Matthew Guglielmetti

PROVIDENCE - A high-ranking mobster in the Patriarca crime family has agreed to plead guilty to cocaine trafficking charges stemming from his arrest in an FBI sting operation two months ago.

Matthew L. Guglielmetti, 56, of Cranston, described by the authorities as a capo regime, or captain in the mob, 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 yesterday in U.S. District Court in Providence. The maximum penalty for the crime is consecutive terms of life imprisonment, while the minimum sentence is 10 years on each count.

Investigators said they anticipate that Guglielmetti will get about 12 years in prison.

No date has been set for Chief U.S. District Court Judge Ernest C. Torres to accept Guglielmetti's guilty plea.

As part of the plea agreement, the government agrees not to bring additional criminal charges against Guglielmetti for his "association and involvement" with a construction firm in Johnston. The agreement said that the "potential charges" stemming from his involvement with the firm will later be spelled out in a letter to the court.

The firm, Hemphill Construction Co., was a front for an FBI undercover operation.

The arrest of Guglielmetti is part of a larger federal, state and local investigation. On the day Guglielmetti was arrested, 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' International Union of North 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's plea agreement is the third in the case. On March 15, Anthony P. Moscarelli, 44, of Johnston, pleaded guilty to the same cocaine charges. His lawyer said that he reached an agreement with prosecutors to have Moscarelli sentenced to 121 months -- 10 years and a month -- in prison. He will be sentenced on June 24.

A third defendant, Alan J. Blamires, a mob associate and felon, is scheduled to plead guilty on Monday to the same drug charges.

All three men have been held at the Donald W. Wyatt Federal Detention Center in Central Falls since their arrests in January.

Guglielmetti, Moscarelli and Blamires are accused of conspiring to protect a shipment of 67 kilograms of cocaine that was passing through Rhode Island and headed to Canada. The cocaine was real, but the plot was fictitious. The FBI, using undercover agents, orchestrated the drug shipment.

First Assistant U.S. Attorney Kenneth P. Madden told the court at Moscarelli's last court appearance that Guglielmetti met with an undercover agent posing as a drug dealer and they agreed to split a $67,000 payment for protecting the drug shipment.

Madden said that Guglielmetti recruited Moscarelli and Blamires to protect the shipment of drugs in a motel room in Warwick. On Jan. 18, two federal agents posing as drug dealers guarded the cocaine that was packed in three suitcases in the motel. They watched the drugs for five hours, Madden said.

The five hours in the motel were recorded on video and audiotape, Madden told the court.

Guglielmetti, Moscarelli and Blamires were arrested on Jan. 20 and 21.

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.