by Mike Stanton
The Life and Times of Buddy Cianci, America’s Most Notorious Mayor, Some Wiseguys, and the Feds
THE
Prince OF
Providence
MIKE STANTON
CONTENTS
Title Page
Frontispiece
Dedication
Epigraph
Half Title Page
PROLOGUE
A Knock on the Door
CHAPTER ONE
The Prosecutor, the Priest, and the Mob Boss
CHAPTER TWO
The Anticorruption Candidate
CHAPTER THREE
The Art of Politics
CHAPTER FOUR
Operation Snow Job
CHAPTER FIVE
The Education of Ronnie Glantz
CHAPTER SIX
Nightmare on Power Street
CHAPTER SEVEN
He Never Stopped Caring
CHAPTER EIGHT
Zorba the Mayor
Insert
CHAPTER NINE
Mr. Freon
CHAPTER TEN
Toads in the Basement
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Buddy’s Inferno
CHAPTER TWELVE
Pomp and Circumstantial Evidence
EPILOGUE
The Last Hurrah
Author’s Note
A Note on Sources
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Copyright
To Susan
Willy:
Well, I got on the road, and I went north to Providence. Met the Mayor.
Biff:
The Mayor of Providence!
Willy:
He was sitting in the hotel lobby.
Biff:
What’d he say?
Willy:
He said, “Morning!” And I said, “You got a fine city here, Mayor.” And then he had coffee with me.
ARTHUR MILLER, Death of a Salesman
The Prince of Providence
PROLOGUE
A Knock on the Door
Providence is an old city, built on seven hills like ancient Rome, and situated at the head of Narragansett Bay in Rhode Island.
When Dennis Aiken, a young FBI agent, learned that he was being transferred there in 1978, he cringed. Aiken was from Clarksdale, Mississippi, birthplace of Muddy Waters and home of the blues. He thought he was being sent to Long Island, and this southern boy wanted no part of New York. His boss pulled out a map of the United States and pointed to Providence, a spot on the map beneath the curved arm and fist of Cape Cod—the armpit of New England.
It was a long way from Houston, Texas, Aiken’s last assignment. Providence was an alien world of old buildings and narrow streets, a crabbed seaport and faded factory town, carved up into balkanized neighborhoods—the old-moneyed Yankees on College Hill, the Italians on Federal Hill, the Irish on Smith Hill.
But for Aiken, Providence was also paradise. In law enforcement parlance, Providence was “a target-rich environment.”
Providence was the capital of the New England Mafia. Providence, Jimmy Breslin once wrote, is “where the best thieves in the world come from.”
Providence was also the capital of Rhode Island, an incestuous city-state where politics had been dominated since colonial times by a rich cast of visionaries and freethinkers, rascals and rogues, patriots and privateers. Founded by Roger Williams in 1636 as a haven for religious freedom after the Puritans banished him from Massachusetts, Providence was, in a sense, America’s first safe house. The colony, whose motto was “Hope,” became a refuge for Jews, Catholics, Baptists, and Quakers, who fled Massachusetts to escape whipping, branding, ear-cropping, tongue-boring, and hanging. But even the tolerant Williams found that individualism could be carried too far, as colonists resisted paying taxes and bowing to any government authority. The colony’s wide-open mores opened the door to land speculators and sharp merchants. The Puritans called it “Rogue’s Isle.” Cotton Mather described the colony as “the fag end of creation” and “the sewer of New England.” By the early eighteenth century, its venturesome sea captains were leaders in the notorious Triangle Trade, exchanging rum for African slaves and Caribbean molasses, a key ingredient in rum. “I would plow the ocean into pea-porridge to make money,” said one Rhode Island privateer. When the Revolution dawned, Rhode Island was the first colony to declare independence from Great Britain and the last to join the new union. Later, Moses Brown helped finance America’s first textile mill, based on plans smuggled out of England, and the colony became the birthplace of the industrial revolution. Rhode Island grew rich, restrictive, and Republican. Robber barons built mighty companies like Fruit of the Loom, exploiting tens of thousands of immigrants from Ireland, Italy, and other countries. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Providence was a national economic power—and a hotbed of political corruption.
“The political condition of Rhode Island is notorious, acknowledged and it is shameful,” muckraker Lincoln Steffens wrote in 1904. “Rhode Island is a state for sale, and cheap.”
Aiken learned that lesson firsthand when he put together a case against the speaker of the Rhode Island House, for taking bribes from a furniture salesman. Armed with a search warrant, the FBI agent went into the speaker’s home and cut a swatch of carpet from under his bed that matched the new carpet in the speaker’s office at the State House. The case ended in two hung juries, which taught Aiken that Providence wasn’t easy.
While he was in Providence, Aiken also got to know its colorful mayor, Vincent A. “Buddy” Cianci, Jr.
In his second term, Cianci was a spellbinding speaker and ubiquitous politician who, in a line borrowed from Andy Warhol, joked that he would attend the opening of an envelope. He was a Republican who had beaten the Democratic machine, the anticorruption candidate who had come out of nowhere in 1974 to be elected Providence’s first Italian-American mayor in a city ruled by Irish bosses.
Cianci’s résumé—grandson of immigrants, son of a doctor, former mob prosecutor—and his dynamic leadership of a dying urban center convinced many that he had a bright national future. He had been friendly with President Gerald Ford and had spoken at the 1976 Republican National Convention. The mayor had his eye on the United States Senate, and from there, perhaps, a spot on the Republican ticket as a vice-presidential candidate. As audacious as it seemed, some said that Buddy Cianci had the potential to be the nation’s first Italian-American president. Short of that, there was always Hollywood; a producer once offered Cianci his own sitcom.
Then there was the other Buddy. This was the Buddy Cianci who helped inspire a recurring character played by comedian Jon Lovitz on Saturday Night Live—the Pathological Liar. This was the mayor of insider deals and cash in envelopes, of political hacks and mobsters on the city payroll. This was the ruthless Buddy who took a masochistic glee in crushing his opponents and settling old scores, the dark Buddy who had been accused in law school of raping a woman at gunpoint.
“He’s a survivor in a wicked world,” said Frederick Lippitt, who ran against him twice. “If he’s out to get you, your head’s going to be in your lap before you know it’s been cut off.”
The second Buddy soon came under Dennis Aiken’s microscope. Acting on tips about payoffs for city contracts, Aiken began constructing a profile of the mayor, gathering background information that could be used later in a full-scale investigation. Trailed by aides, Cianci would approach Aiken in the marble corridors of City Hall and ask the FBI agent what he was doing. Aiken would answer that he was conducting surveillance. Cianci would sort of chuckle, make a wisecrack, and walk quickly away.
In 1981 Aiken left Providence. He was
promoted to run the FBI’s office in West Palm Beach, Florida. He rose through the ranks, to chief of the Bureau’s Public Corruption Unit. He wrote the book on corruption, The FBI Field Guide to Public Corruption. Along the way, Aiken married a woman from Rhode Island. In 1994 FBI director Louis Freeh announced an initiative to put several hundred senior agents back in the field. Aiken, bored with his desk job in Washington, jumped at the chance.
This time, he asked to be sent back to Providence.
In his absence, the city that The Wall Street Journal in 1983 had called “a smudge beside the fast lane to Cape Cod” had undergone a remarkable transformation. The grimy railroad yards and parking lots that had bisected downtown were gone. Rivers that had been smothered in ribbons of concrete had been uncovered and moved. Authentic Venetian gondolas glided along the water, past impressive stone and brick buildings that spoke to Providence’s storied past as a maritime power and a factory town. At night, thousands congregated to behold WaterFire, a series of meditative bonfires on iron pyres in the rivers, accompanied by music ranging from New Age to opera. With its nationally acclaimed restaurants and devotion to the arts, Providence had become a mecca for tourists and a trendy place to live, a poster child for the rebirth of the American city.
Presiding over this renaissance was a reincarnated Buddy Cianci.
Driven from office in 1984 after his conviction for felony assault—an ugly episode involving his ex-wife’s suspected lover, a lit cigarette, and a fireplace log—Cianci had staged a stunning comeback in 1990. Although twenty-two people had been convicted for corruption in his first administration, Cianci convinced the voters to give him a second chance.
By the time Dennis Aiken returned to Providence in 1994, it appeared that Cianci had made the most of his comeback. He was the longest-serving active mayor in America among cities with more than 100,000 people. He was hailed as an urban messiah. An acclaimed PBS documentary, Vote for Me, called him “the King of Retail.” He had his own marinara sauce. He traded barbs on national radio with Don Imus. He mingled with Hollywood stars. He landed a cameo—as himself—on the hit NBC television series Providence.
The real Providence was a much more interesting place, and Buddy was the undisputed star. He was squired about his city in a shiny black limousine with a surveillance camera on the back and a riot gun and a spare case of marinara sauce in the trunk. His driver, a husky policeman in high black boots, towered above the squat, forceful mayor. Cianci wore tailored suits and a marvelously coifed toupee and moved in a perpetual haze of cologne and cigarette smoke. At night, as he made the rounds, he carried a “to-go cup” of liquor; he favored vodka when he was campaigning because the voters couldn’t smell it on his breath. He joked that every time he smoked, he helped schoolchildren, who benefited from the cigarette tax. This was vintage Buddy, repackaging vice as virtue.
He was equal parts visionary, cheerleader, rogue, and lounge singer. A city was like a woman you made love to, he said. Or, in Providence’s case, many women. Cianci embraced them all—the Italian ward bosses in Silver Lake, the Ivy Leaguers on the East Side, the black-clad artists at RISD, the gays in the downtown leather bars, the newer Asian and Hispanic immigrants, the old ladies in the senior high-rises. And they all loved Buddy—they all tolerated and even reveled in his flaws—because he was funny and put Providence back on the map and made them feel good about themselves. He was a larger-than-life political character unique to Rhode Island and yet reflective of America, which had evolved more along the lines of Roger Williams’s freewheeling Providence than puritanical Plymouth. If the Puritans shunned Providence, it was because there was more of Providence in them than they dared admit. Providence, wrote Brown University historian William McLoughlin, was the heart of a city-state that “epitomizes all the ambiguities of the American dream.” And Cianci, who boasted that he could ride around his city blindfolded and recognize each neighborhood by its sounds and smells, embodied Providence.
Cianci was at the peak of his popularity in the spring of 1999, when Dennis Aiken decided it was time to pay him a call. Having been reelected the previous November to a sixth term, Cianci would soon become the longest-sitting mayor in Providence history. The occasion was to be marked by big festivities, including a gala exhibit of artisans and art from the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy—Providence’s new sister city.
Aiken had returned to Providence wanting to believe that Cianci had learned his lesson, that the Renaissance was real. But Providence was a city of ghosts. Once he started digging beneath the surface, it didn’t take Aiken long to find what he was looking for.
The FBI agent liked to warn reluctant witnesses, “You’d better be knocking on my door before I’m knocking on yours.” On the morning of April 28, 1999, Aiken and another agent drove down Benefit Street, known as the Mile of History for its wealth of well-preserved colonial homes and mansions. Dappled sunshine filtered through the trees. They passed the soaring white spire of the First Baptist Church, the restored brick mansion that housed the University Club, the Rhode Island School of Design, the templelike Providence Athenaeum, and the colonnaded Providence County Courthouse, where socialite Claus von Bulow had been acquitted of trying to murder his wealthy wife.
At the imposing John Brown House, built in 1786 by the Revolutionary War patriot, slave trader, and early benefactor of Brown University, Aiken turned onto Power Street. The street dove steeply down College Hill toward the old waterfront. Aiken turned into the first driveway, drove through a black iron gate and up a curving brick drive. He parked in front of a massive brick carriage house topped with a cupola and a patina-green steeple, got out of the car, and rang the doorbell. This was Buddy Cianci’s house.
It was shortly before 9 A.M., early for the nocturnal mayor. It was an hour when Cianci might still be in bed or lounging in his robe, having a cup of coffee and a cigarette, reading the paper, and working the phones as his city came alive. The mayor liked to stay well informed, and he followed his press coverage closely. He was mentioned in several stories in that morning’s Providence Journal—his attendance at a meeting of the city investment board, a speech at an education luncheon, an appearance with actor James Earl Jones to announce a $2.1 million Bell Atlantic grant for the planned Heritage Harbor Museum. Cianci had been in good spirits, presenting Jones with a jar of his marinara sauce and laughing when Rhode Island’s lieutenant governor joked that the grant was the size of the mayor’s cell-phone bill. Another story reported a no-confidence vote by police officers in Cianci’s police chief, following a series of scandals involving missing evidence, including a kilo of cocaine.
Aiken and the other agent waited on the mayor’s doorstep. Cianci’s gravelly voice came through the intercom. Aiken said that the FBI would like to talk to him.
The door opened. Cianci, who was dressed this morning, stood peering out, surprised to see Dennis Aiken on his doorstep. He invited the two agents inside.
Aiken told Cianci that he was working on an investigation of City Hall and would like to ask the mayor a few questions. Cianci looked at the tape recorder that Aiken held and asked what this was about. He was curious but guarded.
The FBI agent did not tell the mayor that, at that moment, fifty agents were preparing to fan out across Providence, armed with search warrants for City Hall and other places. Aiken did not say that the chairman and vice chairman of the city tax board had just been arrested and handcuffed. He did not mention that the FBI had the mayor’s top aide and campaign treasurer on videotape, taking bribes in his City Hall office with Cianci’s smiling picture on the wall.
Cianci stared at the tape recorder suspiciously, as if wondering whether it was running. Aiken asked if he would like to cooperate. The mayor wanted to know who was involved, and whether he was involved. Aiken made it clear that he was there to ask the questions. He told the mayor that he wanted to tape-record anything Cianci had to say, so that there would be no dispute later.
The mayor replied that he didn’t want to s
ay anything into a tape recorder that could be contradicted later.
With that, Aiken and the other agent said good-bye. They got back into their car and drove down the hill the short distance to City Hall, which would soon be in an uproar as agents seized boxes of records.
Back on Power Street, Cianci holed up in his house late into the afternoon, consulting with his lawyers and advisers.
The mayor could count the FBI agents and state police detectives who had stood in Dennis Aiken’s shoes over the years, hoping to take him down. They had all failed.
This was just one more challenge in a career full of challenges. Cianci had taken Providence too far, through the wilderness of the past quarter of a century, to be turned back now. So intertwined were the fortunes of the mayor and his city that he could have borrowed as his epitaph what was engraved on the tombstone of the horror writer H. P. Lovecraft in Swan Point Cemetery: I AM PROVIDENCE.
Let Aiken and the FBI and the United States Justice Department come after him. Buddy would not be beaten on his turf—not in his Providence.
They had too much history together.
CHAPTER ONE
The Prosecutor, the Priest, and the Mob Boss
Buddy Cianci sat in the wooden pew of the courtroom, doubting a priest.
Courtroom No. 5 in the Providence County Courthouse was crowded on this spring morning in 1972, like Easter mass at St. Bartholomew’s in Silver Lake, where Cianci had gone as a boy. Cianci, a thirty-one-year-old Rhode Island prosecutor, sat shoulder to shoulder with Bobby Stevenson, a beefy Irish detective who had played CYO ball for St. Michael’s in South Providence.
