Mobster to face 5-year sentence
Heads to federal prison for part in killing
A once-menacing mobster was sentenced yesterday to 5 1⁄2 years in federal prison for keeping the secret of his crew’s gruesome hit on nightclub owner Steven DiSarro buried for 23 years.
U.S. District Court Judge Denise J. Casper meted out the punishment recommended by prosecutors, who lavished praise on 73-year-old Robert “Bobby” DeLuca for his gritty testimony that earlier this summer sealed the fates of his former mob boss Francis “Cadillac Frank” Salemme and Burlington plumber Paul Weadick for strangling DiSarro in 1993 after he was approached by the FBI to inform against his business partners and pals.
DeLuca’s sentence is expected to run concurrently with a yet-to-be-imposed sentence by the state of Rhode Island for his guilty plea to orchestrating the 1992 murder of mob enforcer Kevin Hanrahan. DeLuca testified he watched from a car as Hanrahan was shot in the head outside a Providence restaurant.
“But for the defendant cooperating in this case ... we may not have achieved a conviction in the SalemmeWeadick case,” assistant U.S. Attorney William Ferland said. “He has broken away from that life of crime . ... If he has not learned his lesson by now, he never will.”
For DiSarro’s long-suffering widow and children, who wanted DeLuca sentenced to at least 13 years, the leniency given has added to their heartache.
“While I’m thankful for his testimony ... it’s beyond apparent that he testified for his own selfish reasons,” DiSarro’s 31-year-old son Michael told the court. “He only decided to help when his own back was up against the wall.”
Angrily wiping tears from his eyes, Michael DeLuca said of growing up fatherless with his two brothers in Westwood, clueless as to where their dad was, “People in our town would whisper about us being ‘the mob boys.’ Kids weren’t allowed over to our house to play. Do you know what that’s like?
“It isn’t a Hollywood movie. We have to live with the decisions these men have made. I believe Mr. DeLuca should have to live with the consequences of his decision.” DeLuca, a Providence native and father of four children ages 7 to 50, once read the riot act to those who would double-cross the New England Mafia. Yesterday, he quietly read an apology to the DiSarros for his years of silence in a voice bereft of the bravado he displayed during four days on the witness stand. “I know I done wrong for lying and I’m accepting full responsibility for it,” said DeLuca.
DeLuca’s attorney, Carlos Jorge Dominguez, said his client “has found refuge in the church.”
On Salemme’s order, DeLuca arranged for DiSarro to be buried in a hazardous waste pit in Providence. Even when he agreed to start wearing a wire for the feds in 2011, DeLuca denied knowing anything about DiSarro’s disappearance until he was arrested on obstruction of justice charges in 2016, after the remains were located and exhumed.