Animal by Casey Sherman Read Free Book Online

crime.
    The rogue politician also called Raymond “a virtuous young man eager to be released from prison so that he might go home to his mother.” 11 Investigators later found out that upon his release Patriarca did go home, but only for a change of clothing. The mobster then took off for Miami Beach with a beautiful blonde in tow.
    The Massachusetts state senate voted to remove Coakley from the Governor’s Council in October 1941. He was the first state official have been impeached in more than a century.
    By this time Patriarca was newly married to Helen G. Mandella, a nurse whose sister worked for Leverett Saltonstall, the successor to Massachusetts governor Hurley and a future U.S. senator. Helen would give birth to the couple’s first and only child, Raymond J. Patriarca, a few years later. The baby’s father would soon gain a growing reputation as a man to be feared and respected. He had shown that he had the requisite political skills to corrupt susceptible lawmakers and had also proved willing to remove his rivals with brutal efficiency.
    In 1952, Patriarca took out his last remaining rival in Providence. Forty-nine-year-old Carlton O’Brien was a former bootlegger and armed robber turned racketeer who competed directly with the Mafia for the city’s lucrative race wire services rackets, which gathered horse racing results from tracks around the country and transmitted them to bookmakers for a price. At first O’Brien worked hand in hand with the Italians. He bought into the Ferrara-Rossetti wire service, which operated in East Boston. But the Ferrara-Rossetti operation was constantly on the move in order to elude the watchful eyes of law enforcement. New locations meant new telephone equipment, which drove up the fee for the service. Carlton O’Brien refused to pay higher prices, so he started his own race wire service, a move that did not sit well with the Mafia. But O’Brien was not about to hand over his golden goose without a fight. He was a tough Irish gangster who had once been given the dubious distinction of “Public Enemy Number One” by Rhode Island law enforcement officials. There was no way for the two wire services to coexist. Two is always a crowd in the underworld, especially in a small city like Providence, Rhode Island, located in the heart of the smallest state in the union. Raymond Patriarca was given the order to bust up O’Brien’s operation. Patriarca trashed O’Brien’s betting parlors, robbed his bookies, and savagely beathis runners. Still, the stubborn Irishman would not budge. At this time, O’Brien was fighting a war on two fronts. A jailhouse informant had recently fingered him as the “mastermind” behind the infamous 1950 Brink’s Job in Boston. The story made sense, as O’Brien was a close friend and associate of Joseph “Specs” O’Keefe, a former Lyman School delinquent who was now a key suspect in the $2,775,395 heist, at that point the largest in U.S. history. It would only be a matter of time before his Brink’s cohorts turned up to ensure his silence.
    Raymond Patriarca would get to him first. His men delivered their death notice to O’Brien with murderous zeal as the Irish gangster returned to his Cranston, Rhode Island, home one night after spending several hours at a local roadhouse he owned. Patriarca’s gunmen welcomed O’Brien home with two shotgun blasts to the chest. The hoodlum was dead before he hit the ground. When his body was discovered, O’Brien was lying on his back with both arms stretched wide. His legs were also positioned outward in an unnatural state. The gangster’s blood was everywhere. Police believed O’Brien had been murdered in connection with the Brink’s robbery. No one suspected Patriarca. Carlton O’Brien’s killers were never found. Raymond L. S. Patriarca was now the undisputed king of Providence, and soon the other New England states would fall like dominoes under his control in a seismic shift of power radiating