May 16, 2024 — According to exclusive GR sources, federal-court documents and FBI 302s, Patriarca crime family boss Luigi (Baby Shacks) Manocchio ordered his main Connecticut lieutenant murdered and contracted the hit out through the Gambino mob’s crew in Bridgeport. The slaying never took place because the captain of the hit team was arrested in an FBI sting and Manocchio, who ruled from Federal Hill in Providence, stepped down as Godfather of the New England mafia shortly thereafter and moved to Florida.

The target of the murder contract was Anthony (Beaver) Ascenzia. The contract was given to then-Gambino mob affiliate and crew leader Raul (Sonny) Suner. The failed homicide conspiracy was referenced in Suner’s 2009 federal racketeering indictment as attempting to kill a Patriarca mob bookie, but the target wasn’t named specifically. “Sonny” Suner and the Gambinos promised Manocchio a larger percentage of their gambling and loan sharking rackets than he was seeing from Ascenzia and Suner accepted responsibility for planning the hit, recruiting at least two members of Ascenzia’s crew into the conspiracy.

“Beaver” Ascenzia died in Florida in July 2020 at the age of 61 from a sudden heart attack. Suner overdosed on fentanyl in 2021, five years removed leaving federal prison after doing eight years of a decade sentence for racketeering, weapons offenses, bookmaking and extortion. His arrest in an FBI sting purchasing a silencer in March 2008 took him off the streets and foiled the Ascenzia murder plot. Aging, however surprisingly spry “Baby Shacks” Manocchio, 96, is retired from his life of mafia affairs and hasn’t helmed the mob in New England since the late 2000s, despite his name surfacing in at least one cold-case murder probe in recent years.

Even though “Sonny” Suner didn’t have a button, he possessed final-say in a Gambino mob-backed crew out of Southern Connecticut and reported directly to Gambino organization Connecticut shot callers Tony (The Genius) Megale and Nicolo (Nick the Greaser) Melia. Megale, who rose to Gambino mob underboss, was away in prison on an extortion conviction when Suner began his infringement on Patriarca territory, in late 2006.

According to court records and FBI 302s, Suner targeted the New England mafia’s old Grasso crew and rackets that were supposed to be being tended to Ascenzia. The situation resulted in a pair of sit downs and subsequent admonishment for Ascenzia and other Connecticut Patriarca crime family members by their own superiors in Providence for allowing the Gambinos to grab ahold of their former customers so easily, per sources and FBI memos chronicling the events at issue.

Half Spanish and half Italian, Suner could never get a button, but struck fear in fellow mobsters and had the supreme faith of Gambino bosses locally and in New York alike. His arrest record dated back to 1984 (more than 10 state convictions) and as a teenager he was a gofer for then-mafia skipper Frank (The Attorney General) Piccolo, the Gambino’s No. 1 captain in Connecticut in the 1970s and early 1980s. Piccolo based his operations in Bridgeport and was killed in September 1981. Suner had a well-honed reputation for hair-triggered eruptions of violence, once baseball batting the legs of a bookie and debtor that threatened to call the police on him and then weeks later taking a knife to debtor’s throat over a $13,000 gambling tab.

On two separate occasions in the second half of 2007, members of the Patriarca pecking order from Providence led by skipper Bobby (The Cigar) DeLuca and Suner and a Gambino contingent led by Nick Melia and Dean (Bald Dino) DePreta met to iron out their differences. DeLuca allegedly “chewed out” Ascenzia and his inner circle at a post first-sit down meeting of just Patriarcas for the embarrassment they caused him and Baby Shacks in Rhode Island. Suner and another Gambino mobster met with Manocchio inside a non descript Federal Hill apartment to discuss the never carried out murder of Beaver Ascenzia, per two different 302s. “Bobby the Cigar” De Luca soon flipped and began wearing a wire for the FBI, avoiding a murder contract Manocchio okayed on him around the same time of the Ascenzia situation beginning to fester.

DePreta was just an associate back then, even though, like Suner, he oversaw a crew of Gambino operatives in the Constitution State. Per sources, DePreta looks after Gambino interests in Connecticut as a fully-inducted member of the organization, a status he earned after a federal prison stint.

DeLuca eventually implicated himself and Manocchio in the fall 1992 gangland homicide of rogue Irish mob enforcer Kevin Hanrahan. The Hanrahan case remains active today. Hanrahan, 39, had accepted murder contracts on Manocchio, who was the New England mob’s underboss back then and then-boss Francis (Cadillac Frank) Salemme. Manocchio relayed the green light on Hanrahan to DeLuca, who put together the two-man hit squad that gunned down Hanrahan leaving a Federal Hill steakhouse on September 18, 1992.

Although a somewhat polarizing mob figure in New England underworld history, there’s no debate that Baby Shacks stabilized the Patriarca in the wake of the blood and revenge-ridden Cadillac Frank era of the 1990s. Salemme was indicted in 1995 and Manocchio assumed the reins of the crime family the next year, steering the ship until his voluntarily resignation in 2009.

Manocchio’s one-time driver and bodyguard Napoleon Andrade was shot to death in the parking lot of a Pawtucket halfway house in 2019. Andrade had ties to a home invasion involving Nick Melia’s Stamford mansion years earlier. Melia passed away of natural causes three years ago this spring. He was 89.