Gerard “the Frenchman” Ouimette, a former enforcer for the Patriarca family in Providence, RI, was sentenced to life in 1995 pursuant to the federal three-strikes-your-out law following an extortion conviction, and has used the time to write his memoirs What Price Providence? about the life as reported by W. Zachary Malinowski for the Providence Journal.
The imprisoned mobster apparently has an ax to grind with law enforcement according to the book’s description on Amazon:
Readers will have difficulty discerning whose behavior is criminal, Gerard Ouimette’s, the author, or the Government’s. * * * This book tells the entire ugly truth, sparing no one. The author has spent over 45 years in prison, the victim of police, prosecutors and judge’s corruption and fabrication of evidence and testimony, that has since all been disproven.
Even the late Director J. Edgar Hoover is not spared, and Ouimette recounts that family boss Raymond L.S. Patriarca “used to always refer to him as, That f** Hoover!”
No doubt the FBI considered Ouimette the real deal, and in an April 16, 1979 memo allege the following:
Subject OUIMETTE controls a large group of criminals known as the OUIMETTE faction, whose criminal activities include gambling, loansharking, extortion and property violations such as major hijackings, robberies and burglaries. Although not Italian, OUIMETTE enjoys the same stature as lieutenants under RAYMOND L.S. PATRIARCA, who controls organized crime (OC) in the Boston and New England area.
According to the document the feds further suspected that Ouimette was responsible “for seven or eight gangland-style murders.”
Filed under: Books, Gay, Government, History, Mafia, Organized Crime Tagged: Extortion, FBI, J. Edgar Hoover, Mob History, Patriarca, Raymond L. S. Patriarca
