Gerard Ouimette

Gerard Thomas Ouimette (March 6, 1940 – April 19, 2015), commonly known as The Frenchman, was an American mobster and author from Providence, Rhode Island who was a prominent associate of the Patriarca crime family.

He served for years as one of Raymond L. S. Patriarca's lieutenants, and also headed his own faction of the Patriarca mob.

Ouimette was born on March 6, 1940, in Providence, Rhode Island.

His parents were both of French descent.

His father worked as the Governor of Rhode Island's chauffeur.

He had to resign when he contracted tuberculosis, which is contagious, and found work as a taxicab driver.

As his illness progressed, he eventually had to go live in a sanatorium.

The family would visit him there once a month, followed by routine exams to make sure they did not contract the disease.

His father died in 1948, when Ouimette was seven.

After his father's death, Ouimette's mother struggled to raise him and his eight siblings.

During that time, Catholic nuns provided emotional and material support for the Ouimette family, bringing them food and clothing and checking in nearly every day.

Soon, they were forced to move from their middle-class neighborhood to the poorer Federal Hill area.

Ouimette's criminal activities began in the 1950s.

After his father died, he and his brother would shoplift to make some money.

His first court appearance came when he was ten, when he was charged with criminal possession of a firearm.

He was arrested in an alley, holding a gun, which he claimed he picked up after it was dropped by a man fleeing law enforcement.

Nevertheless, his mother could not afford an attorney, and he was sent to the Sockanosset School for Boys, a reformatory in Cranston, Rhode Island.

There, after several fights with other boys, some school teachers took him around to boxing clubs to perform.

After ten months, he was allowed to return home.

In the late 1950s, he did a stint of service in the US Army.

In 1956, when Ouimette was 16 years old, he was given a series of psychological tests.

The psychiatrist who conducted them concluded:

"It seems likely that, because of the nature of this boy's problems, and because of the lack of acceptable moral principles, he will indulge in delinquent behavior again."

In 1959, two months after turning 18, he was sentenced to six years in prison for robbing, at gunpoint, a South Providence jewelry store.

During his third year in prison, his two oldest brothers, Alvin and Billy, both in their 20s, died in a construction accident.

A few months later, he was granted parole, and moved in with his mother in East Providence.

Soon after, he was sent back to prison for a parole violation.

Ouimette first met mob boss Raymond L. S. Patriarca in the mid-1960s, when a friend brought him around to Patriarca's cigarette store, his mob headquarters.

Soon after, he carried out his first task for Patriarca: acquiring stolen Cadillacs.

His mob activities only escalated thereafter.

The 1960s also saw Ouimette gain his famous nickname "The Frenchman."

It may have originated in the Ouimette's unique ancestry in a mostly-Italian American mob.

On January 24, 1969, Ouimette and his brother John were arrested on charges that they shot a Pennsylvanian mob hitman outside a Cranston restaurant.

At that time, Ouimette was already serving a five-year sentence for possession of a gun after a crime of violence.

The brothers were ultimately acquitted after the victim told the jury that the Ouimettes were not the ones that shot him.

"'The Frenchman' is the name that Rhode Island police attached to me in 1969 since I am proud of my French descent, an anomaly in that neighborhood. Due to ensuing notoriety, the name stuck."

On July 9, 1972, while still in prison on the gun possession charge, Ouimette was convicted of conspiracy to kill Michael Greene and Homer Perkins, career criminals who had been found murdered three years prior.

He was sentenced to ten years in prison, and was sent to the Adult Correctional Institutions (ACI), a maximum security facility in Cranston.

There, operating out of the prison's North State Wing, where the mafiosos lived, Ouimette continued to lead his gang from behind bars, and had enormous influence and freedom within the prison.

Ouimette himself credited police with the name, writing in his 2012 memoir: