Fra Noi Embrace Your Inner Italian
At the 10:30 a.m. Mass with my parents at St. Mary Star of the Sea in Narragansett, Rhode Island, in August, I noticed the empty pew where Judge Frank Caprio had long sat with his family. Knowing his deep Catholic faith and his battle with pancreatic cancer, I feared the worst. On Aug. 20, his family announced his passing at age 88.
I interviewed Judge Caprio in the summer of 2023. It wasn’t our first meeting, but it was the first time I was welcomed into his home. I was nervous to enter the world of a man who was a force in Rhode Island politics long before gaining national fame through his enormously popular YouTube clips, “Caught in Providence.” His warmth soon put me at ease. I found a man shaped by an immigrant household’s hard lessons, family bonds, a close-knit Italian American community and the belief that justice must be tempered with humanity.
He reached into his desk and pulled out a small autograph book from his sixth-grade graduation. Inside, his father, Antonio Caprio Sr., had written: “The road is long and very bumpy, but I know that you will proceed with honor, and with your head held high, to the end of the highest learning.” His father urged him to reach beyond his own education, which had ended in seventh grade when he went to work to support the family. “My father didn’t sign it just ‘Dad,’” he said. “He wrote ‘from your father, Antonio Caprio, Sr.’ He wanted me to understand the weight of those words.”
His philosophy — compassion for the vulnerable, patience with the struggling, fairness — was rooted in that family ethos and the Italian American neighborhood where he grew up. “We knew everyone, their aunts and uncles, their cousins,” he told me. “We were like one big family.” Federal Hill in Providence, Rhode Island, was an Italian village transplanted to America.
Another defining lesson felt like prophecy. One winter, sitting in a cold-water flat with the oven door open for heat, his father placed a hand on his young son’s shoulder and said: “Someday you’re going to be a lawyer, Frank. And you can’t charge poor people, because if we need a lawyer now, we can’t afford one.” In Italy, respect often meant deference to authority; in America, his father recast it as fairness rooted in compassion and taught his son the law could be a shield for the powerless. From then on, Frank Caprio never wanted to be anything else.
His path was not easy. He worked multiple jobs, studied law at night, taught by day, served on the City Council, and eventually opened a small practice. Through persistence and support of family and community, he built a career that took him to the bench.
On his first day as a judge, a belligerent woman came before him with many unpaid tickets. He ordered her to pay. Later, his father corrected him: “She wasn’t arrogant, Frank. She was scared. You can’t do that.” From then on, he viewed each case by placing himself in the other’s shoes. “It wasn’t about punishment,” he reflected. “It was about understanding. I never wore a badge into the courtroom. I wore a heart.”
That heart is what millions saw when his brother began filming cases in his Providence courtroom. “Caught in Providence” drew more than a billion of views online. He never sought fame; people recognized a man who treated everyone with dignity and kindness.
As our interview wound down, he spoke about returning to his immigrant grandfather’s hometown of Teano, Italy, where he was welcomed in a parade and embraced by distant relatives. “Every other person told me we were related somehow,” he laughed. “In two generations,” he marveled, “we went from my grandfather who could not sign his name to my son graduating from Harvard.”
Judge Caprio’s passing leaves a deep void, but his legacy lives on in those he touched. For those of us in the Italian American community, he embodied the best of our heritage — faith, family and heart — and showed how those values could ennoble the law.
The article above appears in the October 2025 issue of the print version of Fra Noi. Our gorgeous, monthly magazine contains a veritable feast of news and views, profiles and features, entertainment and culture.
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