Torn up over a tarp hiding DiSarro’s body
Salemme pawn details Mafia murder cover-up
Shortly before swearing the blood oath that inducted him into the Mafia, Joseph DeLuca nearly botched the cover-up of Steven DiSarro’s murder by cutting corners and lying about it to the New England godfather, the made man testified yesterday.
“Currently, it (the oath of silence) doesn’t mean much among the mob,” DeLuca, 78, grumbled from the witness stand, where he continues his immunized testimony today in U.S. District Court against former boss Francis “Cadillac Frank” Salemme and mob associate Paul Weadick.
As widow Pamela DiSarro wept, DeLuca cold-bloodedly recounted how it took him three days in May 1993 to dispose of DiSarro’s corpse in a hazardous-waste pit in Rhode Island, only to dig it up nearly a week later because he and his brother, made man Robert DeLuca, defied Salemme’s order to destroy a potentially incriminating piece of evidence.
“He said, ‘This has got to go down. You can’t go throwing it anywhere.’ He said, ‘Make sure the tarp comes off. There’s a lot of prints on there and now yours are, too,’ ” DeLuca said Salemme told him after the gangland kingpin personally drove the body 30 miles to North Providence from his ex-wife’s house in Sharon. Prosecutors charge Salemme, his late son and Weadick strangled the nightclub owner at the Sharon home because they feared he would become an FBI informant.
On May 11, 1993, the day after the hit, DeLuca said he picked up a prearranged, rented “switch car” and met Salemme, transferring DiSarro’s remains bound in tarp and rope to the trunk.
That night, DeLuca said, a longtime friend, Charles “Harpo” Garabedian, picked up him, his nephew and his brother Robert in the switch car with the corpse in the trunk and set out for an old mill building where he said the owner, William Ricci, first offered the use of a furnace, then a pit he’d dug to dump hazardous waste.
“We opened the trunk, took the body out and took it up a flight of stairs,” DeLuca said. After waiting nearly three hours for neighbors to go to bed, DeLuca said they loaded DiSarro “on a rusted hand truck” and bolted from a loading dock toward the hole. “Harpo fell down and the body fell off the hand truck,” DeLuca said. “We dragged it across the lot.”
He said DiSarro was slid into the hole — still swathed in the blue tarp, which DeLuca decided was “ridiculous” to fuss over. Ricci was to cover DiSarro over the next morning with sand and construction debris.
But over the next several days, he said, Robert DeLuca became unglued because Salemme “specifically asked, ‘What did you do with the tarp?’” He testified his brother assured Salemme that Joseph DeLuca had discarded it in a dumpster.
DeLuca finally threw up his hands and went back to the mill to discuss exhuming DiSarro with Ricci, only to find him already opening the grave with a backhoe. When the teeth of the shovel snagged on the rope and the tarp, DeLuca said Ricci “pulled it up and it ripped open. Body fell out. Moving the body is not going to happen,” he recalled thinking to himself. “The blue tarp was hanging on the end of the shovel.”
Assistant U.S. Attorney William Ferland delicately asked DeLuca what he remembered about Di S arr o’ s remains. After a pregnant pause, DeLuca replied, “I remember a blue jogging suit.” He said he and his brother would not speak of DiSarro again for 23 years until 2016, when they learned the feds had found the grave.