by Mike Stanton
Not everyone would accept the handshake. When he tried to address the longshoremen, they shouted him out of the hall and slammed the doors. With beer bottles banging off the walls, Cianci pushed the doors open and marched right back in, winning their grudging respect, if not their support.
Every day, it seemed, Cianci was introducing a new program. He sketched out his visions to revive downtown, restore the blighted neighborhoods, rebuild the waterfront, create green spaces, build housing, create jobs, improve the schools.
Doorley, who had disappeared to Florida after the primary, ran a more passive campaign. One nervous supporter urged the mayor to pay more attention to the city’s elderly housing projects. He warned that Cianci, who was throwing campaign parties for senior citizens, was making “tremendous inroads.”
Jean Coughlin, a Mount Pleasant housewife running for mayor as an Independent, recalled going into the senior high-rises to do ice cream socials and hearing that Cianci had been there. “The little old ladies would come up to me and say, ‘Buddy came in with money and gave us a big dinner.’ ”
Coughlin, a member of the Republican City Committee, had been asked the previous winter to run as the party’s candidate for mayor but was told that the impoverished party had no money for her campaign. Then, she said, “Mr. Cianci arrived with a fistful of money,” and she was shouldered aside. Her shoestring campaign as an Independent featured an old postal truck, painted shocking pink and with a loudspeaker on top, that she drove around Providence. One day she stopped outside City Hall and shouted, “The only activity down here is the pigeons.” The old men on the bench in Burnside Park clapped and cheered. She attacked the cozy relationship between the Irish pols and the Catholic Church—the only reason Doorley had pushed for the Civic Center, she said, was that the Dominican fathers at Providence College wanted it for their basketball team. Her quixotic goal was to crack the Democratic machine, as embodied in the heavy metal voting machines bristling with levers and complicated machinery. “The joke was that you couldn’t break the machine,” she said.
Coughlin was also critical of Cianci, calling him “a man born with a silver spoon in his mouth and raised on every advantage money can buy.” Irritated, Cianci snapped that she was mentally ill and should be locked up, she said. One night Cianci’s mother called Coughlin at home and screamed at her for saying negative things about her Buddy. Later, Buddy would refer to Coughlin as “the Menopausal Maniac,” according to two people associated with his campaign.
But Cianci directed most of his fire at Doorley. No Dough Joe had alienated police officers by refusing to buy them winter coats. When the police union set up an informational picket line outside the Civic Center during an event attended by Doorley, the Republican challenger marched with them. Cianci vowed that when he became mayor, the officers would never have to buy another piece of clothing.
In an ominous sign of the city’s shifting demographics, a group of suburban voters who had left Providence formed Commuters for Doorley, to woo Providence voters left behind. The group didn’t even meet in Providence; they met at a hotel in Warwick. According to Edward Xavier, a Doorley adviser, the group disbanded after the mayor failed to show up. Instead, Xavier recalled, Doorley would invariably be found planted on some bar stool, where his cronies would make jokes about Cianci’s latest proclamation.
“You give me any shit, Doorley,” said one crony, “and I’ll sic Buddy Cianci on you.” The men would roar with laughter.
Doorley’s drinking was a serious concern. According to Xavier and another member of the mayor’s campaign committee, they warned him about it at a meeting following the primary. Xavier, a Fox Point councilman and truck driver, was one of the people assigned to baby-sit Doorley, with an eye toward keeping him away from Scotch. Beer was okay, said Xavier; but Doorley didn’t do so well with Scotch.
One night Xavier arrived too late at the Pelham House, where Doorley had been drinking. According to Xavier, mobster Dickie Callei, who would be murdered the following year by Bobo Marrapese, had bet Doorley that he could drink him under the table. By the time Xavier got there, the mayor was so badly out of it that Xavier suspected Callei had slipped a mickey into his drink. Xavier took Doorley out of the bar and drove him around in his car until well past midnight, then left him in his driveway, alerting a trusted police captain.
About ten days before the election, according to a Doorley campaign aide, the mayor arrived drunk at a hall on Elmwood Avenue in South Providence, where several hundred black voters were waiting to hear him speak. His drinking buddy, Jimmy Notorantonio, or Jimmy Noto, as he was known, pulled up to the curb in a white Thunderbird. He and a red-faced Doorley got out. Doorley had trouble walking up the stairs to the building. Notorantonio, who had also been drinking, walked ahead of the mayor, opened the door, glanced at the crowd, and said, “Fuck this—we don’t need ’em,” then turned around and shut the door before Doorley could enter. The aide watched in amazement as the mayor and Jimmy Noto left.
Cianci’s advisers feared a sober Doorley in a debate. But Doorley refused to debate, saying that he was sick of reporters questioning him about his personal finances and corruption at the Civic Center. Besides, he added, half jokingly, the Patriots were playing at Buffalo on Sunday.
One week before election day, Doorley struck back at the anticorruption candidate. The occasion was a gala Democratic dinner at Rhodes-on-the-Pawtuxet, a turn-of-the-century ballroom where the big bands of the forties had played. Virtually all of the state’s top Democrats and more than two thousand faithful had turned out, the largest crowd in the old hall since President John F. Kennedy appeared more than a decade earlier.
Doorley sat at the head table, waiting grimly to speak. There had been rumors all day that the mayor had a surprise for Cianci. When Doorley’s turn came, he stood and waved a piece of paper over his head. It was an affidavit from an insurance adjuster, delivered to the attorney general that afternoon, accusing Cianci of paying a cash kickback to falsify records in an automobile accident.
“This is the man who attacks my integrity and my character!” thundered Doorley.
Cianci watched Doorley on the eleven o’clock news with disbelief, then paced furiously about his living room. Herb DeSimone, who was there, urged him to relax; Doorley’s attack was a sign of desperation.
Over the next few days, details of the accusation emerged. The accident in question had involved Cianci’s wife, his car, and his driver. The insurance adjuster who said Cianci had paid him off was a former state trooper under indictment for insurance fraud. In 1970, when Cianci was dating Sheila Bentley, his driver was giving her a ride when he was sideswiped. The adjuster alleged that Cianci had given him $280 to conceal the fact that Sheila had collected unemployment benefits after going back to work.
A subsequent grand-jury investigation, after the election, would clear Cianci of any wrongdoing. But even before that, Doorley’s charge backfired.
The weekend before election day, a Providence Journal poll predicted that Doorley would win handily, taking 54 percent of the vote to Cianci’s 41.5 percent. Farina argued vehemently with the newspaper reporter before the story ran, pointing out that no self-respecting Democrat would admit favoring a Republican.
Larry McGarry’s numbers told another story. Cianci was within one thousand votes of Doorley.
Late on the Saturday night before the election, Cianci walked into the East Side Diner after a long day of campaigning. He was greeted by the spontaneous applause of 150 people who rose to their feet and cheered.
Election day dawned gray and drizzly in Providence, with a promise of thunderstorms. Turnout across the city was heavy. Cianci made one last, long, mad dash to the finish line. That night, five minutes before the polls closed, not having eaten anything for hours, he stopped by a supermarket to grab a sandwich and wound up shaking hands with shoppers.
Later, Cianci plopped down on the couch in his mother’s house, on Laurel Hill Avenue, and watched the returns on tele
vision with Farina. The two men drank a toast.
Cianci let out a whoop when the results came in from the Second Ward, on the East Side. He took 71 percent of the vote, more than he’d dreamed, giving him an early cushion. Over the next few hours, as the solidly Democratic wards came in, Doorley chipped away at Cianci’s lead. But Doorley wasn’t winning big; he barely carried his own Fifth Ward, by four hundred votes. Cianci won Silver Lake.
Cianci waited for the returns from South Providence, once solidly Irish territory that had been overtaken by poorer blacks. Cianci’s campaign commercials had featured footage of blighted South Side neighborhoods that Cianci compared to “wartime Europe.”
Lloyd Griffin, the black leader who had joined Cianci for the clandestine van ride, delivered big-time. He turned out a strong black vote that helped Cianci carry two more wards, including Larry McGarry’s old Fighting Tenth.
Griffin also delivered on mail ballots. During the campaign he had persuaded hundreds of seniors to sign mail ballots by promising them a free day trip to Atlantic City. When the day came, the seniors were told that the buses had been canceled because of a labor dispute. In fact, no trip had ever been booked.
Cianci won only four of Providence’s thirteen wards, but his commanding East Side margin and strong showing on traditional Democratic turf pulled him through. He beat Doorley by 709 votes.
Doorley’s police chief, Walter McQueeney, arrived at the Laurel Hill house to drive Cianci to his campaign headquarters. The chief called Cianci “Mayor.”
The celebration was already in full swing when Cianci arrived downtown at the Holiday Inn, next to Doorley’s Dream—the Providence Civic Center. In the chaos of the balloon-draped ballroom, jammed with hundreds of sweating, stomping, singing, and chanting people, there was a sense of history being made. After an unbroken chain of Yankee and Irish-American mayors dating back to 1832, Cianci would be Providence’s first Italian-American mayor.
As Cianci rode upstairs in the service elevator with a small group of family and supporters, one observer recalled that the mayor-elect looked at his mother with a poignant expression and asked, “Have I finally done something to make you proud of me?” She said that he had.
When Cianci made his entrance, a little before midnight, the ballroom erupted. A dozen policemen formed a flying wedge through the mob of people who wanted to shake his hand and slap his back.
“It was people fed up with the machine who got him in,” said one supporter. “Buddy is the New Look in politics. He’s the opposite of Watergate.”
Afterward, upstairs at a smaller gathering of campaign insiders, Cianci wrapped Tony Bucci in a bear hug.
Late that night, unable to sleep, Cianci called his friend Vinny Vespia.
“Vespia,” he rasped, his voice hoarse. “They’re never gonna call me ‘Landslide Cianci.’ ”
The next afternoon a car drove up to the mayor-elect’s house on Blackstone Boulevard. A thin, lanky man, unable to walk, was carried by two men into the house. They set him down in a chair. Brandishing a long cigar and a twinkling smile, Larry McGarry finally came face to face with Buddy Cianci.
“Mayor,” said McGarry, with a long, theatrical pause, “we’d like your support.”
Later the press got wind of the meeting between the once and future powers of Providence.
“I’m a Democrat. I was born a Democrat and I will die a Democrat,” McGarry explained. “But I was also born in Providence, and I have lived all my life in Providence. I will in no way be a stumbling block or try to hurt Mr. Cianci if he is trying to do something good for the city.”
The mighty Providence Democratic machine would never be the same. Doorley, stung by McGarry’s betrayal, said that Mr. Democrat’s “sense of loyalty is like Eddy Street—one way.” (Later, a Doorley aide issued a correction when it was pointed out that Eddy Street became a two-way street once it left downtown and ran into South Providence.)
“I’m laughing,” responded McGarry.
Ray Devitt, McGarry’s friend, said that the Democratic split of 1974 “led to good friends going to their graves not speaking to each other.”
Doorley’s friends on the City Council tried to give him a going-away present. They voted unanimously to rename the Providence Civic Center the Joseph A. Doorley Jr. Civic Center.
The vote came shortly after a judge fined Harold Copeland one thousand dollars for soliciting a bribe from Skip Chernov. Fired, Copeland moved back to California. Chernov, who never promoted another concert at the Civic Center, ran into him years later during a trip to the West Coast. “That didn’t do either one of us any good, did it?” asked Copeland.
Cianci voiced outrage that the Civic Center would be named for a man “defeated on that very issue.” The name change never went through. Instead, Doorley had to settle for the lobby.
In the aftermath of Cianci’s victory, The Providence Journal asked, “How will he cope with this complex city, with its decaying neighborhoods, fading retail center, poverty and unemployment, street crime, shabby schools, disinterested students, racial tensions, unequal tax assessments and rising government costs?”
Responded Cianci, “It’s a little frightening.”
CHAPTER THREE
The Art of Politics
Snow flurries dusted the ground as the city employees’ softball team warmed up at the Mount Pleasant Avenue playground in the first week of April 1975. A black limousine driven by a Providence police officer glided to a halt near the field, and a pudgy man in a sweat suit bounded out.
“Let’s go!” Buddy Cianci shouted.
The new mayor grabbed a bat, stepped into the batter’s box, stared down the pitcher, and popped a few fly balls to right. Then he grabbed a glove and trotted out to shortstop. The batter hit a ground ball sharply to Cianci’s left. The mayor lunged and dug the ball out of the dirt. He lost his balance and rolled over, then jumped up with the ball in his glove, proud as a playful puppy.
The players cheered.
Cianci’s first term as mayor had the feel of opening day, from the red, white, and blue bunting that adorned City Hall on inauguration day to the springtime air of renewal and hope. He brought a new sense of vitality and exuberance to the job, and he relished the competition with the City Council, which was controlled by his Democratic enemies.
Cianci also knew how to play hardball.
A few months into the job, he fired the city’s recreation director, a Doorley holdover, for not keeping proper track of baseball equipment. When the assistant director locked Cianci’s designated replacement out of the recreation office, the mayor sent the police over and fired the assistant, too. Then he ordered an investigation of recreation finances that led to the conviction of the assistant director for embezzling $765 in lunch money during a youth bus trip to the Bronx Zoo.
Not since Babe Ruth was slugging for the Providence Grays, perhaps, had the city seen someone with such star power. In national Republican circles, Cianci was a curiosity—an ethnic, urban mayor—and the party cultivated him like a rare orchid.
During his second month in office, he was invited to a private audience with President Gerald R. Ford in the Oval Office. “He wanted to know how I did it—how I, as a Republican, won in a Democratic city like Providence,” said Cianci.
Cianci had visions of using City Hall as a springboard to the U.S. Senate, and from there, perhaps, landing a spot on the national party ticket as a vice-presidential candidate.
But back in Providence Cianci had a job to do: restoring hope to a dying city. His vision for his city and for his political fortunes were intertwined. He sought power, to save Providence and advance his career. That meant playing the game.
Nobody played it better than Buddy.
CIANCI WASTED NO time in getting started.
Five minutes past midnight, on January 6, 1975, Vincent Albert Cianci, Jr., was sworn in as mayor of Providence in a ceremony at his house on Blackstone Boulevard. Standing in front of his fireplace, he raised his right
hand, placed his left on his mother’s Bible, and took the oath of office as Providence’s thirty-second mayor. His wife, Sheila, her shoulder-length blond hair glowing in the television lights, leaned over and kissed him. Their infant daughter, Nicole, crooked in her mother’s left arm, looked around quizzically as more than a hundred people cheered.
“I truly hope to bring a spirit of adventure and excitement to the city of Providence during the next four years,” said Cianci, choked with emotion.
The eclectic crowd ranged from East Side Brahmins to Silver Lake ward heelers, who whispered that this was different from the parties that Democrats threw. The meatballs on the buffet were Swedish. The pizza was cold and had anchovies. There wasn’t a beer in sight, just lots of champagne.
The Yankees sized up the crowd with bemusement. Fred Lippitt, a Republican patrician, surveyed the Runyonesque crew, many flashing gold chains and reeking of cologne, and marveled that this was a whole new world for the Grand Old Party in Providence.
Over in a corner, Democratic power broker Tony Bucci shook hands and winked. Across the room, Republican elder statesman Herb DeSimone chatted with the two lone Republicans on the twenty-six-member City Council. Cianci, confident and self-assured, flitted about the room, pumping hands, cracking jokes, slapping backs, issuing orders—taking charge. He thanked his supporters, Republicans and Democrats alike, and made them laugh when he welcomed them to the “Cianci Civic Center.”
The next morning, Cianci and his wife stepped outside and saw the mayor’s city limousine, a black Cadillac driven by a uniformed policeman. Two more policemen on motorcycles revved their engines. “Is that too much?” said Cianci, laughing with delight.
A few minutes later, the new mayor was being chauffeured along Angell Street, down ancient College Hill with its brick mansions and Ivy League buildings, past curious Brown University students. Inside the car, Cianci mused, “What if nobody shows up?”
The limousine rolled past the soaring white spire of the First Baptist Church and into downtown, through a death-defying traffic rotary known as Suicide Circle, and across a swath of concrete that carried the dubious distinction of being the world’s widest bridge, covering a long stretch of the Providence River. It glided to a stop beside City Hall, a squat gray edifice that was built like its new master, low and wide. A massive wooden platform, draped in red, white, and blue bunting, had been erected in front of the one-hundred-year-old building, built in the style of the French Second Empire. President Theodore Roosevelt had addressed more than twenty thousand people here in 1902 on the evils of corporate trusts and the corruptibility of mankind. John Kennedy had spoken to an adoring crowd here on the eve of his election to the presidency in 1960.
