by Mike Stanton
In 1980, after Buckles stood by the mayor in his battle with Tony Bucci and Clem Cesaro, he was promoted to highway superintendent, the number-two job at Public Works. Another trusted Cianci ally, Joseph DiSanto, took over at Public Works after Cianci finally succeeded in forcing out Cesaro.
As the supervisor of 180 city workers and the overseer of snowplowing and street-paving contracts, Buckles was in a position to sell a lot of Cianci fund-raiser tickets. He was a regular at the mayor’s cocktail parties and meetings of the tickets committee, his pink Caddy parked illegally outside City Hall.
One of Buckles’s employees had also made rats his sworn enemy—as part of his Mafia induction ceremony. Blackjack’s brother, William “Blackjack” DelSanto, also known as “Billy Black” to distinguish himself from his brother, was a capo regime in the Patriarca crime family. He was also a city “sidewalk inspector,” a job that left him plenty of time to hang out with other wiseguys on the sidewalk in front of Tony’s Colonial Market on Federal Hill. Early in 1979, the Rhode Island State Police tailed Billy Black and Raymond “Junior” Patriarca to the Boston headquarters of underboss Gennaro “Jerry” Angiulo. He had also been present for a mob induction ceremony in Boston a few years earlier, when Angiulo had asked the inductee, “If your brother became a rat, would you kill him?”
What exactly Billy Black did as a sidewalk inspector, Buckles couldn’t say, but he defended him as a good worker.
Buckles and Billy Black were also friendly with another notorious wiseguy, Bobo Marrapese, whom Buddy Cianci had once prosecuted for conspiracy to steal a camper, in the infamous Case of the Italian Wedding Soup. Bobo had come far in the decade since Cianci had sent him to prison. He ran a sizeable gambling and loan-sharking operation, and his rap sheet included arrests for threatening to kill someone, assault, possession of stolen goods, breaking and entering, larceny, and possession of a machine gun. He ran the Acorn Social Club, around the corner from Tony’s Colonial Market. Through Buckles, Bobo also received city snowplowing work and had other deals cooking at Public Works.
In the summer of 1981, with his political fortunes sagging, Cianci counted heavily on allies like Buckles when he was confronted with a messy garbage strike. Although nobody realized it at first, the Great Garbage Strike would have an impact on the mayor’s uncertain political fortunes.
UNDER COVER OF darkness on a warm summer night, a band of men slipped, commando-style, into the Public Works garages near the Providence waterfront and spirited away a dozen city garbage trucks.
They drove the trucks across town to an empty used-car lot, where a small army was gathering. About a dozen other trucks were already parked in the back of the fenced lot, hidden behind a blue school bus.
Inside the former showroom, about fifty-five men shuffled about nervously. A few minutes after 1 A.M., Buddy Cianci arrived. The mayor hurried inside. Someone closed the blinds. From the outside, the building appeared deserted in the half-light of a waning moon.
Cianci wore a short-sleeved blue shirt and no tie.
“We mean business and we’re not going to let anyone stop you from doing your job,” he barked. “You will be protected physically. We’re not going to stand for any abuse. One hundred policemen will be here shortly. They will be carrying shotguns and they will be riding shotgun.”
A few men laughed. There was a smattering of applause.
As if on cue, police cruisers suddenly filled the lot. Cianci urged the men outside, where they saw a squadron of Providence police officers forming in military ranks. Each officer carried a shotgun and wore a bandoleer of spare ammunition across his chest.
Cianci and city supervisors, one man wearing National Guard fatigues, exhorted the men to mount their garbage trucks. The sound and smell of diesel engines filled the night. Each truck carried a Teamsters driver, two garbage pickers, and a shotgun-toting policeman.
A supervisor shouted the command “Go, go, go,” and the first truck lurched from the parking lot. The others followed.
And so it went, as Buddy Cianci deployed his troops through the sleeping streets of Providence to collect the garbage. A spring of labor discontent had boiled over into a bitter summer strike and reduced Providence to this—cops riding shotgun on garbage trucks.
When the garbagemen walked off the job, leaving uncollected trash to bake in ninety-five-degree heat, Cianci took a bold stand. He fired the workers and hired a private company to collect the trash, which he said would save the city money. Facing down the union’s leader, Cianci declared: “This is Waterloo. Either for him or for me, but it’s Waterloo. Hopefully, for him.”
To guard against union violence and catch the protestors off guard, he staged his daring midnight ride of the garbage trucks, using Jake Kaplan’s car lot. As the trucks rumbled through the city that night collecting the trash, Cianci rode around in a car getting updates from the front.
“We caught them with their pants down,” gloated one Public Works supervisor.
Tommy Ricci, one of the commandos who had sneaked into the Public Works garage and taken the garbage trucks, was part of a crew that rode around the city that night watching for ambushes and communicating with radios. There had been reports that the union might use tractor-trailer trucks to block key intersections and ram the garbage trucks, but the threat never materialized. On Branch Avenue, a union man rammed his green pickup truck into a garbage truck. Ricci and his men pushed the pickup out of the way and called in a rescue for the injured man.
In the days that followed, strikers outside City Hall showered Cianci with curses and cries of “Maggot” as police bodyguards escorted him through a gauntlet outside his private entrance. The mayor, who had been sworn in for his second term protected by a bulletproof shield and rooftop snipers because of death threats, had round-the-clock police guards at his house.
The garbage strike was a drama that played out on multiple levels. On the surface, it was a classic standoff between the mayor and the powerful Laborers’ Union over the financial survival of Providence and its public employees. Behind the scenes, it was a tale rife with politics and corruption.
Privately, Cianci’s advisers fiercely debated how strongly the mayor should oppose the union, according to former aide Bruce Melucci. Some warned against it, pointing out that the mayor had no strong grassroots Republican organization in Providence and therefore relied heavily on public employees. He shouldn’t antagonize his power base, they argued. But others saw an opportunity for Cianci to win back taxpayers by taking a strong stand against the union and showing financial responsibility. He needed a bold gesture to revive his political career.
As the strike wore on, and the mayor’s private polling showed him scoring points with the voters, Cianci was in no hurry to settle. Relaxing in his air-conditioned office one afternoon, nursing a Scotch, he said, “I have nowhere to go this summer.” Another day, he took a leisurely horseback ride through Roger Williams Park.
Cianci’s inner circle also profited from the strike.
His big boosters, the Capuanos, received the multimillion-dollar contract to take over garbage collection—a deal that Ronnie Glantz said was greased with a two-hundred-thousand-dollar kickback to Cianci.
With a private company picking up the trash, the city had no use for twenty-eight garbage trucks. Two years earlier, the city had bought new garbage trucks in a deal that involved kickbacks to Ronnie Glantz and Tony Bucci. So it was only fitting that the disposal of city trucks would also involve bribes. This time Jake Kaplan stepped in and brokered a deal to sell the trucks to Ralph’s Truck World in New Hampshire—a deal that a federal indictment would later charge involved a fifteen-thousand-dollar kickback. Buckles Melise would later testify that during the strike, the buyer gave the fifteen thousand to Kaplan, who passed on ten thousand in cash to Buckles. According to Buckles, he brought the ten thousand to Joe DiSanto, who gave him half.
After sixteen days, the great garbage strike ended in victory for Cianci. Although the union won som
e concessions, the city’s garbage collection remained with the Capuanos—at a substantial savings to the taxpayers, the mayor proclaimed.
“It’s a crossroads for this city,” the mayor declared. “All that mob can do what they want, but now they know one thing: they don’t run this city, and they never will.”
Cianci’s popularity soared. The shotgun-toting cops had captured the public’s imagination. The people didn’t know that the shotguns were never loaded. It had all been a show, recalled one aide.
Several months later, Cianci was invited to speak to a conservative antilabor group in London about how he had broken the garbage strike.
“He talked about how he had sent Buckles down to the line to beat the shit out of guys,” said Malcolm Farmer III, then a Republican councilman from the East Side. “He said how Buckles sledgehammered one guy and stuck his thumb in another guy’s eye.”
As Cianci told the story, upon his return to Providence, he roared with laughter. Using Buckles, he joked, was “great public policy.”
EARLY IN 1982, Cianci gathered his closest advisers for a daylong strategy session about his political future.
One of his aides, Bruce Melucci, had written a long memo arguing that Cianci would have to abandon the Republican party to be reelected in November. Cianci was no longer strong enough to capture 50 percent of the vote in a one-on-one contest against a Democrat, Melucci concluded—the best he could hope for was 42 percent. Cianci also faced a strong challenge in the Republican party from East Side patrician Frederick Lippitt.
But there were drawbacks to leaving the Republican party. Cianci had nurtured strong Washington ties with the GOP, and still harbored national aspirations. And Cianci relished traveling in Republican circles. Henry Kissinger had been to his home. The previous year, Cianci had been seated next to Henry Cabot Lodge, the former U.S. senator who had been dislodged by John F. Kennedy, at a Massachusetts GOP luncheon in Boston. The blue-blooded Cabots and Lodges had dominated the state for generations; the Cabots spoke only to the Lodges, an old saying went, and the Lodges spoke only to God.
Cianci and Lodge were eating chowder when Lodge reached the bottom of the bowl, then picked it up and slurped the remaining broth.
“You do that just like an Italian,” said Cianci.
“I am,” replied Lodge.
Later, a perplexed Cianci asked Melucci what Lodge had meant by that. Melucci explained that Lodge was descended from an Italian navigator named Cabato, who had sailed from England with early Massachusetts Bay colonists.
Cianci didn’t want to leave the Republican party. He believed that there was a place for both the Ciancis and the Lodges. So in the spring of 1982, he tried to keep Lippitt from entering the mayor’s race. Privately, Cianci threatened to seek revenge by running as an Independent and savaging the GOP’s entire statewide ticket. The party’s elder statesman, Senator John Chafee, sent word back that if Cianci did that, his chances of obtaining a federal job if he lost would be zero.
Lippitt persisted in running. Cianci had good ideas, Lippitt said, but he was more interested in using the mayor’s office as a stepping-stone than in the administrative details of running a city.
The numbers in a Republican primary were stacked against Cianci. There were only seventeen hundred registered Republican voters in Providence (compared with twenty-four thousand Democrats), and many of them were East Siders who had broken with the mayor. So Cianci tried to change the numbers. He and his lieutenants pressured city workers to sign forms disaffiliating themselves from the Democratic party so they could vote in the Republican primary.
Several workers called The Providence Journal to complain; some said that their jobs had been threatened if they didn’t sign. Joseph DiSanto, who was heavily involved in the effort, denied any pressure; in fact, he said, many Democratic employees hadn’t realized they could vote Republican and had been “happy to get the advice.”
Still, convincing lifelong Democrats to vote Republican was slow going. When even Buckles Melise refused to sign, Melucci reported back to Cianci that the effort was hopeless.
In June Cianci made the break, announcing that he would run as an Independent. He said that he still regarded himself as a Republican but that he wanted to avoid a divisive primary against Lippitt. Democrat Frank Darigan, making his third run for mayor, was so frustrated by the maneuver that he went to Lippitt and tried to talk him out of running. “Fred, you’re killing me,” Darigan recalled telling Lippitt. “If you want to make changes, you’re handing him the city by running. I can’t beat him in a three-way race. You’re handing the city back to this guy.” But Lippitt, convinced he could win, stayed in the race.
That summer, the mayor launched the city’s most ambitious public-works program in years, a $2.9 million blitz to repave streets and repair sidewalks. By election day, as Cianci campaigned with the slogan “Providence, you’re looking good,” the city had repaved one thousand streets and repaired two thousand sidewalks. The work was concentrated in neighborhoods that Cianci considered politically crucial—Mount Pleasant, Federal Hill, the North End, and the East Side. To pay for the crash program, Cianci “borrowed” federal funds that had been set aside for downtown and urban renewal, and for fixing substandard housing. When his political opponents accused Cianci of buying votes, his aides said with a straight face that there was nothing political about the program—the city was merely addressing a backlog of complaints about damaged sidewalks dating back to 1964.
“I won’t say it’s never been done. I did read Boss,” quipped one Cianci official, referring to Mike Royko’s book about Chicago mayor Richard Daley. “But you couldn’t buy my vote by paving my sidewalk, even if I had one.”
The program also offered Cianci’s people new opportunities for graft.
Authorities would later investigate several hundred thousand dollars in overcharges by contractor Santi Campanella. A big Cianci booster, Campanella owned a yacht in Florida that the mayor would stay on. Years earlier, he had been partners with Raymond Patriarca and Frank Sinatra in the Berkshire Downs racetrack.
Meanwhile, Buckles Melise steered seven thousand tons of city asphalt, worth $150,000, to Bobo Marrapese’s paving company, where it was used for private driveways, including that of a Mafia porn king. Buckles would send an emissary to Coventry Sand and Gravel. The man would flash his belt buckle, the signal that Buckles had sent him, then cart off a truckload of asphalt that would be billed to the city. Later, Buckles would meet Bobo at the Acorn Social Club to close the deal and receive his commission. This was the same bar where Bobo had killed mobster Dickie Callei in 1975, shooting him five times in the back, then stabbing the corpse for good measure.
One night in August 1982, at the height of the asphalt scheme and Cianci’s reelection campaign, Bobo was drag-racing another mobster down Westminster Street when a Volkswagen cut him off. In the altercation that followed, the offending VW driver, a twenty-year-old man, was beaten to death with a baseball bat. (Charged with the murder a year later, Bobo initially agreed to plead guilty, then changed his mind, went to trial, and was acquitted.)
Buckles defended his city dealings with Bobo, explaining that his friendship with “the Marrapese family” dated back to their childhood on Federal Hill. “Mr. Marrapese always did his work and he did a good job,” said Buckles. “What bothers me in the story, reading it, is using the word organized crime. I don’t ever see anybody belonging to organized crime that worked for the City of Providence.”
Other stories circulated within law enforcement about sidewalk scams. The state police looked into one involving Billy Black DelSanto, the Patriarca capo, in which city sidewalk inspectors went around Providence with sledgehammers, smashing sidewalks to create more work for private contractors.
Three days before the election, a Providence Journal editorial railed against Cianci’s blatant attempt to hoodwink the voters.
Cianci also worked hard to hold on to the East Side. Having lost the WASP vote, he went after
the area’s large Jewish vote. Bruce Melucci, who had become Cianci’s campaign manager on the strength of his early 1982 strategy memo, remembered the mayor’s calling him in the middle of the night and asking how many Jewish voters there were in Providence. The mayor campaigned at synagogues and Jewish events, winning over voters, said Melucci, with his “brains and chutzpah.”
One Saturday night Melucci was at home reading, enjoying a rare night off from the campaign, when his phone rang.
“Melucci,” said the mayor, “do you want to go to the Philharmonic?”
“I didn’t know you liked classical music,” said Melucci.
“I don’t.”
“Then why are you going?” asked Melucci.
“I wanna be seen by the Jews,” Cianci replied.
So off they went to the Philharmonic. During the concert, Melucci had to keep nudging Cianci, who was nodding off. Then, at intermission, Cianci sprang to life and worked the crowd in the lobby. Afterward, the mayor took the head of the United Jewish Appeal and his wife in his limousine to Leo’s, a bar frequented by artists and journalists, where they stayed into the wee hours, drinking, eating burgers, and swapping stories.
The mayor also showed his resilience by winning labor’s endorsement, one year after the bitter garbage strike. Since then, he had signed new labor contracts providing millions of dollars in raises to municipal workers, teachers, firefighters, and police.
The accommodation with the unions was not surprising. Despite his public posturing, Cianci privately acknowledged the power of the unions, particularly Laborers’ boss Arthur E. Coia, a rough-hewn leader from the North End. Coia ran a mobbed-up union and answered personally to his friend Raymond Patriarca. Glantz recalled being in the mayor’s office when Coia convinced Cianci to raise the city’s contribution to the union’s legal-defense fund, something that Cianci had criticized his predecessor, Joe Doorley, for doing. Glantz also said that Coia offered Cianci a job with the union after he left the mayor’s office, just as the Laborers had hired Doorley after Cianci beat him.
