The Prince of Providence

by Mike Stanton

  DeLeo was to get Cianci a certified check for five hundred thousand dollars by Friday, or he’d be dead—“D-E-D,” Cianci spelled it. “Make sure you understand that, DeLeo.”

  “Yes, I understand,” DeLeo answered.

  Cianci insisted that DeLeo repeat it. DeLeo was feeling dizzy and said that he couldn’t but that he understood.

  DeSimone, in his later grand-jury testimony, recalled Cianci’s threatening to ruin DeLeo’s business and screaming and crying and acting irrationally. But he said he was sure he didn’t hear the mayor tell DeLeo that he would be “dead” if he didn’t come up with the five hundred thousand.

  McGair recalled Cianci’s saying “D-E-D,” but felt it was a reference to DeLeo’s standing in the community, not to the “mortality aspect.”

  “C’mon, Buddy,” DeSimone implored. “Let him go, let him go. Let’s go and have some coffee. You need some coffee.”

  With that, Cianci finally allowed DeLeo to leave Power Street. It had been three hours since an unsuspecting DeLeo had walked through the mayor’s door. Joe DiSanto suggested that he drive DeLeo home, since his clothes reeked of the alcohol that the mayor had thrown on him.

  Back home in Bristol, DeLeo drove the short distance from his house to his office to collect his thoughts and clean himself up. It was past 2 A.M., and he was sitting at his desk, when the phone rang. It was Cianci. He sounded light-headed, almost giddy.

  “Do you understand what happened, DeLeo? You know what I want? Get the five hundred thousand, or you’re gonna be dead.”

  DeLeo hung up.

  Back on Power Street, the mayor was in rough shape as the night wore on and he grasped the potential consequences of what he had done. He called his chief of police, Anthony Mancuso, who dispatched Lieutenant Richard Tamburini to Power Street to “keep the peace,” fearing that Cianci might go after DeLeo again. It was nearly midnight when Tamburini arrived to find McGair and Lloyd Griffin, the flamboyant South Side councilman and one of the mayor’s political supporters. McGair, who had taken Cianci out for coffee, left shortly thereafter. Tamburini and Griffin spent the night in the living room, dozing in armchairs and chatting. Periodically, a distraught and agitated Cianci would come downstairs in his robe, without his toupee, to get a drink or use the phone.

  During that long night, Cianci called DeLeo’s son and nephew demanding an affidavit attesting to Sheila’s alleged infidelity. He called Sheila back and said that all of her friends were telling him everything and that DeLeo had broken down and cried and admitted everything. Cianci told her that DeLeo would pay for their divorce—that he would come up with five hundred thousand dollars by the end of the week or he would be dead: “D-E-D.” Cianci also called Vespia, who had been his best man, and told him what had happened. Vespia, who in the Ciancis’ divorce case had testified to their irreconcilable differences, was incredulous, especially when Cianci said that he had used a policeman to bring DeLeo into the house. “You’re in big trouble,” warned Vespia.

  In Cianci’s living room—the scene of the crime—Tamburini and Griffin agreed.

  “The mayor’s in a tight spot,” said Griffin. “But he’s gotten out of other tight spots before.”

  Early the next morning, a few aides arrived and urged him to pull himself together. Cianci, who had spent a sleepless night, was scheduled to make a television appearance at 9 A.M. At 8:45, he bounded down the stairs looking fresh and crisp in a suit and tie, clapping his hands, ready to go. Griffin looked at him approvingly and said, “Showtime!”

  TWO DAYS LATER, on Tuesday morning, Lenore Siegel Steinberg was at home in West Palm Beach, Florida, packing for a trip to Providence later that day, when her phone rang. It was Buddy Cianci.

  Steinberg, a former Barrrington socialite, was a friend of Sheila Cianci’s. A former Broadway soprano, she had given up the stage to marry a wealthy Central Falls lace manufacturer. They had lived in an elegant house on fashionable Rumstick Road in Barrington, where she cut a flamboyant figure in her floor-length furs, large hats, and long gowns, always beige or white. She dismissed the other women in upscale Barrington as “Stepford wives,” devoid of imagination and into tennis and sailing. Then her husband died in 1978, and she married a millionaire philanthropist and moved to West Palm Beach.

  Steinberg listened as the mayor politely told her that Sheila and Ray DeLeo had been carrying on an affair for four years. Steinberg was surprised. She told Cianci that she didn’t know anything about it.

  “You’re going to deny it?” snapped Cianci.

  “Buddy, I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she said.

  “Well, you know, I’m in the midst of a divorce and giving my wife a lot of money, but after hearing this, I’ll get him,” said Cianci, before hanging up.

  That evening Steinberg arrived in Providence. When she walked into the lobby of the Biltmore Hotel, Cianci was waiting for her with a uniformed Providence police officer wearing high black boots.

  “I came to welcome you,” Cianci told her.

  Steinberg protested that she had to check in. Cianci shouted over her shoulder to the man behind the reception desk, “Check Mrs. Steinberg in.”

  The night was cold and the lobby empty, save for the policeman. Afraid to be alone with the mayor, Steinberg did not take her luggage to her room. Instead, she let him steer her up to L’Apogee, the Biltmore’s elegant rooftop restaurant, which offered panoramic views of Providence.

  Steinberg, who was famished, ordered dinner. The policeman stood nearby, until Cianci dismissed him. As Steinberg started to eat, she said, Cianci started raving like “a madman.” He threatened to take her to court and send her to jail if she lied about Sheila and Ray DeLeo.

  Cianci proceeded to tell her about what he had done to DeLeo at his house two nights earlier. He embellished the story, saying that he had had DeLeo tied to a chair and then beaten him “to a pulp.” He boasted that he had put a loaded gun to DeLeo’s head and threatened to pull the trigger. “I almost killed him, but it was worth it knowing that he had had an affair with my wife,” Cianci told her.

  Steinberg had lost her appetite. Cianci seemed to take a sadistic glee in describing the beating. He looked as pale as a ghost, the worst she’d ever seen him.

  “Buddy, you’re kidding me.”

  “I never kid,” he replied. He told her that he would do terrible things to her, too, if she didn’t “come up with the truth.” He brought up the fact that Steinberg’s previous husband had committed suicide at their house in Barrington. He said that he would start an investigation to prove that she and her husband had had a “love pact,” that they had both agreed to shoot themselves, but she had backed out and killed him instead. Cianci also vowed to tell her current husband and wreck her marriage.

  “I’m going to get back at you,” said Cianci, “because you have a very big ego and you think you’re very special and now that you have a fabulous husband, you’re even worse.”

  It was past eleven when a horrified Steinberg finally got away from the mayor. In her room at the Biltmore, in Buddy Cianci’s Providence, she was terrified and felt that she needed police protection. She called Vincent Vespia, the South Kingstown police chief and former state police detective who had been Cianci’s best man. Vespia offered to have a police officer take her to the airport when she was finished with her business in Providence in a few days.

  In the meantime, Steinberg was afraid to let the waiter in for room service. She was scared to take a taxi.

  “I felt that Buddy would tow me away somewheres and beat me up or kill me,” she said later.

  AT FEW DAYS after Cianci assaulted him, DeLeo, experiencing headaches, went to a neurosurgeon. He was treated for injuries to his head and face, including burn marks around the left eye from Cianci’s cigarette.

  But DeLeo, a deeply private man, did not want to discuss his night on Power Street. In April a Providence television reporter came by his office and told him that the story was all over town. DeLeo said
he didn’t know what the reporter was talking about.

  Worried, he went to an old Republican acquaintance, Lincoln C. Almond, the U.S. attorney for Rhode Island. At the time, Almond’s office was investigating corruption in the Cianci administration. At a meeting in Almond’s office one weekend, DeLeo described what had happened and expressed his fear that Cianci might try to set him up. Almond urged DeLeo to relax and to call him if he needed to talk again.

  DeLeo went home, unaware that he had just set the wheels of justice in motion. Almond went to Colonel Walter Stone, superintendent of the Rhode Island State Police. Shortly after that, on April 18, 1983, two state police detectives appeared at DeLeo’s office in Bristol and told him they were taking him to headquarters in Scituate to make a statement. DeLeo didn’t want to go, but he agreed to after the police told him that he could go “the easy way or the hard way.”

  In Scituate DeLeo called his lawyer, who advised him to tell the truth. Over the next several hours, he reluctantly told his story. State prosecutors planned to put the case before a grand jury.

  Meanwhile, Cianci had also swung into action. He dispatched one of his most trusted aides, Vito Russo, and a political ally, city councilman Lloyd Griffin, to visit DeLeo at his office. Their mission was to find out whether DeLeo had gone to the police, and what he intended to do.

  When DeLeo described the incident, Russo was aghast. Russo had a doctorate in educational psychology and had known Sheila Cianci for years, since she had worked as a secretary at Marathon House, a substance-abuse treatment center that Russo had helped found.

  According to DeLeo, Russo and Griffin told him that Cianci was threatening to make up a story that DeLeo had offered the mayor a bribe to help him collect money the city owed him for construction work years earlier. During the conversation, Russo referred to Cianci as a “sociopath.” A few days before the assault, Russo said, Cianci had been elated about his divorce, proclaiming that he was a free man.

  DeLeo told Russo and Griffin about his encounter with the state police. Griffin asked why he talked to them instead of demanding his lawyer.

  It wasn’t clear to DeLeo why Cianci had sent Griffin. The South Providence power broker had recently been tried, in a highly publicized case, for shooting a seventeen-year-old boy in the leg. Cianci had testified as a character witness for Griffin, who was acquitted.

  The pressure on DeLeo intensified. On April 25, the night before he was scheduled to testify to the grand jury, lawyers for Cianci and DeLeo met at the attorney general’s office with the AG, Dennis Roberts II, and other prosecutors and state police detectives assigned to the case. The lawyers brought along a “civil settlement” that had been brokered by Thomas Paolino, the retired supreme court justice who had also helped arrange the Ciancis’ divorce. In it, DeLeo agreed not to press criminal charges and Cianci agreed not to sue DeLeo for alienation of affection. Without a sworn complaint from DeLeo, the lawyers argued that the criminal case should be dropped.

  But the prosecutors didn’t take the document seriously. No one, not even Buddy Cianci, had the right to negotiate a private settlement to a criminal matter. The attorney general made it clear that the case would go forward.

  That same night, the story became public. Channel 12 reported that the grand jury was investigating an assault allegation against Cianci. DeLeo was not yet identified.

  The next day DeLeo appeared before the grand jury and took the Fifth. Prosecutors immediately went upstairs to the presiding justice of the superior court for an order immunizing DeLeo.

  DeLeo’s lawyer, Irving Brodsky, fought the order. Brodsky, a former prosecutor, was close to Cianci; the two had worked together years earlier in the famous murder trial of Raymond Patriarca, the case involving the lying priest. Now, representing DeLeo, Brodsky took the immunity order upstairs to the Rhode Island Supreme Court.

  A supreme court justice ruled in favor of the state. DeLeo was compelled to testify. The next day he told the grand jury about his nightmare on Power Street.

  The other men who had been at Power Street that night—Joe DiSanto, Judge McGair, Herbert DeSimone—were paraded before the grand jury. “He was acting as Buddy Cianci, who was broken-hearted,” testified McGair. Lloyd Griffin told grand jurors that Cianci was “like so many people—you don’t realize what you’ve lost until you lose it.”

  Early in May, two state police detectives walked into the mayor’s office to serve him with a grand-jury subpoena. Cianci saw them outside and thought they had come to arrest him. At first, he wouldn’t let them in. He paced back and forth and spoke frantically into the telephone.

  On May 5, in the Licht Judicial Complex, where he had launched his public career as a prosecutor, Cianci took his place before the grand jury.

  He gave an extraordinary performance. Cianci began by reading a lengthy statement in which he described the pain of his divorce and his anger upon learning that his efforts to save his marriage had been sabotaged by the betrayal of Ray DeLeo, whom he’d thought of as a brother—a man who “shared in my most secret ambitions and dreams.”

  He said that he had learned of the affair on the day before the assault, when DeLeo’s niece, whom Cianci had worked with in the attorney general’s office, called looking for Sheila. The next day, Sunday, they had lunch. As a result of what he learned from her, Cianci said that he went through his wife’s things at their old house—Sheila was in Florida—and found pictures showing DeLeo and Sheila at Disney World, and also in California.

  The mayor described how he had found tape recordings, which Sheila had made on the advice of a psychic, that Buddy claimed captured the sounds of her having sex with DeLeo.

  “This hearing is a secret one—and but for that secrecy, I would not be telling you all this, because I could never expose my wife and especially my daughter to the horror of what I heard on that tape,” Cianci said. And he proceeded to play the tape for the grand jury.

  DeLeo said later that Cianci performed “a tap-dance” before the grand jury, that he “lied through his teeth.” DeLeo said that he and Cianci were never that close and that Cianci didn’t find the alleged sex tapes until after he assaulted DeLeo—when he started scrambling for proof to justify his actions. Judge McGair, who was there, said that Cianci never mentioned the tapes on the night of the assault. Cianci’s divorce lawyer said that he had been summoned to Power Street that evening by a phone call from Cianci, who felt betrayed and asked McGair, “How much did this thing [the divorce] cost me?” (McGair didn’t have any formal papers for DeLeo to sign that night, he said—just notes that he’d scribbled on the back of an envelope.)

  DeLeo maintained that the tapes Cianci found were of the psychic talking to Sheila and Sheila making unflattering comments about Cianci, not of people having sex. Notes that Sheila kept at the time indicate that on Wednesday, March 23—three days after the assault—she received a call from Judge Paolino, who said that he had gone by the house on Blackstone Boulevard with Cianci (Buddy and Sheila had both moved out so that the house could be sold). Cianci had seen the maid taking a basket out of the house, had looked inside, and had found the psychic tapes and some money-market statements from a broker; he was, according to Paolino, “like a madman.” Sheila’s notes also indicate that one of Cianci’s cousins had called her the day after the assault and warned Sheila to get everything out of the house before he found the tapes, because the cousin was on a lot of them. After Cianci found the tapes, the same cousin reported to Sheila that “Buddy is playing the tapes for everyone in the family and they are all crying.”

  DeLeo said that he grew closer to Sheila after the assault, as they faced Cianci’s attempts to discredit them, and she told him more stories about how Cianci had mistreated her during their marriage. But he said that they were never lovers.

  Others disagree. Some of the police investigators thought that the two had had an affair. Vin Vespia, whose wife was close to Sheila, also believed so, but told Sheila that it wasn’t his place to judge her. But th
e prosecution never considered the question relevant; Cianci and his wife had signed a separation agreement nearly a year before the assault, stating that they would live separate and apart, as if they weren’t married.

  Early on, the prosecutors and the state police made a decision to stick to the facts of what happened on Power Street that night. They told one another that this was going to be either a criminal prosecution or a soap opera.

  ON MAY 24, 1983, a Rhode Island grand jury indicted Mayor Vincent A. Cianci, Jr., on charges of conspiracy, kidnapping, assault, assault with a deadly weapon, and attempted extortion. His police bodyguard, James Hassett, was also indicted, for kidnapping and conspiracy to kidnap.

  Later that afternoon Cianci faced the television cameras as they prepared to go live on the six o’clock news.

  “I’ve had better Tuesdays,” he muttered as he watched the technicians set up their camera equipment. He got a laugh from some people standing nearby. Noting the reaction, he repeated the line once the cameras started rolling.

  The case had become a full-blown media circus—Cianci’s natural element. The mayor, who had kept a low profile during the grand-jury investigation, came out joking.

  “I feel like I’ve been on Dynasty, Dallas, and Falcon Crest for the last two months,” he said. “I have had calls from NBC, ABC, and I expect one from CBS about starring in a new television series. It will be called Providence.”

  When middleweight boxing champ Marvin Hagler knocked out his opponent in the fourth round at the Civic Center, Cianci cracked, “There have been longer fights at my house.”

  Cianci refused to discuss the not-so-amusing details of what had actually happened on Power Street that night. It was “a personal domestic matter.” Cianci was the cuckolded husband, betrayed by a close friend, reacting in a moment of understandable rage. Anyone else in his shoes would have done the same thing—or worse.

  “I am a human being,” he said. “I sweat. I feel. I cry. I laugh. I get angry. I am still going to run my city. They’re not going to get me on a domestic matter involving a guy, my wife, and my daughter.”