Who’s Next To Fall In N.E. Feds Attempt To Revive Cold-Case Mob Murders, Manocchio, Lato or Rossetti?

With former New England mafia boss Francis (Cadillac Frank) Salemme’s murder trial completed – jurors found Salemme, 84, guilty of ordering the slaying of his business partner, nightclub owner Stevie DiSarro, in 1993 – the spotlight in gangland judicial affairs from the region turns towards a trio of Salemme underlings, men like retired Patriarca crime family don, Luigi (Baby Shacks) Manocchio, Providence mob captain Edward (Little Eddie) Lato and Boston mob captain Mark Rossetti (seen above). Will any of them follow their one-time underworld superior into the defendant’s chair in court and be charged in similar cold-case homicide fashion?

“I think there’s another case coming down the pike pretty soon, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to tell you that,” one retired FBI agent said. “The Bureau is digging into some old murders in New England and they should be because there’s a lot of questions that need to be answered. Very little bloodshed from Cadillac Frank’s days as boss has been cleaned up indictment wise. We can sit here and debate all day why that is the case, however, that’s where we are two decades after his run on top came to an end”

Lato, 71, and Rossetti, 58, are both behind bars on racketeering convictions and were two of the swashbuckling Salemme’s strong arms during his violent reign in the 1990s. The more reserved and sophisticated 90-year old Manocchio, currently living in retirement down in Florida, was Salemme’s underboss. He got out of prison on racketeering charges in 2015, having led the Patriarca clan from when Salemme got locked up in the mid-1990s until he resigned his post in 2009.

In recent months, Manocchio and Lato have been implicated in the 1992 murder of renegade Providence mob enforcer Kevin Hanrahan. Rossetti, outed by court filings as an FBI informant in 2011 following his arrest on drug, gambling, extortion and loansharking offenses, is a suspect in numerous gangland slayings from long ago, many occurring while on the federal payroll.

Salemme joined the Witness Protection Program in 1999, helping the Bureau convict corrupt FBI agent John Connolly,, but didn’t divulge all he knew about the murders on his watch. Hence, the DiSarro indictment that dropped in 2016 months after DiSarro’s remains were unearthed in Providence. Soon, Cadillac Frank’s former right-hand man Robert (Bobby the Cigar) DeLuca, was telling the FBI that he lied too when he joined Team America and tied him to the DiSarro killing, admitting he was the one tasked with burying DiSarro’s body, and at least one other – the Hanrahan hit.

It’s unknown what if anything he’s told the feds about Rossetti and his possible link to a slew of unsolved homicides from the Boston area. While DeLuca was Salemme’s eyes and ears in Providence, Rossetti and his cousin Stevie, were Salemme’s muscle in East Boston, the territory Cadillac Frank found the most resistance in.

Hanrahan was slain in Providence’s Federal Hill neighborhood in the late hours of September 18, 1992 leaving a dinner with DeLuca’s best friend and fellow wiseguy Ronnie Coppola. DeLuca testified at Salemme’s trial to watching from across the street as deceased New England mob figure Rocco (Shaky) Argenti shot Hanrahan to death. Lato, slated for release from prison on a conviction for shaking down strip clubs next year, was accompanying Argenti on the job, according to what DeLuca has told investigators.

DeLuca, Argenti, Lato and Coppola were witnessed rendezvousing at a bar down the street in the minutes after Hanrahan was shot. Argenti died of cancer in 2002. He had risen to be Baby Shacks’ consigliere before he passed away. A grand jury has been impanelled since the spring of 2017 reexamining Hanrahan’s murder, according to sources with knowledge of the situation.

Manocchio was given responsibility for coordinating details of the Hanrahan hit by Salemme via DeLuca upon Salemme learning that Hanrahan had been plotting to kill him and Manocchio, per DeLuca’s most-recent revelations. Baby Shacks previously pled guilty to murder conspiracy charges tied to a double homicide in the 1960s and did a short prison stint almost 15 years later.

Rossetti was opened as a confidential informant by FBI agent Michael Buckley in the early 1990s at a time Rossetti was at the forefront of Cadillac Frank Salemme’s parade of vengeance and fervent campaign to clip all adversaries. Salemme sought to eliminate everybody associated with a mob faction from East Boston and the North End that had tried to block his ascendance to the throne years before – a 1989 assassination attempt at a suburban Boston pancake house still had him hot and bothered, hungry for blood.

There are more than a half-dozen murders from that period that Salemme is suspected of setting in motion, Rossetti is suspected of participated in and remain unsolved. One of these slayings is the December 1992 hit on East Boston Goodfella Vinnie Arcieri, currently getting a revisiting in attention by  federal authorities per an article posted last week on a local radio station’s website. Whether or not Buckley and the FBI knew of and or sanctioned Rossetti’s alleged involvement in these murders during his tenure as an informant is being probed by multiple government agencies and legislative bodies. Rossetti got promoted to a capo role in his capacity as an FBI mole.

“The circumstances around Rossetti don’t add up,” said one former member of law enforcement in New England. “A lot of us were in the dark…..he was getting a free pass for quite a while and everyone knew he was one of the mob’s biggest hitters.”

Rossetti, who once attacked a state trooper, was sentenced to 12 years in state prison in 2013 for overseeing a sprawling racketeering conspiracy from his Bunker Hill Social Club in East Boston. He had done fed time in the 1980s for knocking off an armored car and again in the first half of the 2000s for illegal firearm possession. Wiretaps from the 2010 state case intercepted Rossetti and Buckley talking on the phone about informant work. Called in front of a grand jury in the 1990s and asked about murders under the Salemme regime, Rossetti allegedly pled the Fifth Amendment.

East Boston wiseguy Michael (Big Mike) Romano’s has filed a civil law suit against the FBI in Boston last year for its work with Rossetti in connection to the murder of Romano’s son in the fall of 1994 at the height of tensions between Salemme and the breakaway crew from “Eastie.” The 60-million dollar suit makes wrongful death and gross negligence claims. Romano was convicted of murdering one of the men he felt responsible for killing his son.