A high-ranking mobster in the Patriarca crime family and laborers union member has agreed to plead guilty to cocaine trafficking charges stemming from his arrest in an FBI sting operation two months ago. Matthew L. Guglielmetti has signed a plea agreement admitting that he conspired to distribute and possessed with intent to distribute more than 5 kilograms of cocaine. The plea agreement was filed March 30 in the U.S. District Court in Providence.
The arrest of Guglielmetti is part of a larger federal, state and local investigation. When Guglielmetti was arrested on Jan. 20, the authorities raided a concrete company in Cranston; a construction/real-estate firm in Warwick; and a Providence office building that houses the New England regional office of the Laborers Intl. Union of N. America. According to union spokesmen, the search was of the New England Laborers’ Labor-Management Cooperation Trust, an entity related to, but separate from, the union’s regional offices.
Guglielmetti has been one of Rhode Island’s most prominent underworld figures. In the late 1980s, he was one of several mobsters recorded in an infamous mob induction ceremony in the basement of a house in Medford, Mass. In the early 1990s, Guglielmetti pleaded guilty to mob racketeering charges in Hartford, Conn., and was sentenced to 5 years in federal prison in Sandstone, Minn.
Upon his release, Guglielmetti worked on construction projects in Rhode Island and Massachusetts as a member of the Laborers union. All the time, he remained under the watchful eye of law-enforcement officials. [Providence Journal, 3/31/05]