by Mike Stanton
Replied Vespia: “You went one way, I went another.”
One night Vespia came crashing through the second-floor window of Willie Marfeo’s crap game on Federal Hill from the bucket of a cherry picker, waving a machine gun at two dozen stunned dice players. An obese man raised his hands, and his pants fell down. Another player, a wiseguy, laughed and said it reminded him of Batman. “This is beautiful,” he said. “I wouldn’t have missed this pinch for the world.”
Willie Marfeo’s crap game was at the root of Raymond Patriarca’s troubles with the law in the late 1960s. When Marfeo refused to pay tribute to Patriarca and brought heat to the Hill with the cherry-picker raid, Patriarca had him killed. When Marfeo’s brother, Rudolph, took over the game and swore revenge, Patriarca had him killed, too.
Vespia and Cianci resented the bad name that the Mafia gave honest Italian-Americans and the folk-hero status that many afforded Raymond Patriarca. Vespia’s father had grown up on the Hill with Patriarca but had chosen an honest path, driving a truck and later working in the city clerk’s office. Vespia could remember walking down Atwells Avenue with his father as a child and stopping to chat with Patriarca, who would pat the boy’s head. Later, when Vespia grew up, he visited his father in the hospital and noticed two plants on opposite sides of the room. One was from Patriarca, his father said, and the other was from Colonel Stone of the state police; Vinny’s dad joked that he had separated the plants before they started fighting.
“Be a good policeman,” Patriarca once told Vinny. “But don’t ever frame anybody.”
It was a source of pride to Vespia and Cianci to lock up mobsters and show the public that not all Italians were gangsters. As an Italian-American, Cianci said, “I wasn’t proud of what these Italian-Americans were accused of doing, what they were doing. I was a very zealous prosecutor.”
One of the more memorable trials that Cianci and Vespia worked on together was the Case of Bobo Marrapese and the Italian Wedding Soup.
Bobo was a squat fireplug of a man with a violent temper and a bright future in the mob. He ran the Acorn Athletic Association, a popular organized-crime haunt on the Hill, and dabbled in burglary, gambling, loan-sharking, and assault. Even a parking ticket could set him off; he once threw two chunks of concrete through an offending policeman’s windshield.
The week before Christmas in 1971, Bobo went on trial for conspiracy to steal a Ford camper. Cianci invited a friend down to the courthouse to watch the show.
His star witness was Bobo’s ex-girlfriend Vivian. In a raucous direct examination, she told Cianci about their tempestuous relationship. After one spat, Vivian hid the keys to all the cars that Bobo had stolen and stashed around Providence. So Bobo beat her up. But the fiery Vivian concocted a spicier revenge. She invited Bobo over for dinner and served him some of her Italian wedding soup. With Vivian’s encouragement, Bobo ate one bowl of soup, then a second.
“Did you like the soup?” she asked Bobo.
He grunted that he did.
“Well, I pissed in it!” Vivian screamed.
Bobo’s lawyer leaped to his feet and objected.
“Did I hear what I thought I heard?” he asked in disbelief. Cianci, who would regale people with the story years later, pantomiming Vivian ladling out the soup and making his voice raspy and nasty like hers, struggled to keep a straight face.
Bobo had his own objection to the polluted soup, Vivian told Cianci, and he beat her up again, this time breaking her arm. Later, to make it up to her, Bobo suggested a change of scenery. With winter approaching, he offered to take Vivian to Florida on a camper safari. Then he sent two of his men to steal a camper from a local car dealership.
The theft went off smoothly, but then Bobo dumped Vivian. Enraged, she called Vespia. The detective found the stolen camper sticking out of a small garage on Smith Hill, next door to the father of a Providence police officer.
Bobo took the stand in his defense, claiming that a local bartender had offered to sell him the camper, but Bobo refused, suspecting it was stolen. Cianci hammered away at his story and got him to admit that the mysterious bartender had died five weeks before the trial.
Two days before Christmas the jury convicted Bobo and his two confederates. Anticipating the immediate revocation of their bail, the three men stood in the courtroom, stripping off their gold chains, pinky rings, and watches and handing the jewelry to their wives and girlfriends as the lawyers argued about bail. Bobo’s lawyer urged the judge to let the men remain free until sentencing, in the spirit of Christmas. Cianci fired back, “Why don’t you just go back into your chambers, Your Honor, and put on your Santa Claus suit?”
“That’s enough, Mr. Cianci,” the judge intoned.
Bobo made bail that day but wound up getting three years in prison. He would be back, to commit more mob mayhem and haunt Cianci’s first go-round as mayor.
After Bobo’s trial, Cianci urged Vespia to join him on a holiday trip to Venezuela. At the Caracas airport, the Customs police started searching Vespia. As the detective stood spread-eagled against the wall, worrying that this was some mob setup and drugs had been planted in his suitcase, Buddy clowned around, taking Vespia’s picture and egging on the searchers. “Check his shoes,” said Cianci. “Check inside his belt—he has a secret compartment.”
They spent a week at a swanky hotel in Caracas. Vespia would get up at seven to jog on the beach, about the time that Cianci would roll into bed. Cianci would rise at two in the afternoon and come down to the pool for breakfast. One night Vespia came back to their room to find himself locked out. Cianci, who had a girl inside, told him to go sleep by the pool, since he’d be up in a few hours anyway.
Another night after dinner Cianci asked their taxi driver if he knew of a good club where they could go and have some fun. The cabbie drove them miles up into the lush hills surrounding Caracas, to an ornate Spanish villa with verandas and wrought-iron windows, lights ablaze and music floating in the tropical air. Couples in dinner jackets and evening gowns drifted about arm in arm, like something out of a movie. Cianci and Vespia went inside, found the lounge, and sat down at the bar. As their eyes adjusted to the dimness, they noticed a bevy of voluptuous women. The ladies started cozying up to the prosecutor and the detective from Rhode Island, rubbing their shoulders, stroking their legs, slipping tongues in their ears.
Vespia turned to Cianci and said, “Buddy, I think this is a whorehouse.”
Cianci slammed his fist on the bar and exclaimed, “Now I know why they made you detective.”
They finished their drinks and left, without partaking. A few days later, they were on a plane to Rhode Island. Back home, the murder trial of Raymond Patriarca awaited.
THE DAY AFTER Father Moriarty testified for Raymond Patriarca, Buddy Cianci called St. Ignatius Church in Oxon Hill, Maryland, where the priest had been in 1968. Recently, he had been transferred to a church in nearby College Park. Cianci spoke to the church secretary, Margaret McNeil, and asked if she knew whether Father Moriarty had been away on April 7, 1968.
McNeil, a genteel churchwoman who had worked at St. Ignatius for fourteen years, was bewildered that a prosecutor in Rhode Island would be asking about Father Moriarty. He had not been her favorite priest; he drank too much and got into loud, violent arguments with people. He was bitter toward the diocese over a dispute involving construction of a new Catholic school. But McNeil wasn’t about to go into that with Cianci. She told him she would have to consult with the new pastor, Monsignor William O’Donnell, who was still dividing his time between St. Ignatius and his former post as editor of the Catholic Standard, in Washington.
Cianci’s request went quickly up the ladder, from O’Donnell to the archbishop of Washington, Cardinal Patrick O’Boyle. The cardinal huddled with his advisers, alarmed at the prospect of one of his priests having testified for a mob boss, and concerned about the diocese’s legal exposure.
Back in Providence, Cianci waited impatiently. It was past lunchtime. Closing arguments were sched
uled to begin in less than half an hour, at 2 P.M. At 1:55, the lead prosecutor, Irving Brodsky, went to the judge’s chambers and asked him to delay the closings for fifteen minutes, because the state was expecting certain information from Maryland.
Finally, Cianci was back on the phone, this time in a conference call with O’Donnell in Washington and McNeil at St. Ignatius. With the archbishop’s permission, McNeil had searched through church records but had found nothing to show where Father Moriarty had been on April 7, 1968.
Then she had a thought. Perhaps, if there had been a baptism that day . . . but, no, that was Palm Sunday. Baptisms were normally done on Saturday. Just to be certain, McNeil pulled out the St. Ignatius baptismal register, in which she meticulously recorded the entry of each new life in the church. It was a large, red-and-black book, bound in leather, which she kept in the safe in her office on the first floor of the rectory.
Flipping to 1968, McNeil ran her finger down the list of babies born that year. Beside each name was written the date of the baptism and the priest who had performed it. Her finger came to rest on the name of Stacy Lynn Densford.
“He had to have been here that day,” she told Cianci. “He baptized a baby girl that day.”
Suddenly, there was pandemonium on the phone. Everybody started talking and shouting at once. It was almost two-fifteen. In the attorney general’s office Cianci relayed the news to Brodsky, who rushed downstairs to tell the judge. Patriarca’s lawyers, curious about the delay, were also waiting. Brodsky told them what Cianci had discovered and asked the judge for a continuance so that Cianci could go down to Maryland and investigate further. The judge gave them until ten the next morning.
Meanwhile, Cianci was telling McNeil not to let the baptismal register out of her sight. Then he and others in the office began making a frantic series of phone calls. The U.S. marshals in Washington agreed to dispatch deputies to St. Ignatius to guard the baptismal register. There were calls to get Cianci and Bobby Stevenson, the Providence police detective, on a plane to Maryland. There was only one more flight from Providence to Washington that afternoon, and it was full. Someone found a U.S. Navy jet, which was placed on standby. Finally, the director of the airport intervened and bumped two passengers off the commercial flight to National Airport.
Cianci and Stevenson landed in Washington around 6 P.M. They were met by two sheriff’s deputies from Prince Georges County. Their car sped along the Potomac River, then crossed over into the gently rolling farmland of Maryland.
St. Ignatius Church was a squat brick building on top of a hill in the farming community of Oxon Hill, about twenty miles east of Washington. Two U.S. marshals were already there when Cianci arrived. And it was a good thing. A group of Patriarca associates, including his son, Junior, and his lawyer, had beaten Cianci and Stevenson to Maryland by chartering a Lear jet, only to be turned away at St. Ignatius by the marshals.
As dusk fell over the church, a congregation gathered in the lace-curtained dining room of the rectory next door. Besides Cianci and Stevenson and the two marshals, there were the two Prince Georges County deputies and two lawyers representing Cardinal O’Boyle and Monsignor O’Donnell. Margaret McNeil sat uneasily at the table, clutching the baptismal record to her chest. She said little as the lawmen sipped the monsignor’s Chivas Regal and puffed on cigars.
Cianci, wreathed in a cloud of cologne and cigar smoke, carried the unmistakable whiff of danger. His speech was fast and gravelly as he talked about how this was an important trial, how Patriarca was the big Mafia guy, the godfather for all of New England, and how he had ordered numerous people murdered. Cianci told her that, as the custodian of the baptismal register, she would have to fly back to Rhode Island with him the next morning and possibly testify. The blood drained from the woman’s face. She nearly fainted.
O’Donnell eased Cianci aside and stepped in to try and lighten the mood. He made a joke about the hit movie in theaters that spring, The Godfather. McNeil blanched. She had just seen the movie, and now she kept flashing on the scene where the Hollywood producer wakes up to find a severed horse’s head in his bed.
A policeman was sent to fetch Father Moriarty. Meanwhile, Cianci negotiated with the archbishop’s lawyers. Cardinal O’Boyle was angry with the priest and wanted him to go back to Rhode Island and straighten things out. But he also wanted to cut a deal with the attorney general so that Father Moriarty would not be prosecuted.
Cianci said that he lacked the authority and called Irving Brodsky, who started screaming into the phone so loudly that Cianci had to hold the receiver away from his ear. “No fucking way I’m making any deals with any fucking cardinals!” shouted Brodsky. “Get that lying bastard back here! I want that priest on the stand tomorrow!”
Cianci told the cardinal’s men that there would be no deal, and went about assembling his case against Father Moriarty. A Prince Georges deputy brought the father of the baptized girl, Allan Densford, to the rectory. Densford showed Cianci his daughter’s birth certificate and dated Polaroid photographs of Father Moriarty baptizing her. The girl had been born with a bilateral hip dislocation that required surgery. So her parents had pushed for an early baptism, which was done on Palm Sunday, three weeks after she was born. Densford remembered the time vividly; Martin Luther King had just been assassinated, and riots were threatening his family’s furniture store in Washington.
Cianci told Densford about the Patriarca trial and said he would be needed in court in Rhode Island the next day. The prosecutor told him that Patriarca’s men were around Oxon Hill, and impressed upon him the gravity of the situation, that the information about his daughter’s baptism could lead to a mob boss’s conviction in a double homicide. The Prince Georges sheriffs agreed to watch the Densfords’ house that night.
Later, Father Moriarty arrived at the rectory and was taken into custody by Cianci and Stevenson. The federal marshals drove Cianci, Stevenson, and Father Moriarty, wedged together in the backseat, to a motel in Alexandria.
They got two adjoining rooms and left the door open. The Providence lawmen shared one room; the priest and one marshal took the other. Cianci and Stevenson questioned Father Moriarty late into the night. He was calm and serene, insisting that he must have confused the dates.
It was nearly 4 A.M. when everyone finally went to bed. A few hours later, Stevenson was struggling to wake up Cianci and pushing him into the shower. Then they drove to National Airport, where they met Monsignor O’Donnell, Margaret McNeil, and Allan Densford and his wife, Jean. Cianci was at the ticket counter, arranging for the flight, when the terminal doors slid open. In walked Junior Patriarca and Joseph Badway, the old man’s driver and proprietor of a Providence auto-body shop that was a wiseguy haunt.
“We want to talk to the priest,” demanded Patriarca.
“You’re not talking to anybody,” replied Stevenson.
The two mobsters retreated when the federal marshal threatened to arrest them.
On the hour-long flight to Providence, the St. Ignatius contingent sat near the front of the airplane, guarded by the lawmen. The younger Patriarca and Badway sat near the back of the plane, poking their heads out to peer up the aisle.
When they got off the plane in Rhode Island, Cianci’s Cadillac and driver were waiting on the tarmac. Escorted by police cars, the Cadillac sped north on Interstate 95 from the growing suburbs encircling the aging capital, through an industrial corridor of old brick factories and warehouses.
Sitting in his car with the Densfords and Margaret McNeil, who was still clinging to the baptismal register, Cianci boasted how he was going to blow the case wide open. Nobody else said much. The convoy arrived at the courthouse, which bristled with shotgun-toting policemen.
Irving Brodsky met Cianci and the group from St. Ignatius. He took one look at Moriarty, who was dressed in civilian clothes, and snapped: “Where are your priest clothes? You were wearing your priest clothes the other day.”
A little while later, having changed into
his priest clothes, an embarrassed Father Moriarty returned to the courtroom. Patriarca’s lawyer tried to block the state’s attempt to put him back on the stand. The priest had made an honest mistake, the lawyer argued, and his testimony should simply be stricken from the record; no purpose would be served in recalling him, except to expose him to ridicule and harassment in front of a crowded courtroom. But the judge refused, calling Father Moriarty’s testimony the strongest evidence on Patriarca’s behalf.
With Cianci once again watching from the back of the courtroom, Father Moriarty took the stand for the second time in three days. This time, there was no hug from Patriarca. Father Moriarty was sheepish, more subdued. The courtroom was hushed as everyone listened intently. The Densfords and McNeil were upstairs, in reserve, should the priest fail to recant his previous testimony.
“Father,” shouted Brodsky, “were you at the home of Raymond L. S. Patriarca on April 7, 1968?”
“I was not.”
During each question, Brodsky pounded the jury rail with his fist.
“Were you at any time on April 7, 1968, in the company of the defendant?”
“I was not.”
“Were you at the cemetery saying prayers for the late Mrs. Patriarca on April 7, 1968?”
“I was not.”
Moriarty said that he had been away from his parish for several months and so he hadn’t had access to the records at St. Ignatius when Patriarca’s son had called and asked him to testify. He had simply gotten confused about the dates.
Few people in the courtroom believed him. Brodsky emphasized the priest’s testimony in his closing argument. Following Father Moriarty’s testimony two days ago, the prosecutor told the jury, it looked as if the state’s case had been destroyed. But that morning’s developments cast things in a new light.
As the jury began its deliberations, Cianci basked in the glow of the media spotlight. Explaining to reporters how he’d uncovered the real story, he said that Father Moriarty’s testimony was “so believable that it was unbelievable.” The next day, Saturday, June 3, 1972, Cianci made his first appearance on the front page of The Providence Journal. A large photograph of him ran above the fold, with a story headlined PRIEST EPISODE “UNBELIEVABLE.”