The Prince of Providence

by Mike Stanton

  But by the late 1960s, a growing number of citizens felt that things had gotten out of control. They were tired of reading about gangland slayings and shootings in broad daylight. One afternoon, bullets smashed through the window of Angelo’s restaurant on the Hill, narrowly missing a waitress and sending diners diving to the floor. The streets of Providence, said Stone, had turned into “a jungle.”

  The police became jaded by the violence. They found Baby Curcio one winter’s night, slumped behind the wheel of his car in his pajamas in the city’s North End, six bullet holes in his head and neck. A junkie, Baby had made the mistake of burglarizing the house of Patriarca’s brother. It was so cold that his blood wouldn’t run, so the coroner allowed the police to tow the car to headquarters, with Baby’s corpse still behind the wheel. On the way, the two detectives stopped off at the Everready Diner on Admiral Street for a cup of coffee. Thawing out inside, the detectives sent the counter boy to see if the guy in the car wanted anything. The boy came rushing back inside, chalk white, lips shivering, as if he’d just seen a ghost.

  In 1966 Rhode Islanders elected Herbert DeSimone, a Republican long shot, as attorney general. He upset a four-term Democrat who had denied the existence of the Mafia in Rhode Island. The Ivy League–educated DeSimone, who had been a football star at Brown University, wanted to be governor. He saw political advantages in going after Patriarca. A gangbuster image would help him overcome anti-Italian prejudice among suburban voters.

  One of DeSimone’s campaign volunteers was a recent law-school graduate with his own political ambitions, Buddy Cianci.

  RIDING DOWNTOWN WITH his mother for singing lessons behind City Hall, or going with his father to dinner at Federal Hill’s Old Canteen, where Raymond Patriarca had a private room upstairs, Buddy Cianci didn’t imagine himself as mayor of Providence.

  He had bigger dreams.

  In second grade, little Buddy stood up at the Laurel Hill Avenue Elementary School and announced that he was going to be president of the United States. Whether he said so because of an early interest in politics or a love of the spotlight was anyone’s guess. But one thing was clear—Buddy wanted to be loved, and when he wasn’t, it hurt.

  He was the Golden Son, the only boy in an immigrant family that had found success in the New World, and much was expected of him. His father, Dr. Vincent Albert Cianci, was one of thirteen children, the son of an immigrant carpenter and the first in his family to attend college. A proctologist, he had an office in a Victorian house on Pocasset Avenue, in the heart of Silver Lake. The Ciancis lived up the hill, just over the line in Cranston, in a rambling brick house, with a swimming pool, that Buddy’s grandfather had built. His mother, Esther Capobianco, came from a prominent North End family—her father was a businessman active in Democratic ward politics, and her grandfather had been mayor of Benevento, an Italian hill town.

  Vincent Albert Cianci, Jr., was born on April 30, 1941. Raised in a household of doting women—mother, sister, grandmother, aunts, and cousins—he was both spoiled and pushed to excel. His father wanted him to be a doctor. His mother signed him up for music lessons. He loved to eat, and battled his weight. Other kids in the neighborhood resented his superior attitude and made fun of the chubby boy whose mother dressed him in Buster Brown suits, bow ties, and white bucks. They tugged at his clothes, stepped on his shoes, shoved him around.

  A neighbor, Pasquale DeSocio, whose son played with Buddy, remembered the other boys teasing him. “Once, we were painting our garage and Buddy came over in his Buster Brown suit and got paint all over it,” he said. “Everyone was laughing at him.”

  Michael Traficante, who grew up a block away, on Heather Street, made fun of Cianci because he had more than the other kids. They envied his in-ground pool and would jump in, aggravating Cianci. “He could be a snotty little twerp,” said Traficante, who went on to become the mayor of Cranston and remained friendly with him.

  Once when he was mayor Cianci showed an aide a family photo album and began reminiscing. He said that his mother wouldn’t let him out of the house much, and recalled a lonely childhood. In the photographs little Buddy was dressed like Little Lord Fauntleroy.

  Cianci found refuge as a child performer. His music teacher, Celia Moreau, called him “a good little entertainer.” By the age of seven, he was singing the theme song to Moreau’s Kiddie Revue, a weekly radio show broadcast live on Saturday mornings from the Outlet Department Store downtown. He dressed up as a little old Italian man, with a funny hat and work clothes, tap-dancing and singing silly songs like “Where D’Ya Worka, John?”

  “He was my comedy guy,” recalled Moreau. “Whatever I’d tell him to do, he’d do it.”

  His mother also put him in church pageants around Silver Lake. One Christmas, he blanked out in the middle of “O Holy Night” but kept singing, making up the words. Buddy’s Aunt Josephine recalled him as precocious, “always up to something.” He could talk his way out of mischief so well, she said, that his grandmother would smile indulgently and say, “That boy’s going to be president someday.”

  An old-time Silver Lake resident remembered the Cianci family—Buddy, his parents, and his older sister, Carol—walking into St. Bartholomew’s for Sunday mass. The family always sat in the same pew, up front, but sometimes Buddy would try to detour to a different pew, only to be collared by his father. “His father would walk behind him, bada-boom, bada-bing,” the man recalled, smiling. “Because Buddy was no angel.”

  Buddy looked up to his father and struggled to please him. Dr. Cianci, who had worked his way through medical school sorting freight for the railroad and driving a cement truck, could be hard on his son. He thought the boy was spoiled and lacked discipline.

  Dr. Cianci fooled around with other women, which pained his wife. That Buddy was aware of his father’s affairs was evident years later, when he told one friend about his father’s reputation as a ladies’ man, and joked in front of another, at a family dinner, about “Daddy’s girlfriends.”

  The adult Buddy didn’t talk much about his father, even to close friends. One day, after he had berated an aide at City Hall, another aide turned to Cianci’s sister, who had stopped by, and expressed surprise at such a childish tantrum by a grown man. According to the aide, his sister explained that Buddy had had a difficult time with their father, who could be busy and distant.

  Cianci’s former girlfriend Wendy Materna can recall a conversation with him in the 1990s, when they were breaking up, in which she asked what had gone on between him and his father. Cianci, she said, burst into tears and never went into it. Instead, he spoke sadly about the last time that he had seen his father alive, when he boarded the train in Providence to join the army in 1967.

  When Cianci was nine years old, his father enrolled him in fifth grade at the Moses Brown School, an East Side prep school across the street from Brown University. Years later Buddy would still vividly remember driving through the iron gates for the first time and up the curving drive shaded by elm trees. Ahead loomed Middle House, a massive brick building draped in ivy.

  “Wow!” he said to his father. “What is this place?”

  This was the cradle of Providence’s WASPs, who bred their sons for Harvard and Williams, Yankee banks and white-shoe law firms—a world of bridge and tea dances. Founded as a Quaker school around the time of the American Revolution, the school preached the tolerance of its benefactor, Moses Brown, who had freed his slaves and clashed with his slave-trading brother, John Brown, an early benefactor of Brown University across the street. The school motto at Moses Brown was “For the honor of truth.”

  Cianci felt conspicuous at Moses Brown, although he was not the only Italian-American student and there was no overt prejudice. He made friends and developed fond memories of his times there. He also developed the social skills that would enable him to move in different social circles. But there was also a sense of being different, a cultural displacement after growing up across town in Silver Lake. Cianci’s t
eachers and classmates had trouble pronouncing his name; they called him “Kee-yankee,” or “Chauncey” (it’s “See-ANN-see”). A classmate might make a crack about the Mafia. Cianci invited classmates to his house, but some “never invited me to their houses,” he sadly told an aide years later.

  “I didn’t understand a lot of their lifestyle,” he said. “I didn’t understand a lot of their values. . . . We drove in and I saw these monstrous buildings—old and, you know, it was really another world. I mean, across the city was another world.”

  Cianci was an average student, “part of the pile,” according to one of his teachers, King O’Dell. Classmate Robert Ellis Smith recalls him as an outsider who tried hard to be one of the gang. He was a joiner—glee club, chess club, school newspaper, wrestling, football, baseball. He got by with grit, determination, and a wisecracking sense of humor.

  “Everyone on campus had noticed the Buddha,” his yearbook said.

  He owned a convertible and took classmates to the old Narragansett Race Track in Pawtucket to play the ponies. Seabiscuit had raced at the Narragansett, where Raymond Patriarca’s men were known to “past-post” races—get down bets after the race. Cianci loved horses, and rode himself. For his yearbook saying, his classmates chose “The gray mare is the better horse.”

  Cianci was too much of an outsider to get very involved in student politics. He did serve on the snack bar committee—“without a whiff of scandal,” a classmate joked. At the snack bar, in the basement of Middle House, glimpses of the future politician could be seen. Buddy would lean across the bar as he dispensed snacks during recess, telling funny stories about teachers, classmates, and characters from Silver Lake. The other students would gather around their pudgy classmate, who resembled the comedian Jackie Gleason doing his popular bartender TV skit.

  At Moses Brown, Cianci defined himself through sports. A football lineman, he badgered his coach all year for a chance to carry the ball. Finally, in his last senior practice, he got his chance—and was gang-tackled so hard that he lost two teeth.

  But it was as a wrestler that Cianci had his most success. On the wrestling mat—a twenty-four-foot square smelling of old leather and stale sweat—he learned some of the moves that would serve him well in City Hall. Success required a combination of aggressiveness, brute strength, leverage, and cunning.

  Cianci was not a natural athlete, but he worked hard, sweating and grunting to avoid being pinned. Hopelessly behind in one match, he won by default when his opponent tripped and sprained an ankle. He was five foot nine and weighed about 185 pounds. His yearbook photos reveal a boy with a stocky torso, long, brawny arms, closely cropped hair, thick black eyebrows, and full lips curled in a smirk.

  In the 1958 state semifinals, at Brown University’s Marvel Gym, Cianci wrestled the defending champion, John Volpe. The match quickly became a test of survival for Cianci. Unable to pin his bigger opponent, Cianci kept scrabbling away from him like a crab to avoid being pinned. Frustrated, Volpe smashed Cianci with a forearm while trying to drag him back to the center of the mat. He was penalized a point for unnecessary roughness. At the final whistle, Cianci had escaped being pinned. Each wrestler had scored one point, but the referee, in a controversial decision, raised Cianci’s hand in victory. The vocal partisans of Mount Pleasant, accustomed to winning, fell into a stunned silence.

  The Buddha just smiled.

  BUDDY CIANCI WAS not destined to become a doctor. He lasted just one semester at his father’s alma mater, St. Louis University, then transferred to Fairfield University, where he switched from pre-med to political science. He went on to earn a master’s in political science at Villanova and a law degree at Marquette University.

  As he matured, Cianci grew surer of himself. He became cockier, more charismatic, quicker on his feet. Initially, he envisioned a career in international relations. Drafted by the army after law school, he received a commission as a second lieutenant in the military police. He was assigned to a military government group in Georgia that was headed to Vietnam to work with villagers in creating democratic institutions. But shortly before he was to leave for Vietnam, in 1967, his father died unexpectedly of a heart attack, on the Fourth of July.

  Following his father’s death, Cianci was transferred closer to home, to Fort Devens in Massachusetts. There a superior’s loss was Cianci’s gain. One day, a prisoner escaped by putting silver soap wrappers on his shoulders and saluting his way out of the stockade. The commanding officer was reassigned, and Cianci replaced him. He spent a year and a half at Fort Devens, watching over draft dodgers and AWOL soldiers. In 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., Cianci was provost marshal of a riot squad—the only white man in the brigade, he said—that was going to be sent to Memphis. But the unit was never deployed.

  Cianci had met Herb DeSimone in 1966, when between law school and the army he volunteered on his campaign for attorney general. In 1969, after Cianci’s army discharge, DeSimone hired him as an assistant attorney general. The job was part-time and paid seventy-five hundred dollars a year. Cianci also launched a private law practice in his father’s old doctor’s office in Silver Lake.

  The young lawyer’s new classroom was the Sixth District Court in Providence, in the Old State House on Benefit Street. It was there, in 1776, that Rhode Island had become the first American colony to renounce its allegiance to King George III. The brick building’s decline in the two hundred years since spoke to the decay that had settled into the cracks and crevices of Providence itself. In seedy halls that had known the step of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and John Adams, halls now pocked with broken plaster and cracked linoleum, Cianci waded into a shifting sea of thugs, prostitutes, junkies, bill collectors, winos, ward heelers, and courthouse politicians.

  Security in the antiquated courtrooms was poor. One day, a two-bit mobster nicknamed “the Moron” bolted out of court while being arraigned on a gun charge and led the police on a merry chase through the East Side, over to Smith Hill, and through the new State House.

  Cianci reveled in the hurly-burly of the courthouse—the camaraderie, the rivalries, the backroom politics. He prowled the courtroom as if it were a wrestling mat, flailing his arms, spinning on the balls of his feet, and perspiring freely, even in the winter. Once, a judge warned him about his habit of grunting at a witness. He had the physical presence and stamina of a bulldog, with heavy jowls, penetrating brown eyes with bags underneath, and prematurely thinning hair that he combed across a broad forehead.

  Out of court, Cianci had a rakish, man-about-town swagger. He was a nocturnal creature, eating and drinking, working and playing late into the night. His iron constitution seemed impervious to illness or lack of sleep. But getting him out of bed in the morning could be a challenge. Minutes before court, Cianci would sweep up to the courthouse in a chauffeured black Cadillac with an opera light on the ceiling. His driver, who also fetched his dry cleaning and brought him sandwiches, was a young man whom Cianci had represented in a worker’s compensation case.

  Some in the office smiled at Cianci’s flamboyance. “That’s Buddy,” they’d say. But others grumbled that Cianci was overly ambitious, and only for himself. A political junkie, he went to lunch with DeSimone and other Republican leaders to plot strategy. He worked on DeSimone’s unsuccessful campaigns for governor in 1970 and 1972, and would have been appointed to a high-ranking position, possibly chief of staff, had DeSimone won.

  DeSimone’s successor as attorney general, Republican Richard Israel, praised Cianci’s abilities and aggressiveness but felt that he had his eye on bigger things and wasn’t a team player. He rarely attended staff meetings and was habitually late for court.

  “I’d get calls from judges looking for him, and I’d threaten to fire him,” recalled William Dimitri, the chief of the Criminal Division. “But he was a damn good prosecutor. He’d rush in late, the judge would chew him out, and then he’d dive into the case.”

  Stephen Fortunato, a schoolm
ate from Moses Brown and Silver Lake, saw Cianci’s swashbuckling style up close. Returning home from college in the early 1970s to launch his own law practice, Fortunato paid a visit to Cianci’s office on Pocasset Avenue. Cianci sat in his heavily furnished chamber, all dark wood and leather, wheeling and dealing. At times he seemed to carry on three conversations at once, barking at his secretary, dispensing advice to Fortunato, and talking to clients on the speakerphone about settling this case or closing that real estate deal. He told Fortunato about his driver and boasted about how well his practice was doing.

  Later Fortunato faced Cianci in court. Fortunato defended a man being prosecuted by Cianci in the death of his estranged wife. The man had caught her having an affair and strangled her. Then he tried to make it look like an accident that had occurred during a sexual-arousal technique known as “burking,” which involves partial strangulation during oral sex. The killer contended that the death was accidental. But Cianci argued that the marks on the woman’s neck proved that she had been deliberately strangled.

  “This woman didn’t die with a penis in her mouth,” Cianci shouted during his closing argument—she had been strangled. The man was convicted.

  Cianci had graduated to prosecuting felonies in superior court by then. He was also promoted to the attorney general’s Organized Crime Unit, and began working closely with an up-and-coming state police detective, Vincent J. Vespia. The two had known each other as boys, through dinners with their fathers at the Old Canteen. They became best friends.

  Vespia was a kick-ass cop who had grown up on the Hill, playing in the street with some of the wiseguys he now pursued. As a young trooper, Vespia had busted a former playmate with a truckload of stolen furs.

  “How can you arrest me?” the man asked. “We played kick the can together.”