October 15, 2020 – His second cooperation deal with the feds has treated him well. Former New England mafia captain Robert (Bobby the Cigar) DeLuca was let off with no prison time for the 1992 gangland slaying of Providence mob enforcer Kevin Hanrahan this week. The Hanrahan hit is an open murder investigation for both the FBI and Providence police.
Rhode Island Superior Court Judge Brian Stern sentenced DeLuca to 10 years time-served Tuesday afternoon for his role in the brazen killing of Hanrahan in the middle of Federal Hill. He’s currently serving a five-year sentence in a federal correctional facility for obstruction in relation to the 1993 murder of Patriarca crime family associate Stevie DiSarro. According to the Bureau of Prison, the 75-year old DeLuca is scheduled to be released in December 2021.
Bobby the Cigar was yanked out of the Witness Protection Program four years ago when DiSarro’s body was exhumed from underneath a converted textile mill in Providence owned by his one-time crew member Billy Ricci, who was busted for growing and selling marijuana out of the building and used his knowledge of DiSarro’s burial as a get-out-of-jail-free card. Ricci helped DeLuca and DeLuca’s brother, Joe, bury DiSarro there in the spring of 1993 after DiSarro was killed in a Boston suburb at the behest of then New England mafia don Francis (Cadillac Frank) Salemme.
DiSarro and Salemme were partners in a nightclub-turned-strip club in South Boston and Salemme and his son feared he was about to become an FBI cooperator because of a bank fraud case he was facing (tied to a series of shady real estate deals). On the morning of May 10, 1993, a distraught DiSarro went to a meeting at Salemme’s residence in Sharon, Massachusetts and was strangled to death by Francis (Frankie Boy) Salemme, Jr. in the home’s kitchen as Cadillac Frank watched on. Frankie Boy died of AIDS-related cancer two years after killing DiSarro.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s, DeLuca was the swashbuckling Cadillac Frank’s “kingsman capo” in Providence, his eyes and ears in Rhode Island while Salemme himself stationed out of the Boston area. Salemme, 87, entered the Witness Protection Program in 1999, but like DeLuca would do a decade later, neglected to tell the feds what he knew about DiSarro’s murder. He was convicted of the DiSarro homicide at a highly-publicized 2018 trial in Boston — with Bobby the Cigar acting as the prosecution’s star witness — and sentenced to life behind bars.
As part of the deal DeLuca cut with the feds in 2016 for the DiSarro case, he also spilled the beans on the plot to murder Hanrahan (he initially entered the WITSEC program in 2011 after helping the feds make an extortion case against top members of the Patriarca clan). Hanrahan, a collector and hit man for the Patriarcas for years, was planning to assassinate Salemme and had been shaking down mob-protected bookmakers in Rhode Island and Massachusetts, according to court records. DeLuca acted as a go-between for Salemme and the shooters in the Hanrahan hit.
On the late evening of September 18, 1992, the brooding 39-year old Hanrahan was gunned down leaving a dinner at The Arch, a popular Federal Hill steakhouse. Per sources familiar with DeLuca’s deal, he has named Edward (Little Eddie) Lato and Rocco (Shaky) Argenti as the triggermen in the Hanrahan slaying. Argenti died of cancer in 2002. Lato, 73, is alleged to be a capo in the Providence wing of the Patriarca crime family today.