The Prince of Providence

by Mike Stanton

  Ead also described walking into the mayor’s office and voicing frustration over the resistance of city tax officials to the Ronci tax settlement. “Vincenzo, you’ve got all stupid people working at City Hall,” he recalled telling Cianci.

  During a recess, Egbert mocked Ead’s testimony. “Vincenzo,” he said, laughing. “I like that.”

  Before the trial, Egbert had been laying his trap for the mayor’s accuser.

  Digging into Ead’s background, Egbert found that Ead liked to gamble at the Foxwoods Casino, in southeastern Connecticut. Since the casino, the world’s largest, was run by the Mashantucket Pequots, a sovereign nation, it wasn’t easy to subpoena patrons’ gambling records. The casino treated them as confidential, like bank records. But Egbert wanted to pursue a defense that Ead had gambled away the bribe money he claimed had gone to the mayor.

  The year before, Cianci had hired an advance aide who had been a hotel supervisor at Foxwoods. The week before jury selection, Cianci and Egbert summoned the aide and asked him how gambling records were kept. Then they asked him to use his connections and see what he could find out.

  The aide drove down to Foxwoods late one night and logged on to a friend’s computer after 11 P.M., when he would be less likely to be detected. Since a printout would be traced to his friend, the aide copied down Ead’s gambling information longhand on a yellow legal pad. That first night, he reviewed thirty days. The next day, Cianci sent him back to get more. The aide wound up at Foxwoods four nights in a row and eventually copied down a more extensive gambling history on Ead. That weekend, staying with a friend in Connecticut, the aide was getting ten or more calls a day from Cianci, who would ask, “Whaddya got?”

  Early Monday morning the aide returned to Providence, made copies of his notes, and rushed them up to Egbert’s room at the Biltmore. That week, aided by knowing exactly what to ask for, Egbert subpoenaed Ead’s gambling records.

  The following Thursday, after Rose finished questioning Ead, Egbert strode to the lawyer’s podium.

  “Good afternoon, Mr. Ead,” said Egbert.

  After a few preliminaries, Egbert got down to business. He asked Ead about his 450 visits to the Foxwoods and Mohegan Sun casinos in the past year and a half.

  “I can’t believe it’s that many times,” replied Ead.

  “How many times? Have a guess—a hundred?”

  Egbert reached for a thick computer printout and plopped it down on the podium with a loud thunk. For the first time in days, Cianci broke into a broad smile. Egbert asked some more questions, then threw another number at Ead.

  “Would you be surprised to learn that you gambled eight hundred seventy thousand dollars in the past three years?”

  “I have no idea where you get those figures,” replied Ead.

  Egbert ticked off the dates that Ead had spent at Foxwoods in December 1999, when his bail restrictions supposedly limited his travel: December 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 16, 17, 19, 20, 22, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, and 30. “That’s indicative of someone with a gambling problem, isn’t it?”

  Ead disagreed.

  During the afternoon recess Rose was visibly distressed. He complained to the judge that he hadn’t been provided with the Foxwoods documents. Egbert pointed out that this was cross-examination; under the rules of evidence, the defense didn’t have to share its information with the prosecution until it began presenting its case. Egbert smirked as Rose complained, to no avail.

  Rose had expected Egbert to beat up Ead, but the extent of Ead’s gambling came as a surprise. The prosecution team realized that this was a potentially devastating blow, one that they would have to respond to somehow. Without access to the Foxwoods information, they wondered what Egbert actually had. During the recess, the prosecutors huddled with Dennis Aiken, who was following the trial from a seat at the prosecution table. An FBI agent started making phone calls, reaching out to retired law enforcement agents who worked in security at Foxwoods.

  Meanwhile, in the hallway, an upbeat Cianci autographed spectators’ courtroom badges and winked at reporters. “You ain’t seen nothing yet,” he said.

  For the next day and a half, Egbert hammered away at Ead as a money-grubber who had lied about the mayor to avoid prison and save his vending business. He mocked Ead’s account of having given Cianci five hundred dollars in cash in the back of an automobile during the mayor’s 1990 campaign.

  “That’s a lot of money,” said Ead.

  “To you?” asked Egbert.

  “To him,” replied Ead.

  “That’s about five minutes at the blackjack table for you,” Egbert shot back.

  Later Egbert walked over behind Cianci and put his hands on the mayor’s shoulders.

  “If the mayor was corrupt enough to take five thousand from a young man when he and his wife are hardly supporting themselves, if the mayor takes ten thousand to assist [the tax break], if the mayor takes ten thousand to assist [the real estate deal], then why didn’t you just buy a job instead of running around? Why didn’t you just say, ‘Buddy, give me a stinking job for ten grand?’ ”

  “I wouldn’t talk to him that way.”

  “ ‘Vincenzo,’ ” said Egbert, “ ‘give me a stinking job for ten grand!’ ”

  “That’s not my way,” said Ead.

  “You didn’t do it because you knew the mayor would have thrown you out of his office,” Egbert shouted.

  “No, that’s not right.”

  The inarticulate Ead had trouble keeping up with Egbert, who mocked his expressions. When Ead referred to a political maneuver against a rival tax-board member as a “pork chop,” Egbert hit him with a flurry of questions ending with the quip, “You gave her a reverse pork chop.”

  Judge Torres, who also had trouble keeping a straight face, had to remind spectators at one point to stifle their laughter. “This is not a sporting event,” he said.

  But Cianci was jubilant. Egbert, he crowed, had ripped through Ead “like a chainsaw.”

  Near the end of his second and last day on the stand with Egbert, Ead fought back in his clumsy way. Ead described a Christmastime meeting he had in the mayor’s office to discuss finding Christopher Ise a job. Ead said that he brought Cianci a box of cigars. As they spoke, an elderly Italian gentleman walked into Cianci’s office and cried, “Thank you very much, Vincenzo!”

  The man, said Ead, dropped to his knees and kissed the mayor’s hand. Ead looked at Cianci and said, “I haven’t seen that in a long time.”

  Egbert zeroed in. “When was the last time you saw that?”

  “The Godfather movie,” deadpanned Ead.

  The courtroom erupted in laughter.

  AFTER THE OPENING fireworks surrounding David Ead, the trial settled into a plodding rhythm interspersed with moments of high drama and low comedy. Hoping to repair some of the damage that Egbert had done to Ead, Rose called two witnesses who corroborated parts of Ead’s story.

  Christopher Ise, the city planner, described how Ead had used his influence with Cianci to get him hired, including bringing him to the mayor’s office for a job interview. During the interview, Cianci telephoned the city’s deputy planning director, Thomas Deller, and ordered him to create a position for Ise. Ead told Ise not to mention the five thousand in front of Cianci. When the interview concluded, Ise testified, he went outside while Ead stayed behind to speak privately with Cianci. Deller followed Ise to the stand and corroborated his story about being ordered by Cianci to hire him. Deller also backed up a key part of Ead’s story about the vacant lots that Tony Freitas had wanted to buy from the city. When the deal hit a snag, Cianci called Deller and told him not to give Ead a hard time. Subsequently, after one of the two lots Freitas wanted was mistakenly sold to someone else, Deller heard Cianci say to Ead, “Tell Tony I owe him one.”

  During his cross-examinations of Ise and Deller, Egbert established that neither had any firsthand knowledge that Cianci’s motives were corrupt. Ise said that he didn’t know what Ead did w
ith the five thousand. Deller wasn’t privy to any discussions between Cianci and Ead regarding a payoff for the vacant lots. Egbert tried to show that Cianci helped Ead because he was vice chairman of the city Democratic party, and because both propositions made sense—Ise was qualified, and Freitas was going to restore two blighted lots.

  Next, Rose turned to the University Club. Patricia McLaughlin, Ramzi Loqa, and other city officials described how angry Cianci had been, and how he had ordered them to keep the club from reopening. Loqa also testified that he had initially lied to the FBI about the mayor’s involvement because he was afraid of Cianci. Alan Gelfuso, the club’s vice president, testified about the club’s attempts to pacify Cianci, culminating in its decision to offer him a lifetime honorary membership.

  Egbert, trying to show that the matter was all about payback, not extortion, brought out Cianci’s memorable line to the club’s leaders: “Be careful how you act. The toe you stepped on yesterday may be connected to the ass you have to kiss today.” Before the trial was over, one Providence entrepreneur would be selling T-shirts imprinted with that slogan. Later, during jury deliberations, Cianci stood outside the courthouse, smoking a cigarette and chuckling at the memory of his one-liner. “I remember saying that. It was a pretty good line. Of course, it may not be so good for me now.”

  In Providence there was a thin line between crime and comedy. One of the details about the University Club saga that emerged from the testimony was Cianci’s anger at having been the butt of jokes at the club’s Christmas party. In a letter of apology, the club’s leaders blamed the “guest comedian.” The comedian, Charlie Hall, was in the courtroom, covering the trial as the sketch artist for local television stations. As Hall sketched Patricia McLaughlin, he listened to her testify how Cianci had telephoned the comedian, in front of the club’s leaders, to ask about the Christmas skit. This was during Bill Clinton’s impeachment crisis; Hall would later remember that the mayor began the conversation with a few Monica Lewinsky jokes. Hall told Cianci that he had told some jokes about the mayor’s not being a member—material, Cianci pointed out with prosecutorial zeal, that could only have come from someone at the club.

  Hall had been questioned briefly by the FBI’s Dennis Aiken, but he hadn’t made the witness list. During breaks in the testimony, Cianci and Hall would kibbitz in the hallway. The mayor and the comedian had a history; they even shared an uncle. Back in the seventies, when Hall was eighteen, he had worked for the mayor’s office, directing a summer camp for senior citizens. Hall, who favored floral Hawaiian shirts in court, had been doing Cianci impressions since his student days at the Rhode Island School of Design. He had also played goalie on the RISD hockey team, nicknamed the Nads (so that students could cheer “Go, Nads!”), a zany bunch that later made Cianci their honorary coach. Hall had a standard repertoire of Buddy jokes—the toupee, the sauce, the thugs. Cianci would smile publicly, then approach Hall privately and grouse, “Why the fuck are you busting my balls?” How could Hall not? Through the years, the mayor’s antics had provided inspiration for Hall’s Ocean State Follies, a comedy cabaret that spoofed Rhode Island’s accent, its eccentricities, and its political chicanery.

  “We’re incestuous,” quipped Hall. “And I mean that in the nicest possible way. The state is just one big, smoky back room.”

  Even in Hall’s world of comedy, one hand washed the other. His work as a courtroom sketch artist provided him with plenty of fresh material for his Follies. In his spare time he worked on a musical, called Buddy, and drew cartoons about the trial. Cianci got a kick out of showing reporters one of Hall’s cartoons, in which two skeptical, cigar-smoking plutocrats ask Jesus Christ why he thinks he deserves to be a member of the University Club.

  One day Cianci walked over to Hall during a recess and said playfully, “You make me look fat.” Hall knew all about critics; his most terrifying moment as a sketch artist had come during the murder trial of mobster Harold Tillinghast. The artist didn’t dare make Tillinghast look fat. “You know what happens when an artist gets a mobster mad at him?” said Hall. “He wakes up the next morning with a drawing of a horse’s head in his bed.”

  The Providence Journal ran a short item in its trial notebook about Hall’s days working for Cianci. With all the testimony from city officials, cops, and tow-truck operators about having to make campaign contributions, Hall remembered when he had worked for the city in the seventies, and how his weekly paycheck of $150 had come with $5 Cianci fund-raiser tickets attached. Hall had been upset; “It seemed like a quid pro quo.” But when he complained, his boss told him that that was how the game was played in Providence.

  The morning that the newspaper item ran, Egbert confronted Hall outside the courtroom and threatened to slap him with a witness subpoena if there were any more negative stories—which would have barred the artist from covering the trial. Hall was stunned. He stood there, waiting for the punch line. But Egbert wasn’t laughing.

  IN PROVIDENCE, EVERYTHING had a price—especially doing the right thing.

  That’s how Steve Antonson felt as he walked into the courtroom late in the second week of the trial. A stocky, rawboned man with a craggy face, he avoided the mayor’s piercing stare as he took the witness stand.

  Once an untouchable because he was the mayor’s boy, Antonson had become a pariah once his cooperation became known. His coworkers at the Civic Center called him a rat. His schedule started getting changed around. He watched Cianci on the television news, saying that he barely knew Steve Antonson. When Cianci attended a concert one night, his police driver told Antonson to stay away from the mayor, as another aide and the chief of police, Barney Prignano, glared.

  Things weren’t much better at home. His wife, who never liked Cianci’s late-night phone calls, was furious with Antonson for having gotten himself mixed up with the mayor. She told Aiken that if anything happened to her husband, either a heart attack from the stress or some physical harm from one of Cianci’s cronies, she would kill him, and the mayor. Antonson’s mother, who also worried for her son’s safety, started telling people that he was her nephew. His father, a temporary city electrical inspector, was passed over for permanent openings. And his thirteen-year-old, Stevie, took it hard. One day, his teacher came into the classroom wearing a Cianci mask and, looking at the boy, asked if anyone recognized the face. Stevie, who had been a water boy for the Providence Bruins and ridden in the victory parade with the mayor after the team won the 1999 American Hockey League championship, even started getting the cold shoulder from Civic Center employees. Eventually, the boy quit. One day during Cianci’s trial, Antonson was driving with his son, who grew quiet and then said that he needed to ask him something about Plunder Dome.

  “Did you take any money?” he asked. Antonson said no. “Did you do anything illegal?” Antonson said he hadn’t. “Then I don’t care what they write about you,” the boy answered, “as long as you’re my father.”

  Antonson’s ordeal had worsened after Cianci’s indictment. A few weeks later, a woman who worked at a Civic Center refreshment stand accused him of sexual harassment. Antonson, an affectionate person, said that it was an innocent hug, something that he had done before. People who knew him found the accusation to be out of character and the timing suspicious. Antonson was fired. The Civic Center’s acting executive director, Lawrence Lepore, was a former Providence cop under investigation by the state police for stealing gold from a pawnshop raid. Ironically, when Lepore was subsequently indicted, during Cianci’s trial, he was allowed to remain on the job. He presided over meetings in a conference room decorated with a picture of Harold C. Copeland, the Civic Center’s first director, whom Cianci had gotten indicted for soliciting a bribe from Skip Chernov, back in the days when the mayor was the anticorruption candidate. (The portrait came down after Chernov complained.)

  Antonson was dying for a cigarette as he testified. He was bolstered by his bond with Dennis Aiken. Before the trial, he had given the FBI agent a bronze
pin with the mayor’s seal, which Cianci had given Antonson. “When you clean out the government,” he told Aiken, “you can give me this pin back.”

  But Steve Antonson’s long-awaited opportunity to tell his story turned into a disaster. Things started fine, with Richard Rose asking him to relate what had happened with the University Club. Then Rose played the tapes of Antonson’s phone conversations with Cianci. In the courtroom, people listened intently. Antonson looked at the mayor, who was watching the script of their conversations as it scrolled across his video monitor. Afterward, several of the jurors stared, expressionless, at the mayor. As Antonson left the courtroom for the afternoon recess, Cianci stood and gazed at him, tapping his fingers on the back of his chair.

  Antonson started to walk out the exit for a cigarette, then halted when he smelled Cianci’s cologne. A court sheriff let him go out the other door. Antonson stood smoking on the courthouse steps, outside the entrance, while Cianci stood about ten yards away, smoking outside the exit. Then the mayor threw down his cigarette and headed back into the courthouse, past Antonson.

  “Steven, are you okay?” he asked.

  “Yeah, I’m all right.”

  Back inside, Richard Egbert went after Antonson. He asked about the sexual-harassment complaint that had gotten him fired.

  “It’s more like a sexual-assault claim, isn’t it?” asked Egbert—“that you grabbed a woman’s crotch, put your tongue in her ear” and jumped over a desk, “rubbed your body against her,” and pinned her against a wall?

  Antonson told Egbert that the allegations were false. Egbert asked Antonson if he thought his firing could be related to his cooperation with the FBI. “I’m not really sure,” replied Antonson. “It could.”

  Then, in a confusing series of questions worthy of the Abbott and Costello routine “Who’s on First?” Egbert asked Antonson about his statements, on the tapes, where he had agreed with Cianci that he told the truth about the University Club. Although Antonson had been playing along at the time, he got all twisted around by Egbert’s questions, and agreed that the mayor had told the truth.