by Mike Stanton
Mosca was an old-timer at the Rhode Island State House, a former legislative counsel who had boasted to Ead about how the bribery game was played. As a lobbyist for the insurance industry, Mosca said, he had paid off various legislative leaders. He described how he would have a relative in New York cash checks, or cash checks himself in small amounts from different bank accounts, to come up with the money for bribes. After handling the Ronci estate, Mosca had paid Ead and Pannone another bribe to lower the property taxes on his Chalkstone Avenue law office.
Not long after his arrest, Ead was driving down the Pleasant Valley Parkway when he passed Mosca’s stately brick home. His Cadillac with the special license plate LEG COUNSEL EMERITUS 1 was parked in the driveway. Mosca, a stooped man with thick glasses and receding white hair, was outside, watering his lawn. Ead pulled over to talk.
“Remember, there’s only ten tickets you bought,” said Ead. He was referring to their cover story, worked out in a previous meeting, that the ten thousand dollars Mosca had given Ead was for ten thousand-dollar Cianci fund-raising tickets.
Mosca told Ead that he had lied to the FBI and the grand jury about the bribe. Ead said that he was glad. Mosca hugged Ead and promised to take their secret “to the grave.”
In early December, a day or so after Joe Pannone pleaded guilty, a trembling Mosca showed up at Ead’s house. They got into Mosca’s car and went for a ride. Mosca said that he hated Pannone’s guts for ratting on them. Ead reassured Mosca that they would be okay, as long as they stuck to their story that the ten thousand had been for campaign tickets. Mosca became so nervous that he stopped the car. Ead told him to start driving again; he didn’t want them to be seen together.
Not long after that, Dennis Aiken flew to Mosca’s winter home in Florida to personally deliver a message: “We gotcha.” Mosca could either cooperate or become the next one indicted.
Back in Providence a short time later, Aiken saw Ead eating lunch with his lawyer, Jim O’Neil, in the atrium of the Fleet Center downtown. He nudged Ead playfully and said, “David, I got your boy, Mosca.” Ead didn’t say anything, but the color had gone out of his face.
On January 19, 2000, Mosca pleaded guilty to extortion charges and agreed to cooperate.
On Valentine’s Day, shortly before his trial was scheduled to begin, David Ead pleaded guilty to charges that he had arranged bribes with Buddy Cianci. The mayor’s identity was cloaked in prosecutor-speak—“E1,” for Executive 1—or described in Ead’s words as “the man downtown.”
But there was no doubt in Providence who that meant.
THE WEEK AFTER Operation Plunder Dome became public, Cianci went on the Imus show and scoffed at “Wonder Dome.”
An Imus sidekick teased that if the mayor couldn’t get a cameo on the TV show Providence, perhaps he could make America’s Most Wanted. Imus pointed out that the show was broadcasting that morning from Scranton, Pennsylvania—where the mayor “never put a cigarette out on somebody’s forehead.”
“You know, Imus, it’s nice to be with you, because you should entitle your show Mad About Everything,” quipped Cianci. The mayor recapped the investigation, which he said was focused on some low-level city officials accused of lowering people’s tax bills. Cianci pointed out that he wasn’t involved.
“You’re awfully quick to defend yourself,” needled Imus. “Nobody made any accusations.”
“No, no one made any accusations,” replied Cianci. “But I know you, Imus, because the first damn thing you’ll do is, you’ll be blaming me for bombing a school bus in Kosovo in about a minute.”
Imus asked Cianci if he’d still be there the next time the radio show broadcast from Providence.
“Unless I get appointed to run against you in the morning, you know, with another radio show or something,” said Cianci. The mayor noted that this was his tenth appearance on Imus. “I should get a pension for this.”
That night Cianci was inducted into the Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame. It was a vintage Rhode Island moment. One of the other inductees, posthumously, was the former mayor of Pawtucket Thomas P. McCoy, who had been one of Rhode Island’s most notorious political bosses in the 1920s and 1930s. The president of the Hall of Fame was Manuel Gorriaran, Jr., the first husband of Cianci’s ex-wife, Sheila. Cianci was introduced by his former aide Patrick Conley, who praised him as the greatest mayor in Providence history. Conley ignored Plunder Dome, calling Cianci’s induction “your ultimate vindication.” Conley didn’t say that he had helped orchestrate Cianci’s selection, in return for a promise from the mayor to appoint him to the Providence Heritage Harbor Commission, which was planning a waterfront museum, and to consider helping Conley’s troubled stepson, who had a drug problem, get back on the Providence police force. (The mayor followed through on the first promise but not the second.)
“It’s a very big night for me, because I’ve had a checkered career, and I’ve been up, down, and all around,” said Cianci.
The Plunder Dome investigation complicated Cianci’s future plans. The mayor had always thrived on challenges, and his easy reelection in 1998 had felt anticlimactic. Privately, he had begun to struggle with the idea of a life after City Hall. The long nights and endless weekends packed with public appearances were gruelling, despite his remarkable energy and stamina. Behind the public bravado was a gnawing loneliness, a void that Cianci sought to fill with his job and with late nights of carousing and a string of girlfriends. Aides joked about his whirlwind affairs; he once flew to a Caribbean island with one woman, then left her and met another woman on another island. In Providence, there were occasions when one woman would be leaving his house or boat as another one was arriving.
“There’s gotta be a life out there,” he would later reflect. “And the life can’t be every day being consumed by this office, which I love very much.”
As much as Cianci loved being mayor—was addicted to the power and the pomp and the celebrity, the ability to make things happen, the turnaround in Providence’s fortunes—he was pushing sixty, and had been doing this for most of his adult life. He was the longest-serving active mayor in the country among cities with populations of 100,000 or more. And in September, on his 6,584th day in office, Cianci became Providence’s longest-serving mayor ever. The milestone made Cianci more aware of his place in history—and of his mortality.
Cianci liked to compare himself to the previous record holder, nineteenth-century mayor Thomas A. Doyle. A self-styled maverick Republican, Doyle had taken office near the end of the Civil War, thanks to a split in the Democratic party. He had lived on Benefit Street, a block from Cianci’s house, and was known as a charismatic, energetic mayor who feuded with the City Council. Doyle was voted out of office in 1869 after being criticized for, among other things, extravagance with city funds—only to make a triumphant comeback a year later. He oversaw the construction of City Hall, the development of Roger Williams Park, the formation of a professional police department, and the creation of a state-of-the-art sewage system. During Doyle’s eighteen-year tenure, Providence doubled in wealth and population. Doyle died in office, after suffering a cerebral hemorrhage while horseback riding.
On September 23, 1999, as Cianci hosted a dinner for visiting Italian artists and artisans from Florence, aides with laptop computers tuned in to the official NASA clock to mark the exact time that Doyle had expired, at 9:26 P.M., on his 6,584th day in office. When the moment came, the guests raised their glasses of Italian sparkling wine in a toast to the new reigning longest-serving mayor, Buddy Cianci.
In the early 1990s Cianci had told a city councilwoman that he wanted to be “mayor for life.” Now, as the decade drew to a close, he wasn’t so sure. He contemplated life as an elder statesman, writing his memoirs, traveling, lecturing—maybe another radio talk show. He formed a nonprofit organization, the Vincent A. Cianci Jr. Library & Archive, to raise money for an urban-research center and think tank. The idea was to merge his marinara-sauce scholarship fund with the researc
h-center fund, providing a pool of money to support his various endeavors—and his own continuing reign as Providence’s Buddy emeritus.
But could Buddy walk away? And would Plunder Dome allow him to leave on his terms?
Cianci’s emotions welled up one August day as he spoke to his longtime secretary, Carol Agugiaro, who was retiring. Agugiaro had been with him from the beginning, first in the attorney general’s office, when he was a prosecutor, and then through the roller-coaster rides of Buddies I and II.
A trim, pleasant woman, Agugiaro could still remember Cianci’s first inauguration day, in 1975, when his eyes shone with the excitement of a child on Christmas morning. There was a sense of family then. Cianci was kind and funny. He would talk to anyone, from corporate executives to Jimmy the Balloon Man, a retarded denizen of downtown who would wander in for a cup of coffee. Agugiaro had witnessed the growing tension in the office, the nonstop power struggles and political battles, the mayor’s rages, his disintegrating family life. She had fielded the phone calls from Sheila, begging her to make sure Buddy came home for Nicole’s birthday party. She had seen it all come apart, with the mayor’s felony conviction, and then watched him put it all back together, with his amazing comeback.
Sitting outside the mayor’s door in the nineties, Agugiaro had seen Cianci’s visions materialize in the Providence Renaissance, and his dark excesses consume him. She had handled his travel arrangements and taken the angry phone calls, like the time the phone in his hotel room in Miami didn’t work, and he called on his cell phone, screaming at her to call the front desk to fix it. She had seen the girlfriends come and go, and had listened to him pour his heart out after Wendy Materna left him. She had seen the emptiness underlying the larger-than-life public persona, the man who, if he was sitting in his office at night, before going out, needed someone else to be there.
Agugiaro had also seen the corruption investigators come and go. In the 1980s, a state police detective asked her if she’d ever seen anyone carrying a bag or satchel into the mayor’s office. “You mean with money sticking out?” she asked derisively.
She had been one of the first people the FBI visited in the days after the raid on City Hall, in the spring of 1999. Two agents had walked into the mayor’s office one morning and flipped their badges, just like in the movies. They knew where she sat and how to pronounce her name. They all went into Ronnie Glantz’s old office, next to the mayor’s. As staffers walked by the open door and gawked, the agents quizzed Agugiaro about people’s comings and goings, and the mayor’s contacts with David Ead and Joe Pannone. Someone called Cianci at home to alert him.
That summer, Agugiaro put in her notice that she was retiring. She had worked in City Hall for twenty-four years and was burned out. It was time to enjoy her family and grandchildren. On her last day, August 6, she and Cianci spoke in the mayor’s anteroom.
“I can’t believe you’re leaving,” he said.
Cianci gave her some advice about stocks and investments, then grew somber.
“You’re doing the right thing,” he told her. “I’m so tired of this. I’m tired of having to go to the opening of an envelope. I’m getting run-down. I’m sick of kissing little old ladies who spit all over you.”
Cianci envied Agugiaro for having a family to go home to. “What do I have?” he said. “Nothing.”
But Cianci also found it hard to let go of the office. If he left, he told Agugiaro, he would miss his city cell phone, the limousine, the police protection.
Cianci hugged Agugiaro good-bye and walked back into his office.
CIANCI HAD OTHER things on his mind in the summer of 1999. The Plunder Dome grand jury had widened its investigation to examine the mayor’s membership in the University Club, a private East Side preserve of Providence’s movers and shakers.
Perched near the foot of College Hill, overlooking the historic First Baptist Church, the University Club was steeped in tradition. Founded in 1899 for “literary, scientific, artistic and social purposes,” its first directors included the governor of Rhode Island, the president of Brown University, and the Episcopal bishop of Rhode Island. Dignitaries from Walter Camp, father of American college football, to Bill Clinton had visited the handsome brick mansion on Benefit Street, which stood on the site of an old burial ground reputed to be haunted by ghosts.
Cianci had applied for a University Club membership in the 1970s, after he became mayor. His sponsors included John Chafee and two members of the Rhode Island Supreme Court. But the club buried his application. The snub was more political than ethnic—one of the leading anti-Cianci members was Edmund Mauro, a successful Italian-American businessman who had been a big Joe Doorley supporter. Still, the rejection stung. He recruited politically influential friends, such as Herbert DeSimone, the former Rhode Island attorney general, and business leader Bruce Sundlun, a future Rhode Island governor, to lobby on his behalf, to no avail.
Living just a few blocks away, Cianci was reminded of his rejection whenever he drove by and saw the white flag with the club’s crest fluttering in the breeze. An aide recalls driving by with him during the 1990 campaign, and Cianci muttering: “Those fucking guys. I’m gonna show them. I’ll be the mayor again, and they’re going to have to answer to me.”
After Cianci regained office, the president of the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce, James Hagan, made discreet inquiries on Cianci’s behalf. But by now, attitudes toward Cianci had hardened in the wake of his corrupt first administration. A few years later, word got back to Cianci that the club had hired comedian Charlie Hall and members of his Ocean State Follies troupe to perform at its Christmas party. One actor, a Cianci look-alike, had come in pretending to be the mayor and brought the official greetings of the city, drawing a huge laugh. Cianci’s rejection was common knowledge among club members.
Then, in the summer of 1998, the club embarked on a million-dollar renovation of its nearly two-hundred-year-old home. The job required permits from the City of Providence. One day near the end of July, Cianci was going through his mail when he glanced at the agenda for the city’s Building Board of Review. The University Club was on the docket, seeking routine construction variances.
A vengeful mayor exploded. He called the city’s building inspector and two members of the building board and told them that he wanted the variances rejected. When the board met on July 30, he dispatched a trusted aide, deputy city solicitor Patricia McLaughlin, to the meeting. Although the club’s architects had been meeting for months with the building inspector and believed everything was on track, a handful of key variances were rejected when the board met.
Afterward, board member Steven Antonson and building inspector Ramzi Loqa went into Loqa’s office and called Cianci to report the rejection. Antonson told Cianci that the rejection was going to cost the club $250,000. “Well, that is because of fucking Mauro,” retorted Cianci.
Cianci wasn’t finished with the University Club. When the club appealed the city’s decision to the state building board, the mayor called Loqa from his boat on Block Island and ordered Loqa not to miss the meeting. He promised him a 10 percent raise if he succeeded in blocking the club. “Make sure you go,” barked Cianci. “No excuses. No vacation, no sick leave. You have to go.”
The club won at the state level. Cianci vowed to appeal all the way to the Rhode Island Supreme Court. That would keep the club shuttered for months and jeopardize a bank loan that club officials had taken out to pay for the renovations.
The club’s leaders tried to make peace. On August 18, 1998, two club officers came to Cianci’s office. One leader, Alan Gelfuso, stuck a Cianci campaign bumper sticker on the back of his suit, hoping to lighten the mood. The other, club president Jerry Sansiveri, had a letter of apology for the club’s past treatment of the mayor—including the 1996 Christmas skit, which Sansiveri blamed on “the guest comedian.”
Rather than appeasing Cianci, the letter set him off. He raged and cursed. He vowed to have the police ticket ca
rs outside the club “all night and all day.” He demanded that Eddie Mauro, who had blackballed him in the seventies, be thrown out. He also threatened to yank the club’s liquor license and turn it into a “BYOB club”—bring your own bottle. When he wanted to speak to the city’s liquor-board chairman, who was legally blind, Cianci shouted, “Get the blind man on the phone.” As he screamed at the club leaders, Frank Corrente stood behind the mayor’s right shoulder, motioning wildly for them to leave.
Cianci pointed out that the letter they had brought was the first official communication he had received in more than two decades concerning his rejection. “How long does Emily Post say it should take to answer a letter?” he asked. “Two, three weeks?”
Gelfuso said that things had changed and that the mayor should consider becoming a member. Cianci swore that he wanted no part of the club. Then he uttered what could pass as a proverb for Providence: “Be careful how you act. The toe you stepped on yesterday may be connected to the ass you have to kiss today.”
Shortly thereafter, the mayor obtained a University Club membership directory. After a meeting in his office to discuss Providence tourism, Cianci went through the book with Jim Hagan from the Chamber of Commerce. It was like taking a trip through your high school yearbook, Hagan later recalled, as Cianci offered running commentary: “This guy’s nice. . . . This guy’s a jerk. . . . This guy’s a moron.”
Early in September, the University Club’s Board of Governors voted to offer Cianci an honorary lifetime membership—only the second such membership the club had ever extended. (The first had gone to a Catholic cleric.) Some members objected, feeling that it was a shakedown. But Gelfuso argued that they had better make peace with the mayor if they hoped to reopen. Those opposed skipped the meeting, since a unanimous vote was required.
On September 11, 1998, Sansiveri returned to the mayor’s office and presented him with a letter informing him of his membership. As an honorary member, he would not have to pay any dues or membership fees, though he would be responsible for meals. The mayor seemed pleased and asked if the membership was for him personally or for the office of mayor. It was for him personally, as long as he lived. Six days later, the city dropped its fight against the University Club. McLaughlin told Loqa that the battle was over—the club had given Cianci a membership. The club reopened that fall.
