by Mike Stanton
But where had the five thousand gone? The mother, Mary Maggiacomo, testified that she had given the money, in hundred-dollar bills, to Autiello, after Autiello told her that she couldn’t expect to get her son onto the Providence police force without contributing to Cianci. Another police officer testified that Prignano had gone to a meeting with Corrente at City Hall to discuss police recruits. Now Richard Rose was calling Prignano to close the loop. In his opening argument Rose said that Prignano and Corrente had argued over Maggiacomo’s hiring. According to a law enforcement source, Prignano had told the FBI that Corrente asked him about reinstating Maggiacomo, and the chief had said he couldn’t.
But the combustible Prignano refused to stick to the story. Perhaps he didn’t want to betray Corrente, who had been instrumental in making him chief. Or perhaps it was simply because he didn’t like Richard Rose, who he felt didn’t treat him with the proper respect. With Barney, you never knew. In any event, a few days before his testimony, he strolled into the courthouse, loudly proclaiming, “I’m a hostile witness.” He was there to be immunized, compelling his testimony. And he was in a combative mood. He went after Providence Journal investigative reporter Bill Malinowski, who had written several exposés about police corruption, saying, “You don’t write the truth about me because my name ends in a vowel.” Malinowski pointed out that his own name ended in a vowel. Prignano said it didn’t, so Malinowski spelled it out for him. “Well, it’s the wrong vowel,” snapped Prignano.
A few nights earlier, during a meeting with Rose and Aiken in the U.S. attorney’s office, Prignano had gotten upset over some of the questions that the prosecutor planned to ask. Prignano threatened to take the Fifth. Rose said that he might have to get into Prignano’s recent, messy divorce. (Prignano’s wife had discovered his affair with a woman who worked at the city dog pound—a woman who had ended up with an automobile that the police had impounded from a drug dealer.) Prignano accused Rose of ruining his personal life. “Why don’t you just pull down my pants and give it to me up the ass?” Prignano recalled shouting. The session ended after Prignano threatened to ruin Rose’s personal life by bringing up things from the prosecutor’s past.
Outside on the courthouse steps Prignano chattered nervously about his upcoming testimony. He seemed upset that the feds wouldn’t tell him what else they knew about the Maggiacomo bribe. As a cop, he said, he’d like to know. When he heard about the bribe, he said, he grabbed Ryan by the lapels, shook him, and screamed, “Did you take the fucking money?” Ryan, who had signed his own proffer with the feds, earning him the nickname Captain Canary, denied it. Prignano said that the feds were out to crucify him because he wouldn’t tell them what they wanted to hear. He insisted that Corrente had never talked to him about Maggiacomo. If he had, Prignano said, he would’ve told Corrente: “Look, Frank, I don’t need this kid. I’ve already got enough fucking assholes working for me.”
Prignano’s testimony was widely anticipated. People stopped by the courthouse and asked the clerk when Barney would be going on. When Prignano finally took the stand that Monday morning, he seemed more nervous than defiant. From the moment Rose began questioning Prignano, their mutual contempt was evident. Prignano said that Autiello had lobbied him about Maggiacomo, but Corrente hadn’t. Rose hammered away at the mayor’s strong political influence over the police department, and the need to contribute to Cianci’s campaign to get ahead, as illustrated by the eight thousand dollars that Prignano had donated in the nineties. Prignano described the meeting in the mayor’s office when Cianci decided to make him chief, and how the mayor had first played a little joke by tell-ing him that someone else was getting the job. Prignano conceded that Cianci called the shots on high-level promotions, but insisted, to Rose’s incredulity, that he, too, had input.
“You promoted him?” Rose asked about one major.
“I think so,” answered Prignano.
“You made that decision?” insisted Rose.
“I didn’t say that. I said I promoted him. Promoting is when you stand in front of the guy and pin on the badge.”
In the spectator benches Lou Pulner, a lawyer doing television analysis of the trial, leaned over to Prignano’s lawyer and whispered, “Did your client have a lobotomy?”
When Prignano stepped down at the lunch recess, Aiken approached him and said something about sticking to his story. After lunch, when Prignano retook the stand, Rose elicited testimony that the chief had given some officers advance copies of their promotional exams. One was Sergeant Tonya King, a black officer whom Rose had praised six years earlier as a pioneer. Noting that there had never been a minority female sergeant in Providence, Rose had said in a speech to the Rhode Island Minority Police Association, attended by Prignano: “We have not given up hope. If the results of the latest sergeant’s exam hold true, we won’t have to wait much longer.”
The reasons for Prignano’s actions were never fully explored, nor were they linked to anyone at City Hall. Ryan, who had his own credibility problems, was never called to testify. But the damage—to Prignano’s reputation and his tarnished department—was done.
“I’m not proud of that,” he told Rose softly. “It’s one of my dark days in the police department in my thirty-four years.”
Prignano’s testimony brought more heat than light to the proceedings. But as he stepped down, some jurors shook their heads. They wondered why Cianci had ever made him chief.
AS THE TRIAL moved toward its climax—the playing of the Freitas tapes—the tensions between the prosecution and the defense grew. On several occasions, defense lawyers complained about Rose’s facial gestures and his tendency to make gurgling noises during cross-examinations. Judge Torres admonished Rose for his behavior. “Some of your facial expressions need to be restrained,” he warned.
The normally even-tempered Torres was growing impatient with the frequent bickering. One day he angrily warned that another outburst would bring consequences. He was regarded as a conservative, fair, and even-handed judge, determined to move the trial along and maintain a strict decorum. “If you watched the O. J. Simpson trial,” Torres said at the trial’s outset, “I can assure you that this will not be anything like that.” But the judge also had an impish sense of humor. One day, during a sidebar with the lawyers, out of earshot of the jury and courtroom spectators, Egbert accidentally stepped on Donnelly’s toes. Rose glared. Torres asked what was wrong, and Egbert told him. “Be careful,” the judge warned, “because the toe you step on today could be connected to the ass you have to kiss tomorrow.” Egbert smiled and replied, “Not on your life!”
With the government nearing the end of its case and preparing to call Tony Freitas, the judge faced a pivotal decision: whether to admit the Freitas-Pannone tapes. Uncle Joe, with his explosive statements about Cianci’s involvement in bribery, was an unwelcome presence in the courtroom for the mayor. The defense lawyers fought hard to keep him out, arguing that Pannone’s statements were hearsay, and prejudicial. But as a coconspirator, Pannone’s statements could be used against his alleged confederates—provided that the prosecution had introduced independent evidence of a racketeering enterprise.
While the judge weighed his decision, prosecutors called another witness, a surprise they hoped to use to rehabilitate David Ead—the director of table games at the Foxwoods Casino. Backed by a stack of computer printouts, Richard Tesler rebutted Egbert’s assertion that Ead had gambled $897,000 in the past three years. In fact, Tesler testified, Ead had actually won $155,000 during the past decade. The revelation stunned the courtroom; there was an audible gasp from one spectator. Foxwoods rated Ead as a steady gambler but not a high roller. He was a pretty good blackjack player who won more than he lost. Tesler explained that the $897,000 was a misleading figure, a cumulative number of bets as opposed to actual wins or losses. Egbert, during his cross-examination, tried to suggest that Ead had manipulated his gambling chips, to launder bribe money, but Tesler rejected the possibility. The prosecution t
eam felt that they had scored with Tesler’s testimony, though that remained to be seen. Tesler also testified that Ead had visited the casino more than a thousand times in the past decade.
The next day Joseph Pannone, now seventy-nine, shuffled into court to be sentenced. A codefendant in the racketeering case, he had pleaded guilty before the trial. He looked frail in his blue prison work shirt and had trouble hearing. Given Pannone’s age and poor health, Torres gave him a concurrent term, meaning that he would serve no additional prison time beyond his original five-year sentence and be eligible for release in two more years. As federal marshals led him from the courtroom to drive him back to prison, the people in the courtroom wondered: Was this the end of Uncle Joe? Would Torres allow the Pannone tapes to be played? And if he did, would Pannone testify for the defense?
In preparation for that possibility, Cianci and Egbert had been cultivating an unlikely source—radio talk-show host John DePetro, who had spent the last two years portraying the mayor as the Tony Soprano of City Hall and who, in covering the investigation, had befriended Joe Pannone. To his critics, DePetro was a typical talk-show wiseass and a shameless self-promoter. He called himself the Independent Man, after the statue atop the Rhode Island State House that symbolized the state’s maverick spirit, and referred to his wife as the Independent Wife and his children as the Independent Children. A native Rhode Islander, DePetro had been making good money in radio sales in Manhattan, working for WABC. But he yearned for his own talk show and in 1999 returned home to take over the midday slot on WHJJ, Cianci’s old station. DePetro latched onto Plunder Dome as the case was heating up. His show could be heard blaring from portable radios in offices throughout City Hall.
DePetro’s constant Buddy bashing irritated Cianci. DePetro would repeat rumors about the investigation and, early on, posted updates on his website predicting the mayor’s imminent indictment. He asked listeners to e-mail their favorite Buddy stories; one claimed to have been in Cianci’s house in the early eighties and seen Hitler’s Mein Kampf on the mayor’s bookshelf. One night Cianci confronted DePetro in a bar and, according to DePetro, grabbed him hard by the arm. Another time, DePetro and Art Coloian, the mayor’s chief of staff, had a Friday night dust-up in the men’s room at Raphael’s, an upscale downtown restaurant.
As Operation Plunder Dome had unfolded, DePetro had gotten to know several of the key players, including Tony Freitas, David Ead, Steve Antonson, Eddie Voccola, and, most notably, Joe Pannone. One day shortly after Pannone’s indictment, when he was ducking other reporters, DePetro went over to his house and they had a long conversation. Pannone and his family took a liking to DePetro.
During Rosemary Glancy’s trial, DePetro ran a contest and took the winner to lunch at the infamous Andino’s, where Glancy and Pannone had discussed City Hall corruption over the fried calamari. After lunch DePetro brought the contestant to court, where she got to meet Pannone, who was there taking the Fifth. One day DePetro was over at Pannone’s house when the bumbling tax official tried to put a tape in his VCR of a Frank Sinatra concert—and unwittingly inserted one of the FBI’s undercover tapes of him and Freitas. After Pannone was sent away, DePetro visited him in prison. About four months before Cianci’s trial, the special counsel appointed by Judge Torres to investigate how the Plunder Dome tape was leaked to Channel 10 subpoenaed DePetro. WHJJ’s lawyer fought the subpoena, invoking DePetro’s journalistic privilege, but he was ultimately compelled to testify in a deposition, where he said he didn’t know how the television station obtained the tape. “John DePetro is a journalist,” scoffed Richard Egbert, “like My Cousin Vinny is a lawyer.”
But now Egbert needed DePetro. On the morning of opening arguments, DePetro was sitting in WHJJ’s Winnebago in downtown Providence, where he would be broadcasting during the trial, when a constable walked in. DePetro had just been on Imus in the Morning, previewing the trial and joking about Operation Thugs and Bad Rugs. “Great show,” the constable said, and handed DePetro a subpoena to testify as a witness for Buddy Cianci.
As a potential witness, DePetro was barred from the courtroom. That came as a blow to someone who had lived professionally for this moment, who said that he prayed that Cianci would take the stand. When Judge Torres announced the DePetro ban later that morning, Cianci cast a satisfied look toward the press gallery. During the lunch break between opening arguments, Torres heard an appeal in his chambers from WHJJ’s lawyer, protesting the ban on First Amendment grounds. The judge seemed sympathetic, but Egbert insisted that DePetro had information that could be helpful to Cianci. DePetro remained locked out of the trial as Egbert put off his lawyer’s efforts to work something out.
DePetro wondered why Cianci wanted him to testify, and whether the mayor was yanking his chain. In fact, Egbert was genuinely interested in calling DePetro—but he and Cianci also enjoyed yanking his chain. Egbert had received portions of DePetro’s deposition from the special counsel investigating the leaked Plunder Dome video, and believed DePetro could contradict some of the things that Pannone had said to Freitas. Egbert kept trying to meet with DePetro, to ask him about his conversations with Pannone, but DePetro refused. After about a week, Egbert finally agreed to let DePetro back in the courtroom, on a limited basis. But the threat of being barred again hung over the talk-show host, to Cianci’s amusement. “Hey, Semi-Independent Man,” the mayor would hail him in the corridor. Cianci started calling him “Semi” for short. Periodically Cianci or Egbert would pull DePetro aside and insist they were sincere about calling him. Egbert promised to let him back in the courtroom if DePetro agreed to talk to him. Later in the trial, when the debate over the Rossi-Corrente tape surfaced, Egbert stormed into DePetro’s radio trailer. The lawyer was upset about how DePetro had egged on a caller speculating about the reference to the mayor’s sex life. Egbert said that he ought to punch DePetro in the nose. Then he told him to cut out that “bisexual bullshit.”
The day after Memorial Day, as the trial moved into its sixth week, Torres finally ruled on the Pannone-Freitas tapes. He said that the government had presented evidence linking Cianci and Corrente to a racketeering conspiracy; therefore, the Pannone tapes could be played.
THE JUDGE’S RULING came after Tony Freitas had already been on the stand for two days, testifying to his meetings with Corrente as prosecutors played those tapes.
It had been ironic to hear Rose urge Freitas, when he first took the stand, to speak directly into the microphone. After weeks of often tedious testimony the jurors appeared eager to see the tapes, and curious about Freitas. After one tape was played, a juror interrupted to ask that the monitor in front of Freitas be lowered so that he could see his face. Outside the courthouse, spectators waited in line for a courtroom seat and cheered Freitas, who smiled and waved. One day, though, Freitas left the courthouse to find a parking ticket on his Jeep Cherokee; none of the other cars around him had tickets.
The Corrente tapes captured the chaos in the office of the mayor’s number-two man. The phone rang constantly. Amidst running the city and scheming with Freitas, Corrente was preoccupied with a new house he was building in Cranston, car repairs, cooking pasta and beans, and fending off an unwanted caller. “Did you tell that guy I’m not coming in today?” he barked at his secretary. “Then why did he call again?” One day the power went out in his office. Another day he railed against “the fucking Jews.”
Turning to the Pannone tapes, the prosecution hoped to weave together the various strands of the racketeering enterprise that Cianci had allegedly presided over. The jurors listened as Pannone’s raspy voice guided them: “There are no free lunches. It’s the money that counts, Tony.” “God bless the mayor. You can’t point the finger at him and say he did it. Frank’s in the middle.” Or the advice he recalled receiving from Cianci: “Never talk on the phone, never get a check, but get cash when you’re one-on-one.”
Pannone might have just been some old blowhard, puffing himself up behind the mayor’s back, but he was righ
t about how things worked at City Hall. He had delivered on his promise to set Freitas up with Corrente, and accurately predicted that Corrente, paranoid of bugs, would talk like he didn’t want the money even as he took it from Freitas. (“ ‘No, no, no’ means ‘yes, yes, yes.’ ”) It was telling that Corrente would take money from Freitas, whom he hardly knew, when he had just been investigated for taking bribes from Eddie Voccola. Was that the act of someone who had never palmed an envelope? And Pannone was right about the Cianci campaign’s taking of illegal cash. When Freitas gave Corrente a cash contribution, it never showed up in the mayor’s campaign reports. The money, Pannone said, “goes south.” (The government also introduced evidence of cash collected at a fund-raiser that Rosemary Glancy had cosponsored.)
The jury had been watching tapes and listening to Freitas weave his tale of sleaze at City Hall for four days when Egbert rose to question the government’s star witness. Freitas would be harder to attack than David Ead because everything he had done was on tape. But Egbert wasn’t going after Freitas—he was going after the absent Pannone. Cianci’s lawyer knew that he wasn’t going to have the opportunity to question Pannone directly. Uncle Joe was through talking; his lawyer had informed Egbert that Pannone would take the Fifth. If Egbert was going to attack Pannone’s assertions that Cianci ran a criminal enterprise, he was going to have to do it through Freitas, by contrasting the statesmanlike mayor with his buffoonish tax-board chairman.
