NORTH PROVIDENCE — When Lisa DiIorio went before the Town Council this month to seek an entertainment license for a wrestling ring in her backyard, she volunteered that she didn’t think she even needed a permit.

After all, she said, the ring behind her yellow ranch on Atlantic Boulevard was going to be for a few “personal friends” and family members who liked to wrestle. She likened it to having a basketball hoop in front of a garage.

Council members agreed that she probably didn’t need a license, but they warned the Fruit Hill mother of two that she could be cited if those family gatherings created a disturbance.

A day later, irate neighbors were calling council members Raymond Douglas and John Zambarano to say that DiIorio had not given them the full story. They said the DiIorio home had already become headquarters to an outdoor operation known as RWA (Renegade Wrestling Alliance) Arena, a wrestling ring whose weekend matches had been making life miserable for neighbors for the last year.

Nearly every weekend, the councilmen were told, 60 to 100 wrestlers and fans from all over New England, and sometimes as far away as New Jersey, would descend on their otherwise quiet street, taking up every available parking space from noon to late in the night.

Lisa DiIorio’s husband, Anthony, who goes by the ring name “The Natural Truth T. Phoenix,” describes himself on the Web site Rwawrestling.net as the “man behind the mayhem.” That site posts the date of matches, then videos of those matches are posted to DailyMotion.com/tbomb2k7.

As Zambarano put it later: “We were misled. What that girl, DiIorio, told us was a lot different from what was happening.”

After hearing renewed complaints from neighbors, town Building Official Leo Bernardino and the planning and zoning director, Edward Civito, sent violation notices to DiIorio on Oct. 10 ordering that the ring be dismantled and wrestling stopped.

Bernardino said the owners failed to obtain a building permit for the ring and Civito said the wrestling matches constituted entertainment that was allowable only in commercial zones. He said the ring failed to meet set-back and on-site parking requirements of the zoning code.

Civito said that if the DiIorios were making a profit from the wrestling matches, as some of their neighbors believe, they possibly would also need an OK from the state’s gaming regulators.

Thomas Eley, whose 83-year-old mother, Dolores, lives next door to the DiIorios, said he was happy to see the ring come down, saying that the noise and the crowds had left his mother feeling intimidated and afraid to go out of her house.

Although the DiIorios have not been available for an interview, they posted a rebuttal on their Web site to some of the allegations against them on Thursday.

“Apparently the Town of North Providence is convinced that we are raking in massive amounts of money from our shows, and that is absolutely ludicrous,” they wrote. “The RWA is not an independent company; we are a group of close friends and family that come together for training and private shows only. We do not charge anyone to view us. We do not sell merchandize, food or beverage. We do not pay anyone to wrestle in the RWA. We are 100- percent nonprofit.”

Although some would see the North Providence-based RWA as part of the shadowy world of “underground” backyard wrestling, Anthony DiIorio insists in a blog posted on MySpace.com that his group is far from the “senseless violence of backyard wrestling.”

Backyard wrestling is that name given to that form of wrestling usually carried out by untrained fans who seek to imitate the moves and stunts of wrestling professionals. In the years since its formation in the early 1980s, the sport has developed its own underground scene, where groups produce, trade and distribute videos over the Internet and through wrestling publications.

In some of the extreme forms, wrestlers have been known to employ high-risk jumps and falls, or have used barbed wire, sharp metal tools, chairs and flaming tables as part of their stunts. As the name would suggest, backyard wrestling will often take place in someone’s backyard — but it could take place in such indoor venues as social clubs and schools.

They also have intriguing names. Some of the regulars who have joined in the competitions have such names as Tom the Bomb, Blaze Image, Sean Synn and the Big Sexy Monty Jones, who is described on MySpace as once being on The Jenny Jones Show.

In a blog posted on MySpace.com, Anthony DiIorio said he and Hak Hansen formed the Renegade Wrestling Alliance after leaving the DWO, a long-standing amateur wrestling group based in Central Falls, because of creative differences. He describes RWA’s first season, in 2007, as having “some of the hardest-hitting, fastest paced, in-your-face action, including two brutal ladder matches and a hardcore lumber match …”

Most of the matches the group has posted on its DailyMotion.com/tbomb2k7 site, with heavy-metal music serving as a backdrop, appear to be relatively tame — with participants jumping off ropes and using arms and legs to bring their opponent down. But a few do show them jumping from ladders or hitting their opponents with garbage can lids and metal chairs.

Not everyone emerges unscathed. On the group’s Web site there is an item, dated Sept. 15, which refers to one of the participants possibly suffering ruptured discs in his neck.

William DeLuca, a former North Providence police major and now chief of racing and athletics for the state Department of Business Regulation, says backyard wrestling is “more of a gray area for us” because the events tend to be scripted and thus considered to be entertainment, rather than actual sports competition.

“We really have no idea how extensive it could be,” he said. “When we did regulate them, they were more in the form of wrestling clubs, which seem to have fallen by the wayside.”

DeLuca and Jimmy Burchfield, a well-known boxing promoter, both commented that some of the backyard wrestling on Rhode Island Wrestling, a program on the state’s interconnect access channel, and on the Internet do give them cause for concern.

Burchfield said that unlike boxing, in which participants receive medical checkups prior to the fight and have a doctor ringside, there seems to be no one on hand at these backyard matches if things should go wrong.

“I am not so concerned about professional wrestlers, who know all the moves and falls, and who are so meticulous in the way they move,” DeLuca said. “Those performers are in top physical condition, and you rarely hear of anyone getting hurt. But backyard wrestling is a different story.”

rdujardi@projo.com