15 Arrested in Crackdown on a Major Mafia Family : Crime: Indictments against 21 people target the New England mob organization. Thornburgh says evidence includes tape of blood-oath ritual.

FBI agents began arresting 21 alleged mobsters Monday after Atty. Gen. Dick Thornburgh announced three indictments naming “virtually the entire active leadership and membership” of the New England Mafia.

By Monday afternoon, 15 of the 21 members of the Patriarca Family were in custody. The indictments accused the alleged mobsters of 113 counts of murder, conspiracy to commit murder, extortion, kidnaping, drug trafficking, gambling, wire and mail fraud, obstruction of justice and intimidation of witnesses.

The case “represents a stake in the heart of a major organized crime family from the boss on down,” and “establishes beyond doubt the existence of a secret, clandestine operation”--that is, the Mafia, Thornburgh told a news conference here.

Evidence obtained by federal law enforcement officials includes what Thornburgh termed “an unprecedented” audio tape of a blood-oath induction ceremony last October.

According to the indictments, Patriarca Family “boss” Raymond J. Patriarca Jr., of Providence, R.I., was present as four inductees had their trigger fingers cut to draw blood for the ritual. Speaking in Italian, they solemnly vowed: “I want to enter into this organization to protect my family, and to protect all my friends. I swear not to divulge this secret and to obey, with love and omerta.” Omerta refers to a code of silence.

A holy card with an image of the Patriarca family saint was then burned, with the inductees intoning: “As burns this saint, so will burn my soul. I enter alive into this organization and leave it dead.”

Thornburgh cited “numerous occasions where witnesses have testified as to ceremonies of this type,” but “they have always been subject to the charge that they may have been embellishing on the situation.”

The tape “should lay to rest once and for all any doubts that La Cosa Nostra is a figment of law enforcement imagination,” Thornburgh said. He declined to say how the tape was obtained.

Patriarca, 45, was taken in handcuffs before a U.S. magistrate in Providence early Monday and was ordered transferred to Boston for arraignment. Alleged underboss Nicholas Bianco and Mafia captain Matthew Gugliemetti were also arrested in Providence.

The Patriarca Family conducted its operations in Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts, federal authorities said.

The charges against them reflect more than five years of investigation by the FBI, as well as various federal, state and local law enforcement agencies working in New England, Thornburgh said.

FBI Director William S. Sessions said the indictments by grand juries in Boston and Hartford, Conn., demonstrated the bureau’s “ability to invade the inner sanctums” of organized crime “with the intent to destroy them.”

Thornburgh said “newly developing groups,” from the “Colombian drug cartels to the Crips and Bloods in Los Angeles to the Asian organized crime groups that increasingly seek to control heroin distribution” face similar enforcement efforts.

FBI officials in Washington said Monday’s indictments represented a heightened drive that began in the early 1980s against major organized crime groups, especially the Mafia. The Justice Department contends that there are 25 separate Mafia “families” in the United States, including Los Angeles, each varying in size, strength and influence.

In the last two years alone, federal prosecutors working with FBI agents have obtained more than 1,200 organized crime convictions, mainly on charges of political corruption, labor racketeering, illegal gambling and loan-sharking.

The President’s Commission on Organized Crime four years ago estimated that the illicit activities of organized crime groups accounted for an annual income of more than $100 billion. That represented a loss of $6.5 billion in tax revenues and a loss of 414,000 jobs in the American work force, the commission said.

Times staff writer Bob Jackson contributed to this story from Washington.