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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 thesuitcase 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 pleaded guilty to the