The aged gangster welcomed me at the door.

Hunched by hard time lived and served, his lean body scarred by several bullets and one ice-pick stabbing, he led a brief tour of the modest rental house he shared in a Massachusetts shore town. He paused to point out his three shelves in the communal refrigerator, a measure of his diminished domain.

This was Ralph DeMasi, once a feared member of the New England underworld whose long résumé included truck hijackings and home invasions, robberies and violence. Days shy of 80, he half-joked that at the moment he’d rather be holding up an armored truck.

He led the way to his small, well-ordered bedroom, where dozens of photographs formed a wall-to-wall collage of contradiction, a blur of toddlers and mobsters. Here, his ex-wife with their baby at an amusement park, and here, a friend at a picnic, shortly before his gangland murder.

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“Rudy Sciarra,” Mr. DeMasi said, motioning to a photo of a vicious Mafioso from Rhode Island, long dead. “And the one on the right, he’s a wiseguy out of New York. …”

But he struggled to summon this mobster’s name from his mind’s darker recesses. “You forget people, like, as you go along,” he said. “So the pictures kind of keep me up to — you know.”

He kept more memories in boxes of correspondence arranged lengthwise on his bed, the dates of every receipt and reply recorded in his shaky scrawl. These letters, which he slept beside, were the coded missives of criminals, swapping family updates, sharing gun-rap loopholes. They often closed with “A friend always” and “With love,” and were signed by public enemies named Bobo, and Gerard, and even Jim, as in James Bulger, the murderous former fugitive better known as Whitey.

Funny story: More than 40 years ago, Mr. Bulger and an accomplice shot Mr. DeMasi several times in the drive-by killing of another target.

Years later, after Mr. Bulger was captured, convicted and sentenced to prison forever, Mr. DeMasi sent him a letter — a message, really — that he summarized as: “Whatever transpired between us, it didn’t kowtow me or make me any less of a man.”

From this a pen-pal friendship grew. In one letter, written in slanted, nearly inscrutable script, Mr. Bulger suggested that Mr. DeMasi sell these notes; they might be worth something. In another, he evoked his time in Alcatraz:

“Thanks for writing and I really enjoyed your letter. Felt like I was hearing from friends way back in the Az years. Fellow Bank Robbers, not ‘Organized Crime’ guys. Life was simple back then.”

The two men also exchanged yearly Christmas cards. But on this August afternoon last year, Mr. DeMasi sat on his bed, trying to remember something. Finally he said, “Whitey owes me a letter.”

To his right, past the exercise ball he balanced on to do 1,000 situps every morning — he often invited people to test his taut stomach — was a closet crammed with still more memories: copies of indictments, appeals of convictions, transcripts of wiretapped conversations (“I’ve got a crew of guys, I’ll tell you, and we rob armoreds, we rob armored trucks. …”). A half-century archive of persistent criminality.

Whenever the corpse of another wiseguy floated up to public consciousness, Mr. DeMasi was always in the mix of likely suspects. “Armed and dangerous” was stipulated.

“He didn’t take any lip from anybody,” recalled Tony Fiore, a mob associate and friend. “I mean, he was a tough guy.”

“One of the most dangerous criminals in New England,” said Brian Andrews, a former detective commander of the Rhode Island State Police. “A bad bastard.”

No doubt, Mr. DeMasi would love to be back at it. Scoping out some strip mall for a week, a month, whatever it took. Getting the timing down for when the guard came out with that canvas bag of cash. Donning a nylon mask. Concealing a semiautomatic. Go!

“It’s still in me,” he said, with a desiccated laugh.

This was unlikely, though, given his age and his consideration for his ex-wife and three grown children, who had suffered enough. Besides, too many cameras out there now.

His quiet life in Salisbury seemed to suit him. He had family living nearby. He had those three refrigerator shelves. And to help him remember all that he had done and seen, he had a framed newspaper article on his night stand: “Tips For Improving Your Memory.”

“Make lists. … Put frequently used items in the same place each time. … Repeat information. … Make associations. … Exercise your mind. …”

But some things cannot be forgotten.

A few months after my visit, on a December afternoon as clear and cold as a stare, other visitors came unannounced to Ralph DeMasi’s door. And they were armed.

Ralph DeMasi “I was a pretty bad actor. I did like to rob banks and armored trucks and things like that.” I was a pretty bad actor. I did like to rob banks and armored trucks and things like that. Ralph DeMasi

Raymond L. S. Patriarca. Frank Marrapese, a.k.a. Bobo. Robert DeLuca. Gerard Ouimette, a.k.a. the Frenchman. Raymond Lyons. Luigi Manocchio, a.k.a. Baby Shacks. Ralph DeMasi. As a Providence Journal reporter covering organized crime a quarter-century ago, I was their deadline Boswell.

I eventually moved on, taking with me the noirish stories and vague threats. That time, for example, when the owner of a mob-connected strip club I was investigating mentioned during a tense interview the name of my wife and the address of the house we were about to buy.

Those days came flooding back two years ago when the documentary filmmakers Marc Smerling and Zac Stuart-Pontier contacted me about “Crimetown,” a podcast focusing on the darker side of Providence. We began sharing our knowledge and research, which benefited me as I prepared a story about Maury Lerner, a minor-league baseball player who became a hit man for the Patriarca crime family.

“The Arrest of Ralph DeMasi” Listen to a bonus episode of the first season of “Crimetown” below.

The documentarians, it turned out, had gotten to know Mr. DeMasi, who had spent time in prison with Mr. Lerner. Mr. Smerling kindly arranged for the two of us to meet with the gangster and his ex-wife and close friend, Sue, at his home last summer, where our conversation wound up centering on Mr. DeMasi and his turbulent past.

“A journey and a half,” Sue DeMasi called it.

In some ways, the man’s journey seemed preordained. Born in 1936 to a teenager in a Connecticut home for unwed mothers, he was soon abandoned. So began his peripatetic life as a troubled foster child.

If his foster parents weren’t happy with him, he once said, “they’ll just call up the people that bounce you around and they just come and get you and take you somewhere else — take you to another foster home. But I don’t hold that against anybody.”

Many years later, Mr. DeMasi tracked down his birth mother, who by then had been long married to a man who knew nothing of her first child. She told her son never to call again. “I remember the tears coming out of his eyes,” his ex-wife said. “He had spent all those years trying to find her.”

In the distant blur of the 1940s and 1950s, who knows what truly happened to one forsaken boy? One version is that, at age 11, he finally found a foster mother whom he loved, a Mrs. Bowman, in Bridgeport. When her husband began hitting her, again, the boy grabbed the man’s shotgun, threatened to shoot and ran away. He slept nuzzled beside the gun in a graveyard, then robbed a bookie’s card game the next day by ordering everyone at gunpoint to strip naked.

That, at least, is the family story. But there is no question that the young Mr. DeMasi spent time in a reformatory, time in the Army and time doing time, his progress chronicled in newspaper police items:

Ralph DeMasi was arrested after breaking into the Kingsway bowling alley in Fairfield and rifling a pinball machine ... was remanded to the custody of the New York State Police after being charged with burglarizing a sporting-goods store in Brewster, N.Y. … was arrested at gunpoint behind a Boston furrier’s, his car filled with $80,000 worth of furs, his pocket allegedly concealing a loaded gun.

In 1970, soon after being released from prison for the fur-theft conviction, Mr. DeMasi met his wife. He had stopped at her mother’s house in South Boston with one of her brothers, who was working a con called the “short change” — in which the swindler uses confusing prattle to distract a clerk handling money. “You’d give them a 20 and say: ‘Oh, wait a minute, I didn’t mean to give that to you, take this dollar, oh, I need my change for the 20,’” Ms. DeMasi explained. “It’s just fast-talking.”

The ex-con and the flimflammer’s redheaded younger sister were married within four months. Around the same time, Mr. DeMasi was suspected in the burglary of a suburban Boston home emptied of assorted valuables, including a mink coat, some jewelry and a saxophone. Searching the DeMasi apartment, the police found many of the goods, as well as a sweet but telltale note:

“Hi Honey! Went out with the cat & got nothing! Am going over to give Millie the money & then shall be taking a fast ride to Providence & try to get some money for the diamonds & the fur. Take care. Should be back by 3 p.m. Get ready & I will take you downtown. Took $19 out of your pocketbook? Love, Ralph.”

When their first child was born on Christmas Day, Mr. DeMasi was in prison. During her pregnancy with their second child, he pulled up to their Rhode Island home in a rental truck one night and informed his wife that they were moving — right now — to California, where he was soon arrested. With the help of some Rhode Island connections, she was able to post his bail just before giving birth.

Ms. DeMasi spent most of her young married life waiting. Waiting and waiting for her husband to come home after a score, her heart pounding like cops at the door. “Like an eternity,” she said.

Then there were waits that lasted for years, and his presence at home came in the form of his disembodied voice on cassette tapes mailed from prison. Amid the inmates’ clatter, he would express his love and promise to change.

“I want to get out of here, and I want to be with you and the children,” he said on one tape, from 1977. “Never again going through all them crazy runarounds. No way, boy. We just got to put it all behind us, baby, and get away from it.”

He never did.

Back then, Mr. DeMasi was a valued associate of Mr. Patriarca, the Mafia boss who ran New England organized crime from his vending-machine business on Federal Hill in Providence. In the front of Mr. Patriarca’s drab store sat broken cigarette machines and old arcade games, and in the back, the cluttered desk where he collected tributes, co-opted elected officials and ordered people dead.

Mr. DeMasi and Mr. Patriarca bonded while serving time in the Adult Correctional Institutions in Rhode Island, the two of them taking walks in the prison yard. The older Mr. Patriarca had also grown up without a father, and perhaps he saw himself in how his tough new friend avoided flash and kept his mouth shut. Even when Mr. DeMasi was wounded in that drive-by shooting, he refused to give names, including Whitey Bulger’s.

The Patriarca connection paid off. During his frequent prison spells, Mr. DeMasi knew that his family would have food deliveries, the use of a car, a tree at Christmas. And every week, Ms. DeMasi said, she would go to Mr. Patriarca’s storefront — “and there’d be an envelope with $200.” All 20s.

In the brazen ranks of the Providence underworld, Mr. DeMasi distinguished himself as a dedicated family man who approached crime as a 9-to-5 job with the occasional late night. The police routinely watched him drive off in the morning to lay the groundwork for a planned robbery, then return home in the evening, leaving the carousing to others.

“And that was not like the other wiseguys I knew,” said Mr. Andrews, the former Rhode Island law enforcement official. “Ralph was all about work.”

Mr. DeMasi was so committed to his criminal profession that he might be in prison for one felony, on trial for another and under indictment for a third. He was almost as ubiquitous in the courts as the clerks and deputy sheriffs.

There was the time he wrote a Rhode Island judge an impassioned letter on nearly eight feet of prison-issue toilet paper. It laid out the injustice of being denied bail, but not before inviting the judge to use the paper for its intended purpose. His scatological cri de coeur lives on in court archives.

Then there was the time he represented himself against charges that he had conspired to murder a different judge by hiring assassins to blow up the man’s home. For the two-week trial, Mr. DeMasi wore button-down shirts, slacks and brown Hush Puppies with white socks — never a jacket or a tie. According to The Providence Journal, he presented his case without opening a law book, relying instead on a mail-order paperback that explained how to win a criminal trial.

Mr. DeMasi, who has an eighth-grade education, wound up winning his own acquittal. He promptly accused the prosecutor of reneging on a $10 bet over the trial’s outcome and invited all the jurors to join him for a drink. That evening, though, he drank his bourbon and Cokes alone.

Janet Morlock “We had to live from day to day. You don’t plan for next week. You might not be here next week.” We had to live from day to day. You don’t plan on next week. You might not be here next week. Jeannette Morlock

New England back then had no shortage of mobsters like Mr. DeMasi, stealing, victimizing, doing harm. Colorful, but only from a safe distance. Then there was nearly everyone else, just trying to get by, like Ed Morlock.

Mr. Morlock was that guy behind you in line at Dunkin’ Donuts, looking like he could use some caffeine. He was 6-foot-3 and a little heavy around the waist, with half-moon shadows under his eyes suggesting hardships endured.

He grew up in Winchendon, an old manufacturing town amid the hardwoods and pines of north-central Massachusetts. It once produced textiles, wood products and so many novelties that it was called Toy Town. But those factories had closed long ago, leaving the Winchendon of his childhood a self-contained place, detached from the Boston bustle.

By the age of 7, he was working on his family’s dairy farm, tending the cows. By his teenage years, he was driving a milk route in a cream-colored truck. Stopping to make deliveries along Maple Street, he would often see a smallish teenage girl balancing herself like a tightrope walker on the guardrail cables along the road.

They never spoke. Sometimes, though, he waved.

Eager to see beyond the Winchendon horizon, the young man defied his father by joining the Marines, returned from service, found factory work, got married, had four children, all girls. One evening, at a wake, he was introduced to a cousin’s wife, Jeannette, a petite woman with dirty blond hair. She had also grown up in Winchendon, one of 16 children of a French Canadian foundry worker and a homemaker.

You weren’t that kid always walking on the wires?

Yes, and I used to see you go by. You never said hello.

Years later, Mr. Morlock was separated from his wife and living alone when he was invited to play cards at the house of that same cousin, whose relationship with Jeannette had soured. He had become abusive, she recalled.

One cold November night, she said, he locked her out of the house after she announced that she wanted a divorce. She had 95 cents and no coat.

“And who took me in? Ed did.”

They married in 1968 and had one child, Ed Jr. Mr. Morlock returned to work at the dairy. Things, it seemed, would be all right.

Then one day, while he was clearing land for firewood, a malfunctioning chain saw bounced and cut his right leg to the bone. The injury left him with a permanent limp and profound circulatory problems that required him to wear pump-powered stockings to keep blood from pooling in his legs and feet. Discomfort defined his days.

The Morlocks moved around Winchendon, then down to Florida, then back to Massachusetts, where they eventually bought a small yellow Cape Cod house on a main road in the bypassed industrial town of Athol. One bathroom, and an endless whoosh of traffic just beyond the front door.

All the while, Mr. Morlock struggled to remain in the work force with his disability, laboring at the dairy, pumping gas, doing security, installing patios. He was also tending to his wife, who was having what she called emotional breakdowns that had them considering a move back to Florida.

In 1987, he found work as an armored-car security guard with Mass Transport Inc. Some days he was the driver and other days the courier, the one who got out to deliver or collect the cash.

He wore a two-tone brown uniform that his wife kept washed and ironed, along with a bulletproof vest that she and their son bought for him. The company feared that vests gave employees delusions of invincibility, but Mr. Morlock figured that, given all the blood-thinning medication he was taking, he would bleed out if he were ever shot. Best to wear the vest.

He also carried his own .357 Magnum, which he had yet to draw from its black holster in the line of duty.

His adult son eventually joined him at Mass Transport. The older Mr. Morlock had not been easy to get to know; for one thing, his disability had deprived the family of so much time and joy. But now, on those pre-dawn drives to the office in his blue Ford Taurus, the father opened up about his childhood, his years in the service, his injury.

“I didn’t know my father very well until we started working together,” Ed Morlock Jr. said.

It was a Saturday morning in May 1991. The Boston Celtics and the aging Larry Bird had just been eliminated from the playoffs. The Red Sox were in the midst of being swept down in Texas. And the older Mr. Morlock had agreed to fill in as a courier for a co-worker who wanted the day off to celebrate his birthday.

Before leaving, he told his wife that after work they would visit his mother at the nursing home and then have dinner at McDonald’s. “And that was a treat for us,” Ms. Morlock said. “Because we didn’t go out much.”

I’ve got a lot of things to tell you, he said.

Fine, she answered. We’ll talk when you get home.

Audio Clip 4 “There’s two objectives, I think, is to get the money and don’t get caught getting the money.” There’s two objectives, I think, is to get the money and don’t get caught getting the money. Ralph DeMasi

Armored trucks were money bags on wheels, often driven up to a bank or store at roughly the same time, day in, day out, depending on traffic. “There were always customers who wanted us to be there between this time and this time,” the younger Mr. Morlock said. “Security-wise, it made no sense.”

By the late 1980s, a finite number of New England gangsters, about two dozen, specialized in robbing these armored trucks. Prominent among them: Ralph DeMasi.

There were “two objectives,” Mr. DeMasi told the “Crimetown” podcast. “Get the money and don’t get caught getting the money.”

A lot of preliminary work came first. You had to assemble your crew: gunman, wheelman, lookout. You had to spend weeks on surveillance: watching the police routines, the traffic flow, the arrivals and departures of the armored trucks, the habits of the armed guards. And of course, you had to plot your getaway.

“Everything had to be planned out,” Mr. DeMasi said. “It couldn’t be just spur of the moment.”

Tony Fiore, a former comrade in crime, agreed. Mr. Fiore’s reputation as a specialist in robbing armored trucks is memorialized by a tattoo adorning his chest. It depicts a thief wielding a gun, with a bag of cash at his feet and an armored truck in his sights.

“We used to go sit in parking lots from 7 in the morning until 5 at night before we would do a score,” said Mr. Fiore, now 74. “We used to actually put more time into a score than people do if they were working a legitimate job.”

The haul could be $100,000, $300,000, a half-million, with everything hinging on the element of surprise. By this point, law enforcement officials could narrow down the possible suspects to the same handful. “There weren’t that many guys doing these jobs,” Mr. Andrews said. “You always knew. That’s Fiore. That’s DeMasi.”

In March 1991, the authorities arrested Mr. Fiore and his crew as they prepared to hold up an armored truck carrying $1 million at a mall in North Attleborough, Mass. The plan included having a grandfatherly thief in a wheelchair holding a semiautomatic under a blanket.

With Mr. Fiore and his accomplices in custody and about to spend the better part of two decades behind bars, the small number of criminals working armored trucks in New England shrank. Still, two months later, there came another holdup, this one in the second-largest city in Massachusetts: Worcester.

Audio Clip 5 “I dropped the phone, and I was screaming.” I dropped the phone, and I was screaming. Jeannette Morlock

On that mild Saturday morning in May, an armored truck pulled up on schedule to a Shaw’s supermarket at one end of an elbow-shaped strip mall on Lincoln Street in Worcester. Ed Morlock clambered out, his .357 Magnum snug in its black holster, and went inside to make his collection.

As he left with a bag of money and receipts, two men confronted him in the supermarket’s foyer, and one tried to disarm him. A bagger inside the store saw Mr. Morlock standing against the wall, his hands raised. Then came loud popping sounds, with blood spattering the soda machines. He slumped to the floor, his gun beside him, out of its holster.

His assailants grabbed the bag, ran to an idling white Cadillac with stolen license plates and peeled out of the parking lot. The vehicle was found in an apartment complex a half-mile away, having been swapped for another getaway car. A chain blocking access to a back road out of town had been removed in advance.

The work of professionals, well planned, well executed. That is, if you looked past the blood.

On duty that morning was a young, clean-cut detective with street smarts and a military bearing named Steven Sargent, the son of a Worcester police lieutenant. Having grown up in a working-class neighborhood just down Lincoln Street, he knew this shopping center well. As a boy, he’d ride his bicycle to visit his grandmother, who lived in subsidized housing behind the plaza. As a uniformed patrolman, he’d take breaks at the Dunkin’ Donuts.

Now it was his job to be with the wounded security guard, who had been rushed to the University of Massachusetts Hospital. His assignment: to collect evidence — the man’s belt, his clothes, the bullets — and, if at all possible, to talk to him.

The detective watched the frantic struggle to save the guard’s life under the surreal lights of the emergency room. He would never forget the bloodied uniform, the empty holster, the man’s last breath. Ed Morlock was 52.

Soon after, a ringing telephone broke the quiet in a yellow Cape about 45 miles away in Athol. Jeannette Morlock was making the beds upstairs when she picked up. She did not quite believe what she was being told, even when two Athol police officers appeared at the front door, in confirmation.

Screaming, Ms. Morlock began pounding one of the officers on the chest. “He kept telling me he was dead, and I said, ‘No, he’s not.’”

Ed Morlock’s wife and son never moved on; they just moved about. “When Ed got killed, my life — I just didn’t care,” Ms. Morlock recalled, crying.

She spent years helping to write and distribute a newsletter for families of homicide victims. She sang alto and soprano in the choir at St. Francis of Assisi Catholic Church and worked the post-Mass coffee break, where her confetti angel cake sold for a dollar a slice. She bought a .22-caliber Ruger and learned to shoot at the Woodsman Rifle and Pistol Club.

She also met a man named Bob Mathews at the McDonald’s near her house. They’re engaged now, but he knows she’ll never marry again.

“You don’t really forget things,” she said. “It stays there. You push it aside — but it’s always there.”

As for her son, Ed Jr., he went on the road, working for a traveling zoo and an indoor circus, then for a series of retail outlets, then for a private school’s horse stable. He married, had a daughter, divorced, remarried.

During his wandering, he collected more than a dozen tattoos that cover his arms and torso, including one of Anubis, the Egyptian god who watches over the dead.

Audio Clip 3 “I don’t got no fear in me, you know.” I don’t got no fear in me, you know. Ralph DeMasi

By August of 1991 — three months after the fatal Worcester holdup — Mr. DeMasi was many years divorced and living in the Pines campground, nestled among the woods and marshes of Salisbury. His furnished, tarp-covered campsite was conveniently close to his children and ex-wife, who had briefly strayed from their marriage while he was in prison. He had forgiven her, she said, but she could not forgive herself.

Once again, the career criminal was being shadowed. Not long ago, he had boasted of his penchant for robbing armored trucks to a Massachusetts State Police officer working undercover on a drug investigation. “That’s always been my thing, always been my thing,” he was recorded saying. “Like I say, I love to go and get the cash.”

He went on: “We put our thing together. We clock it, we clock it, we clock it, we clock it, we clock it, right? The guard’s taking the money in the bank, or he’s bringing it out or whatever. Then boom, we catch him. Boom, boom, quick — it’s over.”

Mr. DeMasi has many sides to his personality. He was so tough in prison that he pulled his own teeth, his ex-wife said, and spent years in solitary confinement rather than obey an order to sleep on his cell’s mattress. He was also inordinately generous, known for giving away much of the money he stole.

“We did an armored car up in Taunton, and I don’t know, he got maybe $50,000 — and he’s broke like two weeks later,” recalled Mr. Fiore, his former partner. “I mean, gee, you just got $50,000. But he never forgot anybody, and he’d say like, you know, ‘Ah, this guy’s in jail, and his wife don’t have this; his kids don’t have that.’”

As his conversation with the undercover officer revealed, Mr. DeMasi also liked to brag, as if to prove that he was his own man, the head of his own crew — which by the summer of 1991 included a couple of degenerate gamblers, a hanger-on distrusted by other gangsters and an aimless young man from the campground.

Now, the Federal Bureau of Investigation was watching as the DeMasi crew monitored armored-truck deliveries to a strip-mall bank in Newburyport, not three miles from the campground. One afternoon, the men were photographed having a picnic in the parking lot, making and eating sandwiches around the trunk of their car while conducting surveillance.

We clock it, we clock it, we clock it…

Two undercover F.B.I. agents, both women, were also assigned to monitor Mr. DeMasi at the campground, but the case agent, John Egelhof, warned them to be extra careful. “This guy’s extremely dangerous,” he remembered telling them. “Any issue with him, blast him.”

After several weeks of planning, Mr. DeMasi and his crew made their move on a warm September morning, guns at the ready. But as their stolen green van crawled toward the armored truck, F.B.I. vehicles raced up from every angle, disrupting the shopping center’s ordinary rhythms.

Within minutes, five would-be thieves were under arrest — including a defeated but still defiant Ralph DeMasi, a bulletproof vest covering his chest and the nylon stocking on his head now looking silly. “He was cold,” recalled James Mullen, a Rhode Island State Police detective who assisted the F.B.I. “No emotion. Nothing.”

A few months later, Mr. DeMasi was sentenced in federal court to more than two decades in prison. When the judge asked if there were any other motions, the gangster said, “Kiss my ass.”

“Motion denied,” answered the judge.

Soon after, Worcester detectives visited the modest Morlock house. They explained that they knew who killed Ed Morlock, though they couldn’t quite prove it. But at least there was this: Those responsible were now serving long prison terms.

The point, the younger Mr. Morlock recalled, was that his father’s killers “were not out there whooping it up” — which gave him some peace.

“At least they got them on something,” he remembered thinking. “And they were spending time in prison.”

His mother took no such comfort.

“No,” she said. “Not me.”

So began another protracted prison stretch for Ralph DeMasi. The Clinton and Bush administrations came and went. Pay phones all but vanished. Email replaced handwritten letters. A black man became president.

Released finally in 2013, Mr. DeMasi said that he received some walking-around money — about $5,000 or so — from an emissary of Raymond Patriarca Jr., the son of the old mob boss, dead now 30 years and more. The gift would be in keeping with mob tradition, a recognition of a man’s long and faithful service, but the younger Mr. Patriarca said through a spokesman that it never happened.

By now deep into his 70s, Mr. DeMasi melted back into a New England that had largely forgotten him. Continuing a kind of institutionalized existence in the squat house in Salisbury, he exercised, corresponded, followed a vegetarian diet, kept his cell of a bedroom neat. He also dreamed.

“I might rob an armored truck before I die,” he told me on that summer day’s visit.

Sitting beside his ex-wife, Sue DeMasi, at the kitchen table, Mr. DeMasi seemed not to remember many specifics of his wild criminal past. After she recounted her dramatic appeal for leniency at one of his many sentencings, he could not recall the case at all, even when she mentioned his accomplice, Tommy.

“Come on,” Ms. DeMasi said. “You don’t remember any of that? Wow.”

“I remember Tommy,” he answered. “Is he still alive?”

“No-o-o,” she said. “Remember he got run over by Billy King and them guys? Ran him over so many times they had to shovel him up.”

Ms. DeMasi got up to leave. Through the years she had held things together for the children while Mr. DeMasi was in and out of prison; she even did long-haul trucking. The two had had their ups and downs, and at times she had feared his facility for violence. But they continued to share an intense private bond impervious to outside judgment.

“If I had to do it all over again, I wouldn’t change a thing,” she said. “I still tell people today: Nobody on this earth — past, present or future – will ever love the way me and Ralph loved.”

“Thanks for coming by, Sue,” Mr. DeMasi said as she gave him a peck.

“O.K., Ralph, I love you,” she said. “I’ll talk to you soon.”

“All right. You take care.”

A quiet, domestic moment. Here, on this pleasant summer’s day, was a mobster in twilight, about to go out for a vegetarian lunch that he would wash down with a bourbon and Coke.

Audio Clip 6 “If I could rob an armorer truck today or tomorrow, I’d do it.” If I could rob an armored truck today or tomorrow, I’d do it. Ralph DeMasi

Four months later, with the imminence of winter in the mid-December air, people with guns approached this same Salisbury house. Given the reputation of their target, these law enforcement officials, including two detectives from the Worcester Police Department’s unresolved-homicide unit, were braced for anything.

But Mr. DeMasi went quietly.

That night I was Christmas-shopping at a mall in New Jersey. To be exact, I was in a Sephora cosmetics store, watching my 13-year-old daughter select stocking stuffers that were clearly not for me. Then Marc Smerling of the “Crimetown” podcast called, and my daughter would later imitate what I said:

“Ralph DeMasi? Arrested for murder?”

I had been planning to write a profile of Mr. DeMasi in the new year — something about the reduced circumstances of an aging, forgetful gangster reflecting the state of New England organized crime. But here was a murder charge.

I felt foolish.

The next day, Worcester County’s district attorney, Joseph D. Early Jr., announced the arrest at a news conference. He then introduced the clean-cut Worcester police chief, who, 25 years earlier, had been the young detective dispatched to the hospital to be with the mortally wounded Ed Morlock.

As Chief Steven Sargent donned his glasses to read from a statement, he struggled to navigate his many emotions. The satisfaction and pride he felt were tempered by memories of having seen a man in a bloodied uniform die in the emergency room.

“This has always been a personal case for me,” the chief said. “And today, it gives me a measure of satisfaction to say justice has been served for Edward Morlock and his family.”

The two law enforcement officials declined to explain the break in the old case. Three men believed to have been involved in the fatal holdup had died, Mr. Early said, but he left open the possibility that others besides Mr. DeMasi were still alive.

“Maybe someone didn’t want to talk before,” he said. “Maybe they want to talk now.”

Mr. DeMasi pleaded not guilty that morning, his cuffed hands holding a piece of paper, his expression somewhere between confusion and concern. Since then he has been in the Worcester County jail, awaiting a trial that may not begin until 2018.

“He strongly denies having any involvement in this armed robbery, which led to the death of Mr. Morlock,” his lawyer, Michael Hussey, said.

As Mr. DeMasi was led out of the courtroom, someone in the gallery shouted “Dad!” It was his daughter, Sue DeMasi, who later told reporters that he was a loving grandfather who had been exhibiting signs of dementia — but who was still preparing Christmas cards to send to all his friends.

Also sitting in the gallery that morning was a small, bespectacled woman of 74 who had spent the past few years dealing with health challenges that included diabetes, lung disease, kidney cancer and heart problems so severe that her doctor had told her she might die at any time.

This was Jeannette Morlock, the murder victim’s widow. And like the man charged with killing her husband, she too kept old photographs, among them a portrait of the family: a young boy of about 10, a short, smiling woman and a large man with half-moon shadows under his eyes.

Ms. Morlock had risen in the dark of early morning. She had bathed. She had chosen an outfit fitting for the occasion, a pale purple suit coat with slacks to match. Then she had taken the hour’s drive down to Worcester from Athol, intent on being in court in time for the arraignment of Ralph DeMasi.

She wept at the sight of him.