Per a report by a suburban Boston radio journalist, former New England mob captain Robert (Bobby the Cigar) DeLuca is now being asked about the 1992 gangland slaying of Beantown wiseguy and restaurant owner Vinnie Arcieri after helping the feds convict his one-time boss, Patriarca crime family don Francis (Cadillac Frank) Salemme of an unsolved underworld murder from that same time frame last week. Arcieri was gunned down outside his Orient Heights home in East Boston on December 8, 1992. DeLuca, 72, was Salemme’s right-hand man and emissary to the Rhode Island wing of the syndicate.
In an op-ed posted on the website of his radio station (1420 WBSM New Bedford) Thursday, on-air personality Chis McCarthy wrote that Salemme underlings are being questioned regarding the Arcieri hit and how or if it can be tied to the 84-year old Salemme’s reign atop the Patriarca clan in the first half of the 1990s. McCarthy further reported that one of the FBI surveillance photos of Salemme presented to the jury in his just-concluded trial for the 1993 murder of Boston nightclub owner Stevie DiSarro showed Salemme with a prime suspect in the Arcieri slaying, someone law enforcement is actively pursuing today. Salemme was found guilty for ordering DiSarro’s killing this past week.
Flashy, feared and power hungry, Cadillac Frank grabbed control of the New England mob in the wake of a civil war and used his newfound crown to seek retribution on those who opposed his swift rise to the forefront of the crime family following a release from prison in the late 1980s. Arcieri was one of more than a half-dozen murders that transpired on Salemme’s watch as Godfather and linked to bad blood between Salemme and a treasonous crew from East Boston. When he entered the Witness Protection Program from behind bars in 1999, Cadillac Frank denied involvement in any slayings during his five years running the organization, including the murders of Arcieri, DiSarro and rogue Providence mob enforcer Kevin Hanrahan.
At Salemme’s recent trial, DeLuca testified Salemme had DiSarro, 43, clipped for stealing from a club they co-owned and the belief that he was snitching or about to snitch to the feds — DiSarro was strangled to death by Salemme’s late gangster son inside the Salemme residence located in posh Sharon, Massachusetts on the morning of May 10, 1993. According to his account, DeLuca was tasked with burying DiSarro’s body, delivered to Providence by Salemme himself.
The previous year, Arcieri got hit in December and Hanrahan, three months earlier, in September. The 39-year old Hanrahan was shot to death leaving a dinner in Providence’s Federal Hill neighborhood on the evening of September 18, 1992. Last fall, DeLuca pled guilty to conspiracy in the Hanrahan murder. He told jurors at Salemme’s trial for killing DiSarro that Salemme ordered Hanrahan dead once he got wind of a plot by Hanrahan to bump off both him and his underboss, Luigi (Baby Shacks) Manocchio.
After Salemme went to prison in 1995, Manocchio, 90, took his place as boss, reining until 2009 when he stepped down. DeLuca has told authorities that Manocchio handled the details of the Hanrahan homicide and admitted in open court at Salemme’s trial that he watched the Hanrahan hit occur from a parked SUV across the street.
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