by Mike Stanton
“See, I’m smart,” Corrente boasted to Freitas afterward. “I know how to talk. I said, ‘Do you got any objections?’ He says, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Well, I think it’s a good idea.’ ”
“Uncle Frank,” said Freitas.
“See, I don’t say do it,” Corrente explained. “I just have to say it’s a good idea. . . . They absolutely know what the fuck I mean.”
BY EARLY 1999, the stress of working undercover was taking its toll on Tony Freitas. It had been a year since Dennis Aiken had come to visit, a year of juggling the demands of his business with hours spent cultivating the mayor’s men. He and his wife, Nancy, who had assumed a larger role in helping to run JKL Engineering, were edgy from the strain. Freitas would feel so drained that he had to lie down during the day to rest.
He worried about being discovered. One day, while he was in his office with Aiken, Freitas’s secretary paged him with a call from a Mr. Freon. He was startled to hear his FBI code name, but it was a coincidence—the caller was an out-of-town salesman with an air-conditioning-equipment supplier.
Freitas also worried that he might walk into a setup. Dennis Aiken was always down the hall when Freitas met with city officials at JKL Engineering, but meetings away from the office were nerve-wracking. Whenever Freitas finished, he would call Aiken on his cell phone and give him the signal that he was all right—“Hallelujah.” One day Aiken worried when Freitas failed to report in for a long time after attending a Cianci fund-raiser at the Biltmore Hotel.
The scariest moments were when Freitas met with David Ead, vice chairman of the Providence Board of Tax Assessment Review.
Ead was an ex-Providence cop, an intimidating grizzly bear of a man, weighing more than 350 pounds. He was also vice chairman of the Providence Democratic Committee, an organization that had been co-opted by Cianci. Ead ran a vending-machine business and traded on his political connections to place hundreds of juice, soda, and snack machines in Providence schools and police headquarters, recreation centers, city and state office buildings—even the federal courthouse downtown.
Cianci had appointed Ead to the tax board in 1994. Ead—his name rhymed with greed—helped Pannone shake down taxpayers who came before the board.
As Freitas burrowed deeper into the corrupt recesses of City Hall, he told Pannone that he needed a way to come up with more cash for all the bribes he was paying. Pannone introduced him to Ead, whose Doris Vending was swimming in cash. The trunk of Ead’s Cadillac sagged from the weight of bags of coins that flowed from his machines like the jackpot at Foxwoods Casino, a favored haunt.
Ead outlined a money-laundering scheme. Freitas would pretend to buy soda machines for JKL Engineering. Ead would supply him with phony invoices. Freitas would write a check to Doris Vending. Ead would cash the check and give money back to Freitas—minus a 10 percent “handling” fee.
Unlike the loose-lipped, cartoonish Pannone, Ead was guarded and menacing. He occasionally lumbered around with a gun tucked in his waistband, and told Freitas that he had a cousin who was a well-known mob associate, Joe Badway, who had been Raymond Patriarca’s driver. (This being Providence, Badway ran a notorious auto-body shop near Eddie Voccola’s. Badway had also been one of Patriarca’s supporters who had raced Buddy Cianci to Maryland years earlier, when the young prosecutor had outsmarted the lying priest in the mob boss’s murder trial.)
Freitas found it unnerving to visit Doris Vending, a ramshackle, barnlike building on Manton Avenue, in the North End. The only way in was through a thick steel door, bearing a sign warning that trespassers would be shot. There were bars on the windows. Ead called it his fortress.
“See these walls? They’re all one foot thick,” he boasted one January day, sitting inside his dark, cavelike office, crowded with boxes of candy and trinkets and hung with pictures of famous Rhode Island politicians, from John Chafee to Buddy Cianci. “This is better than a bank down here. In fact, if you go downstairs, I got vaults that banks have.”
Once, Ead became suspicious about the way Freitas had positioned his briefcase, on the couch beside Ead’s desk. He stared at the briefcase. Freitas thought that Ead had spotted the tiny camera hidden in the handle. Freitas grabbed the briefcase and opened it, then pulled out some paperwork he wanted to show Ead regarding the soda machines he was pretending to buy. Ead relaxed.
Ead warned Freitas not to trust people like Joe Pannone, who talked too much, or Frank Corrente, who had drawn heat from the feds on the Voccola lease. If Freitas had a payoff to make, he should call Corrente and tell him to stop by to pick up the “pizza” and “soda.” Deal on our own turf, Ead advised; as an ex-cop, he knew what the feds were capable of.
“Nothing says they can’t go down to City Hall with a key, open the door, go up to Frank’s office and put a bug in and he’ll never know what’s happening,” said Ead. “You could never get into this building. When I go home at night, my head is rested. You can’t even break into it. So, but you can get into City Hall with a key. Everybody has a key.”
A few days later, David Ead unwittingly became Dennis Aiken’s key to the mayor’s office. Back at Doris Vending, Freitas told Ead of his interest in purchasing two vacant lots from the city, under a program that Cianci had created to combat urban blight.
“I’ll go to the mayor for you,” said Ead. He told Freitas to close the office door, then hashed out a proposal to bring to Cianci—one that called for the city to sell Freitas the lots for a thousand dollars apiece, and for Freitas to give Ead a ten-thousand-dollar payoff to bring to “the man downtown.”
“I do business direct,” Ead later boasted. “Eliminate all the middle-men . . . even eliminate Frank.”
Ead said that he was acting “strictly as a delivery boy”—his play was to ingratiate himself with Cianci, so he could land a part-time city job and qualify for a pension and free Blue Cross. The mayor was open to deals, explained Ead, because he had “a business mentality.” Only recently, Ead said, he had pulled off a great deal involving a half-million-dollar tax break on some abandoned property.
The deal sounded familiar. The previous fall, Freitas had attended a Cianci fund-raiser at the Biltmore with Ead and Pannone. The mayor had stopped by their table to say hello, and mentioned to Ead, “I took care of that for you.” Later Pannone confided to Freitas that the matter involved a big tax break that had required the mayor’s approval. Ead had “taken care of” Cianci, said Pannone.
Ead met with Cianci to discuss Freitas’s interest in purchasing the lots. He showed the mayor photos documenting the nice job that Freitas had done improving the West Broadway neighborhood. In February Ead reported back to Freitas that Cianci was willing to do the deal for a ten-thousand-dollar payoff.
Aiken zeroed in on the anticipated payoff. He sent agents to follow Ead to City Hall when he met with Cianci. But the agents couldn’t monitor what went on inside the mayor’s office.
It was time to get the key.
Fortuitously for the FBI, Freitas had done air-conditioning work in City Hall, and he had the blueprints to the building. One day Freitas and an undercover FBI agent, disguised as a JKL Engineering workman and carrying a toolbox, went into City Hall in work clothes, to work on the ventilation system.
Freitas told the city’s property director that he needed to get into the attic. A custodian handed him the keys to City Hall, on a large metal ring with tags marking which doors they opened. One key opened a door in the dusty archives, on the fifth floor, that led into the attic. Freitas unlocked the door. He and the agent climbed into the upper reaches of City Hall, underneath the Plunder Dome, a vast, musty space honeycombed with air ducts and smelling of a bygone era. There, out of sight, they made a wax impression of the key to the mayor’s office.
Aiken had gathered enough evidence to obtain a warrant to bug Cianci’s inner sanctum. The plan was to send a team of workmen into City Hall during the day and have them hide in the attic until nightfall. Then, under cover of darkness, the team would slip into the m
ayor’s office and plant hidden microphones and cameras. If all went according to plan, Aiken hoped to capture Cianci on camera when Ead delivered the ten thousand dollars.
But before the FBI could move in, the deal fell apart. One of the lots was inadvertently sold to someone else. Then, on March 9, Ead received an anonymous call from a woman who warned him to watch out for Tony Freitas, because he was working for the FBI.
Ead checked his caller ID and traced the call to a pay phone in East Providence. Ead thought he recognized the woman as one of Pannone’s girlfriends, who lived in East Providence. Ead was angry with Pannone for double-crossing him, by not sharing the bribes from Freitas, and had cut him out of the loop. Maybe this was Pannone’s way of getting even.
Still, the call spooked Ead. Four days later, he showed up at Freitas’s office and said that he was going to return twelve hundred dollars that Freitas had given him for voting to lower his taxes. He tried to explain that he didn’t have a broker’s license, so he couldn’t receive cash legally. Ead also said: “There’s no big guy involved here. I was just testing you. . . . There’s no ten grand to give nobody.” At the end of the meeting, Ead asked Freitas to walk him to his car. In the parking lot, unaware that Freitas was wearing a body wire, Ead described the woman’s call accusing Freitas of being with the FBI. Freitas laughed it off, joking that he was really working for the CIA. But later, as he and Aiken discussed the conversation, they knew that Mr. Freon’s work was finished.
At dawn on April 28, 1999, fifty FBI agents from Providence and Boston assembled in offices in downtown Providence, within sight of City Hall. They were armed with warrants to search several city offices for records, as well as Pannone’s home and Ead’s office. The agents awaited Dennis Aiken’s orders.
The next move would be up to David Ead.
CHAPTER TEN
Toads in the Basement
David Ead’s eyes narrowed as he steered his battered brown Cadillac through the early-morning traffic on Manton Avenue and spotted the strange white car parked in front of Doris Vending.
Two men in suits sat waiting in the front seat. It was seven o’clock, the hour that Ead usually arrived to open up his vending-machine business.
Since the early 1970s, Ead had operated Doris Vending at the busy intersection of Manton and Chalkstone Avenues. The building, surrounded by a chain-link fence and padlocked gates, blended into the neighborhood of sagging triple-deckers and used-car lots. Faded campaign signs from last November’s election still hung on the fence.
Ead noticed that the white car had no front license plate. He turned his Cadillac around to circle the block and approach the car from behind. The white car followed. Ead drove slowly around the block and parked. The white car parked. It had a Massachusetts plate. The two suits got out and walked over to Ead’s car.
One of the men smiled and said in a southern drawl, “What are you doing, trying to escape?”
Dennis Aiken and the other FBI agent slid into the backseat of Ead’s Cadillac. Aiken said that they knew about his corrupt dealings with Joe Pannone and Tony Freitas.
Ead denied it. Aiken showed him a photograph of Ead meeting with Freitas inside Doris Vending.
“How’d you get that picture?” asked Ead. “My office is like a bank.”
Aiken laughed.
Ead and the two agents went inside Doris Vending, through a dim storage room stuffed with old gumball and toy machines. In Ead’s office, decorated with autographed pictures of politicians, a photo of Ead with his Providence Police Academy Class of ’63, and pinups of Marilyn Monroe, Aiken laid it out.
The FBI had Ead on tape, discussing bribes and taking payoffs from Tony Freitas. They knew all about the money laundering and the phantom soda machines. And they knew about the ten thousand dollars that Ead had promised to deliver to Cianci for the vacant lots. Aiken told Ead that he wanted him to wear a wire and bring the ten thousand to “the man downtown.” Aiken had the money in his briefcase.
“I can’t do that,” Ead protested. “I can probably do that to Frank Corrente or Art Coloian, but not the mayor.”
Aiken handcuffed him and told him that if he didn’t cooperate, he would face prison and financial ruin. He could be charged with money laundering and lose his business. Ead asked them to take the cuffs off so they could talk. A gambler most of his life, Ead was stalling for time, trying to figure his next play. But this wasn’t Willie Marfeo’s crap game on Federal Hill or the blackjack table at Foxwoods Casino. Ead was confused. He thought Aiken was bluffing.
By now, Ead’s wife of thirty-four years, Doris, for whom the business was named, had arrived for work, too. In her youth, Doris had reminded Ead of Marilyn Monroe. Now she was ready to take a heart attack, as they say in Rhode Island. Another relative of Ead’s came in and started trying to reach his lawyer.
Ead and Aiken went back and forth, with Ead saying that he couldn’t do it and Aiken telling him that he was in serious trouble if he didn’t try.
Meanwhile, the agents who had massed in the FBI’s downtown offices waited for instructions. Aiken knew that he couldn’t keep fifty agents a secret in Providence for long. After half an hour, it was apparent to Aiken that Ead had slipped into denial. He wasn’t willing to cooperate. The handcuffs went back on.
Aiken signaled the other agents to move in on City Hall. He also flashed word to agents following Joseph Pannone, who had just dropped his wife off for work at a jewelry shop in Olneyville. Agents in three unmarked cars surrounded the seventy-six-year-old Pannone’s car as he drove down River Avenue. They handcuffed him and took him to his house, where they searched his bedroom and seized about sixteen hundred dollars in cash—including five hundred that Pannone had raised selling tickets to Cianci’s birthday fund-raiser party scheduled for the next evening at the Biltmore.
Then Aiken headed to Power Street, for his unannounced appointment with the mayor. It was about nine o’clock on a lovely spring morning, the kind of day that brings joggers out along Benefit Street. Here Cianci’s Renaissance was in full flower. The National Historic Preservation Trust had booked its 2001 national convention in Providence. Big celebrations were already being planned for September, when Cianci would become the longest-serving mayor in the city’s history. He was at the peak of his popularity, fueling speculation that he might run for governor or U.S. senator.
Aiken’s shadow fell across the mayor’s doorstep. He parked in Cianci’s impressive brick drive and rang the doorbell. Aiken knew it was early for the mayor—that Cianci wouldn’t normally appear at City Hall for at least another few hours. But Aiken wanted to be sure to catch him.
Their brief encounter was reminiscent of the times, years ago, that the young mayor and the young agent had met in the corridors of City Hall, when Cianci would ask why he was there and Aiken would answer that he was trying to root out corruption.
Cianci had no witty rejoinders this time. Aiken informed him that he was conducting an investigation and asked the mayor if he would like to answer a few questions. They looked at each other, the irresistible force and the immovable object. Cianci looked at Aiken’s tape recorder and said that he wasn’t talking into that thing. Then he bid Aiken farewell.
Continuing his rounds, Aiken drove down the hill to City Hall to supervise the FBI’s search for tax records. Now that Plunder Dome was out in the open, the mayor’s men were going to have to choose sides.
LATER THAT MORNING the chairman and vice chairman of the Providence Board of Tax Assessment Review found themselves holding an impromptu meeting—in a holding cell in the basement of the Providence Post Office on Kennedy Plaza.
Joe Pannone and David Ead were neighborhood guys, rooted in the gritty world of Providence ward politics. Jail was a new experience. Two young Hispanic men, arrested on drug charges, shared the roomy cell. One sat on a toilet, behind a partition.
Ead looked sullen and didn’t say much. Pannone chattered nervously.
“They got me, they got me,” said Pannone, lookin
g dazed and disoriented.
Ead told Pannone how Aiken had asked him to bring ten thousand dollars to the mayor. “I told him to screw,” said Ead.
“I’m glad you told him that,” answered Pannone. “The mayor’s a good guy. He doesn’t deserve that.”
Meanwhile, Cianci remained bunkered on Power Street, talking on the telephone to his lawyers and aides, tracking the day’s mad developments. FBI agents were seizing records from the tax assessor, the tax collector, the building inspector, the Planning Department, the School Department. City officials huddled in small knots in the corridors, as agents turned away confused citizens trying to pay their taxes. A few blocks away, at the city Planning Department, the director turned up his collar and donned sunglasses, to hide from the TV cameras, he joked. Another city worker, leaving a downtown café, deadpanned that he was going back to work to burn some records.
As the day wore on, there was still no sign of Cianci at City Hall. Finally, near the top of the six o’clock news, the mayor materialized for a news conference in his office and attempted to calm the hysteria.
“We’re on a roll in this city,” he said. “We are experiencing a renaissance.” Then he made a Monica Lewinsky joke: “You’re not going to find any stains on this jacket.”
Cianci had never been close friends with Ead and Pannone, but now he also sought to distance himself from them politically. Yes, he had appointed them to the tax board, and yes, “the buck stops here.” But Cianci had had little or nothing to do with the tax board, he said; he certainly never told Pannone or Ead what to do. Pannone was “an old gentleman I haven’t seen in years.” Ead was “a political animal,” a Democratic City Committee official whom the mayor had appointed in the interest of maintaining political harmony.
Although the rough-edged Pannone and Ead were out of Cianci’s league, the mayor relied on people like them for power. They were loyalists in Buddy’s Brigade, the ones who helped with the campaigns and lent financial support, part of the army of city workers, appointees, vendors, neighborhood folks, and supplicants who made Cianci a political untouchable. He commanded their loyalty with patronage and small favors, the mother’s milk of politics.
