Ralph DeMasi, 80-year-old former associate of Boston mob boss Whitey Bulger, in court for 1991 murder of armored truck guard
http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profiles/bl...in-court-for-19

Ralph DeMasi, ex-mobster and pal of Whitey Bulger, found not guilty of 1991 murder of armored truck guard http://gangstersinc.ning.com/profil...nd-pal-of-whitey-bulger-found-not-guilty

A long and interesting article on Ralph Demasi's history.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive...and-the-crime-that-wont-let-them-go.html

THE HOLDUP
A Mobster, a Family and the Crime That Won’t Let Them Go
He was once a feared member of the New England underworld, a specialist in robbing armored cars. At 80, he was years out of prison. But could his life of crime ever be behind him?
By DAN BARRY MAY 31, 2017

Ralph DeMasi, once a feared member of the criminal underworld, in his cell at Worcester County Jail in Massachusetts. Andrew White for The New York Times
THE HOLDUP
A Mobster, a Family and the Crime That Won’t Let Them Go
He was once a feared member of the New England underworld, a specialist in robbing armored cars. At 80, he was years out of prison. But could his life of crime ever be behind him?
By DAN BARRY MAY 31, 2017

THE AGED GANGSTER welcomed me at the door.

Hunched by hard time lived and served, his lean body scarred by several bullets and one ice-pick stabbing, he led a brief tour of the modest rental house he shared in a Massachusetts shore town. He paused to point out his three shelves in the communal refrigerator, a measure of his diminished domain.

This was Ralph DeMasi, once a feared member of the New England underworld whose long résumé included truck hijackings and home invasions, robberies and violence. Days shy of 80, he half-joked that at the moment he’d rather be holding up an armored truck.

He led the way to his small, well-ordered bedroom, where dozens of photographs formed a wall-to-wall collage of contradiction, a blur of toddlers and mobsters. Here, his ex-wife with their baby at an amusement park, and here, a friend at a picnic, shortly before his gangland murder.

This story will be available as a special print section on Sunday, June 4. Call 1-800-NYTIMES, or email ordercs@nytimes.com, to purchase copies.

“Rudy Sciarra,” Mr. DeMasi said, motioning to a photo of a vicious Mafioso from Rhode Island, long dead. “And the one on the right, he’s a wiseguy out of New York. …”

But he struggled to summon this mobster’s name from his mind’s darker recesses. “You forget people, like, as you go along,” he said. “So the pictures kind of keep me up to — you know.”

He kept more memories in boxes of correspondence arranged lengthwise on his bed, the dates of every receipt and reply recorded in his shaky scrawl. These letters, which he slept beside, were the coded missives of criminals, swapping family updates, sharing gun-rap loopholes. They often closed with “A friend always” and “With love,” and were signed by public enemies named Bobo, and Gerard, and even Jim, as in James Bulger, the murderous former fugitive better known as Whitey.

Funny story: More than 40 years ago, Mr. Bulger and an accomplice shot Mr. DeMasi several times in the drive-by killing of another target.


Years later, after Mr. Bulger was captured, convicted and sentenced to prison forever, Mr. DeMasi sent him a letter — a message, really — that he summarized as: “Whatever transpired between us, it didn’t kowtow me or make me any less of a man.”

From this a pen-pal friendship grew. In one letter, written in slanted, nearly inscrutable script, Mr. Bulger suggested that Mr. DeMasi sell these notes; they might be worth something. In another, he evoked his time in Alcatraz:

“Thanks for writing and I really enjoyed your letter. Felt like I was hearing from friends way back in the Az years. Fellow Bank Robbers, not ‘Organized Crime’ guys. Life was simple back then.”

The two men also exchanged yearly Christmas cards. But on this August afternoon last year, Mr. DeMasi sat on his bed, trying to remember something. Finally he said, “Whitey owes me a letter.”

To his right, past the exercise ball he balanced on to do 1,000 situps every morning — he often invited people to test his taut stomach — was a closet crammed with still more memories: copies of indictments, appeals of convictions, transcripts of wiretapped conversations (“I’ve got a crew of guys, I’ll tell you, and we rob armoreds, we rob armored trucks. …”). A half-century archive of persistent criminality.

Whenever the corpse of another wiseguy floated up to public consciousness, Mr. DeMasi was always in the mix of likely suspects. “Armed and dangerous” was stipulated.

“He didn’t take any lip from anybody,” recalled Tony Fiore, a mob associate and friend. “I mean, he was a tough guy.”

“One of the most dangerous criminals in New England,” said Brian Andrews, a former detective commander of the Rhode Island State Police. “A bad bastard.”

No doubt, Mr. DeMasi would love to be back at it. Scoping out some strip mall for a week, a month, whatever it took. Getting the timing down for when the guard came out with that canvas bag of cash. Donning a nylon mask. Concealing a semiautomatic. Go!


“It’s still in me,” he said, with a desiccated laugh.

This was unlikely, though, given his age and his consideration for his ex-wife and three grown children, who had suffered enough. Besides, too many cameras out there now.

His quiet life in Salisbury seemed to suit him. He had family living nearby. He had those three refrigerator shelves. And to help him remember all that he had done and seen, he had a framed newspaper article on his night stand: “Tips For Improving Your Memory.”

“Make lists. … Put frequently used items in the same place each time. … Repeat information. … Make associations. … Exercise your mind. …”

But some things cannot be forgotten.

A few months after my visit, on a December afternoon as clear and cold as a stare, other visitors came unannounced to Ralph DeMasi’s door. And they were armed.

I was a pretty bad actor. I did like to rob banks and armored trucks and things like that.
Ralph DeMasi
RAYMOND L. S. PATRIARCA. Frank Marrapese, a.k.a. Bobo. Robert DeLuca. Gerard Ouimette, a.k.a. the Frenchman. Raymond Lyons. Luigi Manocchio, a.k.a. Baby Shacks. Ralph DeMasi. As a Providence Journal reporter covering organized crime a quarter-century ago, I was their deadline Boswell.

I eventually moved on, taking with me the noirish stories and vague threats. That time, for example, when the owner of a mob-connected strip club I was investigating mentioned during a tense interview the name of my wife and the address of the house we were about to buy.

Those days came flooding back two years ago when the documentary filmmakers Marc Smerling and Zac Stuart-Pontier contacted me about “Crimetown,” a podcast focusing on the darker side of Providence. We began sharing our knowledge and research, which benefited me as I prepared a story about Maury Lerner, a minor-league baseball player who became a hit man for the Patriarca crime family.


Listen to a bonus episode of the first season of “Crimetown” below.


The documentarians, it turned out, had gotten to know Mr. DeMasi, who had spent time in prison with Mr. Lerner. Mr. Smerling kindly arranged for the two of us to meet with the gangster and his ex-wife and close friend, Sue, at his home last summer, where our conversation wound up centering on Mr. DeMasi and his turbulent past.

“A journey and a half,” Sue DeMasi called it.

In some ways, the man’s journey seemed preordained. Born in 1936 to a teenager in a Connecticut home for unwed mothers, he was soon abandoned. So began his peripatetic life as a troubled foster child.

If his foster parents weren’t happy with him, he once said, “they’ll just call up the people that bounce you around and they just come and get you and take you somewhere else — take you to another foster home. But I don’t hold that against anybody.”

Many years later, Mr. DeMasi tracked down his birth mother, who by then had been long married to a man who knew nothing of her first child. She told her son never to call again. “I remember the tears coming out of his eyes,” his ex-wife said. “He had spent all those years trying to find her.”

In the distant blur of the 1940s and 1950s, who knows what truly happened to one forsaken boy? One version is that, at age 11, he finally found a foster mother whom he loved, a Mrs. Bowman, in Bridgeport. When her husband began hitting her, again, the boy grabbed the man’s shotgun, threatened to shoot and ran away. He slept nuzzled beside the gun in a graveyard, then robbed a bookie’s card game the next day by ordering everyone at gunpoint to strip naked.

That, at least, is the family story. But there is no question that the young Mr. DeMasi spent time in a reformatory, time in the Army and time doing time, his progress chronicled in newspaper police items:

Ralph DeMasi was arrested after breaking into the Kingsway bowling alley in Fairfield and rifling a pinball machine ... was remanded to the custody of the New York State Police after being charged with burglarizing a sporting-goods store in Brewster, N.Y. … was arrested at gunpoint behind a Boston furrier’s, his car filled with $80,000 worth of furs, his pocket allegedly concealing a loaded gun.

In 1970, soon after being released from prison for the fur-theft conviction, Mr. DeMasi met his wife. He had stopped at her mother’s house in South Boston with one of her brothers, who was working a con called the “short change” — in which the swindler uses confusing prattle to distract a clerk handling money. “You’d give them a 20 and say: ‘Oh, wait a minute, I didn’t mean to give that to you, take this dollar, oh, I need my change for the 20,’” Ms. DeMasi explained. “It’s just fast-talking.”

The ex-con and the flimflammer’s redheaded younger sister were married within four months. Around the same time, Mr. DeMasi was suspected in the burglary of a suburban Boston home emptied of assorted valuables, including a mink coat, some jewelry and a saxophone. Searching the DeMasi apartment, the police found many of the goods, as well as a sweet but telltale note:

“Hi Honey! Went out with the cat & got nothing! Am going over to give Millie the money & then shall be taking a fast ride to Providence & try to get some money for the diamonds & the fur. Take care. Should be back by 3 p.m. Get ready & I will take you downtown. Took $19 out of your pocketbook? Love, Ralph.”

When their first child was born on Christmas Day, Mr. DeMasi was in prison. During her pregnancy with their second child, he pulled up to their Rhode Island home in a rental truck one night and informed his wife that they were moving — right now — to California, where he was soon arrested. With the help of some Rhode Island connections, she was able to post his bail just before giving birth.

Ms. DeMasi spent most of her young married life waiting. Waiting and waiting for her husband to come home after a score, her heart pounding like cops at the door. “Like an eternity,” she said.

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