Medic to the mob
Memoir details life of a cardiologist turned trusted confidant to some of the state’s biggest names in organized crime
All the images we see of the late Raymond L.S. Patriarca through the years depict the head of New England organized crime as an unflinching, stoic figure, the consummate tough guy whose turf you didn’t want to mess with.
In the twilight of his life, the truth was a bit more complicated, and Patriarca did his best to keep it a secret from family members and criminal associates.
But there was one person who knew better.
His doctor.
“He was trying to project an image of strength when in fact he was severely disabled,” said Dr.
Barbara Roberts. “He was far sicker than people knew.”
Rhode Island’s first female cardiologist, Roberts had only been practicing a few years when, in the fall of 1980, a colleague at Miriam Hospital in Providence introduced her to John “Jack” Cicilline, who was gaining prominence in those days as a well-connected criminal defense lawyer. Through Cicilline, Roberts met Patriarca’s son, Raymond “Junior” Patriarca, who was looking for a new doctor to care for his father.
Now Roberts has written “The Doctor Broad,” a memoir about an unexpected professional detour that led her to become not just the elder Patriarca’s personal physician, but the lover of his No. 3 underboss, Louis “Baby Shacks” Manocchio.
The title might not be flattering, particularly for a self-described feminist, but Roberts says those are the very words some people used to describe her when they found out she was Patriarca’s doctor nearly four decades ago.
“I thought it was hilarious,” she says. “I always thought a broad was somebody with big breasts and small frontal lobes, which was the opposite of me.”
But being Patriarca’s doctor wasn’t usually funny.
There were times when the police and the press turned against her, she says, attacking her credentials and impugning her reputation. Roberts happened to be involved in a bitter custody battle with the father of her youngest daughter during the period Patriarca was her patient. That was when she found herself arrested on “trumped-up” charges of breaking into his home to rescue her daughter, who was 4 years old at the time.
The child’s father had made repeated complaints against her, but until she became a mob doctor they were simply brushed aside.
“The mug shots are in the book,” says Roberts.
Retired from clinical practice in 2016, Roberts is still on the clinical faculty at Brown University Medical School. Back when she was still practicing, however, Roberts was a familiar face at many hospitals in Rhode Island and often did consultations at Landmark Medical Center in Woonsocket and Memorial Hospital in Pawtucket. A native of New York, she has lived in Jamestown for many years.
Roberts first started talking to Junior Patriarca about his father’s medical care around September 1980, shortly after the elder Patriarca had developed a gangrenous toe, the result of complications of diabetes. He’d been admitted to Fatima Hospital, where the toe had to be amputated.
“Junior made it clear he didn’t think his father was getting adequate care,” said Roberts. “I said, ‘Sure, just call the office and schedule an office visit for your father.’”
They scheduled the visit, but the Rhode Island State Police had other plans for the crime boss. Shortly before he was due to see his new cardiologist, Patriarca was arrested at his home in Johnston for conspiring to murder Raymond “Baby” Curcio, a mob underling who’d been gunned down years earlier.
Roberts met Patriarca for the first time at the Scituate barracks of the state police. Patriarca, who was struggling with bouts of angina, had forgotten his nitroglycerin pills, and his associates called on Roberts to check on his condition.
“When I laid eyes on him it was apparent he was a very sick man,” said Roberts.
The state police were skeptical of Roberts’ assessment of Patriarca’s condition, but they reluctantly agreed to act on her recommendation to have their prisoner admitted to Miriam Hospital, where he would remain for weeks.
Over the next three-anda-half years or so – until his death in July 1984 at age 76 – Patriarca would have weekly medical visits with Roberts unless he was in the hospital, which was fairly often.
State prosecutors were pushing to put Patriarca on trial, but it was Roberts’ testimony about his tenuous health that prevented them from doing so. Patriarca, she says, was hobbled by an assortment of issues, including chronic muscle wasting from diabetic neuropathy. He was showing signs of a dangerous infection known as osteomyelitis at the amputation site in his foot. And he suffered from unstable angina, a life-threatening syndrome in which the heart muscle is starved of oxygen.
TRUE TO HIS image as the powerful lord of a sprawling criminal enterprise, Patriarca wore the mask of an iron man.
In reality, Patriarca was too weak to button his own shirt or drag a knife through a steak. His wife Rita had to help him.
“He was in constant pain from the neuropathy. He was literally incapacitated. He couldn’t walk across a room without suffering from angina,” said Roberts. “I would have to draw the complaints out of him. He wasn’t faking. Various law enforcement agents accused him of faking and the state and federal prosecutors hired their own experts and tried to refute my testimony.”
None succeeded. Many of Roberts’ regular visits with Patriarca were house calls.
“He would be sitting in his den with his feet on a hassock... we would chat,” recalls Roberts. “I would examine him and Rita would give us lunch. She was a wonderful cook. The first time I had venison was at his house. She made baked stuffed lobster.”
About a year after meeting Patriarca for the first time, she lost a patient during a cardiac catheterization procedure. She was so distraught, she called on her friend Cicilline for moral support. He consoled her with a meal at a Federal Hill restaurant where the manager turned out to be Louis Manocchio.
“There was an instant attraction between the two of us,” said Roberts. “Within a few weeks we were lovers. It went on until 1985. Two of those years Louis was in prison. We’re still friends and we’ve been friends for many years.”
When she and Manocchio met, he’d been in the U.S. for about two years after 10 years on the lam in Europe, in flight from an indictment for a murder conspiracy in which two other denizens of the underworld had been slain – Rudy Marfeo and Anthony Melei.
Roberts says Manocchio may have thought it was a cool thing to become a hood when he was growing up, but by the time he came back from Europe he had other ideas about what it meant to be a stand-up guy.
“He taught himself French and took up mountain climb-ing,” she said. He told her, “All the guys I grew up looking up to I realized were crazy.”
“The Doctor Broad” isn’t due for official release until Sept. 3, but millions of people are already familiar with Roberts’ racy story. It was featured in the first season of the “Crimetown” series of podcasts, which draws on Providence’s colorful – and sometimes lawless – civic history.
The “Crimetown” version has been downloaded some 50 million times, around the world, since it was released in 2017, according to Roberts. The author of three earlier books about heart disease had been mulling a first-ever memoir about her experiences with the mob for about a decade, but the response to the podcast made her a hot property.
“There’s a potentially huge audience for my book,” said Roberts. “My agent was a big fan of “Crimetown” and he came looking for me.”
It’s a story that’s all the more beguiling for readers, given the cultural milieu from which Roberts emerged to mingle with the mob. As she tells it in the book, she wasn’t just a well-bred doctor, but a feminist who’d been active in the political crusades of the 1970s. She spoke at the last mass demonstration against the war in Vietnam in Washington, D.C., on the day President Richard Nixon was inaugurated for a second term, and she helped organize the first nationwide pro-choice demonstration in 1971, before the the Supreme Court made Roe v. Wade the law of the land.
But Roberts says there’s a timely message in the unlikely trajectory of her life. In an era when a woman’s right to control what happens to her body is more politically threatened than it has been in many years, standing on principle may lead to unfamiliar places. Today’s women should be prepared to stay the course, no matter who’s offended.
In her case, Roberts says, she was guided by the Hippocratic oath that all doctors are sworn to uphold. Put the patient first, and do no harm.
“I had no idea the price I would pay for adhering to the Hippocratic oath,” she says.