by Mike Stanton
Lombardi had also watched in amusement as several Cianci loyalists now attempted to ingratiate themselves with him. One, Cianci’s acting police chief, asked the new mayor if there was anything he could do. Lombardi suggested that the chief try to get to the bottom of reports that Cianci had used the police to follow his enemies on the council. The chief promised to look into it.
The new mayor lowered his voice, as if the office still belonged to Cianci, and confided that he thought the room might be bugged.
A few weeks later, Lombardi demoted the police chief and fired Cianci’s public-safety director. The next morning Cianci had the fired official on his radio show.
Cianci was also hired to do election-night commentary on Channel 6, Providence’s bottom-rated television station. The response was so negative that two other election-night commentators—a former lieutenant governor and a college professor—refused to show up, saying that a corrupt politician shouldn’t be provided such a platform.
On September 10 David Cicilline decisively won a four-way Democratic primary. With no meaningful opposition in November, the victory assured the forty-one-year-old Cicilline, the gay, Jewish-Italian son of a mob lawyer, of becoming the next mayor of Providence. Cicilline represented a break with the past and signified a new era of diversity, political observers said.
His father, Jack Cicilline, who had been Joe Doorley’s top policy aide back in the 1960s before becoming a mob lawyer, had remained in the background, not wanting to tarnish his son’s image. But one old family friend of the father’s who turned up at Cicilline’s campaign headquarters election night was Buckles Melise, Cianci’s former highway superintendent. Buckles, who had been arrested on a bad-check warrant the previous month, could still be found, most days, hanging out on Federal Hill.
Behind his upbeat public persona, Cianci was morose about the prospect of prison as the weeks slipped by with no word from the appeals court. The Bureau of Prisons assigned him to the Elkton prison in Lisbon, Ohio, a bleak spot in rural Appalachia, where locals hunted squirrels outside the fences. The prison was in the district of former congressman James A. Traficant, Jr., who was serving time in neighboring Pennsylvania following his corruption conviction—and campaigning for reelection.
One night, Cianci came into Murphy’s Deli for a corned-beef sandwich and commiserated with Scott MacKay, a veteran Providence Journal political reporter, about his fate. “It’s all drug dealers,” he said of the Elkton prison population.
On a brighter note, he told MacKay that his radio show was doing well. “My ratings are up,” he said.
But that was small consolation, he added, if he had to “go away.”
Cianci wasn’t his usual snappy self when he appeared on the Don Imus show. When Imus congratulated him on getting married, Cianci didn’t catch on, saying that he wasn’t getting married. “Oh, yes, you are,” said Imus, a reference to his impending prison date.
Cianci also seemed puzzled when Imus asked, “Have you ever watched Soul Train?” Cianci said that he hadn’t. “You will,” Imus predicted.
Cianci told Imus how the jury had found him not guilty twenty-nine times. But this wasn’t the First Circuit. Imus joked that the jury should have read the twenty-nine “not guiltys” first before socking him with the one “guilty.” When Cianci sought to downplay the lone count he was convicted of, Imus pointed out that the feds had gotten Al Capone on his taxes.
“I’m not Al Capone,” said Cianci plaintively.
Four days after a Providence Journal story detailing conditions at Elkton, Cianci launched a campaign to be transferred to a prison closer to Rhode Island.
He invoked the need to be near his daughter, Nicole, who was in a drug-rehab center.
Born in 1974, the year her father first became mayor, Nicole Cianci had had a hard life. Trotted out for campaign commercials from the time she was a baby, she had struggled to win her father’s attention as he pursued his political ambitions and ran the city. Alternatively spoiled and ignored by her father, Nicole later had to endure the very nasty and public breakup of her parents’ marriage, compounded by news of Cianci’s ugly assault of Raymond DeLeo.
In her teens, Nicole developed a drug problem, said Cianci’s former girlfriend Wendy Materna. In her early twenties she became the unwed mother of two children. She depended on her father for financial support. She was listed as a director of a private company that Cianci formed to handle his marinara sauce; the company paid for her car insurance. Aides recalled the mayor’s dismissive attitude toward Nicole when she came by City Hall. She often relied on Cianci’s aides and police drivers. Aides said that they admired her efforts to be a good parent, but that it was hard. The drug problem persisted.
During the summer of her father’s Plunder Dome trial, Nicole reported to the police that a boyfriend had beaten her up. She appeared in court for her father’s sentencing, a girl of twenty-eight with straight blond hair and reddened eyes hidden behind sunglasses. A few days later, she was found wandering incoherently on Branch Avenue. She checked in to a residential drug-treatment center in rural Exeter, under an assumed name. Her mother, Sheila, took the grandchildren.
In November, seeking a new prison assignment, Buddy and Nicole Cianci wrote letters to Rhode Island congressmen Patrick Kennedy and James Langevin, asking them to intercede. “Being closer to Nicole and providing a solid base of family support is not only crucial to Nicole, but to me as well,” wrote Cianci.
Cianci, who said that he had created a trust to provide for his daughter and grandchildren in the event of his death or imprisonment, acknowledged that his “preoccupation” with himself had harmed his daughter. But he said that Nicole had been there for him since his indictment in Operation Plunder Dome, and now he wanted to be there for her.
Nicole wrote that the prospect of her father going to prison was difficult, “because I love him unconditionally.”
Arlene Violet, the former nun and attorney general who was friendly with Sheila and Nicole and knew the grandchildren, was incensed after the letters became public. As host of a popular afternoon talk show on WHJJ, she blasted Cianci on the air for ignoring Nicole and his grandchildren and now using them to help himself. She charged that Cianci, after his conviction, had sent an aide to his daughter’s home to tell them to go on welfare. “Shame on you, Buddy Cianci!” she shouted.
A Cianci family tragedy quickly became a public spectacle. David Ead, who was on home confinement, phoned Violet’s show to call Cianci “a scumbag.”
The next morning Cianci went on his radio show and called Violet a liar. Cianci’s accountant called in to say that Cianci paid Nicole’s rent, car insurance, and medical insurance. Nicole’s former landlord reported that Cianci had paid his daughter’s rent and bought her a car. Callers even questioned whether Violet was a lesbian; Cianci’s cohost, Steve Kass, snapped: “What the hell does she know about raising children? What would she know about tough love?”
DePetro joined the fray, asking listeners whether they believed Violet, his WHJJ colleague and a former attorney general, or Cianci, a convicted felon and “pathological liar.” Tony Freitas weighed in, writing a letter to the Bureau of Prisons urging that Cianci’s request be denied. He accused Cianci of using Nicole’s “unfortunate situation for his own personal gain.”
The next day Cianci met a Journal reporter at the bar at Davio’s to deliver a handwritten letter from Nicole attacking Violet for her public remarks, and accusing her of “telling lies about my father.”
The following week, after Congressmen Patrick Kennedy and James Langevin intervened with the Bureau of Prisons for Nicole’s sake, Cianci was reassigned to the federal prison in Fort Dix, New Jersey.
During Thanksgiving week, Cianci had dinner with Wendy Materna, now Wendy Johannsen, who was in town with her family visiting relatives. After a period of homesickness for Providence, she had made a new life for herself in Florida. She and her husband had a son, Christian, who had his mother’s thick blond hair and
blue eyes. The bitterness of her breakup with Cianci had faded, and they remained friendly. (When Cianci called shortly after his indictment, Wendy’s five-year-old had gotten on the phone and said, “Buddy, I thought you were in jail,” prompting a chuckle from the mayor.)
“How tragic it is for this man who has so much talent to end up in prison,” she reflected. “The years I spent with him were the highest of the highs and the lowest of the lows.”
The day before Thanksgiving, Cianci was at the eye doctor’s when he received a call from the lawyer handling his appeal, Terry MacFadyen. “I have some bad news,” MacFadyen told him. “We lost the appeal.”
The day after Thanksgiving, Cianci went on the radio for the last time and said good-bye.
“You’ll always be our Buddy,” sobbed Anne from North Providence. “Please don’t give up.”
Cianci tried to remain upbeat. He said that he’d be back in four or five years, maybe less if he won the appeal of his conviction. He said he might lose weight, learn Spanish, quit smoking, cut back on his drinking. “There’s no alcohol there, there’s no good wine,” he said.
“Probably the wine list is fairly limited,” said his sidekick, Steve Kass.
Said Cianci, “It’s like going to a very, very inexpensive spa.”
Only one of the callers who got through was glad that Cianci was going to prison. “You betrayed the public trust,” he said. “You committed the worst crime any man could commit—an elected official who was corrupt.”
But Kass cut the man off.
“If you’re that vindictive or that mean-spirited, take it out on somebody else. . . . Go kick someone in a wheelchair.”
THE DAY BEFORE he left for prison, Cianci sat in the Biltmore and did a live interview on NBC’s Today show with Matt Lauer, who had covered Cianci as a young Providence television reporter in the early 1980s.
“I’ve had better Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays,” Cianci told Lauer. After his Plunder Dome indictment Cianci had said that he’d had better Mondays. After his indictment for assaulting Raymond DeLeo, he’d said that he’d had better Tuesdays. He was running out of days.
The next day, Thursday, December 5, as a snowstorm moved up the East Coast, Buddy Cianci checked out of Providence. Fat white flakes fell outside the Biltmore. Christmas carols filled the air. Skaters glided around the ice rink across the street. Cianci, his face puffier and older-looking, said how surreal the day seemed.
His longtime employee and errand boy, retired police officer Bob Lovell, drove him to New Jersey. As they headed south on Interstate 95, Cianci called a producer for 60 Minutes to request a sneak preview of a segment about him scheduled to air that Sunday. But the producer told him it was against the show’s policy.
Cianci had no need to worry. En route to prison, he still had the ability to spin 60 Minutes. In a rosy profile that painted Cianci as the victim of overzealous prosecutors, Morley Safer allowed the ex-mayor to rewrite his ugly assault on DeLeo. The cigarette, said Cianci, “wasn’t even lit. Just threw it at him. End of story.”
By the time the profile ran on Sunday night, Cianci would be an inmate, in a harsh new world where the senior prisoners dictated what shows to watch in the television room. Another former Rhode Island public official who had done time at Fort Dix recalled watching inmates use a “lock in the sock”—a combination lock stuffed into a sock—to settle fights over the television. Cianci would be sleeping in a twenty-by-twenty-five-foot room with bunk beds housing a dozen or so other convicts. Many were drug dealers and illegal aliens, with a sprinkling of mobsters. Lights-out was at 11 P.M. Prisoners got up between 5 and 6 A.M.
“You’re basically losing your life,” said the former Rhode Island convict. “All the things that are part of who you are are gone. Buddy lived a twenty-four-hour day. He was everywhere. Now he’s nowhere.”
Cianci and Lovell spent the night in Trenton. The next morning, with eight inches of snow blanketing the sprawling prison and military-base complex in southern New Jersey, Lovell pulled up to a military checkpoint at the entrance to the base. The guards would not allow Cianci to take in the cigarettes and novel that he carried.
Lovell had been with Cianci since 1974, when they walked a police picket line together to protest “No Dough Joe” Doorley’s refusal to buy new police uniforms. He had fought back tears outside the courtroom prior to Cianci’s sentencing.
“Good-bye,” said Cianci, hugging Lovell. “Thanks for all your help.”
Buddy Cianci climbed into a white prison van with tinted windows. The van drove off across the flat, barren landscape, carrying away the prince of Providence.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Shortly before I began work on The Prince of Providence, I was sitting in Buddy Cianci’s office, listening to the mayor talk about a Caribbean dictator.
“Take Trujillo,” said Cianci gleefully. “Now he was a bastard.”
Cianci, who had been indicted a few weeks earlier, was unwinding after a press conference with his friend Anthony Quinn to promote the Providence Latin American Film Festival. Rafael Trujillo, the notorious Dominican Republic dictator from 1930 to 1961, had come up because Quinn was supposed to play him in a movie being shot in Puerto Rico that summer. Cianci had dug up an old biography of Trujillo that he had read years ago, when he said he was considering President Reagan’s offer to become the United States ambassador to the Dominican Republic.
“I flew down to look around,” he recalled. “I went with Ellsworth Bunker, who wrote their constitution. He was the U.S. ambassador to Vietnam. Jeb Bush was in the delegation. We flew down on Air Force Two. You couldn’t drink the water, but there was a big swimming pool at our hotel. Palm trees all around. People wore white suits. I had just lost the race for governor and I was gonna bail. I went to the palace and met the president. I also met the mayor of Santo Domingo. We went to his inauguration. I remember riding in the mayor’s limousine and suddenly hundreds of people surround the car and start rocking it. I thought, ‘Shit! It’s a revolution!’ The mayor says, ‘No, they like you when they do that!’ These crazy fucking people are trying to lift up the car and carry it, to show how much they love you.”
Cianci laughed and took a quick drag on his cigarette. Then he returned to Trujillo.
“A Ph.D. student at Columbia University in New York was writing his thesis about the misfortunes of the dictatorship. He had published some pretty unflattering things about Trujillo. One day, Trujillo sent a plane to New York. Two guys went up to Columbia and hustled the student into a car, then drove him to La Guardia and put him on the plane. They had diplomatic immunity, so no one asked any questions. That night the guy was at Trujillo’s compound. Trujillo comes in, wearing the boots, waving the swagger stick. They’re out by a swimming pool, which is filled with piranha. Trujillo says, ‘Tell me how shitty I am for my country. You say I’m a mean bastard? I’m going to show you how mean I am.’ Then they throw him in the pool. The water is thrashing with piranha and sharks, eating the shit out of the guy, right down to the bones. Dead.
“You know how they finally nailed Trujillo? The pilots gave him up. They got fired from their jobs, so they gave him up. That was the beginning of the end for Trujillo. When word got out, public opinion turned against him.”
Cianci laughed, a throaty chuckle. “What a banana republic,” he said, grinning. “We need more of that around here.”
Those two stories—the adoring throng rocking his limousine, the despotic dictator punishing a critic—reflected the two sides of the mayor. Writing a book about Cianci gave me the opportunity to witness both sides firsthand.
As I went about my research into this complex character, he and I engaged in the traditional dance between journalist and politician. On some days, he would invite me in to share some of his stories—though always selectively, for this most public of figures managed to glide through his high-profile career without really addressing the most personal or controversial aspects of his life. On other occasions, he wo
uld shut me out and call me “the novelist” or a “mercenary.” Journalists write books about politicians all the time, but Cianci tried to make it sound as if I was acting unethically in doing so. When he learned that I was writing this book, he called Howard Sutton, the publisher of The Providence Journal, and tried to have me ordered off the project. Later, Cianci complained to The Boston Globe’s Alex Beam that I was “stalking” him—showing up at his press conferences and other public events and trying to ask him questions about his personal life. When I mentioned that to Brown University political science professor Darrell West, the author of a biography of Rhode Island congressman Patrick Kennedy, Darrell told me that that’s what all biographers must do.
Just before his trial, when he learned that the movie rights to the book had been optioned, Cianci confronted me after a press conference at Prospect Park, near the statue of Roger Williams with his hand outstretched over downtown. A television reporter asked him what he thought of the movie deal. The mayor, seeing me standing with the other reporters, pulled me into the picture, put his arm around me, and squeezed me hard on the back of the neck. Then, with the cameras rolling, the mayor proceeded, in classic Cianci fashion, to turn the tables by trying to interview me about how much money I was getting. We sparred playfully for a minute or two and then he dismissed me, saying, “Go play in the traffic now.” The film clip later appeared in a 60 Minutes profile of Cianci.
