by Mike Stanton
Ironically, one of the contractors on the University Club renovations that summer was Tony Freitas, who did the ventilation system. When the job was delayed, the general contractor alluded to some problems with City Hall. That fall, in a taped conversation in Freitas’s office, Rosemary Glancy confided that Cianci had also ordered a city appraiser to give the University Club a hard look. “The mayor’s on their ass,” said Glancy. “He must have got a bad dinner over there.” Dennis Aiken had also heard about the mayor’s membership from another source. The following spring, when Plunder Dome became public, the FBI seized records from the building inspector and began questioning people.
One of the first people questioned was Ramzi Loqa, the building inspector from Baghdad. Raised in the repressive society of Iraq, Loqa had come to the United States in the early 1970s to study engineering and later went to work for the city. A timid man with a bad hairpiece, he had grown accustomed to Cianci’s belittling and abusive behavior. Fearing the mayor more than the FBI, he denied that Cianci had pressured him. Later, Loqa said, he filled Cianci in on how he had held back, and the mayor sounded pleased. But then Aiken came back to Loqa and called him a liar. After talking it over with his wife and his lawyer, Loqa agreed to cooperate.
Steve Antonson was also feeling the pressure from both sides.
Shortly after the FBI raid on City Hall, Antonson was sitting at home watching the television news when he saw Cianci interviewed about the University Club. The mayor denied having spoken to anyone on the building board about the club’s variances prior to the vote. Antonson leaped up and said, “Oh, shit.” An expressive man, he began talking aloud to himself. “I know he talked to me. What the hell is he lying for?”
Antonson had come a long way since joining the mayor’s 1990 comeback campaign, hoping to learn about politics. After the election, he recalled, Cianci had seemed stunned when Antonson turned down a City Hall job. “What’s wrong with you?” Cianci demanded. “Why the fuck did you get involved with me?”
“All I wanted to do is learn about politics,” he replied.
“You mean to tell me you don’t want anything?”
Antonson explained that he made more money as an electrician. Cianci seemed offended. After he regained City Hall, Cianci helped Antonson’s wife get a job as a police dispatcher—one that she was quick to point out she was qualified for. When the mayor saw Antonson, he’d say: “You’re gonna work for me, Antonson. I’m gonna get you.” Early in 1992, Antonson received a call from the business agent for the electricians union, which assigned work, and was told that he was being moved to the Providence Civic Center as the chief electrician, on the mayor’s demand. Antonson protested that he didn’t want to go, but his union bosses told him he had to; they didn’t want to anger Cianci. Shortly after he started, Antonson saw Cianci there. “See, Antonson,” the mayor said, “I told you you’d work for me. This is my building, you know.”
Antonson renewed the relationship that had developed during the ’90 campaign. Cianci would show up for Civic Center events and sit on a couch outside the operations office, in the concrete tunnel beneath the stands, bantering with Antonson and the other workers. When the National Figure Skating Championships came to town, along with the ABC Sports television cameras, Cianci asked Antonson, “Whaddya think about a TV at my seat? So if the camera hits me, I can watch myself.” Antonson installed the television, then watched as the mayor wreaked havoc. Spectators complained that the TV was too loud. Figure-skating officials complained about the mayor’s late, attention-getting arrivals, which distracted the skaters.
One night, Cianci asked Antonson if he would like to become his personal electrician. The previous one, Caesar Brown, had died. “Do you want to fill his shoes?” asked Cianci. “They’re big shoes to fill.” Antonson began doing odd jobs, sometimes at odd hours, at the mayor’s house and on the mayor’s boat, always for free. There were funny, aggravating times. Antonson went over to the house on Christmas Eve to fix the lights on Cianci’s Christmas tree. He endured the middle-of-the-night phone calls from the lonely, obsessive man who would call repeatedly, saying, “Antonson, now, you know, my lights are not on. When are you going to fix them?” Often, the air-conditioning ducts on Cianci’s boat would become clogged with seawater. One Sunday morning, Antonson received a panicky call from Cianci on his boat, anchored in Jamestown. “There’s smoke!” wailed Cianci. “I can’t see.” Antonson told him to put out the fire and promised to come down after church. Cianci asked how long that would take.
“Obviously, you haven’t been in a while,” replied Antonson.
“Don’t fuck with me, Antonson. Never mind church.”
Antonson skipped church and hurried to Jamestown to rewire the boat’s electrical system. When the problem was fixed, Cianci beamed. “That’s my electrician!” The mayor was always after him to go for a cruise, but Antonson, who was easily seasick and thought the boat was “a piece of shit,” put him off. Cianci usually kept the boat anchored at a marina in Warren; sometimes he would have his city limousine brought down, so that he could decide whether to return to Providence by land or by sea.
Cianci also appointed Antonson to replace the late Caesar Brown on the Providence Building Board of Review. The mayor told him that it was a very important board, dealing with safety issues. And, “you’re gonna get paid for doing nothing.” Plus, free Blue Cross. “You have to pay attention,” Cianci told him. Antonson agreed, on one condition. If it was a safety issue, he didn’t want to get any phone calls from someone looking for a favor. He told the mayor: “I’m an honest guy. I’ll serve as long as I can do the honest thing.” Cianci agreed.
The mayor had kept his word until the summer of 1998, when he called about the University Club. Antonson didn’t understand why Cianci was so worked up, but he called repeatedly. “Remember, I appoint people to this board. You get Blue Cross. You get a check. You always said safety was important. Well, this is it.” Still, Antonson never thought that what he was doing was illegal; he didn’t believe that the mayor would put him in that position.
The following spring, after watching Cianci lie on television, Antonson saw him at a Providence Bruins hockey game. The mayor was standing behind the glass near one of the goals, where he liked to harass an American Hockey League goal judge who had once been his police driver. Without turning around, Cianci rocked back on his heels and said, “If the FBI asks you anything about the University Club, we never talked. Do you understand, Antonson? Loyalty.”
Not long after that, Dennis Aiken called. “You’re not a target, you’re a witness,” he said. Two days later, after two sleepless nights, Antonson put on a tie and walked into the FBI offices, passing through a door with a combination lock and a metal detector in a small reception room with photographs of America’s Ten Most Wanted criminals. Aiken showed him into a room with another agent, and began questioning him about the University Club. After ten minutes of evasive answers, Aiken blew up.
“Listen, kid,” he shouted. “Did you know obstruction of justice is five years? Do you want to go to jail for that piece-of-shit mayor? You’re a liar. Don’t ever cheat on your wife, because you can’t lie.”
Aiken turned to the other agent and asked, “Can he lie?” The agent replied, “He sucks as a liar.” Aiken said that they could tear up their notes and start over, or Antonson could keep playing games and take his chances. “My advice, if you don’t want to go to jail, is to start over. You’ve got a family. What’s wrong with you?”
Antonson relented and told them everything he knew about the University Club. As the agents explained extortion, Antonson realized that this could be the end of Buddy Cianci. Aiken said that they would need him to testify. Antonson felt relieved to get the truth out, but also scared about how the mayor and his cronies would react. He was even more petrified a month or so later, in August 1999, when Aiken brought him to testify before the grand jury in the federal courthouse opposite City Hall. Grasping him firmly by the arm, Aiken pu
lled Antonson into a waiting room holding about a dozen City Hall officials, who had been subpoenaed to produce records. Then Aiken pulled him out of the room and put him in another room, by himself.
“Do you know why I did that?” asked Aiken. “So all those people will see you. It will get back to him. It’ll kill him. All those little people are going to run back like little servants. So I know he’ll call you.”
Antonson didn’t share Aiken’s enthusiasm. “Oh my God,” he thought. “I’m a dead man.”
Sure enough, when he got home, there were messages from the mayor’s office. Antonson called Aiken, who came down to his house with a tape recorder. “Listen, we gotta record this,” the agent said. “Do you want your life back? We gotta get him on tape.”
Aiken told Antonson to tell Cianci that he had not yet testified; there had been a screwup and the feds wanted him to come back tomorrow. Standing by his kitchen sink in his house in suburban East Greenwich, Antonson dialed the mayor’s private line. Cianci quickly came on the line and began coaching Antonson on how to testify.
“Nobody ever talked to you about not giving them anything,” said Cianci. “That’s what I’m gonna tell them when I talk to them. . . . I never fucking talked to you once.”
Cianci reassured him that Ramzi Loqa had already talked to the FBI twice, and denied everything. When Antonson hesitated, Cianci said, “What, are you losing your balls now? . . . Don’t let those guys intimidate you. Don’t be a volunteer for the U.S. government.”
“No, I’m not,” replied Antonson.
“Who the fuck do they think they are?” growled Cianci.
As they spoke, Antonson realized that Cianci was intimidating him—and that he always had. Antonson sensed the disappointment in the mayor’s voice, and felt as though he had failed him. He listened as Cianci criticized the feds. “They operate with great deceit—and great trickery.”
Cianci told Antonson that he would take a lie-detector test. “By the way,” said Cianci in parting, “don’t volunteer anything.”
When Antonson hung up, his face was flushed; he felt drained and exhilarated. “My God,” said Aiken. “Does he do this to you all the time? He really intimidates you.”
The next day Antonson called back. Once again, the conversation was recorded. This time an agitated Antonson told Cianci that the FBI had shown him some of the Freitas tapes. The mayor responded, “I’m not on any tapes.”
“Mayor, I’m not gonna lie for you,” said Antonson. “I can’t.”
“I didn’t ask you to lie for me,” replied Cianci.
“I can’t. I mean, the shit they have is unreal.”
“Steven, Steven, I never asked you to lie for me,” said Cianci.
“You know, I’m an honest person . . . and it’s fucking me up . . . destroying my family. . . . I feel fucked.”
Cianci acknowledged that he had called him prior to the building-board meeting—but only to ask if the University Club was on the agenda, not to tell him how to vote. The conversation deteriorated quickly. Antonson was shouting and on the verge of tears. “You used my honesty!” he said.
Cianci, the canny ex-prosecutor, seemed to realize what was happening. “Did I ever ask you to change your vote on anything?” he asked.
“On what, Mayor?”
“On the University Club?”
“No, no, that night you called, you asked me to deny every goddamned fucking item,” replied Antonson.
“Oh, Steven, come on.”
“No, I can’t lie, Mayor.”
“Well, well, then don’t lie.”
Near the end of their conversation, Antonson was nearly sobbing.
“I got involved in frickin’ politics for the honesty of it,” he said.
“I totally agree,” said Cianci, reassuringly.
When he hung up this time, Antonson felt like he’d hurt Cianci. The mayor couldn’t stand people not liking him, and Antonson had rejected him.
Aiken smiled and said, “Steven, you got your life back. You really told the bastard off.”
A FEW WEEKS after his conversations with Antonson, Cianci got into a tussle with The Sopranos.
In anticipation of its season premiere, the producers of the hit HBO series were planning promotional events in twenty-three cities, including Providence. In September an HBO official contacted the mayor’s office, asking to purchase several cases of the Mayor’s Own Marinara Sauce. Cianci fired back a sharp letter refusing to have anything to do with The Sopranos. Although he had never seen the show, which depicted the life of a dysfunctional New Jersey Mafia family, the mayor bristled at what he considered its negative stereotyping of Italian-Americans.
One of the show’s writers and producers, Robin Green, was from Providence. In college she had double-dated with Junior Patriarca. The show’s creator, David Chase, also had a Providence connection: his grandmother Theresa Melfi had emigrated from Italy and lived in Providence before moving to New Jersey.
An HBO executive wrote to Cianci to point out that many prominent Italian-American politicans supported The Sopranos, including Alfonse D’Amato, Mario Cuomo, and Rudolph Giuliani. Cianci retorted that D’Amato and Cuomo had been voted out of office, and asserted that Giuliani, who had campaigned with Cianci on Federal Hill in 1998, did not endorse the show. The Sopranos event in Providence was canceled.
“For us to celebrate that in this city, after we’ve done all this work to rid ourselves of this image, doesn’t do us any public good,” said Cianci.
Besides, who needed The Sopranos when you had the real thing? In March 2000, federal prosecutors began playing tapes in the first Plunder Dome trial.
The trial offered the first public glimpses of the explosive Freitas tapes, including Joe Pannone’s comments that Cianci used Corrente as his bagman and how the mayor had schooled him in the art of bribery: “Never talk on the phone, never get a check, but get cash when you’re one-on-one.” The case involved charges that Pannone, David Ead, and Rosemary Glancy had conspired to lower Freitas’s property taxes for bribes. But Pannone and Ead had pleaded guilty, leaving Glancy to stand trial alone.
Glancy was not your typical corrupt public official, but she was a typical city worker. A heavyset woman with grayish hair that she usually wore swept back in a ponytail, she had worked at City Hall for twenty-six of her forty-seven years. She lived with her sister, who also worked for the city, in the house where they had grown up, in Mount Pleasant, a neighborhood of tidy middle-class homes inhabited by Irish and Italians. Two of her brothers were Providence police officers; another brother was a dispatcher for the Rhode Island State Police.
Glancy spent a lot of her free time in Muldowney’s Pub, where she tended bar, cheered on her beloved Boston Red Sox, and brought home-cooked meals on Christmas and Thanksgiving for patrons who had nowhere else to go. Located downtown on Empire Street, Muldowney’s was not like the yuppie fern bars or artsy cafés that had popped up as part of the Providence Renaissance. It was an old shot-and-beer joint that offered karaoke on Monday nights and that had, over the years, catered to the down-and-out. The bar stool beside the lottery machine belonged to a man from Mississippi named Paul, an itinerant carpenter who had gone blind in Providence in the early 1970s and just stayed. Marylana, a homeless woman who wore flowery hats, sipped vodka, and dragged on Marlboros, kept a live snake in her bosom and took afternoon naps in one of the booths. When she was found strangled and stabbed to death in Burnside Park one night, in front of the federal courthouse, her friends at Muldowney’s passed the hat and paid for a proper Christian burial, with a funeral mass at the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul.
This was Rosemary Glancy’s world. In 1993, she had been featured as one of The Providence Journal’s Christmastime “Good Folk,” for her charitable work with the homeless and people afflicted with spina bifida. After her indictment, her friends rallied to her support, throwing a time that drew more than two hundred people and raised more than five thousand dollars. A homeless man pressed o
ne hundred dollars in crinkled bills into her hand, and when she resisted, said: “Rosemary, when I was hungry, you always made sure I ate. At Christmas, when I was lost, you found me. You treated me like I was someone. Now it’s my time to help you.”
Glancy was also part of the “go along to get along” culture that had pervaded City Hall for decades. You followed orders, didn’t ask questions, looked the other way, and contributed to the mayor. As a lowly clerk in the 1970s, Glancy could remember being up for a five-dollar-a-week raise. Before she got it, she had to go into Cianci’s office and raise her right hand, in a perversion of the pledge of allegiance, and swear her loyalty to the mayor. In the 1990s, as the deputy assessor, she organized fund-raisers for Cianci, geared toward winning her brother John a promotion in the police department, where advancement was widely seen as being tied to political contributions.
Pannone enlisted Glancy in his corrupt tax-fixing schemes. She was the one who knew how to make the numbers work. She wasn’t taking the kind of money that Pannone and Ead were, but she wasn’t stupid. Pannone had called her “the fat girl,” the one who “bends” if he showed her “a little green.” He’d throw her fifty bucks here, a hundred there, and take her out to lunch; Andino’s, on Federal Hill, was a favorite spot.
Her lawyer, Kevin Bristow, an earnest ex-prosecutor, tried to paint Glancy’s conduct as more reflective of the political culture of City Hall than blatant corruption. Unlike Pannone and Ead, Glancy had not been caught on tape taking money. It was primarily the word of Pannone, a proven liar and cheat, that he had shared the bribe money with her. But unlike Pannone and Ead, Glancy couldn’t cut a deal with the feds because she had nothing to give up—she was, Bristow argued, “the smallest fish in the pond.” That was underscored when Bristow tried to call Pannone and Ead to testify at Glancy’s trial. Bristow wanted to attack their credibility and raise doubts that they had, in fact, passed bribe money along to Glancy. But although their plea agreements required them to testify for the government, it did not require them to testify for a defendant. Ead and Pannone both took the Fifth.
