Confessions of a Former Mafia Mistress

Barbara Roberts speaking at the last mass anti-Vietnam war demonstration, January 1973. Photo courtesy of Barbara Roberts.

On Dec. 4, 1980, Barbara Roberts’ career was on the way up.

The state’s first female cardiologist, she had come to the Miriam Hospital after completing a prestigious Gorlin fellowship at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and serving on the faculty at Penn State College of  Medicine. She’d also worked at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland where she learned how to sail, a hobby she continued on Narragansett Bay. A single mother of three, she would eventually become the first director of the hospital’s Women’s Cardiac Center.

But in 1980, she was still an up-and-coming doctor with her own private practice, possibly the last person expected to run in the state’s organized crime circles. So it was with some trepidation she found herself on the way to see Raymond L.S. Patriarca, head of the mob in all of New England, on that fateful night. It’s a story she recounted in her 2019 memoir, The Doctor Broad, a Mafia Love Story, and in a recent interview at her Jamestown home.

“I’m in the car thinking, ‘What have you gotten yourself into, Barbara?’” she recalls.

Roberts met the Patriarca family through well-known defense attorney Jack Cicilline, whom she had hired to represent her in a custody dispute. Raymond Patriarca Jr. had expressed interest in having her become his father’s doctor, but she hadn’t yet met the patient when she was summoned to State Police headquarters alongside Cicilline one night. The Mafia head had been arrested, and there were questions as to whether he was well enough to stand trial.

“The first thing I thought was ‘Oh my god, he’s so tiny,’” she says. “It became apparent to me very early on that putting this man on trial would be tantamount to a death sentence.”

Barbara Roberts (right) with Luigi “Baby Shacks” Manocchio (center) and her daughter, Dory, in 1982. Photo courtesy of Barbara Roberts.

Patriarca never did stand trial, and the controversy around that decision pulled Roberts into the firestorm of media coverage that followed the aging mob boss. She began making weekly house calls until his death four years later. As a result, many doctors stopped referring her patients, though some self-referred after hearing about the newly famous cardiologist. Mob members and cops, she says, were impressed with her credentials, since they knew Patriarca would only want the best.

“I wound up taking care of a lot of law enforcement officials, probably for the same reason. Sometimes my waiting room would be several wise guys and several cops and a lot of elderly people sitting quaking in their boots,” she recalls with a laugh.

Though her sought-after status was new, Roberts was not a complete stranger to police rap sheets. As a young woman, she’d racked up a reputation as an outspoken activist attending rallies up and down the East Coast. Raised as the oldest of ten in a devout Catholic family, she rebelled in her twenties and joined the feminist movement, getting involved with abortion rights rallies and anti-war demonstrations. In her early years in the medical field, she worked at Planned Parenthood and was involved as a student activist.

Manocchio leaving Superior Court in 1983. Photo courtesy of Richard Benjamin-USA TODAY NETWORK.

“I used to tease Raymond that I was probably his only doctor who had an FBI file as thick as his,” she says.

Two years before her memoir, Roberts was interviewed by Marc Smerling and Zac Stuart-Pontier for their hit podcast Crimetown. It was the first time she spoke publicly about another piece of her story, up until then only known by close friends and family — her romantic affair with Luigi “Baby Shacks” Manocchio, at the time Patriarca’s number three man.

“I said, ‘Marc, what do you think you know about me?’” she recalls. “He said, ‘I know you were Raymond’s doctor.’ I said, ‘Yes, and while I was Raymond’s doctor, I was Louis Manocchio’s mistress.’ His eyes popped out of his head and his jaw dropped.”

Book cover courtesy of publisher.

Roberts met Manocchio in much the same way she met Patriarca, through Jack Cicilline. The two were getting dinner at a Federal Hill restaurant where Manocchio worked as manager, and the young doctor caught his eye. She describes the onetime mob boss as an “old-fashioned gentleman,” well-traveled and speaking three languages on account of the decade he spent running from authorities in the 1970s. They struck up a romance that continued briefly after his two-year stint in prison. After his release in 1985, he made plans to return to Europe to avoid further arrest, and invited her to come with him. She declined, and met her now-husband four years later.

Though her days of waiting rooms filled with mobsters are now in the past, Roberts maintained a friendship with Manocchio and visited him before his death in December at the Rhode Island Veterans Home. As a doctor, she says, she learned to see her patients as humans, and not for their crimes.

“As a physician, these things don’t matter,” she says. 

Read more of Roberts’ story or purchase her book at thedoctorbroad.com. To read an excerpt from her book, go to RIMonthly.com/mafia-mistress-memoir.