by Mike Stanton
A deeply religious man, Rose worshiped at the Mount Hope Community Baptist Church and approached his job with a missionarylike zeal that bordered on arrogance. He alienated defense lawyers in a major drug-trafficking case by telling them, “You’re in my house now.” Later he and one of the lawyers nearly came to blows. During Rosemary Glancy’s trial, her defense lawyer, Kevin Bristow, told the jurors that he wasn’t going to “bounce around” like Rose. Spinning and hopping around the courtroom, modulating his voice from a roar to a whisper, pointing an accusing finger in the trembling Glancy’s face, Rose spoke passionately in his closing argument about the toll of corruption on honest government and equal opportunity. Afterward, he teased Bristow, “You didn’t like my Chuck Berry?”
Smart and flamboyant, favoring bow ties that complemented his scholarly round wire glasses, Rose had a flair for zeroing in on the pertinent fact or incriminating detail that would stick in a juror’s mind. In one case he seized on the fact that the defendant had hidden drugs in a child’s room, in a box of Grizzly Graham cookies.
As Providence’s first black assistant U.S. attorney in three decades, Rose was always conscious of his position and his race. Whenever he walked into a courtroom, he felt as though he were the one being judged. He urged other minorities in law enforcement to serve as role models and spoke to inner-city youths about overcoming obstacles. Rose exhorted a banquet of minority police officers: “Know your history. Take responsibility for your role in history.”
Rose discovered the racial divide when he was in the third grade, in the 1960s, being bused from South Providence to the Italian North End; one day angry whites rocked his school bus and shouted, “Nigger, go home!” As a prosecutor, he decorated his office with an autographed picture of Muhammad Ali, the front page of a nineteenth-century abolitionist newspaper, and a yellowed legal document settling a lawsuit with the payment of a male slave.
Sometimes he wondered if he was doing the right thing, prosecuting black criminals from his old neighborhood for a government that imprisoned a disproportionate number of minorities. One of his first cases involved a seventy-three-year-old crack dealer who had peddled drugs from a tenement next door to where Rose once lived. After the man was convicted and sentenced to fifteen years in prison—more than a suburban white drug dealer might have gotten—an anguished Rose drove by his old neighborhood. He saw two little girls his daughter’s age, sitting on the front porch of the crack dealer’s tenement, and knew that he had made the right choice.
When Dennis Aiken needed a prosecutor to work with in Operation Plunder Dome, early in Tony Freitas’s undercover work, he had been happy when the U.S. attorney’s office suggested Rose. Aiken thought that Rose was gutsy, unafraid of a tough case. When Aiken first pitched Plunder Dome, Rose had some concerns. Taking on Buddy Cianci in Providence wouldn’t be easy. There would be a lot of noise, tremendous pressure. When it was over, Aiken told Rose, “Somebody’s gonna leave town.” But as Rose watched the tapes of Freitas and Pannone, he saw the potential. This was the kind of case he lived for. “Let’s go,” he told Aiken. “Let’s play.”
As Rose helped shepherd the undercover phase of the investigation, he would run into Cianci around town, at various events or nightspots. A few days before Operation Plunder Dome had become public, in 1998, the mayor had seen Rose at a banquet of the minority police officers’ association at the Biltmore. Cianci, who knew that Rose shared his taste for fine cigars, had made a big show of presenting Rose with an Ovo, a Dominican cigar. Rose, knowing that the FBI was about to execute search warrants at City Hall, turned the cigar over to Aiken and filed an internal report documenting his contact with the target of an investigation.
Now, three years after he had begun building the case against the mayor, just before court closed for the day on April 2, 2001, Rose’s work was finally unveiled—a ninety-seven-count indictment of Cianci and his alleged confederates. The indictment reduced the mayor’s well-worn nickname to a moblike alias: “Vincent A. Cianci Jr., a/k/a ‘Buddy.’ ”
As word of the mayor’s indictment flashed across Providence and beyond, a private lawyer who was Rose’s best friend, Casby Harrison, was leaving work when a man approached him outside his office in South Providence. The man identified himself as a private detective, working for Frank Corrente. He was investigating the leak to Channel 10 of the video of Corrente taking money.
The detective asked Harrison if Rose had ever shown him any of the secret Plunder Dome videotapes. Harrison had seen a tape the previous spring—the same one that had been leaked to Channel 10. He and his wife had stopped by Rose’s house after dinner one night and found him at work, reviewing a Plunder Dome tape. Rose had invited Harrison to watch, curious as to his reaction. But the tape was under a court-ordered seal. This being Providence, where a secret is something you tell one person at a time, word had gotten back to the defense camp. Harrison, stunned by the detective’s questions, refused to say anything. Instead, he went home and warned Rose.
A chagrined Rose knew that he would have to confess his transgression to his superiors, and to the judge and the defense. He could face court sanctions for his lapse in judgment. In the biggest case of his career, Rose had given Cianci an opening to counterattack. The indictment was only a few hours old, and already the pressure on the prosecutor had been ratcheted up. When Rose told Rhode Island attorney general Sheldon Whitehouse, the former U.S. attorney who had hired him, Whitehouse said, “You have given the world’s biggest ball buster a giant nutcracker.”
BUDDY CIANCI WAS also feeling the pressure. The mayor was agitated as he sat in his private conference room, with its mahogany bar and richly varnished wainscoting. Outside, reporters and television cameras waited in his office. It was Monday night. A few hours earlier, after his indictment had become public, the mayor’s aides had received 911 pages to rush back to City Hall. Now, in the remobilized Cianci War Room, the mayor chain-smoked as he went over his statement with his lawyer, Richard Egbert, and his longtime confidant Charles Mansolillo.
Finally, it was showtime. The mayor strode into his office and stood behind the lectern on his desk, under the white glare of the television lights.
“I’ve had better Mondays,” he said, an echo of his line, following his indictment nearly two decades earlier for the assault of Raymond DeLeo, that he’d had better Tuesdays. The mayor waved the ninety-seven-page indictment defiantly and thundered, “Ninety-seven times zero is zero.” The government’s case was “based on self-serving statements by criminals seeking to save their own skins.” Cianci vowed that the indictment would not deter him from doing his job, including a date at the White House on Thursday with President Bush for a summit of American mayors on “the New American City.”
The room was packed with reporters and with Cianci supporters, who lent it the air of a church revival. Robert Farrow, an African-American Methodist bishop who called himself the mayor’s spiritual adviser, stood behind him, chanting, “Amen.”
“I said before there are no stains on this jacket, and there are still no stains on this jacket,” he said. “I’m going to fight this as far as I can. I’m going to go all the way to the Supreme Court, to The Hague, wherever they want to go.”
Richard Egbert, Cianci’s lawyer, stepped to the mayor’s podium and declared of the indictment: “This is the government’s best shot. They won’t get to control the way the case is tried.”
A television reporter asked Egbert if he would seek a change of venue to another city because of the intense negative publicity. It was one of the rare moments that the taciturn Egbert smiled. “Who would want to leave this wonderful city?” said Egbert. “Who better to judge the mayor than a jury of his peers?”
Afterward, away from the cameras in the privacy of his conference room, Cianci slumped in his chair, lit the first of three Merits in ten minutes, and inhaled deeply. His voice dropped to a hush and his eyes reddened as he described a phone call from his daughter, Nicole, who cried when she heard abou
t the indictment.
“Yeah, it hurts,” Cianci told Karen Lee Ziner, a Providence Journal reporter. “The first day is the toughest. Then it gets better.”
Thirty minutes later Cianci headed up to the tony Oyster Bar, one of his regular haunts on Federal Hill, packed tonight with his people. The owner, Frank DiBiase, was a good friend, his restaurant the beneficiary of a start-up loan from the city.
This was where the mayor would fight the government’s racketeering case—not just in the courtroom, but here, amid the friends of Cianci and the fat of the Providence Renaissance. Here, in the long, narrow Oyster Bar with its stamped tin ceilings and linen tablecloths, live lobster tank and waiters hurrying past with trays of stuffed oysters swimming in butter and bread crumbs. Holding a cigarette in one hand and a snifter of brandy—“cough medicine”—in the other, Cianci drew strength from the steady stream of supporters who shook his hand and kissed his cheeks.
The day after his indictment, Cianci received an e-mail from Laurel Casey, who wrote: “You’re the hero of the community. I’m plugging for you.” She and her friend Deborah Zaki, the wife of a wealthy East Side doctor, went to a print shop and ordered several hundred FREE BUDDY bumper stickers. But the next day Zaki’s husband was found murdered, shot to death in his bedroom. Debbie Zaki, who had cited spousal abuse in an earlier but never-finalized divorce proceeding, quickly emerged as a leading suspect. The state police questioned Casey, who had been her yoga instructor. Mrs. Zaki was never charged, and the murder remained unsolved. She and Casey were so distressed that they never picked up the FREE BUDDY bumper stickers. Casey did hang a LEAVE BUDDY ALONE sign in the window of her apartment; shortly after that she was evicted by her landlord, an Old World Italian man who thought that she was a prostitute because of the slinky evening gowns she wore for her cabaret shows. She found a new place and continued to worry about Buddy. “If he leaves, I leave,” she vowed. “I can’t imagine the city without him.”
For Cianci, especially in times of adversity, the show must go on. The next day, he flew to Washington for the annual gathering of the U.S. Conference of Mayors, where he was to moderate a seminar entitled “The American City: Competitive Assets and Investment Opportunities.”
Trailed by a flock of Providence reporters and camera crews, Cianci was the center of attention. His fellow mayors gave him a warm and sympathetic welcome.
“People get indicted in this business,” shrugged Oakland mayor Jerry Brown. “Buddy’s a good guy.”
Discussing Cianci with a colleague, Akron mayor Donald Plusquellic said, “You know, the worst scumbag drug dealer in Akron that’s been busted and convicted twenty-seven times is still entitled to the presumption of innocence the twenty-eighth time he’s arrested.”
When Cianci saw the mayor of Reno, Jeff Griffin, he joked, “Hey, they still got those prostitution houses out there?”
“Six blocks from the state capital,” replied Griffin.
Later, Griffin said: “I heard they [the FBI] were sneaking around there in City Hall. . . . You do this job and you’re going to get people mad at you—sometimes the feds.”
Meanwhile, at the White House, Bush officials were deflecting questions about whether Cianci was still welcome to join the other mayors with the president in the Rose Garden. When Bush’s chief of staff, Andrew Card, heard of the indictment, he declared brightly, “Buddy!”
“His career has been a roller coaster at other times, and I guess this is one of those roller-coaster moments,” said Card, who had known Cianci since Card’s days as a Massachusetts state legislator in the 1970s.
Cianci insisted that he would go to the White House to meet Bush, just as he’d met Bill Clinton and Bush’s father and Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Carter and Gerald Ford.
But other mayors pulled him aside privately and said, “Hey, don’t embarrass the president.” Finally, Cianci got the message. He skipped the White House reception and left Washington early on Thursday, explaining that he had to get home early for his arraignment the next day.
The following morning the mayor waded through one of the biggest forests of cameras and microphones outside a Providence courthouse since Newport socialite Claus von Bulow’s 1985 murder trial.
A television reporter promptly handed Cianci a setup line. “Are you concerned about the media circus?” he asked.
“What, are you calling yourself a clown?” the mayor deadpanned.
Cianci pleaded not guilty and was released on a fifty-thousand-dollar unsecured bond. The judge gave the mayor the standard instructions to refrain from excessive use of alcohol and the use of illegal drugs. Then Cianci reported to the U.S. marshal’s office, where he was fingerprinted and forced to remove his toupee for a mug shot.
The Monday after his indictment Cianci launched his counterattack. That day Rose sent Judge Lagueux and the defense lawyers a letter acknowledging his mistake with the videotape. Rose said that he had also shown the tape to his sister, to elicit her reaction, but that he had not given any of the tapes to anyone, including Channel 10.
That night, Cianci and Art Coloian called reporters at home to tip them off to the news, even providing Rose’s home address and phone number and urging them to hurry over because “the TV trucks are rolling.” It was a time-honored tactic that the mayor employed in his dealings with the media; through the years, many a reporter had received a late-night phone call from Cianci, who would bark the reporter’s last name in a gravelly voice, then announce, “This is your mayor.” Often he would have a tip regarding one of his enemies, prefaced by “You didn’t get this from me . . .”
The story about Rose and the tape was all over that night’s eleven o’clock news and on the front page of the next morning’s Providence Journal. Rose’s lapse in judgment didn’t rise to the level of misconduct that would jeopardize the government’s case, but it did give Cianci an opening to turn the tables on his accusers.
On Tuesday morning the mayor went on the Don Imus show and ripped into the prosecution. “When I was a prosecutor, I never showed tapes that were sealed and sacrosanct,” Cianci told Imus. “It’s outrageous. It’s cuckoo.”
Imus agreed. The mayor milked it. “I guess Blockbuster’s was closed that night,” he quipped. “He had a little party at his house. I wonder if he sold popcorn.”
Since his indictment, Cianci pointed out, Rose had been caught showing secret tapes, the judge had recused himself (after having called Cianci corrupt), and the government’s star witness, Tony Freitas, was in jail.
“Absolutely, not guilty,” Cianci pleaded before Imus and a national radio audience. “It’s like Mario Puzo wrote that indictment. Awful . . . these people come off as holier than thou and they are the leaders of the free world, and, by the way, when you go against the United States of America, the federal government, they bring out the FBI, the IRS, the Coast Guard, the National Guard, the Navy SEALs. And there you are, alone, fighting this stuff.”
The mayor also went after Dennis Aiken, the lead FBI agent. In the affidavit supporting his search warrant, Aiken had acknowledged having been censured in 1982 as part of an internal FBI investigation for lying about signing an internal document on behalf of another employee. Aiken later called it a mistake that was “stupid” and “embarrassing” but noted that he was promoted the following week. On Imus, Cianci inflated the matter, saying that Aiken had signed an affidavit admitting that he had obtained money under false pretenses, adding, “This is what you’re fighting here.”
Aiken, who was driving to work, heard Cianci on the radio and was furious. Walking past City Hall to his office a short time later, Aiken saw Cianci’s staff administrator, Christopher Nocera, and told him to deliver a message to “your piece-of-shit mayor”—to stop lying about him on the radio, or else Aiken might sue.
Richard Egbert wrote to the U.S. attorney to condemn Aiken’s behavior, and released copies of the letter to the press. Cianci took the opportunity to further embellish his accusations against Aiken, telling a Pro
vidence Journal reporter that the FBI agent had signed an affidavit saying that he lied—“whether it was about money, women, I don’t know. . . . We go from tapes that are being released, private showings, sneak previews, now we go to witnesses being intimidated on the streets,” fumed Cianci. “Don’t forget, this man was armed.”
Was the mayor suggesting that Aiken had brandished his weapon?
“I didn’t say that,” shouted Cianci. “He was armed! . . . He’s an armed agent of the federal government. And it had nothing to do with the case. It had to do with him personally.”
Of course, with Cianci, everything was personal. But his actions also served to spin the potential jury pool, deflect attention from the racketeering charges, and put the focus on the government’s tactics. Shortly after the case became public, the mayor had publicly criticized Aiken, then sent word to the FBI agent, through an intermediary, that he was sorry and shouldn’t have done it, according to Aiken. The agent tried to ignore Cianci. He viewed it as part of the mayor’s strategy to discredit him and the FBI and discourage potential witnesses from cooperating. But when he heard Cianci on Imus, he and his family were upset. Cianci, Aiken reflected later, “likes to play head games, and I wouldn’t play his head games. I bit once, and I shouldn’t have.”
