by Mike Stanton
On April 25, 1984, five days before his forty-third birthday, as twilight fell over Providence, Vincent A. Cianci, Jr., stepped out of his office and strode to the second-floor landing on the grand staircase of City Hall. Several hundred supporters leaned against the lime-green walls and the marble pillars and hung over the balustrades above, cheering and weeping. The scene was carried live on all three Providence television stations.
Cianci’s last official act was to order the massive, churchlike front doors of City Hall thrown open, so that he could leave the same way he had come in a decade earlier.
“There is no question everyone makes mistakes in their lives,” he told them. “But one I never made is loving the City of Providence too much.”
Later that night, Lloyd Griffin rallied the troops at a packed meeting in Cianci’s downtown campaign headquarters. Guards were posted at the door to bar journalists, but a young Associated Press reporter slipped in, unnoticed. Griffin exhorted the people to show Cianci that they would support him if he tried to come back in the special election for mayor a few months from now. Buckles Melise wandered through the crowd.
“We all got a piece of the action while Buddy Cianci was mayor,” shouted Griffin. “Some of us ate real big.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
He Never Stopped Caring
It wasn’t until a few days after his resignation, when he was sitting at home, that Buddy Cianci was hit by the enormity of his loss.
For the first time in nearly a decade, he couldn’t pick up the phone and order something done. There was no limousine or police driver outside. The ex-mayor of Providence sat alone with his thoughts, in the house where he had assaulted Raymond DeLeo, powerless on Power Street.
He immediately began plotting his return.
Seven days after he resigned, Cianci received a tumultuous welcome on Federal Hill when he served as grand marshal of the St. Joseph’s procession. He had hinted in advance that the crowd’s reception would help him decide whether to run in the special election for mayor that summer, and he wasn’t disappointed. The crowd surged forward when Cianci stepped out of his car. So many women rushed up to kiss him that he had to wipe the lipstick from his cheek. Many of the spectators moved with Cianci as the procession made its way down Atwells Avenue. An airplane flew over the Church of the Holy Ghost trailing a banner that read PROVIDENCE NEEDS CIANCI FOR PROGRESS.
The man who had been sworn in as acting mayor, City Council president Joseph R. Paolino, marched further back and passed in near silence.
Despite Cianci’s rousing reception, the Italian-American newspaper The Echo, long a staunch supporter, urged him not to run if he truly loved Providence. Citing his assault conviction and “the unanswered question of corruption,” The Echo said that Cianci risked becoming an embarrassment to his heritage. But Cianci forged ahead and declared that he would run again. Although the city charter had required him to resign following his conviction, he said that it didn’t disqualify him from running again. He argued that he wasn’t technically a convicted felon, because he hadn’t been sent to prison.
Incredibly, Cianci invoked his eleven-year-old daughter, Nicole—the daughter he had neglected during his long hours as mayor—as his reason for running. Cianci said that he had met with Nicole and that she had urged him to run “because if you don’t run for mayor, people would think you are a quitter and Ciancis aren’t quitters.”
But the Rhode Island Supreme Court didn’t see it that way. In a 3–2 ruling, the court knocked Cianci off the ballot. The majority reasoned that it would be ludicrous to allow Cianci to fill out the term he had just been forced to surrender. The court was silent on the question of whether he could run in a future election.
Paul Campbell, a Cianci aide, says that they had campaign bumper stickers printed and the comeback campaign ready to roll. After the supreme court’s ruling, Campbell recalls going to Cianci’s house to discuss an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court and an attempt to “reach out” to one of the justices in Washington. But Cianci ultimately decided not to appeal; it would have been expensive, and he faced long odds.
Ironically, the mayor had been done in by Providence’s new home-rule charter, which he had pushed for to strengthen the powers of the mayor following his frequent battles with the Democratic City Council. A provision of the charter stated that felons could not serve as mayor. The chairman of the charter commission, Dr. Melvyn M. Gelch, had challenged Cianci’s eligibility. A few days after the supreme court’s ruling, a vitriolic Cianci called in to a radio talk show on WHJJ, on which Gelch, a neurosurgeon at Rhode Island Hospital, was the guest.
“Don’t you own some land around Rhode Island Hospital?” asked Cianci.
“I do,” replied Gelch.
“Yeah, and you’re giving it to Rhode Island Hospital and taking a big tax deduction.”
“No, I’m taking no tax deduction.”
“You’d better not, Doctor, because we know about it.”
“Buddy, the IRS knows about you, too. That two hundred thousand dollars a year.”
“That was spent, Doctor, legitimately on campaign expenses—”
“Buddy, remember Al Capone went to jail for income-tax evasion, not for the other things.”
“Doctor, you know something? You just can’t stop being ethnic, can you? That’s the problem with you.”
“Now, Buddy, that’s ridiculous. That’s another wild attack.”
“You know, you mention Al Capone, you mention me. I happen to be of Italian-American background and proud of it . . .”
Meanwhile, political life moved on without Buddy Cianci. Joseph Paolino, the twenty-nine-year-old son of a downtown real estate mogul, was elected mayor in the special election. Cianci faded from the spotlight. He dabbled in real estate, and he read a lot—he favored biographies of great men. He talked of writing his own book and about a variety of business ventures, including launching a regional airline. A few years after his departure, Cianci’s name turned up on a list published by the state treasurer of forty-eight hundred people with unclaimed bank accounts. “When you’re out of public office,” he joked wryly, “they forget you in a hurry.”
Later Cianci would liken the experience to “going through withdrawal.” Friends would encounter him sitting forlornly in a bar or a restaurant, alone. “When you’re in, you’re in,” he said heavily. “And when you’re out, you’re out.” Rhode Island state police detectives doing drug surveillance began noticing Cianci driving his Mercedes late at night in Central Falls, a small, impoverished city near Providence that was gaining a reputation as the nation’s cocaine capital. The one-square-mile city was home to a large number of immigrants from the Medellín section of Colombia, as well as several major drug dealers who were distributing cocaine throughout New England and as far as Montreal and Chicago.
Detective James C. Lynch, Jr., said that he saw Cianci perhaps half a dozen times as he was doing surveillance, and that other detectives also saw him. They thought it was unusual to see the ex-mayor cruising around Central Falls late at night, though they never saw him with any drug dealers or with drugs.
During the same period, in September 1986, the state police raided the home of a Warwick drug dealer, seizing more than one pound of cocaine, two ounces of marijuana, and eight thousand dollars in cash. Three detectives involved in the raid—Lynch, Captain James P. Mullen, and Sergeant Brian Andrews—said that a Mercedes in the garage belonged to Cianci. The dealer also did some work out of his house as an auto mechanic. The police tried to get the dealer to cooperate and tell them about his supplier and other customers, but he refused and later pleaded guilty. Cianci was never questioned.
Cianci’s time in exile was a time for counting his losses, but also for healing old wounds.
Bruce Melucci, his former political adviser who had left on bitter terms, started seeing Cianci in Leo’s. The two men reestablished a cordial relationship. Melucci, who had been struck by Cianci’s loneliness even when he was mayor, thought
that he seemed lost without the office that had come to define his life.
Skip Chernov, the fallen rock-and-roll promoter, had a drink with Cianci one night in the former Alarie’s, now another bar. They discussed opening a jazz club together. The conversation turned to the old days, when Chernov had worn a wire into the Civic Center and Cianci had indicted Harold Copeland and then run as the anticorruption candidate. Chernov was bitter toward Cianci for having later turned on him, by blocking his efforts to expand Tortilla Flats, which had forced him out of business. Now, according to Chernov, Cianci said that he had done it because of Chernov’s reputation as a rat—“You weren’t a team player,” Cianci told him.
Norm Roussel, his erstwhile adman, would eat lunch with Cianci on Fridays, at the Barnsider. Cianci would sit in the corner, depressed. Roussel would kid him that if he didn’t cheer up, he wasn’t going to buy him lunch. Cianci talked about how miserable he was, how he had let his career slip through his fingers. Roussel encouraged him to run for mayor again, but Cianci said no. Too little time had passed.
One day Cianci had martinis at the Left Bank restaurant with Bill Warner, the architect who had developed the original plans to relocate the downtown rivers and strip away the concrete that had smothered them. From their table the two men could track the progress of the ambitious project, which had begun during Cianci’s first watch.
Warner had come up with the idea as an offshoot of the Capital Center Project, a city, state, and federal redevelopment effort to relocate the downtown railroad tracks and open up some thirty-five acres of prime land for development. Cianci, recognizing the potential and eager to tap into the federal funds that would pay for the bulk of the project, had eagerly signed on to the project. But within a few years he was gone.
As Cianci sat with Warner in the Left Bank, sipping his martini, the irony of his squandered opportunity could not have been lost on him. Minutes before Warner had come to the mayor’s office to outline the river project, in 1983, Cianci had received the phone call notifying him of his indictment for the assault of Raymond DeLeo.
Although Cianci probably didn’t realize it, his identity had been incorporated into a character that appeared on Saturday Night Live in the mid- to late 1980s—the Pathological Liar. Played by comedian Jon Lovitz, the Pathological Liar wore three-piece polyester suits and wide ties and bullied people to get what he wanted as he spun an increasingly improbable series of lies, punctuated with the exclamation “Yeah, that’s the ticket!”
Cianci thought about leaving Providence. Then two things came to his rescue—a radio station and a woman.
About a year after Cianci’s resignation, Ron St. Pierre, the program director at WHJJ, was leafing through a trade publication when he saw that the ex-mayor of Cleveland, Dennis Kucinich, had a successful Cleveland radio talk show. Chatting with his bosses, St. Pierre noted that Kucinich was popular, and he wasn’t nearly as funny or as personable as Buddy Cianci. “Hey, Buddy’s not doing anything right now,” said St. Pierre. “Why don’t we give him a call?”
On March 11, 1985, after a one-year hiatus, the Buddy Cianci Show moved from City Hall to the airwaves. The ex-mayor became the host of an afternoon drive-time talk-show on WHJJ. This was during the infancy of the modern era of talk radio, when Larry King and Dr. Ruth Westheimer were two of the big national names and a Denver talk-show host, Alan Berg, was gunned down by a crazed caller. In Rhode Island, WHJJ was the only station with an all-talk format and was looking to invigorate its lineup. (The station’s midday host said that his best show ever had been a discussion about which way people put up their toilet paper.) In a state where politics is sport and everybody knows everybody else, Cianci was an instant hit.
One of Cianci’s regular callers was “Ray from Lincoln”—left unspoken was his true identity, New England Mafia boss Raymond “Junior” Patriarca. Not that Ray ever called to chat about the good old days, like when he and Cianci had crossed paths in Maryland in pursuit of the priest who had been the elder Patriarca’s alibi. Ray was like any other caller, offering his opinion on the issue of the day, from politics to taxes.
Smart, funny, and opinionated, Cianci became the bad boy of local radio, tossing out one-liners and skewering his political guests as he simultaneously settled old scores and boosted WHJJ’s ratings. Unlike many hosts, Cianci screened his own calls and was quick to cut off those who disagreed with him. “Wait a minute,” he interrupted one caller who challenged him. “I’ll decide what’s important on my show because I’ve got the microphone.”
The smoke-filled, glass-walled radio booth became Cianci’s Elba. Behind the microphone, he could pretend that he was back in the political arena—only this time with a seven-second delay button to silence his opponents. Some politicians, like Joe Paolino, whom Cianci liked to attack, refused to come on. Others ventured onto Cianci’s show at their own risk, as young Patrick Kennedy learned in 1988 when he ran for state representative in Mount Pleasant. Kennedy, the son of Massachusetts senator Edward Kennedy, was an easy target for Cianci. Back in 1976 Ted Kennedy had blocked Senate confirmation of Cianci’s mentor, Herbert DeSimone, to a federal judgeship. When Patrick Kennedy announced his candidacy, Cianci went after the Kennedys on his show. What had Patrick’s father known about Chappaquiddick? How had a young woman drowned in the car accident while Ted swam away? What about Ted’s alleged affairs with women? Why did he drink so much?
When Patrick Kennedy, a timid Providence College student, came on the show, Cianci ripped into him as a carpetbagger who didn’t know his district. Before long, Cianci had Kennedy stumbling over street names in Mount Pleasant. Calls flooded in, asking the befuddled Kennedy if he knew where Jasmine Street was, or if he knew the Mahoney family. The show was a disaster. But Kennedy, backed by his family name and money, and a dose of sympathy from Cianci’s attacks, went on to victory, the start of a successful political career that would carry him to Congress.
Cianci was making good money in radio, with little effort. Minutes before he was due on the air, he would call his frantic producer from his blue Mercedes convertible and cheerily report that it was “a top-down day.” Then he’d roll into the station’s parking lot in East Providence, carrying a newspaper or a magazine, and jump right into the show.
Cianci also found some personal stability in his life when he met Wendy Materna, a tall, pretty blonde. Despite her last name, Materna was descended from an old-line WASP family. A Daughter of the American Revolution, she traced her ancestry back to one of Rhode Island’s first settlers, Colonel Benjamin Church, a famous Indian fighter who kept a diary chronicling the bloody King Philip’s War in 1675–76, when the colonists wrested control of New England from its native inhabitants.
Born in Providence, Materna had moved around the country as a girl because her father was a navy pilot. Although she lived in Chicago, Providence remained her touchstone, the place she would return for holidays and to visit her grandparents, who lived on the East Side and had been big Cianci supporters. On Pearl Harbor Day in 1984, toward the end of Cianci’s first year in exile, Materna met him in Capriccio during a visit to Providence. The following year she moved to Rhode Island to take care of her elderly grandmother, who had had a stroke. She and Buddy began dating in the fall of 1985.
Materna, who had just turned thirty, found the older Cianci, who was forty-four, fascinating. He was funny and bright, kind and charming. Away from politics, he was calmer. Their relationship worked because she knew him as just Buddy, not the mayor. She was from Providence, but she wasn’t a Providence girl. She was smart, savvy, and socially graceful. They enjoyed a nice life together. Cianci, who was doing well financially between his radio gig and his real estate ventures, bought a fifty-one-foot yacht, which he named the Nicola, after his daughter. In nice weather he and Materna spent weekends together on the boat, in Newport. They bought two cocker spaniels, Tucker and Belle. On Sunday nights Wendy cooked dinner for Buddy at his house.
When the mayor’s job opened up again
in 1986, Cianci vacillated. On the morning of the filing deadline, WHJJ bought a newspaper ad that said: “Run the show or run for office? Buddy’s decision today.” Forty minutes before the deadline, Cianci signed his declaration papers at the Café at Brooks, then decided not to file. He announced on the air that he would not run—for personal reasons, he emphasized, not because he was running away from a fight.
Materna knew that running again was always in the back of his mind. Cianci had vowed never to set foot in City Hall unless it was as mayor. But she also knew that it was a question of timing—not just politically, but personally. He had to, in her words, “rebuild to a good place from a bad place.”
WHILE BUDDY CIANCI tried to move on, state and federal investigators were moving in on City Hall.
Investigators found a cornucopia of corruption and eventually indicted thirty people, many of them connected to the Department of Public Works. Twenty-two were convicted, and sixteen went to jail. Many of those convicted were low-level players, who had been involved in no-show jobs, bogus construction repairs, rigged snowplowing contracts, and stolen asphalt. Police divers even searched the Providence River for manhole covers that authorities suspected had been stolen for sale as scrap metal, then dumped when the police started closing in.
William “Blackjack” DelSanto, the Patriarca capo and city sidewalk inspector, was charged with obtaining money under false pretenses. But the charges were later dropped, for lack of a speedy trial, and a judge ordered Blackjack reinstated at Public Works, with back pay.
The week before Cianci resigned, Edward “Buckles” Melise, Cianci’s highway superintendent and campaign fund-raiser, was charged with extorting snowplow contractors, then indicted twice more after Cianci left, for stealing city asphalt and for approving paychecks for no-show workers. Following one indictment, Buckles led state police on a hundred-mile-an-hour car chase up Interstate 95 in his pink Cadillac before finally surrendering on Federal Hill. He pleaded guilty and went to prison.
