by Mike Stanton
Meanwhile, the jurors slogged through a weekend of deliberations. On the first ballot, they voted 7–5 to convict Patriarca. Many jurors were troubled by the priest’s testimony. Before “the priest thing,” as the jury foreman later referred to it, not one of the jurors thought Patriarca was guilty.
Ultimately, one lie trumped another.
The jurors were also bothered by contradictions in the testimony of the government’s star witness, Red Kelley. The most glaring example was Kelley’s recollection of the fateful Palm Sunday meeting with Patriarca as having taken place in front of the Gaslight Lounge on Orange Street. The defense had presented testimony that the restaurant was closed at the time because of a fire. Years later, Kelley would admit that he had lied about the location of the meeting on orders from a Boston FBI agent, Paul Rico, who wanted to implicate the owner of the Gaslight. Rico would later become notorious in his own right in the 1990s, as part of a burgeoning scandal involving the Boston FBI office and its cozy relationship with gangster-informants Whitey Bulger and Stephen Flemmi.
On Sunday afternoon, after eight ballots, the jury voted to acquit Raymond Patriarca of accessory to murder. The mob boss wept at the news.
Cianci was unfazed by the verdict. “It’s okay,” he told Monsignor O’Donnell, now back in Maryland. “We’ve got other charges coming.”
Margaret McNeil, relieved to get out of Providence, had to contend for a while with anonymous threatening phone calls in the middle of the night about her role in the Patriarca case. Someone sent her a Boston newspaper article reporting the verdict. Then, one day, Father Moriarty stopped by the rectory. He seemed happy, and drunk, and was eager to gloat.
“I want you to know that my friend was acquitted,” he told her.
That summer Patriarca testified before a congressional committee investigating the mob’s influence on horse racing. He denied knowing Frank Sinatra, who also appeared to deny his hidden interest with the mob boss in a Massachusetts racetrack. One congressman couldn’t resist asking Patriarca’s opinion of Mario Puzo’s best-selling novel, The Godfather.
“It was a good book and interesting reading,” replied Patriarca. “There was a lot of fiction in it. People like to read that stuff. You could come out with The Patriarca Papers tomorrow and make a million dollars on it.”
Cianci went on to try a case involving a violent criminal, John Gary Robichaud, who had disguised himself as a priest to steal a sixty-six-thousand-dollar payroll from an armored car at the state Department of Employment Security. Robichaud was convicted, then escaped from the state prison a few months later. Cianci slept with a gun by his bed—until Robichaud’s bullet-riddled body turned up a few weeks later in Massachusetts.
Then Cianci’s work as a prosecutor took a turn: he was assigned to a new public-corruption unit formed by the attorney general. Not long afterward, Cianci received a tip that would lead to an investigation of the administration of the mayor of Providence, Joseph A. Doorley, Jr.
That case would be part of the genesis of Cianci’s first run for public office—as the anticorruption candidate.
CHAPTER TWO
The Anticorruption Candidate
They called it Doorley’s Dream.
Rising from the marshy soil near the Great Salt Cove of colonial times, on the site of an old jewelry factory, the Providence Civic Center was hailed as the salvation of a dying city. Joseph A. Doorley, Jr., the mayor of Providence, had built the Civic Center after the state’s voters refused to pay for it. It was the early 1970s, desperate times for Providence. Since the suburban boom that followed World War II, the capital city’s population had plummeted from 248,000 to 179,000. The federal urban-renewal funds from Lyndon B. Johnson’s Great Society had dried up.
The big department stores were closing, one by one. One day teenagers pulled some mannequins out of a Dumpster, smeared the arms and legs with ketchup, and then drove around downtown with the would-be corpses sticking out of the trunk of their Karmann Ghia; the police ignored them. A Chamber of Commerce leader said that you could fire a rifle down Westminster Street at dusk and not hit anyone. Even a downtown Bible studies storefront had shut down, because there were no souls left to save.
The cynics said that Providence was beyond salvation. They predicted that Doorley’s Dream would become Doorley’s Icebox.
The building opened on Friday night, November 3, 1972, with a Providence Reds hockey game. The proud city fathers invited President Richard M. Nixon, who was scheduled to make a campaign stop at the state airport in Warwick, to drop the ceremonial first puck.
Not surprisingly, the Republican president declined to venture into a Democratic stronghold that hadn’t elected a Republican mayor since the Great Depression. Standing on the steps of Air Force One, bathed in spotlights, Nixon urged Rhode Islanders to elect Herbert DeSimone as governor and John Chafee as U.S. senator the following Tuesday. The marching bands drowned out a small group of hecklers who chanted about Watergate—which was still just a third-rate burglary.
Among the crowd of ten thousand cheering Nixon supporters was Buddy Cianci, who had emerged as a key campaign adviser to DeSimone. DeSimone was considering making Cianci his chief of staff if he became governor. But when DeSimone lost, Cianci started to think more seriously about his own political future. He had toyed previously with the idea of running for mayor of Cranston, or some other office in that Republican-dominated city.
Meanwhile, in Providence, Cianci was hearing rumors of turmoil in the mighty Democratic party.
Early in 1973, a few weeks after Doorley presided over the Civic Center’s grand opening, a rock-music promoter named Robert “Skip” Chernov walked into Cianci’s life.
Chernov had come to the attorney general’s office angry and scared. The executive director of Doorley’s Civic Center had just shaken him down for a one-thousand-dollar bribe to book a Grateful Dead concert.
Doorley’s Dream was about to become Cianci’s Opportunity.
SKIP CHERNOV WAS an unlikely instrument for a political revolution.
With black curly hair and red velvet sport coats, he bore a striking resemblance to Tiny Tim. He did drugs, drove a Bentley, and cultivated a flamboyant hippie image that was the antithesis of the Irish Catholic, shot-and-beer Doorley, whose taste ran to Frank Sinatra.
In 1969 the mayor had banned rock concerts in Providence after Chernov promoted a Sly and the Family Stone concert at the Rhode Island Auditorium that was followed by a riot. But with the construction of the Civic Center, Doorley needed the revenues from big rock shows to pay off the bonds. And Chernov was the biggest promoter in town.
The son of an Orthodox Jewish interior decorator from Russia, Chernov had always been different. Born in South Providence, he got his start promoting rock-and-roll dance nights at Catholic Providence College, where he also ran for class president with the slogan “A Jew for you,” losing by fifty-one votes.
After college he headed for the West Coast and landed in the center of the vibrant San Francisco music scene. He worked his way up from doorman at a topless bar to manager of Basin Street West, which defied the San Francisco police by booking Lenny Bruce. Miles Davis played at Chernov’s wedding. A young Janis Joplin crashed at his apartment. He went on to become a Xerox salesman in Beverly Hills, where he made a lot of money but missed the action.
In 1968, with a pregnant wife and dreams of becoming a big shot in his hometown, Chernov moved back to Providence and opened a nightclub, the Warehouse, on the grubby waterfront. He brought in up-and-coming acts like Neil Young and Deep Purple. The crowds, hungry for rock and roll, poured in—hippies, sailors, bikers, artists, businessmen, college students, secretaries. In a town where the drinking age was twenty-one, Chernov defied convention by aiming his club at youth.
He also learned two truisms of doing business in Providence: you had to cater to the mob, and you fought City Hall at your peril.
To install vending machines and game machines in the club, Chernov had to go through
Raymond Patriarca’s Coin-O-Matic Distributing. Other companies were cheaper, but Coin-O-Matic offered something that its rivals didn’t—protection from break-ins and vandalism. When Chernov went up the Hill to close the deal, Patriarca looked over the long-haired, shabbily dressed young man who aspired to be Providence’s king of rock and roll.
“Aren’t you Sammy Chernov’s son?” he said. “Your dad’s a stand-up guy.”
Chernov was indeed Sammy Chernov’s boy, gregarious Sammy Chernov, whose interior-decorating fortunes had brightened one day, during World War II, when he was hired to redecorate Patriarca’s brother’s house and Raymond stopped by. Patriarca had taken a liking to him, and his business began to expand into areas that he had been unable to crack before. Soon Chernov was landing lucrative contracts redecorating Providence funeral homes, even the Rhode Island State House. As the business grew, the Chernovs moved into a spacious house in the upscale waterfront suburb of Barrington, one of the first Jewish families to do so.
Years later, when Skip was planning to open the Warehouse, his father advised him to see Patriarca but never to become his partner. Straight money deals were okay, but a partnership was for life—and partnerships could end badly.
The strange cultural crosscurrents of Skip Chernov’s life were never more evident than the day he took Neil Young to Smith’s, a popular family-style Italian restaurant on the Hill, and ran into Raymond Patriarca after a mob shooting.
Chernov liked to take his performers to Smith’s, known for its succulent spareribs, to impress them so that they’d want to return to a second-rate city like Providence. The singers would get the celebrity treatment and autograph a photo to hang on the wall.
As soon as he and Young walked in, they noticed that the phone booth was splintered and saw some blood spattered on the wall. Young, who had just released his first album with Crazy Horse, Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, had pulled into Providence that afternoon in a rented car, towing a U-Haul trailer with the band’s equipment. Now he wanted to get the hell out.
Chernov, trying to calm him down, looked down the long, narrow restaurant and spotted Patriarca sitting in the last booth. They nodded to each other. A waiter told Chernov that there had been a mob shooting the night before; the Old Man was there to restore order.
“Who’s that?” Young asked, lowering his voice. “Is that the don?”
“You don’t want to know,” said Chernov, but Young persisted.
Chernov conceded that it was “the don,” and that it would be a sign of disrespect for them to leave. They stayed for dinner. Young left an autographed picture, inscribed, “Best ribs ever.” The picture hung in Smith’s until the restaurant burned a few years later. That night, Young played an inspired four-hour set at the Warehouse, prowling the stage during extended guitar solos on “Cinnamon Girl” and “Cowgirl in the Sand,” for a crowd of forty-three paying customers.
If Skip Chernov could coexist with Raymond Patriarca and the mob, Joe Doorley’s City Hall was another story. The Warehouse was a constant source of friction. Fights broke out at closing time, and the Providence police became a familiar presence. Chernov complained of police harassment, saying they didn’t like hippies. At closing time, he played a tape of the “Hallelujah Chorus,” which further irritated the police.
Nor did Chernov endear himself to City Hall by booking the MC5, the Detroit band whose signature song was “Kick Out the Jams, Motherfuckers.” The MC5 had played for antiwar protesters at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, where Doorley had chaired the Credentials Committee, and given the finger to his pal Mayor Daley. Doorley’s Board of Licenses refused a permit for the MC5 concert. Chernov sued on free-speech grounds and won. The MC5 played to a packed house, without incident.
In 1969 Chernov was busted for having a cover charge on a Sunday, and later for serving beer to underage drinkers and asking them to lie about it to the police. Chernov beat the charges, but the city took away his liquor license. The Warehouse wound up in the hands of the father of Ronald Glantz, Doorley’s assistant city solicitor.
Chernov bounced back. He cut a deal with Narragansett Brewery to promote the Narragansett Tribal Rock series throughout New England, booking acts like the Band and Led Zeppelin. He opened a bar, the Incredible Organ Pub, and a Mexican restaurant, Tortilla Flats, and bought and motorized a San Francisco cable car to ferry customers between the two. In 1971 he won New England closed-circuit television rights to the world heavyweight boxing match between Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier and took in a million dollars. He bought a big house on the East Side with French gardens and a billiards room.
Chernov suffered a setback when the riot broke out after the Sly and the Family Stone concert, and Doorley banned rock concerts in Providence. Furious, Chernov wanted to take the city to court. But brewery officials counseled patience, urging Chernov to focus on concerts in other cities. A few months later the concert ban was lifted—but not by a judge. According to Chernov, it went down like this: Doorley ran a bar near City Hall. Narragansett Brewery agreed to supply him with free beer. And rock and roll returned to Providence.
ON THE MORNING of February 13, 1973, Chernov and his lawyer were ushered into Dick Israel’s office and offered coffee and pastry. Someone introduced Chernov to a heavyset, balding man in a short-sleeve shirt and tie named Buddy Cianci.
Chernov proceeded to tell a story about his efforts, over the past several months, to book concerts at the Civic Center. For months, Chernov said, he had been lobbying the center’s executive director, Harold Copeland, and gotten the runaround. Then, on February 2, 1973, during a telephone conversation with Copeland about a possible Grateful Dead concert, Copeland told Chernov that it would cost him $13,500 to rent the Civic Center—plus a thousand bucks, under the table, for Copeland.
Hanging up, Chernov was a nervous wreck. He told his wife, his secretary, and his business partner, Bruce Goldstein. In Chernov’s opinion, Copeland was either shaking him down, setting him up, or making a sick joke. They agreed to notify their lawyer, who told the attorney general, Dick Israel.
Six days later, on a Friday, Chernov came into his office and found a message from Copeland. Angry and scared, Chernov called Doorley’s office and demanded an emergency meeting with the mayor. He told Doorley’s personal secretary that he didn’t want to make enemies at City Hall, but that if he didn’t get an appointment, the shit was going to hit the fan. But Doorley wouldn’t meet with him. A few minutes after Chernov hung up with Doorley’s secretary, Copeland called to say that he had a couple of open dates in April. Once again, Chernov said, Copeland brought up the thousand dollars for himself, under the table.
The following Monday, February 12, Chernov bought a tape recorder and hooked it up to the telephone in his office. There was another message to call Copeland. With Chernov’s partner listening on the extension and recording the conversation, Chernov made the call. He and Copeland discussed the concert dates in April. Copeland reiterated that Chernov’s expenses for renting the building would be $13,500.
“Yeah, it’s the whole thing,” said Copeland. “Out the door you’re thirteen five.”
“Right,” replied Chernov.
“With me,” Copeland continued.
“Well, okay,” said Chernov.
“Yeah, and there’s a thousand for me,” Copeland said.
“Okay,” said Chernov.
“Strictly under the table, and all that [blank],” said Copeland.
“Right,” said Chernov.
The next morning, February 13, Chernov brought the tape to the attorney general’s office and played it for the assembled prosecutors, including Cianci, who listened quietly. Israel asked Chernov if he thought Copeland was just kidding. Chernov said he didn’t know but agreed to work undercover and try to deliver the bribe to Copeland. The case was assigned to state police detective Vin Vespia, Cianci’s friend and a former classmate of Chernov’s at Hope High School. The Providence police, who were too closely aligned with J
oe Doorley, would be kept out of the loop. Israel told Chernov that Cianci would probably try the case.
Cianci didn’t say much during the meeting, but Chernov did take note of one comment. The prosecutor allowed himself a Cheshire-cat grin and said, “Now I got him!”
In the following weeks, Chernov talked to Copeland again and booked a Pink Floyd concert for March 19. On the night of the show, Chernov walked into the Civic Center carrying a state police briefcase wired with a tape recorder and transmitter. He also carried ten one-hundred-dollar bills that Vespia had dusted with a fluorescent powder that would stick to the hands of anyone who handled the money. Chernov had been warned not to offer the money unless Copeland asked for it.
Outside, Vespia waited in a van. He had a warrant to search Copeland and his office.
As Chernov walked inside, he whistled a few notes to test the transmitter, not unlike the sound check that the band members of Pink Floyd were performing onstage. The psychedelic rock band from Great Britain had just released a new album, Dark Side of the Moon, with its hit single, “Money,” featuring the ca-ching of cash registers. The building pulsed with sound as Chernov waited nervously, wired with his own sound system.
Chernov thought that Copeland seemed uneasy as they settled the box-office receipts. He never asked for the money. Outside, in the van, Vespia cursed, believing that Copeland had been tipped off.
Shortly thereafter, Chernov and Bruce Goldstein, his partner, attended another meeting in the attorney general’s office. According to Goldstein, the attorney general was on the fence about whether to proceed, since Copeland hadn’t taken the money. But Cianci spoke up forcefully in favor of pursuing the case, Goldstein recalled.
Israel said the authorities would monitor the situation. Chernov and Goldstein left the meeting relieved, figuring that that was the end of it. Since going to the authorities, they had had second thoughts about the ramifications to their concert business.
