FIVE

When I was living alone in the apartment with my dad we had a framed print of the iconic Maxell ad known as the Blown Away Guy. I was sure that was my dad’s martini swept up in the audio tempest, my dad’s tie thrashing behind him. The lush-haired guy in the ad for Maxell cassettes getting blasted by the music coming from a pair of JBL speakers, the veritable image of cool: It was Kevin Carroll. I was certain.

The Blown Away Guy was aspirational, and my dad aspired. He might not have known that the Blown Away Guy’s chair was designed by Le Corbusier, or maybe even who Le Corbusier was, but he knew what could make a guy eschew a savings account in favor of a McIntosh 2105 receiver for the baddest hi-fi in town. He might not have known not to douse himself in so much Polo cologne that when he left a room you could still smell him in the air, but he knew how to rock a pin-striped suit and red suspenders and make it work. And when my dad strutted into the production facility at the Providence Journal he was the best-dressed guy there. Of course, he was the only guy in a suit; these guys were driving trucks to deliver the paper. But it didn’t matter. He looked good. And he knew it. Everyone did.

My dad was a certain kind of guy. He dropped out of high school in the tenth grade to enlist in the army. He wasn’t a patriot—he was a bored seventeen-year-old who didn’t get along with his father and stepmom. But he was, as one of his co-workers at the Journal told me years later, in a letter, “so smart it was spooky.”

WHEN WE DIE we leave behind a paper trail, and I started collecting my father’s life as it appeared on paper, just as I had been doing with my mother’s. I have twenty years’ worth of my dad’s personnel records from the Journal, charting his move from mail clerk to manager of distribution. In 1982 he handwrote a cover letter:

Sir:

I would like to enter my name in consideration for the supervisory positions posted in the mailing room. I am 31 years old, married, and the father of a two year old.… Since working at the Journal I feel that I have compiled an excellent work and attendance record. I am also in excellent condition and shape. I feel the time is right for me to assume new responsibilities and challenges.

Thank you, Kevin Carroll.

I have his war record. At seventeen, he was only five foot ten and barely 160 pounds, not yet the solid man he’d become, but it was 1968 and they took him gladly. Initially he signed up for airborne duty but changed his mind. As part of the Nineteenth Combat Engineer Battalion he spent most of his time as a company clerk and his last two months as a demolition specialist, clearing the roads of mines every morning. A friend’s father, an army officer, translated the jargon of the records for me. He ended his note of explanation by saying, “I don’t know the rest of the story, Leah, but for those three years of his life, your Dad’s service records paint him as an exemplary young man.”

I have his autopsy report: “At autopsy, he had an enlarged greasy liver with steatohepatitis, consistent with acute and chronic ethanol use, as well as an enlarged heart with microscopic findings consistent with hypertensive cardiovascular disease. An additional significant contributing condition to his death included chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder.”

I have various notes he wrote me throughout the years. One is from when I was a teenager and is typed out. I can no longer remember the context but he writes, “I Leah’s father do promise to be more fatherly and help Leah through this difficult period she is experiencing. I further give Leah free notice to ask me about any subject without any fear of anger on my part. Should I break this contract at any time, I encourage Leah to bring it out and show it to me and put me in my place. This I do promise as Leah’s dad, because I love her and because she is the light of my life.”

I have the note he wrote me on the night before he died, also typed and printed. “Please don’t be mad,” it begins. “Alcoholism and depression have ruined my life.”

But still it is almost as hard to explain him as it is to explain my mom, whom I never really knew. I feel like I’ll never get it right. How you couldn’t trust him, not for a minute, but you always did. How when he turned his attention to you it was like everything was lit up, and when he decided he was done everything went ice-cold. The way that he presented himself as invincible: smarter, faster, funnier, so that when he was vulnerable it was somehow extra pitiful. The way he scrunched up his chin and poked it with his index finger when he was thinking and didn’t realize anyone was looking. The ways he let me down, and I let him down, and how I still think about him, twenty years later, almost every day.

There were these specifics: He took road trips to Civil War battlefields. He was a heavy hitter on the Journal’s softball team. He said the best band he ever saw live was Television. He took me to the Holocaust Museum and to my first sushi restaurant, and sometimes we would drive to New York and take photos for the whole day and then drive back the three hours to Rhode Island. He was Irish American and hated, in roughly descending order: Margaret Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, and Morrissey. He blasted solo Lindsey Buckingham and Parliament Funkadelic from his JBL speakers so loud that our little apartment shook.

Our print of the Blown Away Guy hung above a bust of Beethoven, which in turn sat atop an antique wooden console radio. Beethoven was a little taller than my eye level and sometimes I pretended the bust was the head, and the radio was his body, and the whole thing was my boyfriend. Blown Away Guy and Beethoven were the sole decorative objects in that apartment as far as I recall. When I asked Dad if he was the guy in the photo, if he was the cool guy in the sunglasses drinking a martini with the volume up extra high, he just laughed like he had a secret. At some point, in the way a kid learns what money does, or overhears an old lady swear, I came to understand that the guy in the picture was some other man, a model. But that was just a pointless detail.

I’M EIGHT YEARS old when Dad tells me we have to have a Serious Talk. He sits on the floor of my bedroom and before he has a chance to say anything, I ask him, “Are you going to tell me my mom was murdered?” I have no idea where the knowledge came from. It was just there. For years I’ve been telling people my mom died in a car accident, just like Dad told me at Aunt Rita’s. But deep inside, I’ve always known the truth. It’s just been in there, waiting, and finally saying it out loud feels good. But Dad tells me that her murder is something we have to keep a secret. “It’s personal,” he tells me. “It’s something we don’t talk about outside of the family, okay?” I keep a picture of Mom in my dresser, an eight-by-ten she’d developed herself, and I sometimes take it out of the drawer and study it. I think about how she will never look any different to me than she does in this photo. I think about it for a long time and stare at the picture, and when I try to picture my mom in my head, it’s only the face and pose from the photograph that I see. I’m forgetting the real her.

The word murder feels like a bad word, like something to be ashamed of. I don’t want anybody to think bad things about my mom and so I continue telling people she died in a car accident. After our Serious Talk, Dad and I never talk about the way she died again.

THIS, I NOW know, are the details of how my mother died:

On October 18, 1984, she attended services at Temple Sinai with my grandmother. Then she said she was going to meet a friend named Debbie. Really, she was on her way to Sonny Russo’s Restaurant in Johnston, Rhode Island. Sonny Russo’s was where Gerald Mastracchio Sr. conducted much of his criminal business. It was where my mom, who just a few months prior had completed a rehabilitation program that did not take, knew she could get drugs.

That night, October 18, the men happened to be talking about a girl they knew, Joanie, or Joanie the Jew, as they called her sometimes, alias Joanie Grant, real name, Joan B. Carroll. The men were discussing how Joanie “had to go.” And when she walked into the restaurant, Mastracchio said, “This is beautiful.”

He invited her to party; promised her drugs. She told him she had to go home, attend to personal matters, check on her child. They made a date for later that night.

When she returned she parked her car around the corner and left with Gilbert and Mastracchio to rent a hotel room in Attleboro, Massachusetts, just over the Rhode Island line. They all shot up cocaine. Mastracchio appeared from the bathroom holding a wet towel and started to strangle her. Her legs went out from under her and as she struggled, Mastracchio yelled for Gilbert to help him. As her face turned purple, Gilbert stepped on one end of the towel for leverage and Mastracchio said, “Come on, you rat, give me the death rattle.” Then, when she was finally dead, they wrapped my mom’s body in a blanket, put it in the trunk of the car, and drove off, pulling eventually to the side of I-95 where they left her body in a marshy area off the exit ramp. She’d officially be a missing person. For the next six months.

I WONDER SOMETIMES what she must have been thinking as these two men choked her to death. I think most of all she must have been confused. Why was this happening?

THIS IS WHY my mother was killed:

On September 7, 1984, the Rhode Island State Police raided Mastracchio Sr.’s home. They found weapons, drugs, syringes, and money. They found the heart of Rhode Island’s drug trade. They arrested everyone on site. One of the men arrested that day was taken into the state police barracks where he was handcuffed to a desk for hours awaiting intake. As he sat there, waiting, the man realized that a detective had left the affidavit in support of the search warrant for the raid on the desk to which the man was chained. So he reached out, cuffs and all, and read every single page.

When given his one phone call, he used it to dial Mastracchio Sr. and tell him everything he’d just read in the affidavit: There was a confidential informant. That person had given details about Mastracchio’s apartment including the fact that the street-facing windows were made of one-way glass. Mastracchio Sr. was furious. He liked to say that he valued loyalty above all. My mom had recently made a comment to him about the mirrored glass, something like, “Oh you can see in, but you can’t see out.” That was enough evidence for him.

“Joanie’s a rat,” Mastracchio said. “I’ll kill her with my bare fucking hands.”

AFTER MY MOTHER was murdered she likely might have remained a missing person forever, but on February 28, 1985, the Providence Police raided Peter Gilbert’s home in a drug bust.

In custody at the Providence police station Gilbert told the two police detectives guarding him that he felt like he was having a heart attack. In the ambulance on the way to Miriam Hospital, he told the detectives he had information on three murders and some other crimes and he’d tell them whatever they wanted, he promised, if they gave him protection from Mastracchio. He said he’d bring the police to the bodies. And there was more. Gilbert swore that the drug dealing, the robberies, and the murders to which he would confess were condoned and sanctioned by the man running organized crime in Rhode Island, Raymond Patriarca.

Patriarca had been New England’s most powerful organized crime boss for more than three decades and tying him directly to a crime would advance the careers of everyone involved—the arresting officers, the entire Providence Police Department, and especially the attorney general, an incumbent Republican and former nun named Arlene Violet.

In fact, Violet had run for her office on a platform largely devoted to the promise that she would bring down the mafia in Rhode Island. On the night that Gilbert started talking Violet, along with the specially created Intelligence Bureau of the Providence police, couldn’t resist the opportunity for a possible RICO indictment against the Patriarca crime family.

By ten thirty on the night of his arrest, Gilbert had given detailed information about three murders and the robbery of a liquor store that he claimed were linked to the Patriarca crime family. The next day the office of the attorney general dispatched a representative to make a deal. If Gilbert told them everything he knew, and if he could link his crimes to the Patriarca crime family by testifying in court, he’d be given a sentence of forty years—thirty suspended and ten years to be served in the custody of a fledgling state Witness Protection Program. If all went according to the deal, he’d never spend a day in an actual prison.

On March 1, 1985, Gilbert brought the police to my mother’s skeletal remains off the side of the highway in Sharon, Massachusetts. He confessed to the murder of Joe West, who’d been found dead in a parked car, shot in the head execution style, a few months before. Gilbert then helped the police track down the remains of Joseph Olivo, another drug customer who Mastracchio and Gilbert had suspected was an informant.

Olivo’s dismembered torso was found, with Gilbert’s guidance, under two thousand pounds of refuse in the local landfill. In grand jury testimony, Gilbert would later explain that he couldn’t recall exactly where all the other pieces of Olivo had gone, but he was sure he’d thrown the man’s legs in a dumpster outside of a Mister Donut franchise in Cranston.

All three victims were young drug users. The decision to make a deal with Gilbert was a simple one for the state of Rhode Island: a few dead addicts in exchange for the RICO indictment they’d been seeking for decades against the Patriarca crime family?

By their logic, it was a deal they’d be foolish to turn down.