November 5, 2020 – Smoke’em if you got’em. A victory cigar would be appropriate. Turncoat mobster Robert (Bobby the Cigar) DeLuca, formerly of the Patriarca crime family in New England, was granted a compassionate release from prison in a ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Denise Casper in Boston this week. Bobby the Cigar is on a roll with the Robes. DeLuca, 75, was serving a six-year sentence for obstruction connected to a 1993 gangland homicide. Last month, he was given time served by Rhode Island Superior Court Judge Brian Stern for his role in a 1992 mob hit in Providence’s Federal Hill neighborhood. Judge Casper decided to let DeLuca out of prison 13 months early in his fed case because she deemed his age and underlining health issues makes him more susceptible to attaining the COVID-19 virus. Bobby the Cigar ran Rhode Island for the Patriarcas in the first half of the 1990s and after serving a federal prison term for racketeering, returned to the Providence area as a capo. He flipped in 2006, wore a wire and entered the Witness Protection Program five years later. Living in Florida under an assumed identity, DeLuca was back in hot water with the feds in the spring of 2016 when the body of mob associate Stevie DiSarro was dug up back home in Providence under a building owned by one of Bobby the Cigar’s former crew members. DiSarro, a 43-year old nightclub owner and real estate developer, was strangled to death in the kitchen of then-New England mob boss Francis (Cadillac Frank) Salemme’s house in a quiet Boston suburb in May 1993. His body was given to DeLuca’s crew to get rid of in Rhode Island. DeLuca lied to FBI agents in the 2000s about his lack of knowledge of the DiSarro murder. Salemme did too when he became a witness for the government in late 1999. DiSarro and Salemme were partners in a South Boston rock club turned topless bar. Cadillac Frank and his hot-tempered son feared an increasingly desponden DiSarro was about to become an FBI cooperator. At the time of his murder, DiSarro was facing a looming federal bank fraud indictment tied to a series of shady real estate deals. Cadillac Frank’s long-deceased progeny “Frankie Boy” Salemme, Jr. choked DiSarro to death as his father watched on the morning of May 10, 1993. Salemme, 87, was found guilty of ordering the DiSarro homicide at a highly-publicized 2018 trial and sentenced to life in prison. Bobby the Cigar was the prosecution’s star witness. Prior to the unearthing of DiSarro’s remains in March 2016, Cadillac Frank was living in the Witness Protection Program in Atlanta. As part of the deal DeLuca cut with the feds for the DiSarro case, he also agreed to spill the beans on the plot to murder Kevin Hanrahan, which occurred in Providence eight months before DiSarro was killed in Sharon, Massachusetts. The tough, scrappy Hanrahan was an Irish collector and enforcer for the Patriarca crime family who was alleged to be planning a palace coup. Informants told the FBI Hanrahan intended to knock-off Cadillac Frank and his entire administration and had support from Italian mob figures behind bars. According to court records. DeLuca acted as a go-between for Salemme and the two shooters in the Hanrahan hit. On the night of September 18, 1992, Hanrahan was gunned down leaving a dinner at The Arch, a popular Federal Hill steakhouse. Per sources familiar with DeLuca’s deal, Bobby the Cigar named Edward (Little Eddie) Lato and Rocco (Shaky) Argenti as the triggermen in the Hanrahan slaying and said Argenti aided him in coordinating the details of the hit. DeLuca and Lato were seen meeting at a local tavern on “The Hill” 20 minutes after Hanrahan was slain Argenti died of cancer in 2002 after ascending to the New England mob’s consigliere post. Lato, 73, is alleged to be a capo in the Providence wing of the Patriarca crime family today. Sources in the federal government confirm a grand jury has been convened listening to testimony in the Hanrahan case for the last three-plus years. Little Eddie Lato got out of a federal prison term for extortion courtesy of DeLuca’s cooperation in 2019.
