On the morning of July 13, 1966, Willie Maro walked into the Corner Kitchen, a small restaurant on Atwells Avenue in Providence, Rhode Island. It was a routine stop, one he made most mornings on Federal Hill.
A man walked in behind him, carrying a gun. He ordered the owner and the customers to lie face down on the floor. They obeyed.
But he did not tell Willie Maro to lie down.
Instead, he forced Maro into the restaurant’s telephone booth. Then he fired four times. Maro died inside the booth, and the gunman walked out onto the street in broad daylight.
He was never identified.
The customers on the floor told police they had never seen the man before. On Federal Hill in 1966, that was not unusual. It was survival.
Maro was a gambler who ran dice and card games a few doors from the restaurant. For two years, he had done something almost nobody in New England dared to do. He had refused to pay Raymond Patriarca.
The phone booth murder did not end the story. It started a war on Federal Hill that killed more people, sent the most powerful mobster in New England to federal prison, and exposed a lie inside the FBI that took decades to come out.
The version most people know is simple. A small-time bookmaker refused to pay tribute, and the boss had him shot. That version is true as far as it goes.
It is also incomplete.
To understand the phone booth, you have to start with the man who owned the street.
Raymond Loreda Salvatore Patriarca was born on March 17, 1908, in Worcester, Massachusetts. His family moved to Providence when he was a boy. By his teens, he was in trouble with the law.
By his twenties, he was a known hijacker, armed robber, and bootlegger.
In 1938, the Massachusetts Governor’s Council granted him an early pardon from a prison sentence. A newspaper investigation later revealed the pardon had been arranged with political help. The scandal ended careers.
It did not slow Patriarca down.
By 1954, he was the boss of the New England mafia. His family controlled gambling, loan sharking, and racketeering from Connecticut to Maine, including the powerful crew in Boston’s North End. He ran all of it from a small office on Atwells Avenue in Providence.
The sign on the door read National Cigarette Service Company and Coinomatic Distributors, a vending machine and pinball business. Men came from all over New England to stand in that office and ask for permission.
Federal Hill was the Italian heart of Providence. Bakeries, social clubs, barber shops, and churches lined Atwells Avenue. Everyone knew which door belonged to Patriarca.
Everyone knew the street had rules.
The first rule was simple. Anyone who ran a game on Patriarca’s territory paid him. Dice, cards, numbers, sports betting.
It did not matter how big or small. The payment was called tribute, and it went up the street to the vending machine office every week.
The system was not written down anywhere. It did not need to be. A bookmaker who opened a game learned the price from the first visitor who walked in and asked whom he was with.
Most paid without arguing. Paying was cheaper than the alternative, and it bought something useful in return. No rival would rob the game, and no one else would be allowed to open next door.
Patriarca did not collect because he needed every dollar. He collected because the payment itself was the point. A gambler who paid was admitting that his game existed with permission.
A gambler who refused was saying that permission was not needed.
That is the rule that explains everything that happened to Willie Maro.
Willie Maro came from a large Federal Hill family. His brothers included Rudolph, known as Rudy. The Maros knew the neighborhood, and the neighborhood knew them.
By the early 1960s, Willie was running card and dice games out of a club on Atwells Avenue, across the street from the Corner Kitchen. The games made money. They made enough that Willie began saying out loud that he did not need Raymond Patriarca.
He stopped paying. Nothing happened.
That is often how it works. A boss who answers an insult too quickly looks nervous. A boss who waits looks patient.
But on Federal Hill, everyone was watching the Maro game, and everyone understood the wait would not last forever.
The FBI was watching too. From 1962 to 1965, agents had a hidden microphone in Patriarca’s office on Atwells Avenue. The bug was installed without a court order and could never be used as evidence, but it gave the bureau a front seat to New England’s underworld.
Later released FBI files show that by 1965, agents were reporting that Patriarca’s people had been trying to kill Willie Maro for more than a year. The plan was not a secret to the federal government. It was a file.
No one warned Willie Maro. Nothing in the released record shows that anyone tried.
In those same years, the FBI was cultivating a hitman from New Bedford named Joseph Barboza. He was known as the Animal. He was a former boxer, a member of a crew that did violent work for Patriarca’s Boston underboss, and one of the most feared men in New England.
According to later reports of the FBI files, Patriarca was heard trying to hire outside help for the Maro killing in 1965. One account says a key recording from that period failed to capture the conversation because of a mechanical problem.
A year passed. Willie Maro kept running his game.
Then came July 13, 1966.
Willie Maro walked into the Corner Kitchen that morning as he usually did. The restaurant was small, with a few customers, the owner behind the counter, and a pay telephone in a booth.
A man came through the door with a gun. He did not rob the place. He did not ask for money.
He told the owner and the customers to get down on the floor face down. They obeyed.
Willie Maro was not told to lie down. The gunman wanted him standing.
He pushed Maro into the telephone booth. A phone booth is a small glass and wood box with a folding door. There is nowhere to go.
He fired four times. The shots struck Maro in the head, the shoulder, the chest, and the body. Accounts disagree about whether the weapon was a shotgun or a pistol, and about whether the booth stood just inside the restaurant or right outside its door.
They agree on everything that mattered.
It took a few seconds. The gunman walked out onto Atwells Avenue in daylight and disappeared.
The people on the floor got up. All of them told police they could not describe the man clearly and had never seen him before.
A phone booth is where a man goes to make a private call. For years, gamblers on Federal Hill had used payphones to place bets and pass numbers without speaking in front of anyone. The killer chose the one place in the restaurant that was meant for privacy and turned it into a cell with glass walls.
Willie Maro was killed a short walk from Patriarca’s office. Nobody needed to be told who had won the argument.
The family did not accept it. The Maros were not a quiet family.
In the months after Willie’s murder, Federal Hill became dangerous. There were shootings and attempted shootings. A nephew of the Maros was shot in the leg.
A man named Angelo DeLuca, believed to be connected to the murder, was killed in November 1966. A young man named Frank Mele Jr. was found dead outside Rudy Maro’s apartment.
Not every one of those killings has been solved, and the record does not tie each one to the Maro feud. But the pattern frightened the neighborhood. A gambler’s refusal to pay had turned into a family war on the boss’s own street.
At the center of it was Rudy Maro. He had lost his brother in a phone booth, and according to police and later court testimony, he was not willing to forget who had ordered it.
Why did Patriarca need Willie Maro dead? Not because of money. The dice game was small.
Patriarca took in more from a single week of New England gambling than Maro’s game produced in a year.
He needed Maro dead because every week Maro stayed alive and unpaid, the whole street learned that the rule could be broken. And now Willie’s death was making the street even more dangerous than his defiance had.
The thing that finally reached Patriarca was not the Maro family. It was the man the FBI had been cultivating.
In 1966, Joseph Barboza was arrested in Boston on a weapons charge. His bail was set high. Patriarca’s people were expected to raise it.
They did not.
Then two of Barboza’s friends, Arthur Bratsos and Thomas DePrisco, were murdered in November 1966 while trying to collect money for his bail. The money they had raised disappeared with them.
Barboza decided that the organization he had worked for had abandoned him. The men who were supposed to protect him had let him sit in a cell, and the men who tried to help him were dead.
For a killer who had lived by loyalty to that world, it was the end of the arrangement. In June 1967, sitting in a jail cell, he agreed to become a witness for the federal government.
It was the opening the FBI had been waiting for.
On June 20, 1967, a federal grand jury indicted Raymond Patriarca and his underboss Henry Tameleo for conspiracy to murder Willie Maro. The charge was built on Barboza’s account of conversations with Patriarca’s people about killing the Providence gambler.
The man the government relied on was a confessed killer, but he had been close enough to Patriarca’s world to describe how a murder was arranged. And for the first time, the boss of New England was in a federal courtroom over a killing on his own street.
In 1968, a federal jury in Boston convicted Patriarca of conspiring to murder Willie Maro. He was sentenced to five years in federal prison. In March 1969, the most powerful mobster in New England walked into the federal penitentiary in Atlanta.
It is important to be precise about what that verdict meant. Patriarca was convicted of conspiracy, not of pulling the trigger. The jury did not decide who the gunman in the Corner Kitchen was.
No one was ever convicted of firing the shots that killed Willie Maro. His murder, as a shooting, has never been solved.
The second part of the story was already underway.
On April 20, 1968, Rudy Maro went shopping at a market on Pocasset Avenue in Providence with a friend named Anthony Mele. Gunmen walked in and shot both men dead.
The brother who had refused to let go of Willie’s murder was now dead himself.
This time, the government found another witness. John Kelley, known as Red, was a Boston armored car robber who decided to cooperate. He testified that he had helped plan the murders of Rudy Maro and Anthony Mele, and that the contract had come from Patriarca’s organization.
In 1970, Patriarca was tried in Rhode Island for the Maro and Mele murders. He was convicted of conspiracy to commit murder and sentenced to ten years. A man named Maurice Lerner was convicted of the murders themselves.
Patriarca kept running the family from prison. He was released in 1975.
Then the government’s case began to come apart piece by piece.
Joseph Barboza, the government’s star witness, had also testified in a separate Boston murder case, the killing of a man named Edward Deegan. Four men were sent to prison on his word. Years later, it was proven that Barboza had lied in that case to protect a friend, and that FBI agents knew it.
The four men, one of them Patriarca’s underboss Henry Tameleo, spent decades in prison for a murder they did not commit. In 2007, a federal judge ordered the government to pay more than one hundred million dollars to the men and their families.
One of the four, Joseph Salvati, spent almost thirty years in prison before he was released. Peter Limone was freed in 2001 after thirty-three years in prison. Two of the men, Henry Tameleo and Louis Greco, died behind bars.
The man who had helped convict Patriarca in the Willie Maro case was in another courtroom a proven perjurer.
John Kelley’s testimony in the Rudy Maro case collapsed too. Investigators later established that Kelley had lied at the 1970 trial, and that FBI agent H. Paul Rico had backed his false testimony.
In 1988, the Rhode Island Supreme Court overturned Maurice Lerner’s murder conviction.
So both brothers’ murders reached a courtroom on the word of a cooperating killer. Both witnesses were later shown to have lied under oath in serious cases.
The jury in the Willie Maro case heard Barboza before anyone knew what he had done in the Deegan trial. That does not prove Patriarca was innocent. Later released FBI files show agents reporting the plot against Willie Maro long before Barboza ever testified.
The motive was well known on Federal Hill.
But it does mean the verdicts are weaker than they looked at the time. The truth of who killed the Maro brothers was never established cleanly in any courtroom.
Joseph Barboza did not live to see most of this. He entered witness protection under a new name, moved to California, and was released from prison in the 1970s. On February 11, 1976, he was shot dead on a street in San Francisco.
Raymond Patriarca died of a heart attack on July 11, 1984, at the age of 76. He was never convicted of any killing as the man who pulled the trigger. For thirty years, he had ruled New England from a vending machine office on the same street where Willie Maro died.
Willie Maro was not killed because of money. Patriarca did not need what his dice game made. He was killed because he said out loud that he did not need permission, and because Patriarca could not let Federal Hill hear that statement go unanswered.
The tribute was never the price of the game. It was the price of admitting who ran the street.
The FBI knew the plot was coming more than a year before the shots. The bureau had a microphone in the boss’s office and an informant in his world. It did not save Willie Maro.
It used his murder later when a hitman with his own reasons offered to testify.
And the government’s victory turned out to depend on witnesses who were willing to lie.
The boss went to prison for conspiring to kill both Maro brothers. Yet no one ever answered in a court who walked into the Corner Kitchen with the gun.
Willie Maro refused to pay a tax on his own game. The street collected it anyway, in a telephone booth, in front of witnesses who chose not to see.
The boss who demanded tribute and the gambler who refused it are both long dead. The phone booth is gone. The question of who fired the shots is still open on Atwells Avenue.