Mobster Frank 'Bobo' Marrapese dies
PROVIDENCE, R.I. — Mafia capo Frank L. “Bobo” Marrapese Jr., long known as one of the most vicious enforcers for New England crime boss Raymond L.S. Patriarca, died early Friday morning at Rhode Island Hospital.
Marrapese, 74, had been serving time at the Adult Correctional Institutions for murder, racketeering and extortion. Rhode Island State Police Lt. Col. Joseph F. Philbin confirmed his death.
The son of the late Margaret (DiCristofaro) and the late Frank Marrapese, he was especially active in the 1960s and '70s, during the heyday of the Patriarca crime family.
Marrapese operated the Acorn Social Club in the heart of Federal Hill, which had become a key meeting spot for mobsters from across New England. That's where Marrapese shot mob associate Richard “Dickie” Callei to death on March 15, 1975. He then had the corpse buried near a golf course in Rehoboth, Massachusetts.
Marrapese had recently gone to the hospital, ACI spokeswoman Susan Perez said on Friday, but she did not know when. Since he has been held in maximum security at the state prison, correctional officers continued to guard him at the hospital, Perez said.
After Callei’s murder, it took nearly a decade to catch Marrapese, although he continued to commit other crimes, such as a hijacking case involving stolen La-Z-Boy recliners in the early 1980s.
Marrapese was convicted of Callei’s murder in 1987 and was sentenced to life in prison. He was released on parole in 2008, but it didn’t take long for him to get in trouble again.
Within two years, state police say, he and other mob figures were running a large-scale sports gambling ring that was raking in hundreds of thousands of dollars. Marrapese was among two dozen people in that ring arrested in May 2011. He was sentenced in 2013 to nine years for racketeering and extortion.
In September, the Rhode Island Parole Board had denied parole to the notorious mobster.
“There were two sides to Bobo’s personality,” Providence Police Cmdr. Thomas Verdi, once head of the department’s organized crime and narcotics unit, said on Friday. “On one hand, he could be gregarious, a big smile, the center of attention. The other side of him — mostly when he was younger and on the street — he was a volatile, violent, and lethal criminal.”
As word of his death spread Friday, security officer Pat Cortellessa, who worked with Marrapese at a Providence nightclub in the early 1980s, called The Providence Journal, saying he wanted to offer a glimpse into the “human side of Frank.”
Cortellessa's boss, the owner of Gallery nightclub on Richmond Street, had hired Marrapese because the club was having trouble with vandalism, violence and drug dealing, Cortellessa said. Marrapese’s reputation in organized crime and as a “tough boxer-type guy” was well-known, Cortellessa said, and his presence decreased violence, kept out alleged gangsters and helped keep the peace.
“There were so many different gangs in Providence,” said Cortellessa, who’s 61, lives in Cranston now and works in private security. “By him being there, he kept out worse people that would harass the owner, and lunatics and crazy people and just troublemakers. So it’s a reverse psychology of keeping the riff-raff under control.”
The club owner, Cortellessa said, told him the FBI had come in and asked whether he was being extorted by Marrapese, and he said "absolutely not."
Cortellessa recalled Marrapese as a “total gentleman.”
“In my experience, he was a very honorable man, and he would never forcefully beat people up,” Cortellessa said. “He was very diplomatic.”
In some ways, Marrapese’s death is the end of an era, said Col. Steven G. O’Donnell, former superintendent of the Rhode Island State Police.
But in other ways, O’Donnell said that era ended with Marrapese's incarceration years ago and the police work that broke up the traditional La Cosa Nostra, known locally as the Patriarca crime family.
Patriarca died in July 1984, and many of his and Marrapese’s longtime associates have also died.
Marrapese is “just another piece of that family that is gone,” said O’Donnell, who emphasized that Marrapese’s “reign of terror” predates his own police work.
Marrapese’s time as a Patriarca enforcer spanned the 1960s to the 1980s. O’Donnell became a correctional officer at the ACI in 1983 and joined the state police in 1987 after a stint as a North Kingstown police officer. He worked as an undercover state police detective from 1990 to 1996, infiltrating factions of the Patriarca crime family.
Even though the criminal world retained respect for Marrapese, O’Donnell said Friday that he had minimal influence on criminal decision-making during the past decade.
“He didn’t enjoy the same type of reputation that he did when he was on the streets,” O’Donnell said. “When he was on the streets, he was as feared as any criminal has ever been in Rhode Island.”
But Friday, O’Donnell said his sympathy goes out to Marrapese’s family for their loss: “At the end of the day, this is a human being who passed away. He is a father, a husband and a son that people really care about.”
O’Donnell readily understood the nightclub owner’s decision in the 1980s to hire Marrapese to work security. Because of his “propensity to violence” and the way he thrived on his name recognition as an enforcer, O’Donnell said, “Yeah, he can keep your club safe because no one’s going to mess with him.”
Although it took nearly a decade for law enforcement to catch Marrapese after Callei’s death, O’Donnell said Marrapese wasn’t on the lam in the early 1980s while working at the Gallery nightclub. At a time when members of the mafia were far less likely to step forward and give corroborating evidence, it just took much longer to gather evidence to prove his involvement, O’Donnell said.
When longtime Providence Journal reporter and mob expert, the late W. Zachary Malinowski, wrote about Marrapese in 2008, he noted that “more times than not, witnesses or victims had memory problems or recanted their testimony and the charges were dropped.”
While Marrapese spent most of his adult life in prison for various crimes, not all of the charges stuck. He was acquitted in the murder of Anthony “The Moron” Mirabella at Fidas Restaurant in May 1982, as well as the August 1982 murder of 20-year-old Ronald McElroy, who was beaten to death with a baseball bat after accidentally cutting off Marrapese and other mobsters who were street racing in Providence.
Marrapese maintained his innocence in McElroy’s murder during a recent prison interview with “Crimetown” podcast producers Marc Smerling and Zac Stuart-Pontier. He blamed the murder on the informant, a former friend and mob associate.
What broke his heart, Marrapese said, was the betrayal.
“Whenever I got in trouble, I was the only one who went to jail. But I don’t take nobody with me,” Marrapese told “Crimetown,” while inside maximum security. “I had people inform on me who murdered people, and the state police know they did it, and the FBI know they did it, but what they thought was that, if they put enough charges on me, I’d roll over, too. But the buck stops here, like Harry Truman said. The buck stops here.”
Reflecting on Cortellessa’s view of Marrapese as a gentleman, O’Donnell said that’s the side that Marrapese's co-working security officer would have seen of him.
“At times he acted appropriately and could comport himself as a gentleman should,” O’Donnell said. “But the true definition of a gentleman: Gentlemen don’t kill people, period. He might have some good days and bad days, but his good days come from a reputation that people are scared to death if they do wrong.”
— With reports from Journal staff writer Amanda Milkovits
— kbramson@providencejournal.com
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