by Mike Stanton
While that drama played out behind the scenes, Joe Doorley and the city were preoccupied with the fortunes of the Civic Center’s primary tenant, the Providence College men’s basketball team. The day before the Pink Floyd concert, the Friars upset Maryland to advance to college basketball’s Final Four. The team was led by homegrown talents Ernie DiGregorio and Marvin “Bad News” Barnes, the star-crossed All-American center from South Providence who, according to local legend, had once tried to hold up a city bus wearing his Central High School letter jacket. Doorley joined a delegation of Rhode Island politicians who journeyed to St. Louis, hoping to see the Friars meet Bill Walton’s mighty UCLA team for the championship. But Barnes injured his knee in the semifinals and the Friars lost to Memphis State. Doorley returned home and dreamed about what might have been.
That spring, with the Watergate scandal mushrooming, Mayor Doorley remarked that the Republicans’ apparent attempt to bug the Democratic National Committee offices was no shock to him.
“Everybody assumes that the politicians are spies and cheats and liars,” said Doorley, who confessed that he liked to “snoop” to find out what his political rivals were up to. “I suspect that very little of my activities are not bugged.”
Doorley didn’t say that he had recently been tipped off that Chernov had Copeland on tape, asking for money. The mayor had passed the rumor on to Copeland, according to Copeland’s subsequent court testimony. Copeland went to Chernov, who dismissed the rumor as “absurd.”
“There’s always somebody trying to get somebody in this town,” Chernov told him.
TWO MONTHS AFTER the Pink Floyd concert, Joe Doorley served as toastmaster at a very different kind of gathering at the Civic Center, one rife with intrigue that would have implications for the political fortunes of Buddy Cianci.
Three thousand city workers, ward heelers, and other Democratic party luminaries and soldiers—from the governor on down to sewer workers—turned out to pay tribute to a man known simply as Mr. Democrat, Lawrence P. McGarry, a lean, twinkling Irishman with a mischievous smile and a Machiavellian mind.
McGarry was the Democratic city chairman of Providence, the last of the old-time political bosses. He ran the city’s Public Works Department, the hub of a patronage empire that turned out the votes on election day. A product of the “Fighting Tenth” Ward, on the city’s South Side, McGarry had come up through the ranks, beginning as a teenage errand boy in the Great Depression for the party bosses who hung out at Gallagher’s plumbing shop. An advancing case of multiple sclerosis made it increasingly difficult for him to get around without the aid of a cane or a wheelchair. But McGarry, an avid horse-racing fan with his own box near the finish line at Lincoln Downs, still possessed an agile political mind.
McGarry believed in unquestioned loyalty to the Democratic machine. He once warned that if the unendorsed candidate won in a certain ward, “not another leaf will be picked up in that neighborhood.” But he was also a benevolent boss, a devout Catholic who attended St. Pius V Church in Elmhurst, and a sucker for a hard-luck story. He enjoyed a good cigar—the bigger, the better—and he mocked the image of the smoke-filled room by posing for a newspaper photograph with ashtrays overflowing with cigarette butts.
“The political machine is just ordinary people,” he liked to say. “I never saw anything dishonest take place in a back room.”
In the back room McGarry was king—and, as the crowd gathered at the Civic Center attested, Rhode Island’s preeminent political kingmaker. He came to power in 1964, when he led a party revolt against the entrenched Democratic leadership and backed Joe Doorley, a spunky young councilman and lawyer educated at Notre Dame and Boston College.
Together McGarry and Doorley had restored the strength of the Democratic machine. Doorley was the out-front guy, making speeches, searching for ways to reverse Providence’s postwar decline, mingling with national Democratic bigwigs. McGarry was the behind-the-scenes guy. Sitting in his wheelchair at Public Works, a brick building near the crumbling Port of Providence with its dilapidated warehouses and gasoline-storage tanks, McGarry oiled the machine—doling out patronage, receiving favor seekers, directing the troops.
But after nearly a decade, the partnership was fraying. Despite their smiles at McGarry’s Civic Center tribute, Mr. Democrat and Mayor Doorley were in the process of a painful political divorce. McGarry believed that Doorley had broken faith with the machine—that the mayor had lost interest in the job and grown aloof and arrogant. Doorley’s drinking also bothered McGarry. The mayor, who boasted that he could conduct all of his city business for the day between 9:30 A.M. and lunchtime, could often be found later on some bar stool, his speech slurred, his balance unsteady.
Doorley’s dissolution mirrored his city’s. Providence Journal political columnist Brian Dickinson wrote that the mayor had squandered his obvious talents for running a city. “Drained by a penchant for high living and compromised by a reliance on the dreariest sort of machine politics, he has been content to see the city drift and stagnate. Behind that rambunctious Frankie Fontaine exterior, whatever spark there used to be has flickered out.”
The mayor, who bristled at any criticism, particularly from a newspaper run by Yankee Republicans, fired back that at least his high living was not at country clubs, but in working-class establishments where he could watch a ball game and live up to his reputation as “a beer-drinking, two-fisted politician.”
The son of a Providence firefighter whose father had emigrated from County Roscommon, Doorley grew up in Irish working-class Elmhurst, where life revolved around family, church, and ward politics. The Democratic machine was not the corrupt monolith attacked by East Side reformers but an extended family. It had enabled the immigrants, predominantly Irish and Italian, to accumulate power and to eventually overthrow the Yankee factory owners and Republican bosses. The machine provided order and stability. If you needed a streetlight replaced, a sidewalk fixed, a job, coal for your furnace, a Christmas turkey, even a pair of shoes or a bath—the city operated public bathhouses then—you went to your block captain, who went to his ward committeeman, who went to the ward chairman, who called downtown. In return, the machine commanded your loyalty, and your vote.
Doorley, who nurtured his idealism at Notre Dame and later as a civics teacher at La Salle Academy, a Catholic high school that educated scores of future political and business leaders, viewed Kennedy’s New Frontier and Johnson’s Great Society as extensions of the machine’s noblest principles. Doorley had run President Kennedy’s 1960 campaign in Rhode Island and been inspired to run for city council in 1962 by Kennedy’s inaugural declaration that the torch had been passed to a new generation. Proud that Kennedy’s political roots were in the wards of Boston, Doorley also saw a need for new ideas. He felt that Providence was falling out of the mainstream of American life. The city was losing middle-class whites faster than any city in the country except Detroit.
The Democratic machine that had run Providence since the Great Depression was suffering from atrophy. Mayor Walter Reynolds, nicknamed “Scratchy Ass” by some, had alienated party regulars by neglecting politics and patronage and catering to the big shots downtown. He had been in power for fourteen years. When Larry McGarry tried to take control of the Democratic City Committee, Reynolds fired him from his job at Public Works.
Another machine boss, City Council president Tommy Luongo, carried his patronage empire too far. A Federal Hill liquor-store owner, Luongo was said to have placed a thousand people in city, state, and federal jobs. One of them was Joe Melino, a Providence street sweeper who didn’t exist but who still managed to cash his city paychecks for more than three years. In 1964, while Doorley was running for mayor, Luongo and one of his ward committeemen were convicted of cheating the city. The scandal highlighted Doorley’s call for change and drove Luongo from office; he died shortly thereafter—from a broken heart, some said.
Not wanting to risk a divisive primary, Reynolds didn’t run in 1964,
citing his health. McGarry, who had initially favored another candidate, aligned himself with Doorley. He was a fresh, appealing face; he came from the Fifth Ward, the city’s most populous; and he had a well-to-do uncle who ran a construction company and could help finance the campaign. Doorley and McGarry swept to victory over Reynolds’s handpicked candidate and took control of the machine.
Joe Doorley was thirty-three years old, the youngest mayor in Providence history, and eager to get to work. The morning after his election-night celebration, he was out early with his campaign volunteers, taking down his political signs.
During the turbulent sixties, when politicians were struggling to address the ills of America’s cities, Doorley stood on the ramparts of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. Providence was among the first to join the federal Model Cities program and to integrate its schools. Doorley pushed for fair housing laws and antipoverty programs, and obtained federal funding for the country’s first urban-renewal demolition project and the second code-enforcement project. Doorley and his top policy aide, Jack Cicilline, traveled regularly to Washington and New York to learn about various urban programs. Cicilline said that federal officials were impressed that the mayor would come personally rather than just sending an aide.
“I firmly believe that the position of mayor of a large urban city is the single most important political office in America today,” Doorley wrote.
Doorley’s advocacy won him attention from such publications as Time magazine. He began traveling in national Democratic circles. He became a regular visitor to the Texas ranch of national party chairman Robert S. Strauss and ran a respectable race for national chairman himself in 1970. He headed the credentials committee in 1968, the year of the party’s riotous national convention in Chicago, where Mayor Richard Daley’s cops beat antiwar protesters. Daley, who sent his son, Richard, the future mayor of Chicago, to Providence College, praised Doorley’s Providence machine. Doorley, in turn, joked that he was “a mini Daley.”
While Doorley attacked the city’s problems and cultivated his growing national image, Larry McGarry tended the machine. He was in his element chewing on a cigar, a ball game on in the background, surrounded by cronies like “Snack” McManus, who drove a yellow Cadillac, and “Taxi” Albanese, a Fourth Ward committeeman, sewer inspector, and bookmaker who didn’t drive but instead took cabs from bar to bar. Taxi didn’t really know how to inspect a sewer, said one councilman, but he could tell you how many miles of sewer pipe there were in Providence.
McGarry could also count. He knew how many votes there were, and how to keep them in line. His friend ex-councilman Ray Devitt recalled McGarry presiding over a Tenth Ward committee meeting in a restaurant, and making everyone join hands around the table to show that “we’re all in this together.” Still, politics was like sports, all about the action and winning or losing. McGarry loved to gamble, running a regular Friday-night card game in the Tenth Ward, and he loved the rough-and-tumble of ward politics.
“With Larry, you toed the mark or you were gone,” said Devitt. “He played hardball.”
Although he never held public office, McGarry dictated to those who did. Each week, before the City Council met, McGarry gathered the Democratic councilmen in a private room next to the council chambers at City Hall and told them how to vote. Since the Democrats controlled twenty-four of the twenty-six council seats, the caucus was where the real decisions were made. There would be some fierce battles, but McGarry saw to it that they walked out onto the floor unified.
In 1971 some councilmen complained anonymously to The Providence Journal about McGarry’s “tyranny” in trying to dictate appointments to the new Civic Center Authority. “We’ve had it up to here with the ‘Last Hurrah’ antics and being told what we must do and how we should vote,” said one.
The reference to The Last Hurrah showed how far behind the times Providence had fallen. The classic American political novel by Edwin O’Connor, who had been weaned on Rhode Island politics growing up in Woonsocket, depicted machine politics in Boston as going out of style in the 1950s. In Larry McGarry’s Providence, the machine was still fashionable in the early 1970s. The day that the Journal published its story identifying the so-called dirty dozen councilmen who were unhappy with McGarry, eleven of the twelve publicly denied any rift and swore their loyalty to Mr. Democrat. End of mutiny.
Not everything was so easy to control. In the early 1970s friends noticed that McGarry would lose his balance without warning. He wasn’t a drinker, so they knew something was wrong. He was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a degenerative nerve disease that robs the body of coordination, muscle control, and, eventually, speech and brain functions. It was a terrifying illness for anyone, but especially for a man who thrived on moving around the city and talking to people.
McGarry persevered. He required help going up stairs. He started using a cane and a wheelchair. He got a driver and continued to make the rounds. While the disease slowed him down physically, it didn’t dull his mind—or diminish his growing conflict with Joe Doorley over the direction of Providence.
From Jack Cicilline’s perspective as Doorley’s top policy aide, the struggle between the two men reflected the desperation of the times. By the 1960s, three fourths of the nation’s people lived in cities; many of these city dwellers were poor, black, and elderly, unemployed and ravaged by drugs. The changing demographics threatened the power of old political machines and cried out for new solutions. Doorley and McGarry clashed over patronage in the new federal programs and the mayor’s efforts to draw minorities into the political process.
Cicilline bore the brunt of McGarry’s anger. Mr. Democrat thought that Doorley should take care of his base and get rid of people like Cicilline, a young, liberal idealist with shaggy hair and glasses who had a picture of Robert Kennedy in his office. But Doorley, though a Johnson man, relied on Cicilline, a bright former student at La Salle Academy, to guide him through the maze of new federal programs and keep him in touch with the black community. Doorley created an antipoverty agency, Progress for Providence, and brought in Kennedy pal William McNamara from out of state to run it. He gave McNamara free rein to hire other outsiders and nonpolitical people from the city’s poor neighborhoods.
Cicilline witnessed shouting matches in the mayor’s office between Doorley and McGarry, who had three criteria for a job: if you were a friend, if you were qualified, and if you were a Democrat.
“Geez,” McGarry would complain, “you’re giving this guy a ten-thousand-dollar job when I have a list of people we owe jobs.” Cicilline also argued with Mr. Democrat, who couldn’t understand why “there’s this guy in South Providence who’s got a city car and a fat job, hanging around with kids.”
McGarry and the Old Guard also were unhappy with Doorley’s efforts to reach out to the black community. With racial tensions increasing, a loose group of neighborhood advocates, school officials, and East Side liberals convinced Doorley to push for integration and to open a magnet school in South Providence, where the mayor sent his own children.
“Larry McGarry complained that this was pissing off the whites,” said Cicilline. “We’d go to a rally or a function up in Elmhurst, and people started ignoring Joe, in his own neighborhood.”
Cicilline viewed McGarry as a throwback to James Michael Curley, a likeable, “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours” politician who had fallen out of step with the times. “He didn’t recognize that you needed to open the doors,” says Cicilline. “I would tell him, ‘Do you remember when the Irish were trying to become cops, get city jobs, and there were guys in City Hall with baseball bats, trying to keep them out?’ His attitude was, ‘Yeah, well, now it’s our turn. We’re the guys with the bats.’ ”
In retrospect, Cicilline said, some of the well-intentioned solutions, such as tearing down buildings and putting up high-rises, proved misguided and even made things worse. But you had to be there, to see the city burning, to feel the urgency to try something, a
nything. In blighted neighborhoods across Providence, arson was the leading pastime; on some summer weekends, weary firefighters fought several hundred fires as a haze of smoke hung over the city.
Cicilline quit in 1968, the year that Bobby Kennedy was assassinated, to pursue a private law practice, eventually becoming Rhode Island’s preeminent mob lawyer. In the morning Cicilline would bring coffee to Raymond L. S. Patriarca on Federal Hill, and the two men would chat on the sidewalk. Patriarca, who had been a contemporary of Joseph Kennedy’s when the Kennedy patriarch was a reputed bootlegger, had no love for the Kennedys; one day he told Cicilline that the Kennedys were “double-crossers.” Eventually, the picture of Bobby Kennedy came down from Cicilline’s wall. A picture of Patriarca, whom Kennedy had once pursued, took its place.
In 1968 Richard Nixon was elected president and federal funds for cities dried up. Providence continued its decline. Doorley, an austere fiscal manager, hoarded what federal money did come in to hold down taxes, neglecting new programs and capital improvements. At budget time, he sat at his desk with sharpened pencils and an adding machine, scrutinizing every expenditure. People started calling him “No Dough Joe.”
Doorley, like Providence, seemed to lose his way. The tension between him and McGarry increased after the mayor passed up opportunities to run for higher office. According to Cicilline, when Doorley went away to think about a bid for Congress in 1967, after the sudden death of Congressman John Fogarty, McGarry started lining up the City Committee votes to back him for mayor. When Doorley decided not to run, he was annoyed that some people had committed to McGarry without checking with him first.
McGarry intimates said that he was never interested in succeeding Doorley himself, but that he always had a protégé, probate judge Francis Brown, in mind. Brown had been McGarry’s first choice in 1964, but McGarry had switched to Doorley because he had better financial support. According to McGarry pal Ray Devitt, it was with the understanding that Doorley would eventually run for governor or Congress and make way for Brown.