Mob boss Francis ‘Cadillac Frank’ Salemme dies in prison aged 89

The Boston mobster died in a federal prison in Missouri from an undetermined cause

The once formidable New England mob boss Francis “Cadillac Frank” Salemme has died in prison while serving a life sentence for the 1993 killing by strangulation of a Boston nightclub owner, according to authorities. He was 89.

Salemme died on 13 December, online records from the US Bureau of Prisons show. The local news outlet WPRI first reported Salemme’s death late on Sunday, though a cause was not immediately available.

Salemme was perhaps best known for being the leader of Boston’s Patriarca crime family in the early 1990s and for helping prosecutors win a conviction against a corrupt FBI agent after he realized that other figures of New England’s criminal underworld had been cooperating with authorities against him.

He reportedly earned his flashy nickname because he used to work in a car repair shop and specialized in fixing Cadillacs.

Having confessed to a slew of killings, Salemme had moved to Atlanta and assumed a false identity when the remains of Boston nightclub owner Steven DiSarro were unearthed in 2016. Two years later, federal prosecutors convinced a jury that Salemme and his associate Paul Weadick killed DiSarro in Salemme’s home outside Boston in 1993 before burying DiSarro behind a mill in nearby Providence, Rhode Island, with the help of sibling mobsters Robert and Joseph DeLuca.

Salemme fought to overturn the conviction and life sentence handed to him for DiSarro’s murder, but in March he lost his last opportunity for a new trial when the US supreme court declined to take up his appeal. He was housed at a federal prison in Missouri when he died.

After learning of Salemme’s death, DiSarro’s son, Nick, said to WPRI: “The world is better off without him. Good riddance.”

Salemme’s attorney, Steven Boozang, stood up for his former client in an interview with WPRI, calling him “a gentleman” as well as “honest and forthright” in their dealings with each other.

“He regretted a lot of things in his life but came from a different era,” Boozang said. “I think he felt particularly bad for the hardship that came to his family and to other families.”

The gang war that precipitated Salemme’s rise as a mob boss began with a botched attempt to kill him in 1989. Masked attackers shot and wounded him as he walked into a Massachusetts pancake house, and they killed his companion, Billy Grasso.

According to WPRI, Raymond “Junior” Patriarca ended the violent tit-for-tat that ensued by inducting new members into the crime family which he headed. That induction ceremony was secretly recorded, and Patriarca was imprisoned in 1992, setting the stage for Salemme to take over the helm of their organization.

That same year, in addition to the DiSarro murder, Salemme was charged with racketeering alongside the infamous late Boston mobster James “Whitey” Bulger and Stephen “the Rifleman” Flemmi. That indictment led to an 11-year prison sentence for Salemme, during which he learned both Bulger and Flemmi were FBI informants.

Salemme reacted by sharing what he knew about the two men and their Winter Hill gang. That knowledge helped authorities secure a corruption conviction against Bulger’s FBI contact, former agent John Connolly. Salemme enrolled in a witness protection program which took him to Atlanta and gave him a new name.

Even while in that program, Salemme was unable to shed his links to his home region. WPRI reported that, in a particularly colorful chapter of his life, Salemme joined a fan club of the New England Patriots football team under his Atlanta-based identity of Richard Parker.

Salemme ultimately left the program of his own volition before the exhumation of DiSarro’s body and his subsequent downfall.

Weadick is still serving a life sentence after also being convicted in DiSarro’s murder. Prosecutors charged Weadick with holding DiSarro’s leg as Salemme’s son, Francis Jr, strangled him.

The younger Salemme died of an illness in 1995.

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