by Mike Stanton
Cianci pitched Providence on Broadway and in Hollywood, on the Today show and The Tonight Show with Jay Leno. His face beamed out from the display window of Cartier on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, on a jar of the Mayor’s Own Marinara Sauce wreathed in gems. When First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton came to Providence in 1997, Cianci presented her with a jar of his sauce and told her to give the White House chef a night off and open it for her and the president. He prepared an authentic Italian meal in the kitchen of his house on Power Street for the PBS cooking show Ciao Italia. The creator of the Fox television cartoon The Family Guy—a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design—featured a Buddy Cianci Junior High School on the show.
He lobbied for an expansion of the Providence Performing Arts Center, to accommodate big Broadway shows, and helped convince the producer of The Phantom of the Opera to commit to bringing the show to Providence, to help the theater pay for the renovation.
To Lynn Singleton, PPAC’s executive director, the mayor’s star power was a valuable commodity. When the Broadway producer of Saturday Night Fever was in town for a theater workshop, he told Singleton that he’d been reading about the mayor, and that he seemed like “a hot shit.” Singleton picked up the phone and arranged an immediate meeting with Cianci, who schmoozed him over drinks in the mayor’s office. A few years later, when Saturday Night Fever went on tour, Providence was one of the first cities booked.
Cianci was an intuitive performer, someone who “could hit the mark,” said Singleton. Like all great productions, the Providence Renaissance was a collaboration—but Cianci was the star.
At his 1995 inaugural ball at PPAC, Cianci sang his old radio theme song, “Rhode Island Is Famous for You,” with Robert Goulet. A few years later, when Goulet was performing in Camelot at PPAC, Singleton found the actor and his wife waiting expectantly for the mayor at the cast party after the show.
Frantically, Singleton raced downstairs and called the Providence police station and asked them to track down the mayor. It was past 10 P.M. A tired Cianci called back from his limousine a few minutes later, on his way home after attending several events. He grumbled at Singleton’s request. But five minutes later the reenergized mayor breezed into the theater and charmed the Goulets. When Singleton last saw them, Cianci was herding the couple into his limousine for a midnight tour of the zoo.
Every Christmas season, Singleton took Cianci to New York to see a show and attend an annual party of theater managers. One year, hoping to snare The Lion King for a trial production before it went on tour, Singleton arranged dinner with Cianci and the head of Touring Disney, Tony McLean, at Le Cirque.
Singleton wanted the city to offer Disney a hundred thousand dollars toward expenses to get The Lion King, arguing that it would pay off economically over the course of a two-month run. Cianci was skeptical. “Why would I want to give Disney a hundred thousand dollars?” he asked.
They went to dinner, Singleton anticipating a disaster. Over drinks, Cianci asked McLean where Disney was going to mount The Lion King. McLean said Denver. Cianci, his municipal pride wounded, paused in midmartini.
“Denver!” he exploded. “Why would you want to go to Denver? There’s nothing there but cows and mountains. I’ll give you two hundred fifty thousand to open the show in Providence.”
McLean, flabbergasted, said that he would have to check with his bosses. The dinner proceeded, and Cianci poured on the charm. The owner of Le Cirque, who had received an award from Cianci in Providence honoring the contributions of Italian-Americans to the culinary arts, sent free desserts to their table.
The Lion King stayed in Denver, where it had already been committed, but Cianci had made his point. He wanted Providence to play in the big leagues.
When there was talk of Robert Redford’s Sundance Cinemas building an arts movie house in downtown Providence, Cianci flew to Utah and spent the night at Redford’s ranch. The two of them even went horseback riding—Buddy Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. That project, too, never panned out, due to a lack of financing.
The mayor’s love of the spotlight was evident one night in Lupo’s Heartbreak Hotel, a rock club, when Little Richard was performing. Cianci had a bad cold and sat slumped at his table, his forehead nearly touching the tabletop. Then, down onstage, Little Richard said that he wanted to thank his good friend Buddy Cianci for the warm welcome, and the mayor’s head shot up as if he’d been injected with adrenaline. He bounded down onto the stage and wound up dancing and singing with Little Richard on top of his piano.
One night in April 1996, Cianci showed up for a Bob Dylan concert at the Strand, a downtown nightclub. Toward the end of the show, the mayor sent word backstage that he wanted to meet Dylan, only to hear back from the tour manager that the only people the enigmatic rock star had agreed to meet in recent years were the prime minister of Israel and President Clinton. Cianci, who had been drinking, marched backstage with his entourage, his toupee slipping down his forehead, to confront the tour manager, who demanded to know who the hell he thought he was coming back there.
“I’ll tell you who I am,” Cianci said matter-of-factly, sticking out his hand. “I’m the mayor of this town. I’m the guy who can make sure that the police don’t search those two tour buses out there for the next couple of hours.”
“No problem, Mr. Mayor,” replied the manager, who dutifully introduced Cianci to Bob Dylan when he came offstage.
But not every star was taken with the mayor. One night, while Carol Channing was performing at PPAC, Cianci and his entourage showed up. They were hanging around backstage when the actress’s stage manager, according to his later account, asked Cianci to put out his cigarette, because Channing was sensitive to smoke.
A nasty encounter ensued, in which the stage manager accused Cianci of calling him “a fucking faggot.” The story hit the newspaper a few days later, and Cianci denied it. Channing refused to accept a key to the city.
According to a city worker who moonlighted as a security guard at the Biltmore Hotel, he was on duty one night that week when he saw a city policeman loyal to Cianci going through the stage manager’s room. The cop told the security guard that he was trying to dig up dirt in case the man caused any more trouble. Then the cop asked the guard to call the police and report an attempted break-in of the man’s room, so that the police would have an excuse to question the stage manager and obtain personal information about him.
Cianci’s charisma and vision could be offset by his ego and temper. The mayor could be, in the words of a former secretary who nevertheless admired him, a cafone, an Italian expression for an ill-mannered pig who takes what he wants.
One night, in the Capital Grille, a drunken Cianci gave a Nazi salute to a dictatorial State House politician, the House majority leader, and shouted, “Heil Hitler!” The restaurant was crowded with politicians and businessmen. Furious, the majority leader held up the city’s legislation for weeks.
Another time, the mayor confronted a state senator from Providence in the restaurant Mediterraneo, upset with her for something, and reminded her that he had several hundred police officers working for him.
Cianci could also be nasty to the people who had helped him look good. One night, at a party at WaterFire creator Barnaby Evans’s home, the mayor stood in the back, interrupting the other speakers and speaking coarsely. He leaned over a railing and shook it and said that he’d better send the building inspector down. Later, when Evans tried to present him with a WaterFire poster, Cianci snapped that he already had several.
Cianci had a love-hate relationship with Arnold “Buff” Chace, Jr., the downtown developer who was trying to rehab historic buildings into loft space.
Chace was not your typical developer. He was the wealthy scion of an old Yankee textile manufacturing family—one of the few families not to move their mills south during the early 1900s to capitalize on cheaper labor costs. (His great-great-grandmother Elizabeth Buffum Chace had been a famous nineteenth-century abolitionist and women�
��s suffragist.) Chace could remember, as a boy, his father’s lobbying the Eisenhower administration for protectionist rules to guard against the incoming flood of cheap Asian textiles. Later, as his father’s efforts failed, his father would bring home bolts of corduroy and beautiful fabric as the family’s New England mills shut down.
Still, the family was by no means destitute. In the 1960s they sold their company, Berkshire Hathaway, to financier Warren Buffett. Buff Chace dabbled in filmmaking and later became interested in Buddhism. He became a developer after agreeing to manage some family land on Cape Cod, and with the help of renowned Miami architect Andres Duany developed an award-winning shopping center, Mashpee Commons.
In 1991, the year Buddy Cianci returned to office, Chace read in the newspaper that a block of old buildings behind City Hall was going to be auctioned. He drove downtown with his twins, who were eight or nine, and looked around. His daughter Sarah said, “Why don’t you do this, Dad?” That, he said later with a laugh, was “the kiss of death.”
Chace brought Duany to Providence in late 1991 for a charette, a brainstorming session that ignited the movement to transform downtown into an arts district. Duany marveled at the historic architecture and recommended creating artists’ lofts to bring people back downtown. Cianci, who endorsed the charette, called it “urban group therapy.”
Chace, out of a sense of noblesse oblige rather than a desire for a quick profit, spent the 1990s trudging forward against tremendous odds. It was nearly impossible to find financing to restore the old buildings and create affordable loft space. It was tough to create the necessary critical mass to make downtown a residential draw. And despite Cianci’s vision and his ballyhooed arts district, the mayor didn’t always make it easy.
Chace urged Cianci to take a bold step by condemning the first floors of some of the buildings, to pave the way for stores and specialty shops that would make renovating the upper floors financially feasible, and to provide the amenities that people upstairs would want. A dialogue began, he said, “but then we started to see all the old political relationships” with the big downtown landowners, who had sat on their property for years. Nothing happened.
One of the problems that Chace saw was that there was no thoughtful approach to restoring downtown. It was a helter-skelter process that depended on the mood of the mayor, who could be capricious. It didn’t help that Chace was a member of Cianci’s hated Lucky Sperm Club, a term that he would throw out while berating Chace. Cianci would grow impatient with Chace, saying that he was unrealistic. In one meeting, the mayor lost his temper and scattered the blueprints that Chace had brought.
One day, Chace asked the city’s economic-development director, John Palmieri, why the mayor was holding up approval of tax credits critical to a restoration project.
“Well, Buff, the mayor is trying to decide whether to fuck you or not,” said Palmieri. When Chace asked him why, Palmieri replied, “Just think of fifteenth-century Padua.”
Palmieri and Chace would often commiserate about the mayor. The long-suffering Palmieri had seen the mayor’s brilliance and also borne the brunt of his anger. The mayor was a taskmaster, a perfectionist; he didn’t want to hear about obstacles, but bulldozed ahead, making things happen for Providence through sheer force of will.
Cianci would torture Palmieri and others at his regular directors’ meetings, which became dreaded events. Once, angry with his Public Works director, Cianci whipped open the newspaper classified section and started reading jobs that began with P—pastry maker, plumber. . . . Then he said, “I don’t see any jobs in here for Public Works director.” Another time, Cianci flew into a rage and yelled about how he’d tried to be nice to them, but that hadn’t worked. Then, quoting Machiavelli, he said, “It’s better to be feared than loved.”
The directors, twenty or thirty people, sat in rows of chairs lined up in front of the mayor’s desk. They would stand when Cianci addressed them, like schoolchildren being quizzed by the teacher. If the mayor was in a good mood, his directors would laugh quickly at his jokes, hoping to keep him happy. If a particular director became a pariah, there was an instinctive tendency among the others to disassociate themselves from that person, like the weakest animal in the herd. Palmieri learned to “take the hit,” to weigh the abuse against the overall enjoyment of his job, which paid well, and the need to provide for his family.
Palmieri had also enjoyed good times with the mayor, like the trip to Manhattan to meet with Calvin Klein executives considering a distribution center in Providence. Cianci, who had his police driver and limousine, received a New York City police escort through midtown Manhattan, making Palmieri feel like some Third World head of state visiting the United Nations.
That night the Calvin Klein people arranged for the mayor and his party to dine at Rao’s, a trendy Italian restaurant in Harlem that drew celebrities and required reservations months in advance. Later, Cianci spoke disparagingly of the place, grousing that he could get better food cheaper at the Rosario Club in Silver Lake, from Italian-speaking women with kerchiefs on their heads. That night, he got into an argument with the owner, who also had his own pasta sauce. The mayor scoffed when the owner boasted that his sauce had been ranked by Consumer Reports. “Consumer Reports?” said Cianci. “Who reads Consumer Reports for pasta sauce?”
The Calvin Klein warehouse never came to Providence. Palmieri knew that you couldn’t win them all, but he had also seen the mayor scare away business with his overeagerness and need for headlines. In one instance, Palmieri said, the mayor prematurely announced that a New Bedford, Massachusetts, manufacturer of leather handbags for Coach was coming to Providence. The company, which had pursued low-key talks because of labor issues, didn’t come.
One of the biggest disasters where Cianci jumped the gun involved Pfizer, the pharmaceutical giant. In 1998 Governor Lincoln Almond and state economic officials had been talking for months with Pfizer about opening a plant at Fields Point. Pfizer, not wanting to alarm out-of-state workers who might be affected until the deal was finalized, had insisted on absolute secrecy. Finally, the talks reached the point where Almond, reluctantly, had to tell Cianci. The next thing they knew, Cianci was trumpeting the Pfizer deal on the front page of The Providence Journal. That day, company officials privately told the governor that they were pulling out.
If Bruce Sundlun had been an ally to Cianci, his successor, Linc Almond, was an enemy. Republican allies in the 1970s, Cianci and Almond had broken up in the 1980s, when Almond, as U.S. attorney, investigated City Hall corruption. Cianci ordered workers at the Civic Center not to allow the governor’s limousine to park inside when Almond attended events there. One night, the governor’s state police driver threatened to arrest a Civic Center employee over the matter. Another night, Cianci arrived to find Almond’s limo parked inside, and boxed him in with his own limo. Then the mayor berated an arena official: “Do you know that I can fire you, or are you just stupid? How many times do I have to tell you—the governor doesn’t park here. It’s my building.”
In 1997 Cianci and Almond clashed over a highly publicized effort to lure the New England Patriots football team to Providence. The talks became a media frenzy, intensified by the fact that they occurred during the Patriots’ run to the Super Bowl in New Orleans. Robert Kraft, the Patriots owner, was playing wannabe hosts Providence and Hartford off against Boston, hoping to win generous taxpayer subsidies. Almond, who was unwilling to give the team the millions that Kraft was seeking, watched in annoyance as the Patriots tried an end run with Cianci. The mayor, who boasted of his finesse in prying loose “other people’s money,” lacked the authority to commit the necessary state financing. But he created plenty of havoc. He even followed the Krafts to New Orleans, with former governor Phil Noel, a lawyer involved in downtown development. Later, Cianci told Palmieri about his wild time in the Big Easy, including a description of the voluptuous madam who ran a nightclub that he had visited. The state ultimately rejected a deal with the Pa
triots. The Krafts committed to Hartford instead. Cianci, speaking from Florence, Italy, where he was arranging for Providence to borrow Renaissance paintings from the Uffizi Gallery, reacted with a line that put a new twist on the Broadway musical Damn Yankees, in which Lola, once the “ugliest woman in Providence, Rhode Island,” sells her soul to the Devil to become beautiful. Cracked Cianci, “You can marry an ugly woman for enough money, I guess.” (Or not. The Krafts would later leave Hartford at the altar for a new stadium next to their old one in Foxboro, Massachusetts.)
Other corporate executives shied away from Providence, either because of Buddy’s histrionics or because they were wary of corruption.
Terry Murray, the chairman of Fleet National Bank, considered it unfortunate that a leader of Cianci’s intellect would exploit rather than seek to reform a political culture defined by “getting your brother-in-law a job”—preferably a no-show job. Addressing the annual Chamber of Commerce dinner in 1996, Murray said that Rhode Island, despite its recent strides, still lagged behind other parts of the country because of its bloated and inefficient government. He singled out the excessive amount of money spent on disability pensions for police officers and firefighters, but the message was obscured by the messenger—a wealthy corporate executive. “Terry Murray says ‘You’re paying your firefighters too much,’ ” Cianci later scoffed. “Well, okay, Terry, but you’re not the one to be telling them that, making fourteen million.”
But if Murray’s speech bombed, the problems lingered. From his perch high atop the old Superman Building—when he wasn’t in Boston, where Fleet was moving its corporate headquarters—Murray shook his head as Cianci patched together his budgets with gimmicks while failing to address the underlying rot in City Hall. “When Buddy goes,” Murray predicted in a private conversation one day, “it will be like taking the canvas off a lobster boil. There’s a lot of steam built up, and the smells are enormous.”
