September 27, 2019 – Aging Providence mob associate Gaythorne (Poochie) Angell has completed a pre-trial diversion program and will have perjury charges against him dropped. Federal prosecutors in Rhode Island made the request in U.S. District Court on Tuesday. The feds and the “Pooch” agreed to go the diversion program route in late 2018.

The 84-year old bookie and reputed strip club owner was indicted in 2016 for lying to a federal grand jury convened to investigate allegations of extortion against the Patriarca crime family’s Providence wing. Angell was less than truthful when he denied he was paying tribute to Providence mafia captain Edward (Little Eddie) Lato for protection over his Foxy Lady strip club during the summer 2011 testimony.

Lato, 72, did time for the shakedown racket and walked out of prison last year. He is currently the subject of another grand jury, one probing the 1992 gangland slaying of renegade mob enforcer Kevin Hanrahan. The man allegedly pointing the finger at Lato for his role in the Hanrahan hit is turncoat Rhode Island wiseguy Robert (Bobby Cigars) DeLuca, a former “kingsman capo” who went down with Little Eddie in the 2011 strip club extortion indictment and then entered the Witness Protection Program.

DeLuca and Poochie Angell were nailed together in 1993 for running a large sports book out of the Foxy Lady, the city of Providence’s most famous strip joint dating back to the 1970s. Angell has long been listed on official business documents as a club “consultant,” but federal authorities have always believed that he’s in fact the establishment’s owner. According to a 2009 civil court case, employees at the Foxy Lady reported to Poochie and nobody else. A number of Angell’s relatives run the place today.

Per multiple sources, DeLuca named Little Eddie Lato as one of two shooters in the Hanrahan murder in his testimony before a federal grand jury in the spring of last year. Hanrahan, 39, was allegedly muscling in on protected bookmakers in Providence and Western Massachusetts and part of a plan to assassinate Patriarca crime family bosses. He was slain in Federal Hill, Providence’s Little Italy neighborhood, after leaving a dinner at The Arch steakhouse with a DeLuca lieutenant on the evening of September 18, 1992.