by Mike Stanton
Toupee in place and makeup applied, resplendent in a charcoal suit with a gold city seal and a tiny American flag pinned to the lapel, Cianci made his way downstairs to his limousine for the ride around Kennedy Plaza. It was with a sense of disbelief that he climbed the steps of the federal courthouse, nodding and waving to cheering spectators, to go on trial for racketeering. The RICO law had been designed to go after Mafia bosses, who ordered beatings and murders; to accuse the mayor of running a racketeering enterprise out of City Hall, he said, was “nuts.” A few weeks earlier, sitting in the privacy of his office (a gag order prevented him from discussing the charges publicly before and during the trial), Cianci had dissected the government’s case. “I’ve read through the discovery,” he said, “and they don’t have one person giving me any money. Now, they have someone saying he gave Coloian money, or Corrente money, to give to me—not that I believe it—but there’s no way they gave any money to me. That’s bullshit.” The alleged extortion of $250,000 in campaign contributions from tow-truck operators? “I don’t even know those guys. They’re big, burly guys who go into the worst neighborhoods, risk a bullet for a tow. They’re going to be intimidated by me?” Edward Voccola’s suspicious School Department lease? “I sign hundreds of leases. The only time I get involved is if somebody has a question. I found in our files a report that Judge Brodsky did, recommending we sign that lease. He’s a respected judge, a former prosecutor.” Thirty years earlier Cianci had helped Irving Brodsky prosecute Raymond Patriarca; after becoming mayor, Cianci had named Brodsky city solicitor and later appointed him a housing-court judge. (Brodsky had died in 2000.) With his impending trial, Cianci’s life had come full circle. The onetime mob prosecutor was being prosecuted under a law inspired by gangsters like Patriarca.
The mayor warmed to his defense. “Let’s talk about the University Club,” he said. “If you took the facts, took my name out of it and made it Mayor X, and presented it as an essay on the bar exam, what would you do? You’d indict the club leaders for attempted bribery. If I’m a prick, if I’m the ogre they think I am, do you think it would have taken me twenty-five years to fuck them?” The city had opposed the club for safety reasons. “When I’m eighty-five and sitting in Scalabrini Green [nursing home], I don’t want two guys walking up to me and handing me a subpoena because there was a fire and three people died.”
The phone rang before Cianci could address the witness-tampering charge involving Steve Antonson or the RICO charges themselves, which accused the mayor of using underlings to commit crimes on his behalf. That was the most worrisome aspect of the case for the mayor—the Antonson tapes and the overarching nature of RICO. He worried that the tapes could make jurors more inclined to believe the other charges. His lawyers had asked the judge for a separate trial on the University Club counts, arguing that they didn’t fit the pattern of the other alleged bribes and could prejudice the jury. But the judge disagreed. So now Cianci’s strategy was to downplay the University Club affair. His lawyer Richard Egbert characterized it as “two kids fighting in the sandbox.” In Providence a jury might find it a stretch to criminalize the mayor’s legendary vindictiveness. Cianci liked to tell a joke in which he was sitting in prison with a group of inmates, swapping stories about what they were in for. One prisoner robbed a bank. Another killed someone. A third embezzled a million dollars. And the mayor? “I’m in because I got into the University Club.” But the Antonson tapes, on which a surly Cianci tells a witness to lie to the FBI, might not be so amusing to a jury being asked to decide whether the mayor was a criminal mastermind.
Inside the courthouse, in the small, brightly lit courtroom of chief U.S. district judge Ernest C. Torres, the lawyers were gathering. An upright oar painted silver, beside the Rhode Island flag with the motto “Hope,” signaled that it was also an admiralty court. In the mid-1990s some independent filmmakers had cast the mayor to play the judge in a courtroom drama based on the bloody Prohibition shooting of rumrunners by the Coast Guard in Narragansett Bay. But the financing fell through.
Richard Rose marched in carrying a thick black binder labeled “Battle Plan.” The pressure on the prosecutor had increased since his faux pas in showing friends the Plunder Dome videotape. The previous summer, a judge had fined him five hundred dollars and suspended him from the case for thirty days.
In the months that followed, Rose had braced himself for the possibility of being fired or having the case taken away from him. His superiors in Providence were supportive, but he worried about what someone in the Justice Department in Washington might do, given the magnitude of the case. The previous fall, Rose had attended the annual banquet of the NAACP in Providence at the Marriott. Cianci was one of the speakers. At one point during his speech, the mayor looked pointedly across the large room at Rose’s table and said, “And I guarantee you one thing—I’ll be back next year!”
It wasn’t until the last few months before the trial that Rose felt confident that the case would remain his. As he entered the courtroom, a few of the defense lawyers grumbled in the hallway about a recent message Rose had put on his answering machine at work, saying that he was off “doing the Lord’s work.” Rose said later that he had meant the message to be tongue in cheek, but the pretrial tension was evident.
Rose knew that he had a lot to prove—not just the charges against Cianci and his codefendants, Frank Corrente, Edward Voccola, and Richard Autiello, but also about his own abilities. He had never lost a trial to a lead defendant as a prosecutor, but the stakes had never been so high. If he failed, he worried that some people would say that he hadn’t been up to it—that he was there because he was black. He could quote the lyrics to rapper Eminem’s song “Lose Yourself,” about a man who has one shot at glory:
Would you capture it . . . or just let it slip?
His palms are sweaty, knees weak, arms are heavy
There’s vomit on his sweater already, Mom’s spaghetti.
Rose didn’t want spaghetti sauce on his shirt. But he also looked forward to the battle. There weren’t many jobs that carried the adrenaline rush of athletics; a trial was Rose’s opportunity “to put it all on the line.”
In the hallway outside the courtroom, Richard Egbert hitched up his pants like a gunfighter. A short, fifty-five-year-old man with a bristly mustache and round wire-rimmed glasses, Egbert, one of the top criminal-defense lawyers in the Northeast, was “the guy you don’t want to see represent the guy you arrested,” said the retired detective commander of the Rhode Island State Police Brian Andrews. A manic worker, Egbert would awake at four o’clock in the morning and read documents, then walk around the city at dawn, along the restored waterfront and among the glittering skyscrapers of the Renaissance City.
Providence was not like Egbert’s home base of Boston. It was smaller, more intimate. For all the years that Egbert had been coming down to Rhode Island, he still found it strange to see his face staring out from a newspaper box, or have passersby stop him on the street and urge him to keep up the good fight. He had defended prominent Rhode Island mobsters and politicians, including the former governor Edward DiPrete; the mayor of North Providence, who was acquitted of taking bribes from developers; and the chief justice of the state supreme court, who was impeached for consorting with mobsters.
Egbert also was no stranger to federal corruption probes of Buddy Cianci’s City Hall; in the 1980s he had represented two of Cianci’s former top aides, Ronald Glantz and Joseph DiSanto. In fact, with Glantz listed as a potential government witness in the Plunder Dome trial, to testify to past corruption, the government had tried unsuccessfully to have Egbert disqualified as Cianci’s lawyer. (The judge ruled that Glantz’s testimony would be inadmissible unless Cianci took the stand in his defense and denied ever having taken any bribes, a decision that had not yet been made. If Glantz did testify, Egbert would have to step aside and permit another defense lawyer to cross-examine him.)
The son of a Jewish garment worker and a housewife who traced t
heir roots to Nazi-occupied Austria, Egbert grew up around Boston and came of age during the turbulent sixties. As a student at the University of Massachusetts he had seen his best friend’s head split open by a policeman’s baton during an antiwar protest, a searing memory that served to remind him of his adversary in the courtroom—“a government out of control.” A plaque hanging in Egbert’s office, from a client acquitted in a bank-fraud case, said, ACT LIKE A SICILIAN AND THINK LIKE A JEW. Egbert saw himself as a check against the power of prosecutors and the police. When a mob client discovered a bugging device in his car, Egbert sent photocopies to state and federal law enforcement agencies until the FBI sheepishly claimed it. One of his favorite movies was My Cousin Vinny.
In the courtroom Egbert was a tenacious cross-examiner, someone who would methodically exhume every skeleton from a government witness’s closet and then reassemble it, piece by piece, in front of the jury. His withering interrogation of mob informant Billy Ferle, in a 1988 trial in Providence, had helped mobster Bobo Marrapese—whom Cianci had once prosecuted—win acquittal for the baseball-bat murder of a motorist after a traffic altercation. Ferle, Bobo’s alleged accomplice, kept saying that “Bobo made me do it.” Egbert pounded away at Ferle as if he were the speed bag that the lawyer pummeled at home. He demanded to know whether Ferle would also attribute the sun’s coming up in the morning to Bobo. A defeated Ferle agreed. When Egbert sat down, he knew he had nailed it. He turned to Bobo, who said, “I’m so happy I could burn a church.” The case had been memorable for another reason; during the trial Egbert had met his third and current wife, Patty, a dentist, at a local restaurant. When she came to court to watch, she noticed Bobo’s “satanic eyebrows” as he looked her over and told Egbert to make sure his client didn’t look at the jurors.
One of the biggest trials in Providence history took place in a Beaux Arts granite courthouse that stood where Abraham Lincoln once spoke. The one-hundred-year-old building, richly appointed in marble, mahogany, and oak, had recently been restored to its original grandeur by a contractor who had gotten immunity for admitting to bribes to the former governor Edward DiPrete for earlier government work. Until recently the soda machines at federal court had been supplied by David Ead’s vending company.
Every seat in the courtroom was taken as the lawyers in United States v. Cianci prepared to deliver their opening arguments. Down the hall, more people sat in the “remote room,” where a large, flat-screen television had been erected in an unused courtroom to handle the overflow. Televised proceedings were rare in federal court, which still banned cameras; another notable case where a video feed had been used because of strong public interest was the trial of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh.
Mary Tassone, a sixty-six-year-old retired artificial-fruit maker and veteran court watcher, wore Spectator Badge Number One. She had been attending trials for years and was on a first-name basis with the courthouse personnel and most of the lawyers. “It’s better than sitting home and watching soap operas, right?” she said. Tassone would have liked to have been on Cianci’s jury, or any jury, but she was too well known around the courthouse. The previous month she had gotten excited when she was summoned for jury duty in state court. “They asked me what I do. I said, ‘I go to court.’ So they threw me off. They told me my name could come up again in three years. I said, ‘I’ll be dead in three years.’ ” Tassone, who had no rooting interest in Cianci’s trial, handicapped the case: “The only thing they’ve got him on is the University Club, isn’t it? They don’t have him on tape. They don’t have him on video.” But she was making no predictions. “Never underestimate a jury,” she said sagely, “or what they might do.”
It had taken three days to pick a jury of eight men and four women. Only one juror lived in Providence, and she was a Texan who had attended Brown University. The process revealed the interwoven nature of Providence. One prospective juror, John F. Smollins, had run for mayor as an Independent in 1974, when Cianci beat Joe Doorley, challenging the candidates to a one-mile footrace to City Hall. (Nobody showed up.) He went to the same church as Frank Corrente. He had once had his car repaired by Richard Autiello. He knew Edward Voccola. He was excused. Another juror, a retired naval-police officer in Newport, said that Cianci had attended his twenty-fifth wedding anniversary celebration at the Jamestown Country Club in 1975—but the juror couldn’t remember why Cianci came, who invited him, or whether they had even spoken. “I was half in the bag,” he explained. He made the cut.
The trial was expected to last two months or more, and Cianci worried about the negative publicity that it would generate for Providence. He was determined to maintain a vigorous public schedule, to show that he was still in control. During the lunch recess on the first day of jury selection, Cianci hurried over to an Urban League of Rhode Island luncheon, where he was applauded for saying, “Even the United States of America couldn’t keep me away!” That night he attended a book sale at a branch of the Providence Public Library, where he purchased a book on Harry Truman, one of his favorite politicians, and The Law of Mass Communications: Freedom and Control of the Broadcast Media. The next morning, on his way to court, Cianci stopped off at the Fleet Skating Center to celebrate Bike to Work Day, clambering on an oversized tricycle for a quick photo op.
Beyond establishing Cianci’s guilt or innocence, the trial would also be a referendum on the Providence Renaissance. To Richard Rose, the Renaissance was a façade; to Richard Egbert, it was Exhibit A in the mayor’s defense. Those themes became apparent in their opening arguments.
This was a case, said Rose, about a mayor who ran a criminal enterprise out of City Hall. He pointed at Cianci—“the head of the criminal enterprise”—and Corrente, sitting to the mayor’s left—“the bagman.”
“Cianci’s criminal enterprise collected illegal contributions and cash in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars in tax breaks, jobs, leases, and city contracts,” said Rose, speaking in a measured yet forceful voice. “Indeed, when defendant Cianci wanted a private club membership and the club said no, he used his criminal enterprise to take one.”
Egbert, when his turn came, tore into the government’s case as a house of cards, constructed by witnesses who were “liars, cheats, and thieves.”
“These are people who have been committing crimes since the day they could breathe,” thundered Egbert in his raspy, booming voice. “They would con anyone. They would lie to their friends, their family. They would lie to the government and they are people who will lie to you.”
Egbert might have considered calling the author Tom Wolfe as a character witness. Speaking on the eve of the trial at a Brown University conference on “The City: No Limits,” Wolfe praised the Providence Renaissance as an example of how cities can be reborn through the arts as opposed to factory jobs. In the new “psychology economy,” said Wolfe, “money is exchanged for an experience, not a product. You bring home nothing—except an experience, a gratification.” Cities are “the stage for ambition. Nobody in the country has ever understood this better than Mayor Cianci of Providence.”
Meanwhile, light-years from leafy College Hill, in the gritty streets of Manton near Ead’s vending office, the brief for the prosecution was filed by Keven McKenna, a political gadfly and former municipal judge, as he declared his candidacy for mayor. Standing in a parking lot near St. Teresa of Avila Church, McKenna contrasted Cianci’s illusory Renaissance with the downtrodden neighborhoods. “Real City is not the city of Nobel Prize winners teaching at tax-exempted universities. Real City is a city of the high school dropouts living in three-deckers. Real City is not the soothing glow of WaterFire. It is the slinking shadows of rats running around the neighborhood garbage piles under a disappearing moon.”
Indeed, the proliferation of rats was a growing concern in the neighborhoods. One frustrated letter writer complained that City Hall was not doing enough to address the problem, and that the rats would soon outnumber the humans in Providence. (Where was Buckles Mel
ise and his truckload of rat poison when you needed him?) That spring Cianci sent city residents a newsletter calling rats “Providence’s Public Enemy Number 1.” Rats, the mayor wrote, “carry innumerable diseases and expose us to unspeakable filth. They contribute nothing of value to society. Rats feed on garbage and if you provide access, they will surely take advantage of it.”
And the vermin problem was about to get worse. The government’s first witness was a 365-pound rat named David Ead.
LATE ON TUESDAY afternoon, after the opening arguments, Ead lumbered to the stand. The decision to call him as the leadoff witness came as a surprise, given his liabilities and the other evidence. But it also made sense. The public had focused on the Freitas tapes as the heart of the government’s case. But they weren’t—Cianci wasn’t on them. Eight of the twelve counts against him related to the three bribes that Ead said he had arranged with the mayor—the five thousand dollars for Christopher Ise’s job, the ten thousand for the Ronci tax settlement, and the proposed ten thousand for the Freitas vacant lots.
Over the next three days Cianci sat grimly as Ead described his efforts to ingratiate himself with the mayor. He described how the relationship progressed from politics to payoffs, from free soda for Cianci’s campaign headquarters to an illicit campaign contribution in the backseat of Ead’s Cadillac, an acknowledgment of a payoff at the Columbus Day parade on Federal Hill, Ead’s desire for a city pension and free Blue Cross, a box of fine cigars for the mayor at Christmas, a shared laugh over a payoff, and discussions of extortion and bribery. The jurors also got their first glimpse of the Freitas tapes. Rose played a tape in which Ead boasted: “Anytime I have to do business, I go direct to the mayor . . . he and I have been buddies for twenty-five years.”
