Drug-Dealing Killer’s Wife Wonders How She Could Have Been So Naive : Crime: Peter Gilbert took everyone for a ride, including police, prosecutors and the state of Rhode Island.

Debra Gilbert was in her nightgown preparing breakfast when an ax came through the front door. As a dozen police with shotguns swarmed through her home, she heard her husband cry: “She doesn’t know anything! She doesn’t know!”

What she didn’t know was that her husband of four years was connected with the mob. She didn’t know he had killed three times. And she didn’t know what a shambles her life would become.

But she stood by him when he agreed to testify against organized crime buddies, and lived a bizarre life of fear that included time in a three-room police station apartment.

She watched as her husband manipulated authorities, serving his murder sentence while living the high life complete with expense accounts and beach vacations. When Peter Gilbert died of a heart attack in June, 1988, he was still in custody. But he was driving, alone, to go sky-diving, in a Buick stocked with cocaine.

“I know a lot of people out there would say, ‘Boy, she’s the biggest fool who ever walked this Earth,’ ” Debra Gilbert said in an interview at her Brooksville, Fla., home. “(But) how many people can say they loved someone enough to love them blindly?”

The case of Peter Gilbert offers an unusual glimpse into the sometimes peculiar world of crime and punishment, where a man so skilled in manipulation can take for a ride not only his wife, but police and prosecutors as well.

The escapade rocked the Providence Police Department and led Gov. Edward D. DiPrete to order a state police investigation. So far, 14 officers face disciplinary action for unprofessional conduct. A special prosecutor was named April 30 to take the case to a grand jury for possible criminal indictments.

A state judge is considering overturning a conviction that was based on Peter Gilbert’s testimony.

The “fiasco,” as the internal investigators call it, is expected to cost nearly $1 million by the time all the investigations are completed.

“Then the state of Rhode Island and especially myself will be able to put pieces together and not feel like there is anything missing anymore,” Gilbert’s widow said.

A consummate con man, Peter Gilbert made up in charisma for what he lacked in conscience. He told Debra their marriage was his first, although it was at least his fifth. At 5 feet 5 inches tall, with a scruffy beard and tattoos, he hardly seemed the lady’s man. Debra knew he already had children, but she wasn’t one to ask a lot of questions.

When they met in Florida, she was a high school dropout with three youngsters of her own. Peter was living next door when the man she had married at age 16 walked out.

“He was my hero that came along and loved me and my children,” she said with a soft Southern lilt.

She married him in 1981 in the Brooksville courthouse, believing his name was James Harold Cassidy. The charade crumbled a year later, when he was arrested for burglarizing a church and a lumberyard. Police identified him as Peter Gilbert, a man who had lived half his life as a criminal.

“I couldn’t understand why he lied to me. I left him,” she said.

Peter told her he lied only to get away from his past. He said he stole so he could pay for the birth of their daughter, Kiya. He wrote poems from jail to win her forgiveness:

“Now that Kiya binds our love there is no yesterday;

“Just tomorrow, just for us, our love will show the way.”

A few months later, Peter escaped by knocking out another inmate in a holding cell and taking his place. Gilbert pleaded guilty to the minor charge against the other man and walked free.

He fled to Rhode Island. Against the advice of family and friends, Debra quit her job in a Brooksville restaurant to join him. They had been separated one year.

“I was raising four kids, and they missed him,” she said. “He said I was his life, and after calling me all the time, I believed him.”

In Rhode Island, she wondered why his beeper, supposedly connected with his job at an auto body shop, went off at all hours with strange messages. She asked enough questions to learn that he was “involved” with drugs, but she didn’t pry.

“I didn’t want to know, to be honest,” said Debra, now 30.

Peter’s drug use became so excessive that he asked her to wake him by injecting him with cocaine. She refused, but stayed at his side. She told herself he just needed help.

When police stormed her Providence home in early 1985, Debra learned about the murders--all of drug customers or traffickers.

“I tried to imagine him doing something like that,” she said. “I couldn’t, no matter how hard I tried.”

Authorities offered Peter an unusual deal in exchange for his testimony. He would serve his 10-year sentence in Providence police custody, then be relocated. The dream of starting over helped keep Debra with her husband. So did Peter’s tales of threats against the family.

She sent her three older children to her mother in Florida and she and 2-year-old Kiya were allowed to join Peter in the police station.

The three lived in a cell for a few weeks while a former matrons’ quarters was converted into a three-room, air-conditioned apartment with telephone, television, VCR and a queen-sized water bed. But it was adjacent to the women’s cells, from which the noise and screaming were incessant.

“It was definitely our home,” said Debra. “But it was like jail, too. . . . I think I always felt like I was breathing germs.”

Peter passed the time watching TV, having a beer with the guards, fishing with the mayor’s chauffeur. He started his autobiography. He was allowed out, and sometimes stayed away overnight.

Debra was immobilized by fear. Afraid to go out, she spent more time in the jail than Peter did. She began to fear that the food might be poisoned and made her daughter wait for her to taste it first. The strain finally proved too much, and she moved back to Florida.

“I couldn’t take it anymore--the women screaming, the officers. My daughter was not going to be raised in that kind of environment,” she said.

Two years later, in 1988, she went back to Peter at a rural Rhode Island safe house arranged for them by prosecutors. Debra said she told police that Peter was using cocaine and packaging drugs in the cellar, but was told to keep quiet. A departmental review supports her allegation.

“It can reasonably be inferred that Gilbert supplemented his state income with his profits from narcotics sales,” the review said.

She stayed just seven weeks. Two months later, Peter, who had a history of heart trouble, got into a fight at a Connecticut gas station and suffered a fatal heart attack.

Debra continues to wrestle with her husband’s lies. Peter told the children he lived in the police station because he was an undercover officer. She hasn’t yet found a way to tell them the truth.

Still, she is hopeful about the future. She recently remarried and insists that, this time, she is not so naive.

“I have started a new life with a very good man,” she said. “It’s just a good feeling.”