The Tarantinos, father and son, each sent $250 to the Fiore campaign during the primary, she discovered, and supplemented those donations with an additional $300 each before the end of September. Richardson was forced to conclude that their contributions were relatively small compared to the amounts received from many persons and businesses all over the State. She figured it was a dead end.
At that point she decided to forget Fiore for a while and spend some time fleshing out her story on Bruce Singer. Jenna liked him, and remembered vividly how his sincerity came through in each of the speeches she watched him give. Clearly though, he was far less charismatic than Fiore. She suspected that a number of voters would want to take a closer look at Singer once they read her article about the past connection between Fiore and Sandy Tarantino and considered its implications. She resolved to carefully consider and report everything she learned about the Democratic candidate and his campaign.
The personal aspects of Singer’s life were sprinkled throughout Richardson’s draft of his campaign style and oratory. It wasn’t until she almost finished writing it that the two years he spent in Vietnam after graduating from Brown University in 1970 suddenly meant a lot more to her. She wondered how Fiore and Tarantino managed to go directly on to law school after finishing their studies at Princeton in 1968 while Singer’s matriculation at Harvard Law was postponed by the draft until after his wartime service.
It was worth looking into, Jenna thought. Maybe I’ve got a draft dodger or two on my hands.
* * *
The Providence and Narragansett draft boards no longer existed, but their records and logs were available for inspection. At Providence City Hall, an unattractive granite building facing Kennedy Plaza, Richardson discovered that Sandy Tarantino was classified 1-A after graduating from college in 1968. She also learned that most other young men his age sharing that classification were inducted into the Army between June and December of that year.
Tarantino’s status, however, was changed to “Continue student deferment.” Jenna could find no letters addressed to the draft board from family, friends or clergy urging the deferment. But there were two notes of interest to explain what happened. The first, written in longhand on the bottom of the agency form, indicated that his father had no regular income, and that on becoming a lawyer Tarantino would be able to support his parents. Someone also wrote the words, “Defer, per A. B.” in the margin of the log next to Sandy’s name.
Jenna copied the documents she needed. Her follow-up search to locate the three men who were the draft board officials in Providence at the time took her back to the Herald library. She discovered their names in a book containing a series of legal appeals from some of the board’s decisions.
It took two hours of frustrating research on the telephone before she finally learned their status. One of the officials was dead. A second had moved to West Palm Beach, Florida, in 1979. She located the Florida phone number and spoke to a housekeeper who was caring for the former official’s wife. The housekeeper informed her that the woman’s husband resided in an institution for Alzheimer’s patients. The status of the third draft board member offered some hope. He was in a nursing home in North Scituate, a 20-minute drive from the Herald.
77
THE HAWTHORNE HILL HOME for the Aged was located on Route 6, about fifteen miles west of downtown Providence, in what was mostly a commercial area of North Scituate. Richardson spotted the nursing home sign at the foot of a driveway that was just beyond the last of the business establishments in that block. She turned off the main road and followed the driveway for about 300 feet as it climbed a gentle hill behind the stores. The Home was an uninviting two-story red brick building. When she got out of her car, she realized that the facility was set far enough back from the road so that the sound of heavy traffic down below was only a muffled hum at that level. Inside, a receptionist fingered through a card file and directed her to the second floor. There, a nurse at the desk led her to John Darling’s room for her appointment with him.
Jenna had worked for several weeks on a nursing industry story just over a year earlier. Her digging uncovered the facts of how a chain of homes owned by one prosperous businessman systematically deprived its patients of various services for which they were being billed. Breaking the story required her to spend hours at a time with some patients, masquerading as a relative. That allowed her to sit alone with them in their rooms and observe the total care administered by nurses and aides. But Jenna still found it very difficult to walk through another facility and witness the vegetative state in which some of the residents were surviving.
She was relieved to find that Darling was remarkably vigorous and healthy-looking for a man in his eighties. He was sitting in a wheelchair, reading a magazine when Jenna entered. Despite her protestations, he lifted himself partway out of the chair to shake hands when she introduced herself.
They engaged in some small talk for a while. Darling got an obvious kick out of describing to her what downtown Providence looked like in the forties, during the war years. It seemed to please him to name many of the current buildings that weren’t there at that time. Jenna likened it to an old man letting his grandchild know what kinds of toys they had to amuse themselves with in “the good old days.” Then, while discussing the difficult traffic patterns that existed before Interstate 95 split the city in half, Darling suddenly stopped short.
“You’d better get down to business,” he said, “or I’ll be ranting and raving until it’s time to go eat.”
Richardson showed him the Tarantino draft records she picked up at City Hall. “Do you have any recollection of the circumstances surrounding this deferment?” she asked.
Darling took his time looking at the documents. “I can tell you that what it says there in the margin with the initials ‘A.B.’ is my handwriting. That note on there about him becoming a lawyer and supporting his parents, that’s not mine, and I don’t remember seeing it at the time.” He was silent for a couple of minutes while he stared straight up at the ceiling, his eyes closed most of the time. Jenna waited patiently. Finally, he looked back at her.
“I’ll tell you everything I remember,” he said. But then he remained silent for a while longer, clasping his hands in front of him before continuing. “The man who came to see us about the Tarantino boy was very powerful in some way or another, but I can’t recall what it was. He was insistent that the young man be given a deferment. I know that Henry and Dip—that’s what everyone called Dillard—had both heard a lot about this fellow, but his name meant nothing to me. Of course I was a scientist most of my life and that’s all I ever cared to read about. I never bothered with the newspapers or most magazines. My wife always said I was a one-dimensional man.
“They were afraid of him for some reason, I remember that. And after he left, we took a vote on it right away. It was two to one to grant the deferment, but we never entered the numbers when we voted. We always left every decision looking like it was unanimous.”
Once again Darling studied the ceiling for a minute or so. “You can ask me more questions if you want,” he told her, “but whatever I say about anything the first time is most always all that’ll come to mind. That’s how it works with me.” Jenna tried to jog his memory about a couple of things, but he was right.
* * *
The draft board records in Narragansett were less revealing. Richardson learned that Fiore was given two consecutive deferments. The first allowed him to continue college after his sophomore year at Princeton, the second to go on to law school. The town clerk couldn’t understand why anything that old could be important, and didn’t hide her annoyance at having to search for the records in a damp basement storage room. Jenna had come on a bad day, the clerk told her, and then only reluctantly entered the names of the three board officials on her computer to see if any of them paid a property tax to the town in the past year.
“That’s the only way of finding out whether they still live in Narraganse
tt, other than just looking them up in the phone book. If they’re not listed, I can’t help you. We have no reason to keep tabs on them.”
It turned out that one of them, a Vincent Curcuruto, resided on Shore Road. Richardson wrote down his address, along with the names of the two other officials, and drove to the white frame house with no shutters that was located on a cul-de-sac a block in from Narragansett Bay.
Virginia Curcuruto let her in and called her husband from the den where he was watching TV. The small living room was furnished entirely in colonial style. As they sat there, Jenna noticed that the stitching in several areas of the brown-toned braided rug were pulled loose. She suspected that the Curcurutos owned a cat at some time. The two of them were probably in their mid-eighties, she figured, but both were full of energy and it wouldn’t have surprised Jenna if they told her they were about to go square dancing. She explained the reason she was there.
“I was actually the oldest of the three of us who sat on the board,” Curcuruto told her, “but I’m the only one who’s still alive and kicking. Neal Wilson died in a boating accident out on Narragansett Bay the same week Nixon resigned as President. And Bobby Silvers had an aneurysm in Bermuda about five years ago. Imagine dying like that while you’re on vacation, being someplace you’ve wanted to see for so long. It was a shame.
“Anyway, let me answer your question. We tried to take care of the kids here and keep them away from Vietnam as long as we could. There was a fair amount of feeling in this town against the war, even in the early days. So if a youngster graduated college and was going to do something else aside from just getting a job, we wanted to do what we could for him.
“Naturally, we couldn’t give everyone a deferment or we’d never meet even the minimum quotas that were set for us. Keep in mind that a high percentage of our boys were going on to graduate school for law or business or something or other. But we checked to see how big a family it was, whether any other sons were already in the service, different things like that. Besides, each of us had close friends who called and asked us to do what we could for their kids, so sometimes we sort of swapped favors among ourselves on the board.”
“That wasn’t very often,” his wife interjected protectively, and Jenna smiled in response.
“Now I’ll get to the point,” Curcuruto continued. “You can see from the record here that only Bobby and I signed off on Fiore’s second deferment. What happened is that just the two of us were in the office that afternoon when who walks in but Anthony Buscatelli. Do you know who he was?”
Jenna assured him that she knew all about Buscatelli.
“Well, anyways, there was him and two other guys, they must have been bodyguards. I’d seen his picture in the papers and I’m Italian too, so I knew who he was even before he said a word. He told us why he was there and the fact that Fiore was going to the same law school as the son of a very close friend of his. The two boys already arranged to live together, and the other one was getting a deferment in Providence. He knew that for sure, he said.
“Then he asked me in Italian if I spoke the language. When I told him I did, almost everything else he said was just to me. Bobby didn’t know what was going on. I won’t say Buscatelli threatened me, but he let me know just who he was. He said that Italians had to stick together because everyone else wanted to crap on us. Here was an Italian boy from a good family who deserved the chance to go on and be a lawyer. After law school he was going to be partners with the son of that best friend he told me about, also Italian. By the time he was through talking, I had nothing to say.”
Jenna now understood what the notation “Defer, Per A. B.” meant on Sandy Tarantino’s draft board record in Providence.
“Bobby saw what I looked like. As soon as Buscatelli and his boys left, he asked me what we were talking about. He got the picture right away and said if I wanted to approve Fiore’s deferment for any reason, he’d go along with me right then and there.
“That’s what we did, and the next day we told Neal about it. I don’t know anything about Fiore, except it looks like he’s got a good shot to be governor. I’m not saying he had anything to do with what happened or even knew about it. He filed the papers asking for another deferment to go to law school, and we approved it. End of story.”
Maybe, Jenna thought to herself, or maybe there’s more to come.
78
RICHARDSON’S ACCOUNT OF THE close bond that existed between Doug Fiore and Sandy Tarantino in the years from 1965 through 1969 ran in the Sunday Herald. Although the story appeared on page four of the front section, it was given an attention-catching preview with a headline above the paper’s masthead that read, “FIORE’S PAST LINK TO TARANTINOS REVEALED.”
McMurphy allowed Jenna to go partway out on a limb. She wrote that “ … while there’s no evidence of an ongoing relationship between them since 1969, it’s difficult to accept the fact that two men who shared the same apartment for four consecutive years and live only a few miles from each other in Rhode Island did not continue to have contact after that date.” She attempted to put that exact question to Fiore and Tarantino two days earlier, the story indicated, but neither of them was available for comment.
Jenna asserted in the article that “Even the voters of Rhode Island who are pleased with Fiore’s stand on the issues, especially his strong position against State-run casinos, have to ask themselves whether this candidate has an undisclosed reason for telling them what his old friend wants him to say. The electorate has to be concerned with whether Fiore is returning past favors to help preserve the Tarantinos’ firm grip on gambling. “Furthermore,” she continued, “not knowing the intensity of the relationship, the citizens of our State have to wonder whether Fiore, as governor, would ever be willing to position himself against the interests of the Tarantino family.”
* * *
Cyril Berman made a number of phone calls after reading Richardson’s story that morning. It didn’t have quite enough in it to be a “bombshell,” he concluded, but it came awfully close. He was certain that its being out there would eat into their lead.
On the positive side, he realized, no one could blame Fiore for trying to get a deferment to go to law school. He knew, from the way people now felt about Vietnam, that a lot of them would shrug their shoulders at what Richardson revealed in her column. They probably wished that someone with a little influence had been able to keep their own sons or husbands or friends from having to go over there and get killed or wounded for what amounted to nothing as they saw it. Furthermore, there was no indication that Fiore was aware at the time of any intervention on his behalf by Anthony Buscatelli, whom he apparently never even met.
On the downside, the story underscored the fact that Singer risked his life for his country while Fiore stayed home. And Berman understood that anyone who read what Richardson wrote would now link Fiore with the Tarantinos whenever they spoke of him. That meant that any bad feeling against the Family that ruled on Federal Hill, like the suspicion that the Tarantinos were involved in the murder of Niro and Cardella, would inevitably rub off on his candidate.
Richardson’s less than subtle intimation that Sandy Tarantino and his father were now exerting influence over Fiore because of a past friendship and a wartime deferment raised a separate issue for Berman. He wanted all the major players in the Fiore campaign to be on the same wavelength in case they were interrogated by someone in the media. He got on the telephone before going down for breakfast and made sure every one of them knew what to say and how to answer questions along that line. In the meantime, he assured them, he would call the Herald himself and charge that Richardson’s insinuations bordered on libel.
79
IT WAS AN EXAMPLE of what Terry Reardon always called, “One of my Irish days.”
At midmorning, on Tuesday, he had a visit from Tommy Arena who came to let him know that the Herald delivery drivers ratified the new contract. The pressure was off.
Arena had spoken to Reardon aga
in a few days after Cardella was shot. “Like I told you, don’t worry about having no new contract by the end of the month,” he said. “There’s no way I’ll let these fucking drivers strike under the circumstances we got now. We can finish up negotiations later on. If you want that Donlan kid sitting at the table with you, that’s okay. Or you and me can meet by ourselves and work something out.”
Terry thanked him for his consideration.
“Take whatever time you need and get back to me. These fucking guys ain’t going nowheres without my say-so.”
A couple of weeks later Reardon called Arena and told him he’d like to see if the two of them could put a deal together. They agreed to meet for lunch on the following Tuesday at the Old Grist Mill Tavern in Seekonk, just across the line in Massachusetts. Reardon worked out all his final offer positions on the various economic proposals submitted by the Union. Still, applying one of the lessons Cardella taught him, he held back a little on each when he read the numbers to Tommy as they had their dessert.
Arena wrote them down in a small notebook he carried in the inside pocket of his jacket. He repeated them out loud and asked the question Reardon anticipated: “Are you telling me you got no fucking room to move on any of these?”
Terry responded first with some body English, stretching his arms and shoulders in the chair and looking off into space for a few seconds. “This is the deal my boss said we need to have, Tommy. It’s the same thing you’d get across the table.” He should have stopped right there, leaving Arena without an opening. Instead, his next words telegraphed the fact that the Herald was prepared to do better, to spend more money, if necessary, on settling the contract. “What’s your biggest concern?” he asked.
My Honorable Brother Page 38
