Barbara Roberts is The Doctor Broad
“There are people in the know who will tell you that I caused the downfall of the New England Mafia. I managed this not by killing anyone or putting someone behind bars, but by keeping a man alive and out of jail for about a year too long.”
The Doctor Broad
It is hard to imagine a more unlikely duo than mob boss Raymond L. S. Patriarca and Dr. Barbara Roberts…
Undisputed mob boss, Raymond Patriarca, led the notorious New England mafia out of a storefront in Providence, Rhode Island beginning in the 1950s. In the 80’s, Barbara Roberts was a single mother of three, a feminist, and the first female cardiologist in Rhode Island with a full life. Their lives could not be more different. But, all that changed on December 4, 1980.
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“Cloistered in the car as we rushed through the bare New England countryside, I was seized with panic. I felt as if I were about to take center stage in some long-running hit play without knowing my lines and with only the foggiest notion of what the playwright intended. Flashes of old mobster movies ran through my head: Guns roared, brains spattered against windshields, mothers, wives, and children wept beside caskets….”
Meet the Author
From the age of six, reading allowed me to escape from a chaotic home. One of my earliest ambitions was to be a writer, because reading gave me so much pleasure.
My mother had ten children in ten years, and as the oldest, I was given responsibilities I grew to resent. We were crammed into a barely finished house. Money was in short supply, vacations unheard of. Books allowed me to travel to exotic lands, walk in the shoes of strangers, and peek into lives far removed from my own.
Eventually I left childhood behind. The world I had grown up in, in which the dictates of political and religious rulers were largely unquestioned, died a violent death as I grew to young womanhood. I rejected the faith of my fathers, I became a wife, a mother, a physician, a feminist, and a political activist.
By 1980, I was in my mid-thirties, a single mother of three children, on the clinical faculty of Brown University’s medical school and in solo private practice as the first female adult cardiologist in Rhode Island. On a fateful December night in that year, my life arrived at a crossroads. I agreed to take on the care of the aging crime boss, Raymond L. S. Patriarca, a few hours after he was arrested on a charge of accessory and conspiracy to murder. I had no inkling of the deluge of publicity that would result, of the costs to me and my children that this decision would entail, or of the love that waited, not many months hence, to ambush my heart and cause pain beyond my capacity to imagine.
Almost twenty years later, I decided to tell my tale. The Doctor Broad: A Mafia Love Story is the result, after a long gestation. But this is not just a mafia story – it is the story of a woman born in mid-twentieth-century America who was raised in one world but came of age in another; who expected to live one life but found herself ad-libbing something very different; who faced challenges undreamt of by her mother, while providing a new paradigm for her daughters. It is ultimately a story of redemption and survival. I hope my readers will take away lessons they can apply to their own lives, their own dilemmas, their own tragedies and their own triumphs.
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