Minutes tick by, and still the Levines have not called the police. They are dithering, confused, disoriented; more than that, they are quite simply terrified. They do not want to call the police. Their bickering continues. They keep stalling and arguing, and the longer they delay, the angrier Barbara Oliva becomes.
She is already seething for having had a loaded .38 stuck in her face. When she can’t take the Levines’ dallying and debating any longer, she marches over to the wall of the main office and presses the button that triggers an alarm at Rhode Island Electric Protection Co. In minutes police sirens rise into the thick, superheated haze of the morning and Sam Levine goes silent. His complexion is still grayish white, and he glares at Oliva until the police arrive, but he has no choice but to explain what happened.
He delivers a straightforward account to police. It would have been helpful to know when the safe deposit box operation was set up and who uses it, but Levine doesn’t volunteer the information and the police don’t ask because, on the face of it, there’s nothing illegal going on.
Besides, the police are content to let Levine stew over how he and his brothers, in less than ninety minutes in the heat of a summer morning, have suddenly managed to lose untold valuables carefully entrusted to their safekeeping.
They are quick to notice when Patriarca’s shadow passes over his victims. The hint of Mafia action tends to induce amnesia or stupidity among otherwise intelligent people. They forget. They don’t hear things. They know nothing. And the Levines are looking like a chorus of those answers.
“Providence police called me the day of the robbery,” says Albert E. DeRobbio, then-assistant attorney general, decades after the heist. “And they asked what to do.
“I said, ‘Did you do the fingerprinting, talk to the owners and get their statements?’
“They said they did, so I said, ‘Well, did you secure the premises?’
“They said they did. So I said, ‘I don’t think you’ve got any further obligation in this case,’ so they closed it up and left.
“God knows what happened after that. But it was some time before anybody even claimed any losses. I couldn’t put it before the grand jury because nobody stepped up to say what had been stolen. Technically, we didn’t even really have a robbery.”