The Prince of Providence

by Mike Stanton

  The media played into the mayor’s strategy. Stories focused on his resilience and his roller-coaster career. Would Buddy survive this latest setback? Tune in tomorrow.

  The national media came marching through Providence. One day, over lunch with political aide Bruce Melucci at the Biltmore’s Falstaff Room, Cianci pulled a Time magazine out of his pocket. He flipped it open to a picture of him and Kevin White, the mayor of Boston, who was embroiled in his own corruption scandal. “I’ll show you how to get excellent publicity,” he joked.

  “Too bad you didn’t kill the guy,” retorted Melucci. “You’d be in Newsweek, too.”

  The mayor shrugged and ordered another martini.

  Behind the scenes, Cianci kept the pressure on his accusers. He hired Vincent O’Connell, a retired Providence police officer, to conduct surveillance on Sheila and DeLeo, and even on the state police and the prosecutors. Cianci wanted to know whom they were talking to.

  During the grand-jury investigation prosecutor Susan McGuirl had noticed a mysterious dark sedan following her. It became so obvious that, when she went to lunch, she would make eye contact with the beefy driver, point to her watch, and hold up two fingers to indicate when she’d be back.

  The day after Cianci’s indictment, some prosecutors had their cars booted by the Providence police.

  At times, it was like “Spy vs. Spy.” One day O’Connell went by Sheila’s house, only to run into the state police. Sometimes the state police and Cianci’s private investigators would shadow each other.

  Unlike Cianci, Ray DeLeo was uncomfortable in the public eye. He received hate mail and anonymous threatening phone calls. Someone left a dead fish in a paper bag on his doorstep. Cianci leaked a story to the press about Sheila’s sex tapes, which he played for reporters in an off-the-record session. Another story detailed a trip that DeLeo and Sheila had supposedly taken to San Francisco.

  Vinny O’Connell had unearthed that one, creating more turmoil in the process. The sheriff’s office in Carmel, California, thinking that O’Connell was working as a Providence police detective on a case important to the mayor, had initially agreed to help him check the hotel where DeLeo and Sheila had supposedly stayed. But then the sheriff read about Cianci’s case in a California newspaper and discovered that the mayor was actually the defendant. Furious, he alerted the Rhode Island State Police, who accused O’Connell of misrepresenting himself as a police officer.

  It was a crazy time. The press camped outside DeLeo’s office. The state police had a cruiser watching his house. And Cianci’s private eyes, it seemed, followed him everywhere.

  O’Connell recalled tailing Sheila and DeLeo to a restaurant in Massachusetts one night, but they spotted him and slipped out the back door.

  One Sunday in the autumn of 1983 DeLeo was taking his nephew’s wife to a New England Patriots game when he noticed a man sitting in a car outside his house, his face hidden by a newspaper. Driving away, DeLeo saw the parked car start to follow him. DeLeo gave the man the slip by pulling into a parking lot he was developing, and wound up following his follower. The detective finally managed to switch positions, and took photos of DeLeo and his companion. Later, Cianci showed the pictures to Sheila to taunt her, but Sheila recognized her as DeLeo’s nephew’s wife.

  Behind his upbeat public persona, the mayor was frantic. He called and wrote Sheila constantly, alternately threatening to ruin her and DeLeo and pleading for another chance. He said that DeLeo would never leave his wife for Sheila, that he was too old for her, that he was headed to prison for some shady business dealings. No one, Cianci told Sheila, could love her as he could.

  A former secretary, Sheila kept shorthand notes of some of Cianci’s rambling conversations and tape-recorded others, later giving typewritten summaries to DeLeo as the case unfolded. “I know what is most important in life and it ain’t being mayor, governor, or anything,” Cianci said on the night of March 30. “It is to enjoy my wife and daughter.” One day, urging Sheila to think about it, he offered to resign as mayor. “I will announce that I will never run again.” A skeptical Sheila answered, “Then do it.”

  About a month after the assault, Buddy and Sheila met for lunch at Camille’s, on Federal Hill. The meeting quickly turned ugly. Sheila bolted from the restaurant, drove to their old house on Blackstone Boulevard, and locked herself in. According to a state police detective’s grand-jury testimony, “the Mayor followed with his police entourage and started banging on the doors and ringing the doorbell and Mrs. Cianci became frightened to a point where both the state police were called and the Providence police.”

  Sheila was emotionally exhausted. On Christmas Day, she went to Power Street to pick up their daughter and had another tense encounter. Seated across from her in his den, Cianci rambled for a few hours about DeLeo and the case. At one point, she said, he pulled a money clip out of his left pocket, fanned out about thirty-seven hundred dollars, and asked if that was enough for her to deliver his message to DeLeo.

  That night, Sheila said, Cianci called her and reiterated the threat that Lloyd Griffin and Vito Russo had previously warned DeLeo about—that the mayor would accuse DeLeo of paying bribes involving city construction projects. According to her notes, Sheila taped the call and later played it for Griffin and Russo. Griffin told Sheila not to worry about Cianci’s threats to set up DeLeo because, in his view, “Buddy will probably plead.”

  The question of whether or not to go to trial weighed heavily on the mayor that winter. He sat up late in the house on Power Street, worrying. He vacillated between going to trial and cutting a deal. He didn’t want to lose his office, but he feared going to jail.

  Often Cianci called O’Connell in the middle of the night to vent. O’Connell, lying in bed with the receiver to his ear, would drowse off, only to awaken and hear the mayor, still talking.

  BY EARLY 1984, as Cianci’s case moved toward trial, there were more problems at City Hall.

  State and federal investigations into corruption in the city’s troubled Department of Public Works had picked up. Public Works employees and a private paving contractor were indicted. Others were called to testify before the grand jury. Edward “Buckles” Melise, Cianci’s highway superintendent, took the Fifth.

  One of the focal points was the mayor’s controversial $1.2 million sidewalk- and street-repair blitz, which had boosted his reelection campaign in 1982. Investigators focused on several hundred thousand dollars’ worth of overcharges by Campanella Construction, a big political supporter of the mayor’s.

  When Cianci vacationed in Florida, he often stayed in Fort Lauderdale on Santi Campanella’s yacht. In fact, Cianci had gone there four days after his indictment to get away, making him a footnote in a grisly Florida murder.

  The same day, May 28, 1983, Campanella’s thirty-eight-year-old son, Santi Campanella, Jr., had vacated the yacht to make room for Cianci, who was scheduled to arrive later in the evening. That night, the younger Campanella was robbed and murdered in the parking lot of a Fort Lauderdale shopping mall by two male prostitutes, who stuffed his body into the trunk of his rented car, drove to Tennessee, and dumped the corpse down a well.

  The mayor’s name surfaced as the police tried to reconstruct the younger Campanella’s final hours, though Cianci had never seen him during his stay.

  Meanwhile, the mayor’s ouster of a longtime political enemy, parks superintendent James Diamond, touched off a public furor. Diamond was a maverick who had won accolades for restoring the Victorian grandeur of Roger Williams Park and rebuilding the decrepit zoo. But he had long angered the mayor for refusing to bow to his political demands, such as selling fund-raising tickets, hiring political hacks, and putting Cianci’s name on signs in city parks. Diamond’s removal sparked a petition drive to recall Cianci from office. Diamond, accusing the mayor of running an administration that was “incompetent, immoral, and corrupt,” helped lead the drive.

  On March 1, 1984, recall advocates filed petitions at City Hall conta
ining 19,760 signatures. But the mayor had more immediate concerns. Four days later he was scheduled to go on trial for the DeLeo assault.

  In the courtroom the mayor wouldn’t be able to spin things so easily. The prosecution planned to introduce Cianci’s separation agreement to undermine his cuckolded-husband defense.

  The mayor sought to introduce the Sheila sex tapes, as well as a Michigan State University voice expert to identify the participants. The state planned to counter by delving into the mayor’s affairs.

  Prosecutors were also prepared to resurrect an unsavory allegation from Cianci’s past. In February, two state police detectives flew to Wisconsin to interview Ruth Bandlow, the woman who had accused Cianci of raping her at gunpoint in 1966. She agreed to fly to Rhode Island to testify as a character witness against Cianci.

  Meanwhile, Cianci’s lawyers were pressing for the charges against him to be thrown out, for lack of willing witnesses. Ray DeLeo wasn’t eager to testify, they argued; he had signed an agreement not to sue Cianci and had only appeared before the grand jury after prosecutors immunized him against his will.

  Meanwhile, another key witness, Lenore Steinberg, was getting cold feet. The previous spring, the West Palm Beach socialite had eagerly described to the grand jury how Cianci had attempted to extort a statement from her regarding DeLeo’s alleged affair with Sheila. Now she said that she had not “appreciated the significance” of her testimony when she appeared before the grand jury. She did not wish to testify at Cianci’s trial. The whole experience had been unpleasant for her and her family. She was terrified to return to Rhode Island, and her millionaire husband wasn’t thrilled with the publicity detailing her previous husband’s suicide—precisely what Cianci had threatened to stir up if she crossed him.

  Concerned that Steinberg might skip the country, prosecutors had her subpoenaed as she returned home from her country club in West Palm Beach one afternoon. She was furious, shouting at her doorman and the Palm Beach investigator who served her.

  On Wednesday, February 22, five days before Cianci’s trial was scheduled to begin, Steinberg produced medical affidavits claiming that a digestive disorder had flared up from the stress of the case, and that she was unable to travel. A Palm Beach County judge was not convinced. He ordered her to Rhode Island to testify.

  Meanwhile, Cianci had dispatched to Palm Beach one of his own lawyers, Frank Caprio, a onetime political adversary from Federal Hill. Caprio met Steinberg at the Breakers Hotel. She gave him a sworn statement saying that Cianci had never threatened her.

  On the weekend before the trial was set to open, Cianci flew to London with Normand Roussel, his longtime political adman. As they made the rounds in London—dinner at the Marble Arch, a comedy club, a men’s club where they sat smoking cigars—the topic was the same. Should he plead guilty?

  There was a deal on the table: Cianci could plead no contest to the two assault charges, and the attorney general would drop the four remaining charges and recommend no jail time. Cianci wondered what the rest of his life would be like. Would it be the end of his once brilliant political career?

  When he returned to Providence on Monday, Cianci was ready to plead. He even signed a form detailing a no-contest plea on the assault charges. But when he walked into court on Tuesday, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Smirking at the prosecutor, Susan McGuirl, Cianci stunned even his own lawyer by saying that he wanted to go to trial.

  Vinny O’Connell, Cianci’s private investigator, was urging him to fight. With the reluctance of key witnesses like Steinberg, he saw most of the charges melting away. Cianci was popular. And when the jurors heard about DeLeo’s alleged affair with Sheila, O’Connell told him, they would decide in their hearts that Cianci had been justifiably provoked.

  Patrick Conley, Cianci’s aide, also encouraged Cianci to go to trial. He argued that the prosecution would never convince twelve jurors in Providence to convict him. The mayor’s indictment had already wrecked Conley’s “magnificent scheme” to catapult Cianci into the U.S. Senate—and get Conley back in the good graces of the Democrats from whom he had been estranged since going to work for the mayor. The year before, Conley had conceived a plan in which Cianci would support Democrat Joseph Walsh, the mayor of Warwick, in his 1984 campaign for governor. Then Cianci would become a Democrat and run for the Senate—against his nemesis, John Chafee—with the backing of Governor Walsh and Democratic House Speaker Matthew Smith, an old-style political boss from South Providence. Smith, who in the early eighties had blocked Cianci’s efforts to pass legislation giving the city more fiscal flexibility, would benefit by then being able to handpick Cianci’s successor as mayor. Conley said that he, Cianci, Walsh, and Smith met quietly a couple of times, once at Capriccio, another time at the Brown Faculty Club. Cianci was enthusiastic. Walsh confirmed that there were discussions. But then Cianci was indicted, and the magnificent scheme fell apart.

  With an eye on his political fortunes, Cianci walked out of court that Tuesday ready to go to trial. He turned to O’Connell and said, “Let’s go for it!” By Thursday, however, with the trial set to begin on Monday, Cianci was wavering again. The plea negotiations resumed.

  On Friday the state police served Frank Caprio with a subpoena as he ate lunch at the Aurora Club, a private old-boys club of Providence pols and power brokers. On Monday morning prosecutors planned to question Caprio about his encounter with Steinberg at the Breakers.

  The plea talks continued through the weekend. Cianci offered to plead guilty to the misdemeanor assault charge. The attorney general insisted that he plead to a felony count as well, and now he was no longer willing to promise that he wouldn’t recommend jail time.

  The mayor, notoriously indecisive, vacillated. His ally Lloyd Griffin, the councilman who had gone to trial the previous spring for shooting a teenager, warned him that the judge had a reputation for being strict—that he would probably send the mayor to prison for several years if he went to trial and was convicted.

  The attorney general gave Cianci until 10 A.M. Monday to decide.

  At the appointed hour, on March 5, 1984, Cianci walked into the Providence County Courthouse, which he had once patrolled as an ambitious young prosecutor, and pleaded guilty to assault and assault with a dangerous weapon.

  The plea stunned the packed courtroom. Many of the spectators, including some of the mayor’s closest advisers, had not known what he was going to do. Norm Roussel accompanied him to court believing that the mayor would go to trial. Afterward, Cianci said that he had acted for the sake of his ten-year-old daughter.

  The judge, John Bourcier, read the first charge, the felony count accusing Cianci of attacking Raymond DeLeo with a lighted cigarette, an ashtray, and a fireplace log. The judge asked if it was true.

  “Yes, it is, Your Honor,” Cianci replied in a low voice.

  BUDDY CIANCI LEFT City Hall in a trail of tears, a posse of lawmen nipping at his heels.

  On Monday, April 23, 1984, the mayor received a five-year suspended prison sentence. Two nights later, now a convicted felon, Cianci followed the dictates of the new city charter he had helped push through and resigned before the City Council could push him out of his trophy-laden corner suite.

  The framed photographs of Cianci with Gerald Ford, Nelson Rockefeller, Henry Kissinger, and Elizabeth Taylor were packed away in boxes. The desk and the black leather chair with the mayor’s seal were carted off by Vito’s Express. His office took on the atmosphere of a political wake.

  “Ronald Reagan tells a story,” he reminisced to reporters, “after he completed two successful terms as governor of California . . . of walking outside, getting into the backseat of his car, and there was no one to drive him.

  “I don’t know what my plans are. I don’t know if I can practice law. I don’t have an office. I don’t even own a car. So if anybody sees me hitchhiking, I wish you would do me the courtesy and pick me up.”

  Outside City Hall, Rhode Island state troopers and Providence
police officers stood guard to prevent the removal of records vital to law enforcement’s autopsy of the Cianci years.

  Two weeks earlier, the Providence chief of police, Anthony J. Mancuso, had held an extraordinary meeting in his office with the United States attorney for Rhode Island, top Rhode Island prosecutors, and leaders of the City Council. The topic was corruption. The mayor had not been invited.

  Council members came away shocked. Mancuso displayed two lists—one of Public Works employees with criminal records, another of Public Works employees with ties to organized crime. They talked about corruption in other departments; about no-show jobs and bid rigging; about payoffs for jobs, promotions, and contracts. The feds needed to look no further than their own basement; one suspect no-bid contract involved a broken water main that flooded the cellar of the federal building downtown. Some of the very contractors under investigation had the streets around the offices of the U.S. attorney’s and the FBI dug up for a year; like the lawmen, the contractors kept digging and digging and digging.

  “The obvious feeling was that the pyramid ended at the top,” recalled former councilman Nicholas Easton, a participant. “The ultimate objective was to bring down Buddy Cianci.”

  Despite the spreading stain, Cianci was determined to exit more gracefully than his staunch ally at Public Works, Buckles Melise, had. The week before Cianci left, Buckles unceremoniously wriggled out a window on the first floor of City Hall and fled from state troopers who had come to arrest him for extorting kickbacks from snowplowers. (Later he turned himself in.)

  In one final flourish before bidding adieu, Cianci appointed his private investigator in the DeLeo case, Vinny O’Connell, as a Providence police major. Chief Mancuso refused to accept the appointment. He blasted Cianci for trying to plant O’Connell in the department to spy on the unfolding corruption probes. Cianci’s public-safety director fired Mancuso. The chief refused to vacate his office. Finally, in the face of Cianci’s impending departure, the public-safety director resigned. Mancuso stayed.