by Mike Stanton
Nothing moved in the union without Coia’s okay. One source recalled being at Cianci’s house one night at about 2 A.M. when the mayor was drinking with Coia and another union official. An early-winter snowstorm had struck Providence, and Cianci wanted the sanding trucks sent out. But Coia was refusing to allow the drivers to go until a contract matter was settled. At one point, Coia shouted at Cianci, “Listen to me, you cocksucker, I’ll blow up your house.” Cianci turned to his police bodyguard, who had just walked in with drinks for them, and replied, “You said that in front of a cop. He could arrest you.” Coia looked at the officer and shot back, “He’s my cousin. He’s not going to arrest me.” Before the night was out, the matter was resolved and the sanders went out.
Going into election day in 1982, Cianci trailed narrowly in the polls, but the race was too close to call. When the polls closed on election night, the mayor was convinced that he had lost. As upbeat as he was publicly, Cianci could be equally pessimistic in private. An aide, Paul Campbell, recalled being alone with him in the mayor’s office that night. Cianci sat grimly at his desk, fidgeting with his pen, lamenting his defeat.
Later, Cianci was quiet as he watched the first returns come in. Two of the three Providence television stations predicted a Darigan victory. Then the mayor, who was politically astute counting votes, picked up on some of the numbers trickling in and realized he had a shot.
He carried the East Side, winding up with more Jewish votes, proportionally, than Italian votes. By the end of the night, Cianci led Darigan by 798 votes. Lippitt, who had faded down the stretch, was a distant third.
When Cianci realized that the race would come down to the nearly six thousand outstanding mail ballots, he was elated—because he had in his corner the maestro of mail ballots, Lloyd “Satchel” Griffin. His scheme to collect mail ballots by promising senior citizens a free bus trip to Atlantic City in 1974 had helped lift Cianci to victory over Joe Doorley. In 1978, he had delivered again.
At the start of the 1982 race, Griffin had professed neutrality. But then, eleven days before the election, state police troopers armed with shotguns raided Griffin’s campaign headquarters in search of stolen mail ballots. They arrested and strip-searched a female Griffin volunteer. Two Darigan volunteers had complained that the woman had snatched two mail ballots from them in South Providence and threatened to have their windshields smashed if they persisted in trying to collect mail ballots on Lloyd Griffin’s turf.
Three days later an angry Griffin declared his support of Cianci. “They’ve given me a little push,” he declared.
Griffin brought in more than eight hundred mail ballots, assuring Cianci of victory. In the final tally, Cianci beat Darigan by 1,074 votes. Melucci’s memo had proved prophetic—Cianci won with 42 percent of the vote.
It was a stunning political comeback. Triumphant at his inaugural address on January 3, 1983, Cianci proclaimed, “Like the characters in Homer’s Odyssey, my supporters and I have engaged in an eight-year journey beset by challenges and tribulations.”
“Buddy Cianci,” observed a political foe, “is at his best when he is in trouble and at his worst when he is at the top.”
As he began his third term, Buddy was back on top.
CHAPTER SIX
Nightmare on Power Street
60 Minutes was just coming on in Raymond DeLeo’s house in Bristol when he received a strange phone call from Buddy Cianci.
DeLeo, a wealthy contractor, had known Cianci for years, through Republican politics. But he didn’t consider him a close friend. So he was perplexed when Cianci asked him to come to his house in Providence that Sunday night in March 1983. There was something odd about Cianci’s voice. DeLeo asked what was going on.
“You’ve been fucking around with my wife,” said Cianci.
In Providence, the mayor sat brooding by the fireplace in his rented carriage house on the corner of Power and Benefit Streets. His marriage had essentially been over for the last year or so, a casualty of too many late nights on the political circuit and his own infidelities. He and Sheila had recently gone to court to make it official.
Following his reelection in 1982, Cianci had moved into the rambling brick house at 33 Power Street, diagonally across from the imposing John Brown mansion. The carriage house had been built as a horse stable in 1902 by Providence utility baron Marsden Perry, known as “the man who owned Rhode Island.”
The neighborhood fit Cianci’s mood that night. H. P. Lovecraft, like Cianci a nocturnal creature, had spent most of his life wandering the ancient streets of College Hill, drawing inspiration for such tales of the macabre as The Case of Charles Dexter Ward and The Shunned House. Years earlier, a mournful Edgar Allan Poe had become smitten with a Benefit Street poetess, Sarah Helen Whitman, when he spied her picking roses in the moonlight. He courted her at the Providence Athenaeum, where he penned his famous poem “To Helen,” but she later broke off their engagement because of his excessive drinking.
It was about 8:30 P.M. Deleo didn’t realize that a modern Providence gothic tale was about to unfold as he pulled his Oldsmobile into the curving brick drive.
When DeLeo first heard Cianci’s accusation on the phone, he thought that maybe the mayor was kidding. He agreed to come to Providence that night after Cianci told him that a mutual friend, former attorney general Herbert DeSimone, would also be there.
DeLeo walked up to the massive wooden front door and rang the bell. A uniformed Providence patrolman, James K. Hassett, answered. DeLeo stepped inside, into a spacious living room with a vaulted ceiling and tall, cathedral-like windows. The room had once served as a basketball court for the Fox Point Boys Club.
Cianci was on the phone, yelling at Sheila, who was in Florida. When he saw DeLeo, he shouted at the cop, “Frisk him!”
Hassett, who was Cianci’s driver, turned DeLeo around, pushed him up against the door, spread-eagled with his palms against the wood, and patted him down. DeLeo had the impression that Hassett was checking to see if he was wearing a body wire.
“What the hell is this?” shouted a stunned DeLeo. “I thought I was coming to a meeting. Let me out of here.”
Then, not saying a word, Hassett grabbed DeLeo’s arm and directed him to a chair near the fireplace. Joseph DiSanto, a Cianci confidant and the director of Public Works, was sitting around the fireplace with William McGair, a former probate judge and Cianci’s divorce lawyer. There were some drinks on the coffee table.
Cianci, who had been bellowing into the telephone, hung up and came into the room in shirtsleeves. He stood next to DeLeo’s chair.
“You’ve been screwing around with my wife,” he said. Then he slapped DeLeo in the head.
“Go ahead, strike me back,” said Cianci. “You strike me back, you’re gonna get a bullet in your head.”
Out of the corner of his eye, DeLeo noticed Officer Hassett, who had positioned himself on the other side of his chair, move his hand to the holster on his hip.
Cianci kept smacking DeLeo about the head and daring him to hit back. He said that the men in the room would all swear that DeLeo had thrown the first punch. Like a Greek chorus, the men all agreed. DeLeo looked at Cianci in disbelief.
“I saw a crazed man,” he later recalled. “I saw a lunatic.”
RAYMOND DELEO WAS a self-made man.
A lifelong resident of Bristol, he lived with his wife on High Street, in an impressive house overlooking Narragansett Bay and decorated with Persian rugs and antique furniture.
DeLeo’s parents had died young, leaving his older sister to raise him. In 1954 Hurricane Carol roared up the bay and devastated the historic seaport. The construction business that DeLeo had started on a shoestring received a lift from the rebuilding effort. As his business prospered, DeLeo also found time for politics. In the 1960s he was a leader of Nelson Rockefeller’s presidential campaign organization in New England. He also headed the Bristol Republican Town Committee and met statewide politicians, including Herbert DeSimone.
DeSimone introduced DeLeo to his young protégé, Buddy Cianci. Every Fourth of July DeLeo threw a big party at his house, which was on the route of the famous Bristol parade. Cianci and other Republicans and friends would attend.
Before Cianci became mayor, DeLeo had consulted with him about representing him in a possible libel suit against the Bristol Phoenix. The newspaper had run an editorial cartoon depicting DeLeo sitting on the stone wall outside his house, pulling puppet strings with local GOP candidates attached like marionettes. DeLeo was angry because the cartoon resembled the cover drawing from Mario Puzo’s novel about the Mafia The Godfather. But he never sued.
After Cianci became mayor, he discovered that DeLeo owned a motel in Hollywood Beach, Florida. He started calling DeLeo, asking if his family could go down and spend the week at the Mariner for free. DeLeo obliged.
The visits became regular. Sometimes Cianci would send his wife and daughter, Nicole, down alone. On other occasions, he would accompany them but stay on a friend’s boat in nearby Fort Lauderdale. By the late 1970s, Sheila Cianci was going to Florida more often, and staying longer. DeLeo’s sister, who ran the motel, began to resent her demands and the Ciancis’ freeloading.
It was apparent that the Ciancis’ marriage was in trouble. Sheila would complain to DeLeo that the mayor treated her badly and carried on with other women. According to DeLeo’s later grand-jury testimony, Sheila told him “how she was abused by him to the point of attempting to strangle her, at one point.” Years later DeLeo said that Cianci had come home drunk one night and threatened to throw his wife over the second-floor stair railing. She talked about getting a divorce but said that she was afraid of Buddy. She said that he had threatened her if she ever tried to take their daughter away.
Around the mayor’s office it was no secret that Cianci’s marriage was on the rocks. When Sheila was having a dinner or a birthday party for their daughter, she would call the mayor’s office and beg the secretaries to make sure that Cianci came home on time. But he seldom did. His police drivers would come by the house on Blackstone Boulevard in the morning and listen as he and Sheila argued openly, yelling and cursing.
As things grew worse, Cianci stayed away more. He spent his nights going from one event to another, then out for a drink, then, after the bars closed, to a late-night coffee shop. One aide said that he hated going into Cianci’s house, because of the tension and icy silences between the mayor and his wife.
“I was wrong in this marriage in many ways, many, many ways,” he would later acknowledge to a grand jury, “and I’ve put my personal, political career, in many ways, apart from my family.”
Asked in the grand jury if he had been involved with other women, he replied, “I’m not going to lie to you. Of course I was.” Cianci also accused his wife of being unfaithful with several men, according to DeLeo.
Cianci always had a girlfriend, according to one of his former police drivers, who remembered dropping him off at the Marriott on various occasions or around the corner from the apartment of one particular woman who lived off Hope Street. An hour or two later, Cianci would call the driver to pick him up. Late one night during Cianci’s first term, Ronnie Glantz said that he was in the car when the mayor had his police driver drop him at a woman’s apartment on Benefit Street. The mayor went inside. Glantz said that he and the driver were sitting in the car nearby when they saw Doane Hulick, a reporter who covered City Hall for the Journal, go into the same building. Hulick, it turned out, also lived there; he had just missed bumping into the mayor. The former driver said that Cianci kept an unmarked city car with untraceable police plates in his garage for when he wanted to slip away on his own.
When Cianci finally did come home, Sheila told DeLeo, she would go through his pockets after he fell asleep and find room keys from different Providence hotels. She also reported finding packets of cash, and took some because Cianci was tight with his money.
A man who worked on Cianci’s 1980 campaign for governor remembered going into the mayor’s office one day and noticing a woman’s foot under Cianci’s desk. That night, when the man saw Cianci at Alarie’s, he asked him about his visitor. The mayor laughed and replied, “I call those ‘job applicants.’ ”
Finally, Sheila Cianci had had enough. She told Buddy that she wanted a divorce. The mayor convinced her to wait until after the 1982 election. In return, he agreed to pay her five hundred thousand dollars in their divorce settlement. About a year before the 1982 election, Sheila and Buddy signed a separation agreement. It called for Sheila to make a certain number of public appearances a month with Buddy. And the agreement stated that they would live separate and apart and date other people, as if they were not married.
Early in 1983, after Cianci was sworn in for a third term, Sheila and Buddy Cianci formally filed for divorce. On Tuesday, March 15, the Ciancis received a preliminary divorce decree. That Friday night, at a political fund-raiser, according to DeLeo, Cianci picked up on some gossip between Joe DiSanto’s wife and another woman that Sheila, who had been going to Ray DeLeo’s motel in Florida, was having an affair with him.
Cianci was furious. His pride was wounded. He stewed over the five-hundred-thousand-dollar settlement. Over the weekend, he plotted his next move. On Sunday night he summoned DeLeo to Power Street.
AFTER HIS ROUGH greeting of DeLeo, Cianci got straight down to business.
He repeated his accusation that DeLeo had been fooling around with Sheila. He had Joe DiSanto relate what DiSanto’s wife had heard at the mayor’s fund-raiser Friday night.
Then Cianci turned to Bill McGair, his divorce lawyer, whom everyone called “Judge McGair” because of his former seat on the probate court. Cianci announced that the judge had some papers for DeLeo to sign—a confession that he had been sleeping with Sheila and an agreement that DeLeo would pay Cianci five hundred thousand dollars.
If DeLeo didn’t sign, Cianci warned, “You’re not gonna leave here tonight and you’re gonna end up with a bullet in your head.”
DeLeo, who was married, told Cianci that he had nothing to confess to, that he hadn’t had an affair with Sheila.
Cianci repeated his threat, punctuating his words with slaps and punches. He spoke quickly, words tumbling over one another. He vowed to ruin DeLeo’s business. He said that DeLeo would be found dead in the river. Cianci said that he had 255 policemen behind him and that the streets of Providence would not be safe for DeLeo. Cianci told DeLeo that he would always be looking over his shoulder and that he’d be picked up for some unsolved crime.
The mayor’s eyes were bloodshot. Mucus ran from his left nostril, but Cianci was oblivious. DeLeo would later tell the state police, “I don’t know whether he was just on some drug or something.”
For the next two hours, Cianci stalked around his living room, verbally abusing and threatening DeLeo. He would be talking one moment, then lunge at DeLeo and strike him with his fist, or yank his hair, or kick him.
The police officer and the other men in the room said nothing. Based on their silence and Cianci’s earlier threats, DeLeo dared not fight back or attempt to leave. He would later describe the feeling as if he were the mayor’s prisoner.
Cianci’s rage mounted. He threw liquor on DeLeo. He spit on him. He took his lit cigarette and tried to snuff it out in DeLeo’s left eye. DeLeo flinched, and the glowing embers singed the corner of his eye. Ashes flaked into his eye, irritating it.
Cianci grabbed a fireplace log and raised it over DeLeo’s head like a club. Joe DiSanto rushed over, and helped DeLeo fend off the blow.
As the night wore on, McGair recalled, Cianci spent more time going into the kitchen. McGair called Herbert DeSimone and urged him to come over. McGair hoped that DeSimone’s “commanding presence could end the thing.”
Six hundred miles away, in Florida, Sheila had also been frantically trying to reach DeSimone. She had been on the phone with Cianci when DeLeo arrived at Power Street. She had heard the doorbell ring, heard Cianci say, �
��Here he is now, Sheila,” then heard the mayor shout at Patrolman Hassett to let DeLeo in and put him up against the wall and pat him down for a tape recorder or a gun. She had also heard DeLeo exclaim, “What is going on here?” followed by her ex-husband vowing, “Now I am going to beat the shit out of him, Sheila, I am going to kill this motherfucker.” Terrified, Sheila had tried unsuccessfully to reach Vinny Vespia, then had called DeSimone and left an urgent message asking him to call her when he returned from the football game in Boston.
DeSimone arrived at about ten-thirty. Taking in the scene before him, from Cianci’s crazed look to DeLeo’s beat-up condition, he asked in a stunned voice, “What’s happening here?”
Cianci, in an emotional voice, told DeSimone the DeLeo had been having an affair with Sheila. They walked toward DeLeo, as if to strike him again. But the taller and heavier DeSimone, who had been a star football lineman at Brown University in the 1950s, wrapped Cianci in a bear hug and led him into the kitchen. DiSanto motioned for DeLeo to leave quickly. But DeLeo didn’t dare, because the policeman was standing between him and the door.
From time to time, Cianci would return to the living room and attack DeLeo. One time he picked up a heavy glass ashtray and flung it at DeLeo, who reached out and caught it.
Later, when Cianci was back in the kitchen, a woman knocked on the door to complain that DeLeo’s car was blocking her driveway. The policeman took DeLeo’s keys and went outside to move it. Cianci, hearing the noise, rushed out of the kitchen, bellowing, “You’re not letting him get away, are you?”
When Officer Hassett came back inside, Cianci grabbed DeLeo’s car keys.
About forty-five minutes after DeSimone arrived, at about eleven-fifteen, Hassett brought DeLeo into the kitchen, where Cianci sat at a table flanked by DeSimone and McGair. The mayor ordered him to stand at attention, his back to the range, then reviewed his demands.
