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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 hadno 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