by Mike Stanton
There was a similar Camelot-like quality to Cianci’s entrance into City Hall. The public was captivated by the exuberant mayor and his stylish wife. Their daughter, Nicole, wore a red-and-white snowsuit with an elephant on the left side; in the spirit of bipartisanship, Cianci had ordered a donkey sewn on the other side.
People milled around inside the mayor’s grand corner office, with its carved wooden paneling, gilt wallpaper, marble fireplace, and gracefully curved chandelier. Bright winter sunlight spilled in through the huge windows facing east onto Kennedy Plaza.
“Take off your coat and stay awhile,” he told Ron Glantz, one of his new aides. “We’ve got four years.”
Outside, workers were straining to swing open the castlelike front doors of City Hall, which, under Joe Doorley, had been opened only for ceremonial occasions. Doorley, who had angered Cianci by appointing twenty-one of his supporters to city jobs on his way out the door, was vacationing in Florida.
Shortly past noon, Cianci waited as the police chief called the roll of dignitaries to take their places outside. He kidded with Larry McGarry, Mr. Democrat, who sat in his wheelchair in a black morning coat, a white carnation pinned to his lapel.
“They didn’t call my name,” said Cianci. “You guys are up to your old tricks.”
Finally, his name was called. He and Sheila walked down the sweeping marble staircase and out into the sunshine, where they were met with a shower of applause and the salutes of white-gloved police officers.
As he took the oath for the second time that day, Cianci could see the challenges all around. Directly ahead was Burnside Park, where winos loitered near the statue of Ambrose Burnside, the incompetent Civil War general and prominent Rhode Island Republican. To his right were nineteenth-century office buildings whose upper floors had been closed off as fire hazards. To his left he noticed workmen wheeling a grand piano out of the once-elegant Biltmore Hotel, now home to a dozen or so long-term residents, some jewelry-trade offices, and the occasional overnight trucker.
Surrounding him on the platform were the twenty-six members of the City Council, overwhelmingly Democratic and largely hostile. Although they clapped politely, many had already met in secret and vowed not to give the Republican mayor anything. His election had been a fluke, they believed, and they wanted to see to it that he failed.
Back inside, the mayor joked with his secretary. “Am I on the payroll yet?” he asked. “I better be—with overtime, starting at 12:01.”
Cianci grew more serious when he received word that the council had just met upstairs and elected a Doorley Democrat, Robert Haxton, to lead it. Haxton had taken sixteen of the twenty-six votes, defeating a Democratic newcomer aligned with McGarry and sympathetic to Cianci. The council immediately voted to refer all department-director nominees to committee.
Cianci glanced knowingly at one of his aides. “It looks like a short honeymoon,” he said.
In the next few weeks, Cianci and Haxton clashed over the stalled appointments. The mayor pressured some of Doorley’s department directors to resign. Haxton persuaded them to stay. He accused Cianci of using threats and coercion. Cianci responded by firing two directors and putting his own men in as “acting” directors.
“I started acting like a mayor today,” Cianci declared.
He hung a poster of an elephant in his office, not a soft, cuddly Republican elephant but a fierce bull elephant charging angrily toward the camera, ears flared and tusks lowered. The caption said, “It’s better to be the stomper than the stompee.”
Cianci angrily canceled a meeting with Haxton and other council leaders to discuss the stalemate. He vowed not to negotiate patronage with “people who are trying to usurp my power.”
A few weeks later Haxton was arrested by the Providence police.
Haxton, a ruddy man of forty with modish sideburns, was known as a dashing man-about-town. A Providence Journal feature had once rated him one of the city’s most eligible bachelors. He drove a white Mercedes with a low-numbered license plate, an odd status symbol in Rhode Island, signifying stature or longevity. He lived with his parents in the city’s West End and ran one of his family’s chain of liquor stores.
On Sunday night, January 26, Haxton wound up at the X-rated Columbus Theater on Broadway, a once-grand boulevard west of downtown, lined with Victorian mansions that had grown seedy. He met a sixteen-year-old boy standing on the sidewalk looking at the marquee, which advertised The Life and Times of Xaviera Hollander.
The boy said later that Haxton had asked him to come inside with him and watch the movie, and the boy had declined. According to official accounts, Haxton went in alone; the boy went to the house of a Providence policeman he knew, Alfred Mintz.
Mintz had supported Cianci in the 1974 campaign. After Cianci took office, Mintz was transferred to a plainclothes unit. Mintz rounded up his partner, and they brought the boy back to the Columbus. As the two cops waited down the street in Mintz’s gold Toyota, Mintz’s partner grew uneasy because of the boy’s age; he urged Mintz to call headquarters for guidance. But then Haxton emerged and gave the boy a ride. The policemen followed. After about an hour, driving around the city, the Mercedes stopped in front of a fruit stand on Hartford Avenue. The officers saw the boy get out, and Haxton drove away.
Later that night, at the police station, top police brass took a statement from the boy, who alleged that Haxton had grabbed his crotch. It was past midnight when the boy finished giving his statement.
The next day, Chief Walter McQueeney and two of his top aides went to City Hall to meet with Cianci and Ron Glantz in the mayor’s office. The topic was whether to charge Haxton.
According to Glantz, police officials who had been loyal to Doorley and friendly with Haxton were reluctant to charge him. But the chief, who wanted to keep his job, wasn’t about to openly defy Cianci, who wanted Haxton charged. Glantz said that Cianci also asked him, as a lawyer, about the legal procedure for removing Haxton from office. The meeting ended with a decision to charge Haxton. He was arrested later that afternoon, after attending a meeting at City Hall, and charged with committing a lewd and indecent act.
Haxton’s lawyer called his arrest “one of the grossest examples of dirty politics I’ve ever seen.” Francis Darigan, the new Democratic city chairman and Cianci’s likely opponent in 1978, complained that Haxton had been set up. When Darigan went down to the police station to get Haxton, he asked a major he knew from South Providence, “What’s this all about?” The major, said Darigan, couldn’t look him in the eye.
Several police officers were also upset by Haxton’s arrest. One, Major John J. Leyden, said that the police normally shooed away men caught cruising pickup spots at night, rather than arresting them—including Haxton, whose white Mercedes was a familiar sight to nighttime officers on patrol. Leyden also questioned the wisdom of putting the boy at risk by using him as bait. The whole case smacked of entrapment, he said.
Cianci responded that “there was no political motivation whatsoever.” Asked years later about allegations that he ordered Haxton arrested, Cianci said: “That’s a lie. I can’t help it if he liked boys.”
Haxton’s arrest neutralized him as a public critic of Cianci’s. Although he remained council president as his case wound through the legal system, he was never quite as vocal about the mayor as he had been that first month.
In May, after four months of sniping with the council, Cianci finally acquiesced to a private meeting with the council’s majority leader to discuss their differences. Over a cordial, two-hour lunch at Camille’s, on Federal Hill, the two men reached a compromise; Cianci’s top-level appointees would be confirmed.
“I do have a city to run,” said Cianci. As to why he was now willing to meet with the council leadership when he had refused to in January, the mayor said, “That’s the art of politics.”
EVERYONE FROM THE Hot Dog Lady to Antoinette Downing was welcome in Cianci’s City Hall.
In his first week, the mayor dispatc
hed his limousine to the East Side to pick up Downing, the grand dame of historic preservation in Providence. Downing had single-handedly saved many of the old mansions and colonial houses on Benefit Street, one of Providence’s oldest streets, from the wrecking ball of urban renewal.
Downing and two of her society cohorts sat in the mayor’s office, engaging in polite chitchat and slaughtering the pronunciation of Cianci’s name with their precise Yankee diction. After listening to the women call him “Chauncey” and “Ci-AHN-cee,” the mayor smirked, leaned across his desk on his elbows, and said: “It’s See-ANN-see. You’ll get used to it.”
The Hot Dog Lady, a vendor who had been banished from downtown streets, returned to a warm welcome from Cianci. The mayor made sure that the police would give her no trouble by pulling up in his limousine and, as officers watched, buying a hot dog.
When the banks balked at cashing Social Security checks for seniors without accounts, Cianci flexed his mayoral muscles. He got the bank presidents on his speakerphone and, putting on a show for those in his office, threatened to withdraw the city deposits. The banks capitulated.
Cianci became ubiquitous. He clambered aboard a backhoe to break ground for a new community center in South Providence. He hosted the Mayor’s City Celebration, a downtown festival that included folksingers, ballet dancers, karate experts, the puppet act Kukla, Fran & Ollie, and a City Hall screening of Yankee Doodle Dandy, about the life of Providence-born showman George M. Cohan. He dropped in at a triple-decker where a woman was sitting at her kitchen table planning a neighborhood cleanup. He showed up for the event in overalls and killed a rat.
But the mayor was not universally beloved. At the St. Patrick’s Day parade on Smith Hill, in his first year, Doorley people booed and hissed and turned their backs to him. And when Cianci showed up at a banquet hall for a St. Augustine Church reunion dinner, one supporter recalled, “You’d have thought the devil had walked in there. You could hear people hissing and saying, ‘What’s he doing here?’ ” In those days, Cianci later joked, a Republican mayor intruding on Democratic turf was “about as welcome as the ayatollah at an American Legion convention.” Cianci found it devastating not to be liked. But, ever mindful of his fragile margin of victory, he kept smiling and showing up, trying to win over his enemies.
“I would go to the groundbreaking of an ant,” he declared.
Cianci knew that he couldn’t erase decades of urban decay and solve all the city’s problems overnight. Providence had one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation, at 18 percent, and also one of the highest rates of alcoholism.
During his first week in office, monkeys escaped from the decrepit zoo and ran loose through the city. During his second week, the debt-ridden Biltmore Hotel, a downtown landmark, closed because it couldn’t pay its gas bill. When Cianci received the news in his office across the street, he slid out of his chair and onto the floor and cried out, “What can happen next?”
The mayor wanted people to know that there was more to life than death and taxes. He wanted to create a legacy for Providence. That’s why he made a twenty-thousand-dollar budget request to buy mates for some of the animals at the zoo. “We have one yak at the zoo,” he explained. “If we feed it and care for it, what do we eventually have? A dead yak.”
He told attendees at a neighborhood meeting in Olneyville one night: “Let’s look at the facts, one of which is that Providence is a tired old city. We can’t change it overnight, but we’re trying, and we’re looking everywhere for the dollars to do it.”
In the summer of 1975 Cianci’s search brought him to Nashville, Tennessee, site of the annual convention of the national Fraternal Order of Police. Cianci wanted the convention in Providence in two years. The Rhode Island FOP delegation flew in fresh steamers to Nashville daily, and served them up with clam cakes, booze, and Cianci charm. The mayor made the rounds of each state’s delegation, pressing the flesh and addressing the convention before the vote. Providence beat out New Orleans, Phoenix, and Albuquerque by eighty votes. None of those mayors came.
Cianci’s winning pitch included a boast of Providence’s fine Italian cuisine, which he found wanting in Tennessee. One night, in an Italian restaurant in Nashville, Cianci ordered spaghetti al dente, or hard-cooked. The perplexed waiter responded in his southern accent that they had spaghetti, but they were all out of al dente. Cianci roared with laughter.
In a gesture symbolic of his pledge to clean up City Hall, Cianci clambered up a stepladder in the old aldermans’ chambers one day with a crowbar and pried loose a beam to launch a historic restoration.
He appointed his wife, Sheila, to cochair the restoration task force. Browsing in a Massachusetts antique store one day, she came across some red-leather chairs that bore a striking resemblance to the chairs long missing from the aldermans’ chambers. The antique dealer said that he could get more of the chairs if she liked them.
Subsequently, an investigation found that a City Hall janitor with a drinking problem was selling the chairs to buy booze. The janitor, an ex-boxer, hired Tony Bucci as his lawyer. Bucci’s defense, Cianci later said, laughing, was, “He’s one of ours.”
THE MANEUVERING BETWEEN the mayor and the City Council intensified as Cianci tried to pass his first budget, in the summer of 1975.
The mayor wanted to raise taxes to erase a deficit and finance his programs. The council, not wanting him to succeed, rejected his budget. The mayor threatened layoffs. The council accused him of scare tactics.
On the night of June 24, union members worried about layoffs crowded into the steamy council chambers. The debate over Cianci’s budget raged for more than two hours, as whirring ceiling fans stirred the humid air and bands played on the steps outside—part of a one-hundredth-birthday celebration of City Hall organized by Cianci. At ten-thirty, exploding fireworks and aerial bombs punctuated the angry exchanges between perspiring pro- and anti-Cianci councilmen. Finally, the council rejected Cianci’s budget.
The next morning Cianci called a mass union meeting at the Providence Civic Center. Only six hundred of the city’s forty-five hundred union workers showed up, but they were raucously pro-Cianci. The mayor shouted that their jobs were not safe because of his foes on the council. When council leaders tried to respond, the plugs were yanked from their microphones and their voices drowned out by the boos and jeers of departing union members.
Two nights later the council rejected Cianci’s budget again, creating the spectacle of Democratic union workers booing a Democratic council for opposing a Republican mayor. A Journal columnist said that it was like watching the College of Cardinals booing the pope.
Cianci went ahead and raised taxes anyway, through a deft maneuver of vetoing the council’s stricter spending limits on him, but accepting their higher revenue projections. Council members cried foul. Larry McGarry publicly applauded Cianci’s political skills—the kid learned fast, and his adversaries didn’t know how to deal with a mayor from the opposing party. “They’re used to saying yes and they’re trying to say no and they don’t know how,” said McGarry.
Cianci was a political chameleon, playing off his battles with the council to impress East Side reformers that he was standing up to the machine—all the while embracing McGarry’s political organization.
At a meeting of Young Republicans at Brown University, Cianci described his struggles against the remnants of an old political machine and its “do-nothing hacks” who “hang around City Hall like mannequins.” At an East Side garden party, over iced tea and cake, Cianci regaled his Republican audience with tales of Doorley holdovers, including a city worker who was fired for meeting his girlfriend in the city pump house one night, only to be reinstated after a union arbitration hearing.
“The moral of the story is that everybody deserves a night in the pump house with his girlfriend,” cracked Cianci. “No,” muttered an East Sider, “the moral is we should all move to Warwick.”
His first summer in office Cianci also dropp
ed in, by helicopter, on Larry McGarry’s annual Democratic City Committee clambake, for two thousand beer-guzzling, chowder-swilling ward heelers escaping the city heat at Francis Farm in rural Massachusetts. The mayor mingled freely. McGarry’s sidekick, Snack McManus, was there, in his yellow slacks and matching yellow cigar holder, a Cianci appointee to the city tax board. So was Councilman Ray Cola, a devotee of Saint Rita who handed out medals of the saint and praised Cianci for putting a lot of Sixth Ward people to work. “As Saint Rita says, it’s not what you know that counts in this country but who you know,” he said. Responded Cianci: “Everybody he brings in is a cousin.”
Meanwhile, Cianci was building his own patronage empire, financed by millions of dollars in federal funds. The money paid for two thousand temporary jobs and several hundred permanent jobs, as well as programs offering lucrative construction, street-paving, sidewalk-repair, and other contracts, for housing rehabilitation and neighborhood improvements. To bypass the City Council and retain control over the federal largesse, Cianci created agencies like the Mayor’s Office of Community Development. The office administered the roughly nine million dollars a year that flowed to Providence as a result of the 1974 federal Community Development Act.
When the council tried to assert control, Cianci pointed to its past oversight of Progress for Providence, a high-minded antipoverty agency during the Doorley administration that had disintegrated into a scandal-ridden trough for mobsters, scam artists, and political hacks. “Progress for Providence,” said Cianci, “was probably the worst disaster to hit Providence since the ’38 hurricane.”