by Mike Stanton
Darigan was the most impressive of the three. Tall and handsome, he had grown up in the Cathedral parish on Emmett Street, named for the Irish patriot Robert Emmett. As an altar boy, he had walked down the Canyon, a dirt trench excavated during the construction of Interstate 95, to serve mass at the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul. He came home from the army in 1967 to find his once-vibrant South Providence neighborhood decimated by the interstate. Darigan found it ironic that Doorley had billed the highway as “the Road to Progress,” even using the interstate logo in campaign ads.
His idealism—he was an admirer of John F. Kennedy, whom he’d met in New York the week before his assassination—drove him into politics. As a new city councilman, Darigan was awed to adjourn to Doorley’s private room at the Biltmore after meetings and listen to the mayor hold forth. Doorley was impressive—articulate and aggressive. He pushed through the Civic Center. But by 1974 Darigan felt that Doorley had lost interest in the job; his drinking had become a distraction and he wasn’t doing anything for South Providence. Irish-Americans were fleeing to the suburbs. Darigan went to McGarry and sought his support for the Democratic nomination.
Darigan had first met Mr. Democrat in 1967, when he ran a friend’s primary campaign for state senate; the friend upset the incumbent by fourteen votes. The next morning, McGarry came to their headquarters, in a tenement on Glenham Street, wearing a camel-hair coat and a soft felt hat, to offer his congratulations and his support. In 1974, Darigan tried to talk McGarry out of supporting Franny Brown. Darigan viewed Brown, a dapper, mild-mannered lawyer who favored bow ties, as a good and decent man but a weak candidate. “Franny’s a nice guy, but he’s vanilla,” he said. But McGarry believed in loyalty. “You’re only a kid,” he told Darigan. “You’ve got a bright future. Wait in line.”
That spring, McGarry swung the party endorsement to Brown. Darigan and Pisaturo remained in the race as unendorsed candidates. Furious, Doorley struck back. He fired McGarry and Brown from their city jobs and purged other disloyal city employees. He confined a boiler inspector to his desk for backing Brown. Another inspector was confined, then released after his wife, who sat on the city Democratic Committee, switched her vote to Doorley.
“If you want to sit around in a cushy job and you cut the hand that feeds you, that’s your business,” he said.
The mayor also warned Public Works employees loyal to McGarry about abusing their sick leave to campaign for his enemies. “They are either for me or against me,” Doorley declared. “The time has come for these people to face reality.”
Meanwhile, Cianci blasted away at continuing problems at the Civic Center, Doorley’s Dream. The grand jury issued a report critical of the Civic Center’s operations and the missing forty-six thousand dollars. Then, in July, police arrested the manager of the Civic Center’s restaurant in connection with irregularities at an Elvis Presley concert. The trouble arose when concertgoers who had bought tickets arrived to find people already in their seats.
Darigan met Cianci at a candidates’ forum in the basement of Grace Church that summer and was not impressed. Cianci was fat and balding, with a Nero-style haircut, and didn’t seem to know the first thing about running a city. But he kept showing up at festivals, forums, and any private home that would have him. Republican councilman Malcolm Farmer III, a patrician East Side lawyer who had been a few years ahead of Cianci at Moses Brown, convinced his parents to host a cocktail party for Cianci at their impressive home on Angell Street. The Farmers invited all their snappy WASP friends, many of them East Siders in their sixties. They sat in the dining room, beneath the crystal chandelier, mesmerized by Cianci’s vision and his sense of humor.
Cianci wanted to face Doorley in the fall election, because he would be an easier target. Hoping to pick off some dissident Democrats after the primary, Cianci reached out that summer to Mr. Democrat, Larry McGarry. One day, at a church festival in the Fourth Ward, Cianci and Farina encountered Ronald Glantz, a McGarry operative who was campaigning for Brown. Because of his defection from Doorley, Glantz had resigned his city job in the spring. Cianci pulled Glantz aside and asked him to consider supporting him in the fall if Brown lost. Glantz reported Cianci’s offer to McGarry.
During the same period, Cianci was attacking Brown publicly, calling him a product of the same corrupt Doorley machine, a man “schooled in the covert ways of Larry McGarry.” But Cianci and McGarry knew that that was just rhetoric—that Cianci needed Democratic votes. And McGarry was an astute enough politician and horseman to know that he might need a new horse to ride after the primary.
Farina, who had become Cianci’s campaign manager, said that he began meeting covertly with McGarry at night. He was so conscious of security that he drove a borrowed car to McGarry’s neighborhood and parked one street over, then walked to McGarry’s house on Royal Avenue. Mr. Democrat would receive Farina in his basement.
McGarry wanted assurances that Cianci would take care of his people. Farina agreed. In return, according to Farina, McGarry pledged to covertly support Cianci if Brown lost.
“You’ll get everything I have,” he said.
ON SEPTEMBER 10, 1974, Joe Doorley won the Democratic primary, beating his strongest challenger, Franny Brown, by about two thousand votes. Collectively, Doorley’s three challengers received twenty-eight thousand votes to Doorley’s fourteen thousand.
But at the Providence Civic Center, where several thousand Doorley supporters had gathered, the mood was jubilant. Doorley had wrested the machine from Larry McGarry. Vendors sold black armbands that said, R.I.P. LARRY & TONY, referring to McGarry and his ally Tony Bucci.
Doorley called it “the sweetest victory of my life.” Political observers said that he was stronger than ever, and predicted that he could run for governor or U.S. senator in 1976. His victory in November over little-known Republican Buddy Cianci was a foregone conclusion. Invoking a Frank Sinatra song that he had quoted frequently during his campaign, Doorley shouted defiantly: “We did it our way! We did it our way!”
Over at Franny Brown’s headquarters, McGarry had not lost his sense of humor. He called the campaign his “last hurrah,” and joked about his image as a political puppeteer, which had hurt Brown among voters ready for a change. Brown, whose political career was over, picked up on the gag and danced around like a marionette, jerking his arms and legs as McGarry manipulated invisible strings.
But McGarry had one more string to pull.
Over in Silver Lake, at the Rosario Club, several hundred Brown supporters who had gathered for a victory celebration turned their lonely eyes to Cianci. They invited the Republican challenger to come down and talk.
Some of Cianci’s advisers urged him not to go. Political passions were running high in Providence; Doorley and Brown partisans had gotten into fistfights during the primary race. Nobody knew what kind of reception Cianci would receive in a neighborhood where Republican was a dirty word. Older residents still remembered how the last Republican mayor, “Honest John” Collins, had purged the city payroll during the Great Depression.
According to Farina, McGarry arranged for Cianci and Farina to meet first at a hotel with Tony Bucci and some other McGarry insiders. Farina said that they sought, and received, assurances that no one would get hurt if they went into the Rosario Club.
Still, some of Cianci’s supporters didn’t want the anticorruption candidate to cozy up to the McGarry machine. But Cianci knew that good government alone wasn’t going to win him the election. Once you came down from the East Side and crossed the river into the rest of Providence, you needed political grease and muscle. You had to cut deals. You needed an organization.
“Fuck it,” Cianci said. “I’m gonna go see them.”
Cianci, after all, had roots in Silver Lake, and he was an Italian-American in a city that had never had an Italian-American mayor. Although Italian-Americans had become the city’s largest single ethnic group, they had been subsumed in the Irish-Democratic machine, an alliance for
ged during the Great Depression by Dennis Roberts and Democratic party boss Frank Rao, who, incidentally, had been a distant cousin of Cianci’s mother’s family, the Capobiancos.
The Irish-Italian alliance spoke to the tribal nature of Providence politics. Despite the historic tensions between the two groups, political survival dictated that they work together. Sharky Almagno, a Silver Lake Democrat, described it as a matter of “You stay on your side of the fence and I’ll stay on mine. . . . You can’t spite yourself, lose a pair of shoes, because you don’t want to vote with the Irish. You gotta go with the Irish to get your shoes.” Still, Almagno said, there was a pent-up desire among Italian-Americans for a mayor of their own.
Most of Silver Lake seemed to be jammed inside the Rosario Club when Cianci walked in. The club, off Pocasset Avenue, was a low-slung hall where Italian-speaking women wearing kerchiefs served plates of pasta while the men talked politics, drank wine, and played cards. The somber mood lifted, followed by chants of “Bud-dee, Bud-dee, we’re with you!” Shouting over the din, Cianci delivered a rousing speech that whipped up the crowd. He promised that they would work together and vowed to protect their jobs. He was one of them—a son of Silver Lake, a parishioner of St. Bart’s.
In the coming days and weeks, the Democratic rebellion would take shape in clandestine meetings and conversations, as Doorley spurned his supporters’ advice to mend fences.
Almagno, who ran Sharky’s Wholesale, a Silver Lake produce stand, was in a difficult spot. Because he had backed his childhood friend Charlie Pisaturo against Doorley, he said, the mayor summoned him to City Hall and told him that none of the Seventh Ward patronage would be coming his way. “Hey,” Almagno replied. “That’s life in Silver Lake.” After the primary, the first person to call Almagno was Larry McGarry. He had no problem with Almagno’s people going with Cianci, saying, “Do what you gotta do.”
One weekend, Cianci and Farina stopped by the basement of the St. Bart’s church hall, where Almagno ran the Sunday bingo, and asked for his support. Almagno’s initial response was, “Is this a joke?” But the more he thought about it, the more he realized that Doorley had left him no choice. On Columbus Day Almagno gathered some of his ward people at one man’s house. Cianci, all dressed up to march in the parade later, stopped by. They talked for several hours, then Cianci left to march. It took Almagno and his men another hour to decide to support Cianci.
The pundits gave Cianci little chance to win. Although he was stronger and better financed than past Republican sacrificial lambs, they said that Cianci shared one fatal weakness—he lacked an organization that could go into the wards and battle Doorley on his own turf.
What they didn’t realize was that Larry McGarry was turning his organization over to Cianci.
One night, shortly after the primary, three of McGarry’s men waited in the shadows at a corner in downtown Providence. One, Joseph Florio, wore a comical disguise—a trench coat and Groucho Marx–style fake eyeglasses, nose, and mustache. The other two men were Ron Glantz and Lloyd Griffin, an up-and-coming black political figure from the South Side who had worked for Doorley.
A van pulled up to the corner.
The three men climbed in. Inside were Cianci and Farina. As Farina drove the van through the streets of the darkened city, the men discussed strategy. Cianci offered his assurances that he would protect the jobs of McGarry’s people. As a sign of respect, Cianci later called McGarry to offer his word directly, according to Glantz.
About three weeks later, Glantz publicly announced the formation of Democrats for Cianci. Glantz was cochairman, along with Charlie Pisaturo, Doorley’s Silver Lake challenger. Glantz and Florio opened a law office in the suburb of Lincoln, created a scholarship fund, and made McGarry an officer. Every day McGarry would come to the office and hold court in the law library with his old cronies, whom he called “the Over the Hill Club.”
Democrats for Cianci provided Cianci with 150 workers as well as lists of thirty-one thousand anti-Doorley Democrats that had been compiled by a Washington pollster Franny Brown had hired during the primary. Armed with those lists, Cianci created a phone bank on the third floor of his house on Blackstone Boulevard and had a host of campaign workers making calls, day and night.
Cianci showed that he meant business by taking over Brown’s campaign headquarters in two crucial Democratic strongholds, the Fourth Ward, in the Italian North End, and Doorley’s Fifth Ward. The transition was marked by the Changing of the Balloons—campaign volunteers popped the old Brown balloons and inflated red, white, and blue Cianci balloons. Brown volunteers and Cianci volunteers went around the city, plastering Cianci’s face over Brown’s campaign signs.
The insurgents met at the Imperial Club on Broadway, recalled Almagno. McGarry attended a few meetings. So did Cianci.
Cianci also met secretly with McGarry ally Tony Bucci to talk strategy, at out-of-the-way restaurants in East Greenwich and North Providence, according to Glantz, a Bucci confidant who also served as a conduit for messages between the two camps.
Doorley’s allies blasted Cianci for cutting a backroom deal with Bucci and McGarry to support the controversial waterfront storage tanks that the mayor had opposed. Doorley called a press conference to report that his spies had seen Cianci, Bucci, and Glantz at the Old Canteen, “conspiring” against him.
“Buddy can have the remnants of the McGarry-Bucci machine,” said Doorley. “I warn him, however, to remember what they tried to do to me during the last few years. . . . If Buddy can trust them, he can have them.”
LATE IN SEPTEMBER, in the midst of the Cianci-Doorley campaign, the Civic Center’s Harold Copeland went on trial for soliciting a thousand-dollar bribe from concert promoter Skip Chernov.
Chernov, the leadoff witness, was about as eager to be in court as Copeland. In the nineteen months since he had cooperated, Chernov’s wife had divorced him, the police had raided his Incredible Organ Pub, a rival promoter had threatened to kill him, the mob had tried to muscle in on his business, and the Civic Center had refused his efforts to book concerts.
Shortly after Copeland’s indictment, Chernov said, Raymond “Junior” Patriarca, the mob boss’s son, offered to become Chernov’s silent partner, guaranteeing him bookings in East Coast arenas. Patriarca also offered to make Chernov’s problems with the Copeland case disappear. But Chernov, heeding the advice of his father never to become partners with the mob, declined.
Not long afterward, Chernov was forced to close the Incredible Organ after a police raid turned up a small amount of marijuana and scared away business. Meanwhile, the Civic Center Authority had denied Chernov’s application to promote concerts by the Beach Boys, Cat Stevens, and James Taylor.
Chernov later said that a Civic Center official offered to let him back into Doorley’s Dream if Chernov would change his testimony and say that Copeland had only been joking when he asked for the bribe. Chernov angrily refused. But as the trial approached, he was having second thoughts. “I’m dead,” he moaned to his lawyer, who encouraged him to follow through.
With obvious reluctance, Chernov testified that Copeland had asked for one thousand dollars under the table. Copeland’s lawyer asked Chernov if he had ever told prosecutors that it could have been a “sick joke.” Chernov said he didn’t know.
Copeland testified that he had only been joking. He also revealed on the stand that Doorley had warned him at the time that there were rumors around town that Chernov had him on tape, asking for money.
During the trial, Chernov felt bad as he looked at Copeland’s wife, Patricia, who was convinced that her husband was the victim of a political conspiracy to get Doorley.
Copeland was convicted on October 2. The following week, Cianci blasted Doorley about the conviction. As the press conference ended, Cianci was interrupted by a telephone call. He listened for a few minutes, then smiled and dramatically waved the reporters back. Cianci announced that Doorley had attended a party for Copeland the night before at a Federal
Hill restaurant, organized by Civic Center employees.
Doorley fired back that he still believed in Copeland’s innocence. He called Cianci a “character assassin who makes charges based on half truths, innuendo, and the distortion of facts.”
One week before the election, Doorley charged that Cianci had offered Copeland immunity to testify against the mayor.
“There are four or five people who will attest to the fact that [Cianci] was walking around offering immunity,” said Doorley.
Cianci denied it. He said that Copeland was never offered immunity, but that Cianci did talk to him about the possibility of him testifying—against whom, Cianci never said. Cianci said that he couldn’t say more because the investigation of Doorley—which Cianci hadn’t been involved with since his resignation as a prosecutor six months earlier—“is still going on.”
“It was not a political investigation in any sense of the word,” said Cianci.
IN THIS YEAR of Watergate—Richard Nixon had resigned the presidency in disgrace on August 9, 1974—Cianci hammered at the anticorruption theme. He promised to release his income-tax statements and run a more open government.
“The Providence River is like the Democratic machine that has been running this city—namely, it stinks,” said Cianci.
As election day approached, Buddy Cianci was everywhere, smiling and schmoozing—at factory gates, church feasts, supermarkets, senior centers, coffee hours, testimonial dinners. “Hello, may I shake your hand? I’m Buddy Cianci and I’m running for mayor,” he said over and over again as he crisscrossed Providence from dawn to midnight.