The Prince of Providence

by Mike Stanton

  As darkness fell over the city, a few thousand people lined Francis Street, which ran from the foot of the State House along the length of Providence Place Mall. The pulsing music and flashing lights of the floats gave the street the feel of a carnival midway. “Enjoy the great city of Providence! Enjoy this great city of diversity!” shouted Cianci. “Let’s get on with the parade!”

  The mayor climbed onto the back of a Saab convertible with a busty blond drag queen, BB Hayes, who was actually a hairdresser from North Providence. The procession moved slowly through a tunnel of noise, as the mayor, electrified, reached out to shake outthrust hands. The parade made its way downtown, past the Biltmore and through darkened streets with pockets of activity outside gay bars. On Weybosset Street the crowd thickened again, as several hundred raucous people waited outside the flashing marquee of the Providence Performing Arts Center. The car moved past a building where three nearly naked men in towels danced on the fire escape.

  Cianci got out at the theater, shaking hands. One man said, “I’m lighting a candle for you.” Humble and grateful, the mayor worked his way through the adoring crowd and went inside Intermezzo, a stylish bistro. He sat at the corner of the bar, nursing a Courvoisier and B&B and smoking a cigarette.

  An inveterate gossip and raconteur, Cianci held court for more than an hour, reminiscing about past political battles and his current predicament. He talked about how he had finally been able to get some sleep last night, then woke up that morning and was channel surfing when he came across the movie Moonstruck and got lost in it for a while, laughing and forgetting. “I love that movie, with the wolf and the moon. It’s so Italian.”

  “Heyyy, El-le-gance,” Cianci called to a man who sang show tunes at Intermezzo on Wednesday nights.

  Two drag queens came over to have their picture taken with the mayor, whose official photographer hovered nearby. “They’re actually guys, you know,” said Cianci, chuckling.

  The mayor fretted about a Journal photographer who had taken his picture earlier, in the parade. “This is going to hurt me with the jurors—oh, he likes gays,” he said.

  Cianci held a bemused live-and-let-live attitude toward gays, he said. His open-door policy was a continuation of the tolerance that had marked Providence since its creation, by Roger Williams, as a haven for religious freedom that welcomed Quakers and Jews and other outcasts. The mayor admitted that he cultivated gays for political reasons, then shrugged and said, “Hey, I haven’t lived my life on the straight and narrow, so who am I to question them?”

  Judgment day was never far from Cianci’s thoughts. He replayed scenes from the trial, laughing about Pannone’s wacky comments and then saying plaintively, “They can’t convict me on that!” There was a sense of disbelief that it had come to this, that such a motley cast of characters—Pannone, Ead, Freitas—had put the mighty mayor in such a jam.

  If he was acquitted, Cianci said, he was going to take the half million dollars in his campaign fund and throw a series of parties throughout the city—for blacks, Hispanics, people in wheelchairs, the blind, the deaf. “People say it’s a victory if I’m acquitted. It’s not a victory. It’s harassment. They’ve been after me for seven years. They spent twenty million dollars. Why? Because I wanted to be a U.S. senator.”

  The mayor’s bitterness toward the WASPs surfaced. John Chafee was a big thief, grumbled Cianci. “I can tell you a deal where he took four hundred grand,” he continued, holding up four fingers. “As a U.S. senator.” He reflected on an early turning point in his life—the decision not to run against Chafee in 1976. “I thought I had more time,” he said regretfully. “There’s a lesson there. When opportunity comes, grab it!” He slammed his fist on the bar.

  It was approaching midnight. Someone had invited Cianci to stop by Mirabar, a gay nightclub around the corner. The mayor, a reporter, and a woman filming a documentary about Cianci’s life piled into his limousine for the short ride.

  There was a line out the door to get in, but one of the mayor’s advance men was already inside. Soon a side door opened and Cianci’s party was ushered inside, into a small, dark room packed with humanity and throbbing with ear-splitting music. The darkness flashed with strobe lights, illuminating near-naked men dancing on a raised platform decorated with balloons. Cianci’s uniformed police driver with the high leather boots stood against the back wall.

  Someone put a white spotlight on Cianci, who wore an olive sport jacket and tan slacks and a tie, and introduced the mayor of Providence. There were screams of delight. Cianci stood modestly, his thumb hooked in his pocket, acknowledging the praise.

  Later, sitting at a small table in the corner, the mayor laughed and shouted to be heard above the noise. “How many laws do you think are being broken in here tonight?” he said with a laugh. “I had lunch in the Old Canteen today. Little old Italian ladies. Can you imagine them in here?”

  His photographer, who had walked over from Intermezzo, joked that this was life in the Renaissance City. “More like ancient Rome,” quipped Cianci.

  Later, as Cianci was leaving Mirabar, a young man from Connecticut, wearing a red T-shirt that said FRUITCAKE, shook the mayor’s hand and said, “You’re the best thing to happen to Providence in thirty years.”

  THE DELIBERATIONS DRAGGED on through the following week. Channel 12 started running a jury clock superimposed on the screen during newscasts. Potential candidates for mayor watched the clock and the calendar as the June 26 filing deadline approached. City Hall fell into an early summer state of suspended animation. The mayor holed up most of the time in his office, unable to venture more than ten minutes from the courthouse in case the jury came back.

  Sitting at his desk a few minutes before noon one day, the mayor was on the speakerphone with his police chief, Richard Sullivan, talking about a fake pipe bomb at Hope High School. Sullivan was explaining that the janitor had found the bomb in a bathroom and, thinking it was real, brought it to the principal’s office. Cianci rolled his eyes. He told Sullivan to have extra officers there that night for graduation, then hung up to watch the noon news, his eyes flitting back and forth between two televisions tuned to two different stations. The reporters at Hope High reported that the bomb was real. “Oh, Christ,” said Cianci, “get me Sullivan on the phone again.” When Sullivan was back on the phone, Cianci barked, “Didn’t you tell the media it was a fake?” The chief said that they were doing that now. “Well, you missed the noon news.”

  A few minutes later, a delegation was shown into the mayor’s office prior to a press conference touting the city’s latest acquisition—a Russian nuclear submarine from the cold war, to be anchored at India Point as a tourist attraction. One of the visitors was the daughter-in-law of former Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev, whose son taught at Brown. The sub was featured in an upcoming Hollywood movie, K-19: The Widowmaker, starring Harrison Ford. Hopefully, Cianci said, Ford would come to Providence for the movie’s premiere in July. “You always need to have a submarine around,” quipped Cianci. “You may need to get out of town in a hurry.”

  On some days, the mayor would come across Kennedy Plaza and hold court with the reporters awaiting the verdict. “Here we are,” he said one day with a sigh, “waiting for a judge to tell us what extortion is.”

  Cianci sat on the granite steps. Inside, the jurors had asked the judge to clarify the definition of extortion. The warm sunshine angled across the front of the courthouse and beat down on the mayor. “I can take the heat,” he said. “Inside and outside the courtroom.”

  He surveyed the skyline of his city, which he had known since he was a boy, coming downtown with his mother for singing lessons in Celia Moreau’s studio behind City Hall. He pointed to the top of the Art Deco Fleet Tower, noting that it had been built during the Roaring Twenties with a rooftop docking station for dirigibles. He reminisced about distant political battles and bygone machine bosses. He talked about his time as a prosecutor, when his longest wait for a verdict had been two days,
in the trial of armored-car robber John Gary Robichaud. He told stories of his army days, when he was commander of the military stockade at Fort Devens—“where Joe Pannone is now,” he added, laughing harshly.

  A Splash Duck Tours bus rolled past the courthouse. The driver was telling the passengers on his microphone that this was where the mayor of Providence was on trial, then spotted Cianci and exclaimed, “Hey, there he is now!” Cianci waved as the tourists snapped pictures.

  As the vigil wore on, the media contingent had grown. The weedy vacant lot from which John DePetro continued to broadcast his radio show had become an RV city filled with television trucks from throughout New England.

  Cianci took in the scene and muttered: “Look at them. Waiting for blood.”

  AS CHANNEL 12’S jury clock ticked, the jurors sat in the deliberation room, shielded behind a wooden door guarded by a federal marshal.

  The morning that Cianci sat outside commenting on the media’s bloodlust was the seventh day of deliberations. The jury had finally begun hashing out the blockbuster charges, counts 1 and 2: RICO conspiracy and RICO.

  The eight women and four men on the jury had spent a week and a half getting to this point, arduously working their way through a ten-page verdict sheet that required them to answer eighty-three separate questions of guilt or innocence regarding Cianci, Corrente, and Autiello.

  After nearly seven weeks of testimony from sixty-one witnesses and 721 exhibits, the case was in the hands of a cross section of Rhode Islanders. They were teachers and social workers, a cab driver, a store manager, a retired policeman, a laborer, a forklift operator, a physical therapist, and a worker at the Rhode Island Central Landfill. The lone Providence resident, a Brown graduate whose parents were lawyers in her native Houston, Texas, was elected forewoman.

  It wasn’t like in the movies, one jury later reflected. They worked hard, taking twenty-minute lunch breaks and carefully considering the law and the evidence. They read and reread the law, trying to understand the elements of conspiracy and extortion and the subtle distinctions between racketeering and racketeering conspiracy. They listened to a tape recording of Judge Torres’s instructions over and over.

  They began with the easiest charges, the ones in which Corrente was on tape, taking bribes. They were unmoved by Corrente’s arguments of entrapment and poor hearing. “He seemed to hear when it was convenient,” noted one juror. And he still took the money from Freitas. They also voted to convict Corrente and Autiello of bribery conspiracy for demanding campaign contributions from the tow-truck operators, based in part on Autiello’s role in collecting the money and Corrente’s knowledge as campaign chairman, as indicated in Cianci campaign records. But they were skeptical of the government’s key witness, tower Kenneth Rocha, who had described a meeting in which Corrente had demanded the money, and acquitted Corrente and Autiello of extorting the towers. The jury also convicted Autiello of conspiring to extort five thousand dollars from the mother of the police recruit, though they acquitted him of taking the actual bribe, because of the mystery of what happened to the money. (One juror said that the jurors debated their own theories of who got the money, with some suspecting that it went to Captain Ryan.)

  The jurors spent a lot of time fighting over the extortion and bribery counts involving Cianci and David Ead. Many generally believed Ead, but not beyond a reasonable doubt. He was too sleazy, and his gambling was troubling. One juror said that some felt a bit “conned” by Egbert after the Foxwoods official testified that Ead’s gambling wasn’t as bad as the defense had implied. But it was bad enough. When Egbert ticked off the number of days that Ead had been to Foxwoods, then asked if he thought he had a gambling problem, “Ead looked like he was trying to answer ‘What’s the distance between Neptune and Pluto?’ ” said the juror. “Maybe Ead was right. But a lot of us felt that the standard of proof fell just short. We were being asked to convict Buddy Cianci solely on the word of David Ead.”

  After a few days of heated debate, the jury voted to acquit Cianci of the eight counts regarding the Ead bribes.

  The most contentious part of the deliberations concerned the University Club. The initial vote was 6–6. For nearly three days the jurors debated whether the mayor had extorted a membership. Voices were raised and tempers frayed. Some of the jurors, many of whom weren’t the type to belong to the University Club, had trouble relating to its affluent members as victims. The debate came down to why the club had offered Cianci an honorary membership. If it was to make a friend, then a majority felt that it wasn’t extortion. But if it was to get the club’s variances approved to reopen, it was. They focused on the testimony of club leader Alan Gelfuso. It was here that their frustration with Richard Rose was most apparent, said two of the jurors. As they went over a transcript of Gelfuso’s testimony, they wished that Rose had asked one more question and gotten the club’s motives explicitly on the record. By the end of the third day, the vote had shifted to 9–3 to acquit. But the three remaining holdouts were adamant. Finally, exasperated, the jury set the University Club aside and moved on to the RICO counts.

  By this point, the jurors felt as if they were the ones in prison. One day, after two of them got into a heated argument, one read his horoscope from a tabloid aloud to the others: “You will be explosive in your temper.” The jurors burst into laughter, momentarily easing the tension. Although they generally kept the window blinds shut, one of the court sheriffs joked one day that they should open them and let the people outside see them duking it out.

  There had been days, during the long and, at times, tedious testimony, that the jurors had longed to escape. They joked about hiding from the sheriff in the two bathrooms off the deliberation room, then opening the second-floor window to make him think that they had jumped. One day, during a recess, there was a commotion in the jury lounge when one of the jurors looked out the window and saw one of the towers, who had testified, in action. “Hey, Matarese is towing someone’s car!” someone shouted. Everyone rushed to the window to see.

  Since the jurors weren’t supposed to discuss the testimony, they made small talk. Often they would discuss the combatants. They noticed when Voccola was asleep and when Corrente came to court one day with his lips swollen (an allergic reaction to medication). They liked Judge Torres, who they felt ran a strict but fair courtroom; once, when the bickering among the lawyers got out of hand, the judge threatened to send them all to the principal’s office. They also studied the lawyers. They liked Egbert, his smooth, confident manner, and were at times annoyed by Rose’s histrionics; whenever he got ticked off during a defense lawyer’s questioning, noted one juror, Rose would sit at the prosecution table and pull on his socks. During breaks, the jurors would imitate Egbert hitching up his pants or Rose tugging at his socks. One day, after watching the two lawyers go at it, the jurors joked that if it came to fisticuffs, they’d bet on Rose, because he was heavier and had a longer reach. Then someone said, “What if [Bill] Murphy [Voccola’s lawyer] jumps in?”

  As they listened to the witnesses, the jurors also formed impressions of Cianci’s City Hall—impressions that came into play as they considered the RICO counts. One was struck by the number of city employees with immunity. Some looked like they hadn’t graduated from high school, said one juror. As they testified, noted another, “you could see the wheels turning, wondering, ‘How can I answer this so that if Buddy isn’t convicted, I won’t lose my job?’ ”

  Given the contentious discussions over some of the underlying charges, the jurors dreaded the time when they would have to resolve the RICO count. But it turned out to be simpler than they had expected. To be convicted of racketeering, a defendant had to be found guilty of at least two predicate acts. Since the jury had not found Cianci guilty of any specific crime, he was acquitted of count 2. But his two alleged confederates, Corrente and Autiello, were convicted.

  That left Count 1: RICO conspiracy.

  In his instructions, Judge Torres had explained that a defenda
nt could be convicted of racketeering conspiracy if he was knowingly a part of the plan. He did not have to be found guilty of committing any of the actual crimes or even be aware of all of the details of the criminal enterprise. “Each member of the conspiracy may perform separate and distinct acts and at different times,” said Torres. “Some may perform major roles; some minor roles.”

  The evidence of a conspiracy did not have to be direct. It could be shown through circumstantial evidence, which one juror would later observe isn’t as sexy as on television, when there is always a smoking gun. After the tapes that they had seen during the trial, one juror wondered: “How come they can’t wire Cianci’s office? Why can’t they wire the big man?”

  As the jurors closed in on a verdict, they considered what the mayor had known. Although the evidence had not been sufficient, in their eyes, to link him beyond a reasonable doubt to Corrente or Ead or Pannone, the accumulation of their corrupt acts, and their association with the mayor, was damning. Even if the people beneath him were sleazy and had their own little scams, the jurors found it hard to believe that all of this could have gone on without Cianci’s knowledge, or that he didn’t benefit. It was so blatant, said one juror, and the mayor kept an eye on things, such as the building-board agenda from which he had learned of the University Club’s application. As another juror put it during deliberations, “This guy knows how many rolls of toilet paper there are in City Hall.”

  Although they didn’t believe everything that Joe Pannone had said on the tapes, two jurors said that they found him generally credible about how corruption worked at City Hall—and his words were backed up by Corrente’s actions caught on tape. One juror also pointed to Freitas’s testimony about attending a Cianci fund-raiser, where the mayor had mentioned to Ead that he had taken care of a particular matter. Other testimony indicated that Cianci had been referring to the Ronci estate-tax deal, and that he had been involved in that matter, as well as in the hiring of Christopher Ise.