by Mike Stanton
ON SEPTEMBER 11, 2001, Buddy Cianci was at home, talking by phone on a local radio talk show, when the second hijacked airliner crashed into the World Trade Center. Like millions of Americans, he flipped on his television to watch the unfolding horror of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.
The next day, in the confusing aftermath, the world spotlight shone briefly on Providence, where authorities searched an Amtrak train suspected of carrying terrorists.
Earlier, police had surrounded the Westin Copley Hotel in Boston, where a band of terrorists were believed to be holed up. In the confusing reports that followed, four suspects were reported to have boarded an Amtrak train bound for Washington.
Television cameras captured the drama live as the train was stopped and surrounded in Providence. Police cars and undercover cars swerved down Gaspee Street, blocking off the train station just beneath the glittering white marble dome of the State House. Shoppers carrying Nordstrom’s bags from the nearby Providence Place Mall gawked as more than fifty police officers swarmed into the station, some with bomb-sniffing dogs straining at their leashes.
At one point there was an unconfirmed report that one of the terrorists had slipped away from the train and was on the loose in Providence.
Into this pandemonium streaked the mayor’s black limousine, cutting through the blockade and screeching to a halt in front. Cianci stepped out and marched into the train station to take charge. A while later a squadron of police marched out with a terrified, bearded Sikh wearing a green turban. He was arrested for possession of a ceremonial dagger. They escorted him through an angry mob of cursing, spitting people. Meanwhile, Cianci went before the cameras and briefed the nation on the situation.
In the weeks that followed, Cianci embraced the war on terrorism to the exclusion of all else—especially nagging questions about Operation Plunder Dome. Appearing on the Sunday-morning Truman Taylor Show, Cianci was eager to talk about terrorism prevention. But when the questioning turned to Plunder Dome, the mayor showed a side that he rarely revealed in public. Sidestepping Taylor’s questions, Cianci pulled out some American flag pins and handed one to Taylor.
“See, I can’t believe that a popular man like you is here with a national crisis, and you don’t have a flag you’re wearing,” he said.
Taylor, a courtly, white-haired veteran broadcaster, gently persisted, and the mayor turned churlish.
“You don’t even wear a flag,” snapped Cianci. “I came here to assure people that we have task forces and everything else and you use it as a ploy to get me on to ask about Plunder Dome so your ratings go up and you get more for this show. . . . We have more people for brunch in my apartment than are watching.” Growing redder and redder, Cianci sneered: “Put the pin on, will you? Show you’re an American, at least.”
When Taylor asked Cianci if he intended to fight in court rather than resign and strike a plea bargain, the mayor’s eyebrows flared. “That’s what America is about, isn’t it? That’s what our liberties are about, our freedoms are about, presumption of innocence, those things that terrorists want to take away from us.”
By the end of the show, Cianci was out of control. “You think President Bush is going to sit back and not fight terrorists?” he asked. “You know something, they’ll never come here because they like you. You’re a terrorist.”
Two weeks after September 11, the mayor decided that it was time to go to Ground Zero.
One morning, the mayor’s limousine roared out of Providence, leading a convoy of six police cruisers with flashing lights and a truck bearing medical supplies and equipment for the rescue workers in New York. The procession made its way down Interstate 95. By the time they reached Connecticut, the policemen were talking back and forth on their radios about how embarrassing it was to have their lights flashing.
During a rest stop in Darien, where the mayor cheerfully bought everyone coffee, the officers discovered that the truck had a flat tire. They stalled fixing it so that the mayor would go on without them.
In the Bronx Cianci’s motorcade, sans truck, started blowing through red lights, lights and sirens going, and roared into Manhattan. The Providence officers were mortified. The New York drivers were not pleased. When Cianci got stuck in traffic around Thirty-fourth Street, lights still flashing, angry New Yorkers started yelling and cursing.
“What the fuck are you doing?” shouted a motorist.
“We’re here to help you people,” an aide to the Providence police commissioner replied.
“Fuck you!” someone yelled back.
“The mayor of Providence is here,” he tried to explain.
“Who the fuck cares?”
The mayor had asked a Providence officer with a friend in the New York Police Department to get them into Ground Zero, which was tightly guarded. The New York cop came through.
Passing through a checkpoint, Cianci made his way down West Street, through a shattered world of glass and steel, powdered in soot and ash that covered his shiny black shoes. The mayor pointed out the twisted metal beams and blown-out windows.
They turned a corner and beheld what had been the World Trade Center. The small party from Providence was awestruck.
Then the mayor’s photographer took out his camera. The videographer, who normally filmed Providence traffic court for a cult show on cable access, Caught in Providence, hefted his camera. Cianci whipped off his white hard hat and began striking heroic poses among the ruins.
Later he pulled out his cell phone and made some calls. Cianci had been trying all day to line up a meeting with the mayor of New York, but Rudy Giuliani, not surprisingly, was too busy.
Then the mayor walked over to Amanda Milkovits, The Providence Journal’s police reporter, who was overcome by the scene. Cianci put his arm around her in a comforting way. “Whaddya think of our first date?” he said. “Not too romantic, huh?”
Before they left, Cianci had his photographer take his picture with Milkovits, and later sent it to her, just as he had had his picture taken thousands of times in thousands of settings with thousands of people over the years.
BACK AT CITY Hall, it was business as usual.
As Cianci prepared for his trial, he continued to preside over the Renaissance and project an image of a strong, confident leader moving Providence forward. He compared his racketeering indictment to the inevitable turbulence one experiences on a long-distance flight; just as the plane finally lands, he predicted, he and the city would ultimately reach their destination, unscathed.
The citizens of Providence showed little outrage. There was no public call for his resignation, just a tolerant and cynical, wait-and-see attitude from people who had seen it all before. Sure, Cianci was probably guilty, they said, but look at all the wonderful things he had done for the city. “This is Rhode Island, where every politician is a candidate for ‘Movie of the Week,’ ” one woman told The Boston Globe. “The mayor’s got pluck, and not only that, he’s got wits. He’s an excellent person, and he’s done well for the city. Corruption? Corruption is everywhere.” A waiter at a downtown restaurant said that the public sentiment was to leave Buddy alone. “Providence wouldn’t be where it is today without the mayor’s charisma,” he said. “If there was a Providence coin, Buddy Cianci’s face would be on it.”
Cianci’s approval rating actually went up after his indictment, from 60 to 64 percent, making him the most popular politician in Rhode Island. At the same time, 80 percent of those surveyed by a Brown University pollster felt that corruption in Providence was a problem, and half considered Cianci dishonest. The results showed that “honesty isn’t a job requirement for a Rhode Island politician,” according to an Associated Press story that ran in The Washington Post. Matt Lauer, a former Providence television newsman who had covered Cianci in the early 1980s, framed the paradox when he asked the mayor, in an interview for the Today show, if it was possible that he could love Providence and steal from it.
A delegation of government officia
ls from Africa seemed bemused by Cianci’s roguish image when they visited Providence in the summer of 2001. The leaders, from Nigeria, Cameroon, and other nations, were on a tour, sponsored by the U.S. State Department, to study government corruption. Rhode Island had been chosen for its historic reputation and also because of Operation Plunder Dome. The Africans met with Dennis Aiken, who talked about the FBI’s investigative techniques. They were fascinated by Cianci; some wanted to meet him. But there was no time. The next day the delegates left Providence for the next stop on their U.S. corruption tour: Louisiana.
In Providence the big question, besides whether Buddy would survive, was whether the Renaissance could survive without him. The jury was divided. Some viewed the Renaissance as fragile, something that Cianci had willed into existence with his dynamic salesmanship, a work in progress that would wither away without him. Business leaders said that a critical mass had been reached, and that Providence’s comeback could continue without Cianci—though his value in attracting development and generating excitement should not be discounted. But critics viewed the Renaissance as a façade concealing the rot of corruption that held the city back from true greatness. Lincoln Chafee, the former mayor of Warwick, who had succeeded his late father as U.S. senator, said that corporate executives had told him they avoided Providence because of Cianci and the stigma of corruption. Business leaders who backed Cianci or failed to speak out were cowardly enablers.
As the holidays approached, Cianci preferred to cultivate his Father Christmas image—until the Boston Pops tried to play Scrooge. For years, the mayor had taken center stage at the Pops’ annual Christmas concert at the Providence Civic Center. In 2001, in need of perhaps more holiday cheer as his trial approached, he became infuriated when he learned that Civic Center officials were planning to cancel the Pops that year. Because so many free tickets were given out—to people in the community, and also to political cronies of all affiliations—the concert had become a perennial money loser. Cianci ordered that the show must go on—until he discovered that the Pops planned to replace him in his annual reading of “ ’Twas the Night Before Christmas” with a professional actor. Cianci pointed out that he was a professional actor, with a Screen Actors Guild card from his guest stint on the TV show Providence. The Pops tried to appease Cianci by offering to let him be the guest conductor, but he ordered the show canceled. Finally, after aides told him how embarrassing a cancellation would be if the real story got out, he backed down. The Pops performed, with the mayor as their guest conductor.
On a rainy January morning in 2002, a few months before Cianci’s trial was set to begin, Buff Chace sat in his downtown office and reflected on the Buddy Question. Chace, the Yankee patrician who had struggled for the past decade to rehab historic downtown buildings, was frustrated by what he called “the unfinished Renaissance.”
“I don’t think we’ll be successful about developing ourselves until there’s a process,” he said. “Buddy is a throwback from the modern way. I briefly considered running for mayor a few years ago, out of frustration. And I thought that the approach would have been not to criticize Buddy, but to praise him for what he has done and to say that now it is time for a new set of skills.” Ironically, when Cianci had auctioned off his job for a day at a recent Trinity Repertory fund-raiser, Chace had made the winning bid, six thousand dollars. “You can be mayor for a day,” Cianci had said. “You can take a ride in the helicopter. You can even go to the police and tell the colonel, ‘You’re not doing a good job.’ ” Chace’s cousin piped up that the mayor also controlled the tax assessor’s office. If he were mayor, Chace said, he would have created a clear process for developers to follow, replacing the byzantine path that shifted according to the whims of the mayor. Chace, who had sought unsuccessfully to create collaboration among rival downtown landowners and political factions, believed that cooperation was counter to Cianci’s modus operandi. “My theory is that he’s always created power by keeping people apart, so that everyone has to go to him. He’s furious if you try to develop a relationship with the City Council.”
On the wall behind Chace hung a huge, color-coded map of Providence, divided into wards bearing the names of each council member, like individual fiefdoms. Chace said that things had gotten worse since the mayor’s indictment. Behind his public bravado, Cianci was distracted and unfocused. Projects had stalled. Part of the problem was the economic recession, particularly in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks. But there was also a sense of paralysis because of the uncertainty over Cianci’s future. Relations were said to be strained between the mayor and his top downtown-development aide, Patricia McLaughlin, who was a witness against him on the University Club extortion charges.
Cianci, seeking to burnish his image as his trial approached, was even more prone to creating policy by press conference; Chace laughed as he recalled a recent news conference in which a hotel developer said that he hoped to break ground within three years. “Buddy’s head jerked around,” said Chace; the mayor interrupted to say that he expected the project to start sooner. Chace, a gentle, soft-spoken man in his early fifties with a full, brown beard, sighed and said, “Buddy has launched a huge PR campaign over the next ninety days to make us think that we can’t live without him.”
Chace, an investor in the Biltmore Hotel, where Cianci lived, was joined by the hotel’s principal owner, John Cullen, who had just gotten off the red-eye from San Diego. Cullen ran a large pension-fund group, Greenfield Partners, which invested in hotels and real estate across America and also helped manage the pension funds of General Electric and Honeywell. His mother managed the Biltmore and, he joked, sometimes swiped the mayor’s newspapers from outside his Presidential Suite.
“Buddy has done a great job generating interest, and he is as pro-development as any urban mayor I’ve ever met,” said Cullen. “Problem is, the city needs him to be like the old Buddy, to pick one project and bring it to conclusion.” When the Providence River was moved, or the Convention Center was built, it was because of a remarkable alignment of forces. But with Cianci’s future unclear, and an election year coming, and the resulting realignment of political forces, Cullen feared stagnation and a loss of momentum. He acknowledged that the city’s corrupt image was also a deterrent to business investment, although he considered that reputation overblown and credited Cianci with making Providence “a major-league city.” Still, Cullen, who had spent sixty-one million dollars on hotels around the country in the past nine months, was reluctant to invest in Providence, because of the tortuous political climate. “Buff finds the hardest buildings to do,” said Cullen. “He’s a bored, rich guy who does it out of a sense of noblesse oblige. I’ve taken his money and invested it in Sun Valley and San Diego. It’s hard to allocate more capital for Providence until there’s more cooperation.” Cullen said that most investors would laugh off Chace’s projects. “Single-digit returns, with heavy politics, wouldn’t make it onto my desk, let alone off of it.”
As maddening as the business climate could be, Cullen, who spent more than two hundred days a year on the road, also loved Providence. He enjoyed its small scale, its fine restaurants, its sense of history, and its rebellious spirit. Sometimes he took day trips from his home in Annapolis, Maryland, catching a 6 A.M. flight from Baltimore, spending the day, having a great meal in a great restaurant, and returning home by 10 P.M. “Some of the things I like least about Providence I also enjoy the most. It’s one of the most sophisticated small towns in America. It has all the best urban experiences of New York, Chicago, or Boston, the dining and culture, without the negatives: congestion, urban anger, crime. You rarely find a city with such natural barriers, confining it so that all the economic variables can ricochet to create a great urban center. It’s confined by the highways, by Brown and College Hill, the rivers and the bay. . . . You have a city with all these different people . . . all forced to live with one another. I think that’s fun. The success and the problem of Providence is that it’s c
ontained naturally. It’s the biggest small town I know. Unlike many other places, politics is one of the city’s great industries. If they could find a way to turn it into money . . .” His voice trailed off as he laughed in agreement with the suggestion that some had.
“From the end of the mill era until 1975, Providence lost its way,” said Cullen. “Then it decided to return to its roots as an incubator, and to that spirit of defiance, of going against the grain. They moved a river. It’s incredible how they mustered the force, the capital to defy the conventional wisdom. That’s a strength. However, if misdirected, it can be incredibly bad.”
People in Providence loved Cianci because Cianci was a reflection of Providence, in all its glory and contradictions. “A mayor reflects every part of his community, which is why Daley could never be mayor of New York, and Giuliani could never be mayor of Boston,” said Cullen. “Providence made Buddy. And Providence will go to the finish line with him, kicking and screaming and loving every minute.”
In the weeks leading up to the trial, Cianci increased his already frenetic pace. He raced around Providence attending news conferences, banquets, groundbreakings, art openings, weddings, wakes. If a garage door opened in Silver Lake, one city councilman joked, the mayor was there to take credit. After the power went out at Rhode Island Hospital, the mayor came striding down the darkened corridors, patients cheering his name. When the workers at the Biltmore threatened to strike, he mediated a settlement, averting cancellation of a wedding reception and winning an invitation from the grateful bride. Posing for a photograph with former state transportation directors, he cracked, “Which one of you guys did I grab the most money from?” Then he helped them blow out the candles on a cake marking the agency’s one hundredth birthday and quipped, “I wish your pensions all get bigger.” At a groundbreaking for a new Brooks drugstore in the North End, Cianci declined to climb into the bulldozer; he told a funny story about how something had gone wrong when he took the controls of a bulldozer at the groundbreaking for the new police station. The next thing he knew, a building being torn down had burst into flames. Wherever Cianci went, people shook his hand, patted his back, said they were praying for him, honked their horns, shouted “Bud-dee!”
