The Prince of Providence

by Mike Stanton

Other Cianci partisans weren’t convinced of that. The mayor believed that he could beat Chafee. Cianci was the hottest thing in Rhode Island politics; the party endorsement was his for the taking and he could lay claim to what had become, in the minds of some ethnic-conscious voters, an Italian seat. Chafee was down and out, a two-time loser for statewide office.

  The rivalry with Chafee was intertwined with Cianci’s resentments and insecurities about being accepted by the WASPs. Years later, Cianci would speak bitterly, and enviously, of Chafee. He said that Chafee was a member of the privileged upper class who went to fancy barbecues while “I was out working for votes in a crowd of two thousand Puerto Ricans—hot, sweaty guys putting their arms around me so you can smell their armpits, spitting on me, asking for a job.”

  Early in 1976, Cianci and Mickey Farina drove down to Chafee’s house in Potowomut, a peninsula jutting into Narragansett Bay in Warwick. Chafee, wanting to speak privately, came outside and sat in his car, an old station wagon, with the mayor and his political adviser. Chafee said that he wanted to run regardless of Cianci’s intentions, and that he would oppose the mayor in a primary if necessary. Cianci’s position was that if Chafee went against the party’s endorsement he truly would be dead politically.

  Not long after, according to two witnesses, Chafee came to Cianci’s house on Blackstone Boulevard for Sunday brunch. Cianci had a handful of advisers there, including Farina and Herb DeSimone. Sheila Cianci, who had prepared a Jewish brunch, served the men at the large dining room table—salmon, whitefish, blintzes, strawberries and sour cream, washed down by lots of espresso. Chafee sat at the end of the table, drinking tea. Cianci, seated at the other end, was cocky and arrogant.

  The conversation flowed back and forth. Farina had been pushing Cianci to run for Senate and get out of Providence; City Hall was a sewer that could drag you down if you stayed too long. Farina, who had worked in Washington, wanted to get back; he could be Cianci’s chief of staff, and they could stay forever. And with Cianci’s oratorical ability and charisma, who knew what opportunities might follow. The Senate was the most powerful club in America—there were only a hundred U.S. senators, and they ran the world. DeSimone, more of an elder statesman in the party, was more cautious and conciliatory. He had pointed out that there were only fifty governors, and that Cianci, who was still young and had been in office for only a year, should pay his dues and then try for the State House first. “It’s not your turn to be selfish,” DeSimone said. DeSimone later disputed that, saying that he never would have backed Cianci against Chafee, still one of the state’s leading Republicans.

  At one point during the brunch, Chafee put his head down on the table and cried. He said, “I want this more than anything. I’ll be a great senator.” There was an awkward silence. After Chafee left, Cianci joked about his behavior. He thought Chafee was weak. Years later, Cianci would smile and say of Chafee, “He wanted it badly. He had lost twice. He wasn’t the lovable John Chafee that we knew later on.”

  But underneath Chafee’s WASP exterior was a steely politician as tough as any ward boss. A combat veteran of World War II and the Korean War, he refused to back down. After months of attempting to build consensus in his quiet manner, Chafee decided to press ahead. When it became apparent that Cianci wasn’t going to step aside, Chafee’s advisers urged him to announce his candidacy, recalled his campaign chairman, Bruce Selya. Further delay, they warned, would only give Cianci more time to maneuver.

  In February, shortly before publicly announcing his candidacy, Chafee went to the mayor’s office to inform Cianci of his intentions. The after-hours meeting was small—Chafee and Selya, and Cianci and DeSimone. The discussion began cordially, with Chafee stating his intentions and Cianci, stalling for time, trying to persuade him to wait, and let the party decide. But when Chafee declined, Cianci blew up. He brought up a divisive primary that Chafee had faced in the early 1960s, when he ran for governor against an Italian-American Republican. Cianci threatened his own primary challenge. He raged about how unfair it was for things to be handed to people like Chafee on a silver platter. He complained that people like himself, lacking Chafee’s lineage, couldn’t get in the door. Chafee just sat there. Eventually, Selya and DeSimone calmed things down, and the meeting ended. Chafee had called Cianci’s bluff. For all his bravado, Cianci did have doubts about whether he could have won and whether the timing was right.

  It was dark when Chafee and Selya walked through Kennedy Plaza in front of City Hall. Selya offered to give Chafee a ride home, but Chafee said that he’d take the bus and Selya went back to his law office. A short time later, he heard a rapping on the door. It was Chafee, who didn’t have bus fare, seeking a ride.

  On Monday, February 9, Cianci publicly removed himself from the race. Campaigning on Saturday in New Hampshire, Cianci said that he had broken the news to President Ford, who had encouraged him to run, then met with Chafee on Sunday to give him the green light. After saying in December that he was “leaning very strongly” toward running, Cianci now said that he had a job to finish in Providence. He was still a young mayor; it was not yet his time. He denied that he had backed off for fear of losing. “It’s a great opportunity, and if I were an opportunist, I’d be taking advantage of it.”

  Spared a contentious primary, Chafee went on to be elected and served twenty-two distinguished years in the Senate. He earned a national reputation as a champion of the environment and health care. When he died in 1999, his funeral at Grace Church in downtown Providence was attended by President Clinton and his wife, Hillary, several cabinet members, and dozens of senators.

  In later years, political junkies would look back and speculate about what would have happened had Cianci challenged Chafee, like the split-screen films that used to run at the Ocean State Theater, presenting a fantasy boxing match between heavyweight champs Rocky Marciano and Muhammad Ali. As time passed, Cianci would regret not running.

  “I thought that I had plenty of time,” he said.

  BUDDY CIANCI’S DECISION to pull out of the 1976 Senate race did not dampen his enthusiasm for the national political spotlight, or diminish his star. At the Republican National Convention in Kansas City that summer, he gave a nationally televised speech introducing a major speaker, former Texas governor John Connally.

  Norm Roussel, Cianci’s political adman, recalled the mayor’s sitting in President Ford’s room the afternoon before the speech, around a large conference table with Republican luminaries like Henry Kissinger, Howard Baker, and Donald Rumsfeld and members of Ford’s steering committee. A White House staffer asked Cianci to introduce Connally. Cianci inquired about giving one of the speeches seconding Ford’s nomination instead. That might be more prestigious, but it would be late at night. The Connally speech offered Cianci six minutes of national prime-time television exposure. He took it.

  Late that night Cianci was grabbing a bite at a Denny’s restaurant with Roussel, trying to figure out what to say. His eyes fell on his paper place mat, which offered an illustrated history of European immigrants—bricklayers, artisans, masons. All of a sudden, it clicked. The message dovetailed with Cianci’s profile as an ethnic northeastern mayor, someone the Republicans wanted to showcase to broaden their appeal.

  The next night, standing before a sea of delegates in Kemper Arena, Cianci delivered a rousing speech that fired up the crowd and won him a huge ovation. He spoke of immigrant hopes and dreams, of the need to rebuild urban neighborhoods, and of how the Democrats had taken ethnic voters for granted.

  “For too long, ethnics have been treated as votes and statistics by Democratic machines that stifled their hopes, laughed at their ambitions, and scoffed at their dreams,” thundered Cianci. “Our Republican ranks contain many of us who are proud that we come from Federal Hill in Providence, from the streets of the north of Boston, or from Floresville, Texas [Connally’s hometown].”

  Then Cianci went after Ford’s Democratic opponent, Georgian Jimmy Carter, who had mispronounced Ital
ian “Eye-talian” in his convention acceptance speech. “I’d like to address myself to Mr. Carter, if he’s watching,” said Cianci. “My name is Vincent ‘Buddy’ Cianci, mayor of the great city of Providence, Rhode Island. I am not an Eye-talian, but an Italo-American and proud of my ethnic background.”

  The speech established the dynamic young mayor as a political comer. Dick Cheney, Ford’s chief of staff, sang Cianci’s praises. The congratulatory telegrams rolled in, along with gifts: Scotch, provolone, salamis. Cianci freely distributed copies of his biography. It was, said Roussel, like winning the Oscar.

  After the convention, President Ford appointed Cianci to his twenty-three-member campaign-strategy council and invited him to dinner at the White House. There was talk of a place for Cianci in Washington, either as a cabinet or subcabinet official, if Ford won. On election night a plane stood by at the airport to take Cianci to Washington if Ford won. But Ford lost. Afterward, Cianci was subdued, especially after Jimmy Carter’s landslide victory in Rhode Island.

  Back at City Hall, Cianci’s continuing battles with the Democrats were taking their toll. The ongoing budget impasse led to frequent labor unrest and a decline in city services. Residents in the West End complained about rats biting their children. In neighborhood meetings angry residents of Mount Pleasant, Federal Hill, and Fox Point protested skyrocketing taxes; some called for Cianci’s impeachment.

  One steamy morning, in the summer of 1977, a convoy of city trucks and private vehicles snarled Kennedy Plaza for ninety minutes to protest layoffs. Trash piled up at the rate of two hundred tons a day as sanitation workers claimed that they had “lost” the keys to their garbage trucks. Frustrated residents dumped their garbage outside the city sanitation headquarters. Sewage pumps threatened to back up into the basements of people’s houses after sewage-plant workers walked off the job. Bodies lay unburied at the city’s North Burial Grounds when the gravediggers refused to show. Said Cianci, “No one is panicking.”

  City Hall became a hostile environment, punctuated by angry shouting matches and juvenile confrontations. One night a city worker walked into the mayor’s office to report that he had just overheard Councilman John Garan, a Cianci foe, talking on the telephone in the lobby of City Hall. Garan had been telling someone that “the mayor is no friend of yours.” The worker had no idea what Garan was talking about, but Cianci did. The mayor had just finished drawing up a list of 182 city employees who would be losing their jobs as a result of budget cuts, and he suspected that Garan was tipping off someone on the list. When Cianci learned that Garan was holding a copy of the list, he erupted.

  Cianci charged out into the second-floor hallway and, peering over the balcony, began screaming at Garan below. Then he sent an aide downstairs to order Garan off the phone. When Garan refused, the aide grabbed the receiver out of the councilman’s hand and then yanked the cord out of the wall.

  “Garan was being the bearer of doom,” complained Cianci, defending his actions. Worse, Garan had been using the only available line to City Hall after 4 P.M., the mayor said. “If Garan had wanted to make 182 phone calls, he could have made them on another telephone.”

  The budget was merely one front in the wide-ranging war for control of the fractious city. In Silver Lake, a council candidate accused Cianci of threatening the jobs of city workers who backed the Democratic ticket. On the waterfront in Fox Point, Cape Verdean community leader Tia Santos charged that Cianci fired him as deputy port director for refusing to take the mayor around the neighborhood and “hit the joints with him” to expand his political base. In the Second Ward Providence’s first black councilman, Democrat Philip Addison, Jr., complained that the mayor pressured the Urban League to fire him for voting against a black Cianci appointee. In South Providence the Irish felt that Cianci neglected their declining neighborhoods at the expense of the more politically important Italian wards, content to see the suburban flight of Irish Democratic voters continue.

  Others accused Cianci of using his power to punish his enemies and reward his friends, something that all politicians do, but which his critics said he carried to extremes. His tax assessor resigned after a shouting match with Cianci in which he complained of political pressure over assessments. Cianci fired his building inspector, Lloyd Griffin, after Griffin alleged political interference in code enforcement. Griffin, the mercurial black South Providence leader whose mail-ballot work had helped Cianci win in 1974, also accused the mayor of telling the police to follow his building inspectors. Cianci responded that the police had been asked to check on suspected malingerers, after a tip about a Public Works truck parked outside a saloon. Larry McGarry, a close Griffin ally, warned that the firing could hurt Cianci politically but also criticized Griffin for being disloyal.

  McGarry watched Cianci’s maneuvering with a wary bemusement. One day in 1975 mayoral aide James Diamond appeared in McGarry’s law office, in Lincoln, where Mr. Democrat had been spending his days since the 1974 campaign. The mayor had dispatched Diamond on a political mission—in essence to find out who was for Cianci and who was against him.

  A native Texan, Diamond had come to Providence to study at Brown and wound up working as a grant writer for Attorney General Richard Israel when Cianci was a young prosecutor. Diamond hadn’t known Cianci well or been terribly impressed—he thought he was lazy and self-centered. But after Cianci became mayor, Diamond found himself working at City Hall, writing grant proposals for federal funds. Before long, Diamond, who had computer skills, received a new assignment. Cianci summoned him to the mayor’s office and told him to start building a computerized database of every citizen in Providence. The mayor wanted everyone ranked on a scale of 1 to 5 in terms of their loyalty to Buddy Cianci. According to Diamond, Cianci said that the list would be used “to reward his supporters and punish his enemies.” Diamond was told to start with the prominent political people and to consult Larry McGarry, who knew all the players.

  The assignment troubled Diamond, raising uncomfortable parallels with the recently fallen President Nixon and his enemies list. Diamond was especially sensitive because he had supported Nixon and felt bad about it in the wake of Watergate. (When he still supported Nixon, Diamond had angered local anti-Nixon Republicans by hiring a helicopter to photograph a “Dump Nixon” rally at the Rhode Island State House; he later said that he wanted to record the size of the crowd in case the president’s enemies exaggerated it.) A devout Christian who had studied Hitler and occupied Europe at Brown, Diamond talked it over with another Cianci aide, Anthony Agostinelli, and decided not to “collaborate.” (Agostinelli confirmed Diamond’s recollection.)

  Diamond went to see McGarry, driving up Smithfield Avenue past the St. Francis Cemetery to his basement office, and found an ally in his one-man resistance movement. Over a period of three or four months, the gangly, bearded outsider to Providence politics and the wheelchair-bound old Irish ward boss spent hours together. Diamond found McGarry to be a devout, ethical man, and saw that his alliance with Cianci was an uneasy one. McGarry shared Diamond’s lack of enthusiasm for Cianci’s project, not wanting to transfer all of his political secrets to a potential enemy. Instead, McGarry regaled Diamond with old political war stories about his heyday in the Tenth Ward and at Public Works. Diamond scribbled down enough names to satisfy Cianci that he was making progress but never entered anything into the computer. Finally, a job opened up in the Parks Department and Diamond left City Hall. The list was forgotten. But the mayor, as Diamond would learn in the coming years, had other ways of keeping score.

  Governing a city as factionalized as Providence wasn’t easy—it required hard decisions and compromise. Vincent Vespia, now a state police lieutenant, saw his old friend’s ambition grow after he became mayor and his national stature increased. Cianci told him of his dream of someday being in the U.S. Senate. Vespia sat proudly in his living room and watched on television when Cianci addressed the 1976 Republican National Convention in Kansas City. Vespia got to meet visiti
ng dignitaries like President Ford and John Connally and joined Cianci in choice seats at the Civic Center to see Red Skelton and Frank Sinatra.

  The wiseguys always came out strong for Sinatra in Providence, where the mob’s presence remained strong. Providence was a city where Bobo Marrapese’s bar on Federal Hill could get a liquor license but the Brown Faculty Club, which Joe Doorley had hated, could not. In fact, shortly after Cianci became mayor, the two establishments appeared back-to-back on the agenda for a licensing-board hearing. Cianci, who was sympathetic to the faculty club, laughed as he told the club’s leaders the story one day over lunch. The club finally got its license.

  Three days after Cianci was sworn in as mayor, Sinatra’s old pal Raymond Patriarca was paroled from prison for his role in the murders of Rudy Marfeo and Anthony Melei. The speaker of the Rhode Island House had written the state parole board, attesting to Patriarca’s “good moral character.” Patriarca went back to Coin-O-Matic on Federal Hill, where wiseguys with no-show city jobs continued to hang out.

  Vespia understood that Cianci had inherited a culture that went back years, one that no one man, not even the mayor, could change overnight. He also realized that his friend faced different choices as mayor than he had as a prosecutor. He had to play the patronage game, and if that involved cutting deals with guys who knew guys who knew guys, well, that was politics, especially in Providence. Vespia felt that Cianci made some bad choices but that it wasn’t his place to say so. He was a cop, not a politician. Still, there was an old Italian saying: “Do good, and forget about it. Do bad, and worry about it.”

  Vespia was angry when he saw men like mobster Gerald Tillinghast on the city payroll. In the summer of 1975 a gang of thieves broke into the Bonded Vault Company in Providence, pried open 140 safe-deposit boxes, and carted away duffel bags crammed with three million dollars’ worth of cash, gold, and jewelry. There was so much treasure that they left a fortune on the floor. Much of the booty had been stashed there by criminals, but the robbery had been sanctioned by Patriarca, who received a portion as tribute. Several men were later arrested, including Tillinghast, who was suspended from his job at Public Works. The following summer, following his acquittal, Tillinghast attended Larry McGarry’s Democratic clambake and praised the mayor. “I have spoken to Cianci,” he said, “and I am happy that he has permitted me to return to the job.” Jim Diamond said that Dick Israel’s former finance chairman asked Cianci how he could allow underworld figures like Tillinghast on the payroll; the chairman later told Diamond that Cianci had explained that this was the way you made deals and got things done in politics.