two-thirds of all maimings and murders in New England. The New England don was not much gentler toward his confederates. Patriarca once ordered an underling to kill his own son to atone for losing money on a sourced deal; the man fell to his knees and begged for his boy's life, but Patriarca refused to withdraw the verdict until a trusted adviser intervened. At one period, the steely boss even had his own brother under death sentence for failing to detect an FBI bug.
In 1966 Patriarca's money lust was put to the test when a subordinate, Joseph Barboza, was arrested for a firearms violation and given an unusually high bail of $100,000. Underworld code called for the boss to pay in those circumstances, but Patriarca decided to let Barboza languish. When two friends of the arrested man tried to raise the bail on their own, Patriarca had them murdered for flouting his wishes.As it happened, Patriarca was being wiretapped at the time. FBI agents visited Barboza in jail and played a tape of the boss saying, "Barboza's a fucking bum. He's expendable." The frightened barboza began to talk. To silence him, Patriarca tried an indirect form of intimidation: A bomb planted in the car of Barboza's lawyer nearly blew the man's legs off. Amid public outrage, Patriarca was tried and convicted of conspiring to commit murder. He went to prison for six years.
Such was Patriarca's power, however, that he continued to rule his empire from inside the penitentiary in Atlanta.
When he told other dons to stay out of New England, they did. But the good old days
of being left alone were over; the law had got his scent. After Patriarca emerged from jail in 1975, he found himself hauled back into court time and again.
Indicted in 1980 for labor racketeering and in 1981 for ordering the
execution of two mobsters, the beleaguered old double-dealer complained bitterly,
"I don't care if I die tomorrow, they're going to harass me." Patriarca died three years later,
in Providence, at the age of 76. The don's heart - such as it was - had finally betrayed him.
-Time-Life Books
