by Mike Stanton
The Providence Journal joined Cianci in calling his council critics hypocritical, but added that checks and balances in spending the money was not a bad idea. “Total control, however well-intentioned, still adds up to despotism,” the newspaper warned.
Cianci also found himself journeying frequently to Washington, D.C., the city that he saw as his ultimate destiny, to lobby for federal assistance for his beleaguered city. Cianci was an anomaly, a young, urban, ethnic Republican, and he enjoyed a friendly relationship with the administration of President Ford, who was eager to broaden his party’s base in the wake of the Watergate debacle. Cianci told the president that he owed his success to appealing to blacks, working people, and others traditionally excluded by the Republicans. “We were able to win in Providence,” Cianci reported telling Ford, “because we didn’t shut them out; we were able to win with them.”
Back home, Cianci proved himself more of a populist, and a shrewd politician, when he bypassed the City Council and reached out directly to neighborhood groups to help decide how the federal money should be distributed. When the Doorley Democrats on the council screamed, Cianci called them obstructionists.
Cianci’s Office for Community Development became a bizarre mishmash of idealism and cronyism characteristic of federal programs that attempted to address the ills of urban America in the 1970s—a blend of the old Providence and the new. Within Cianci’s circle of advisers, a cadre of Republicans—East Siders and reformers—argued that good government was good politics, and so Cianci hired neighborhood activists and grassroots organizers who traditionally had been cut out of power. But then McGarry or T.B.—Tony Bucci—would call about a guy who needed a job, and Cianci would put him on the payroll. When some of the good-government types on the mayor’s staff tried to argue, he would cynically remind them, “Good government will only get you good government.”
Nick Easton, who was hired by the mayor’s Office of Community Development, approached that question from a different perspective. A long-haired South Side radical, Easton knew what it was like to be on the outside looking in. As a director of PACE (People Acting Through Community Effort), the militant group that had futilely fought for neighborhood improvements under Joe Doorley, Easton realized that throwing stones would only take you so far.
Easton, in his mid-twenties, had grown up an exile from privilege. He was a curiosity: a Yankee Democrat. He joked that he came from fourteen generations of blue blood but only thirteen generations of green money. His ancestor, Nicholas Easton, had been one of Rhode Island’s first settlers, with Roger Williams, and one of Rhode Island’s first governors. Eastons had been Quakers, opposed to the Revolutionary War and against the thriving Rhode Island slave trade. The Eastons had prospered, as farmers, merchants, and industrialists. Nick’s grandfather had been an inventor, second in line in the family company. Nick’s father had been raised with servants, maids, and chauffeurs. But then he lost his job in a family power struggle, and the Eastons’ fortunes declined.
Young Nick lived in an extra house that belonged to his grandparents in the upper-caste waterfront suburb of Barrington, surrounded by wealth but forced to wear patches on his clothes. The experience radicalized him. Smart and opinionated, Easton earned a scholarship to Moses Brown, then waited tables to help pay his tuition at Brown University, where generations of more privileged Eastons had preceded him.
Easton had always been drawn to politics. In the blighted neighborhoods of South Providence he found an outlet after college for his radical beliefs. As a leader of PACE, he fought for safer streets, better housing, and equal opportunity. One issue of concern was the city’s failure to rein in wild dogs that attacked people on the streets.
Cianci, who had stunned PACE leaders by inviting them into his office during his first week as mayor, sought to defuse their confrontational tactics by embracing them. He showed up at the group’s annual congress in South Providence one night and charmed skeptical members who, the previous year, had awarded Doorley its “Tory” award in absentia. When one man complained that the city’s property tax structure was unfair, Cianci invited him to serve on a study committee. “He did a job on me,” the man said afterward.
PACE leaders, accustomed to battling the establishment, were wary of Cianci’s motives but pragmatic enough to get what they could. The mayor appointed some PACE members to city boards and hired others to city jobs. Cianci may be acting “for the wrong reasons,” said one leader, but at least people from the community were finally gaining a voice at City Hall. Another PACE leader warned: “At this point, he needs us. But if at any point we need him and he turns on us, we’ll turn into snakes.”
Nick Easton was hired to work in an affordable-housing program in the Office of Community Development. There he found himself surrounded by a motley crew of ward heelers and political favor seekers. Several of his coworkers never showed up at the office, which was probably a good thing, since many of them were incompetent.
Easton oversaw a group of “rehabilitation officers” who were supposed to go around the city in two-man teams, inspecting lists of abandoned buildings and writing reports on necessary repairs. But most days, one man would hand off his stack of folders to his partner and go off to his real job. Another day, his partner might reciprocate. One rehab officer was a jobber for a jewelry factory. Another worked in a shoe store. A third sold used cars.
Easton wound up, by default, as deputy director of the office’s housing program. Although he was one of the only people in the office capable of running the program, he made less money than just about everyone except the secretaries. Cianci regarded Easton as a rabble-rouser and never trusted him.
“Easton!” the mayor would bark. “Why are you going around causing trouble?”
Easton can remember being called into the mayor’s office and getting yelled at by Ronnie Glantz in front of Cianci. The issue was inconsequential, involving a list of job applicants that Easton had passed along to PACE leaders, but the message was clear: intimidation. Glantz, who had emerged as a key Cianci confidant, screamed at Easton that passing on the list was a federal offense, that he could go to prison. It was a routine that Cianci and Glantz also pulled with others, said Easton, to keep people in their place and remind them who was boss.
After about a year and a half, things grew so outrageous that Easton quit his job with the city. PACE officials, despite Cianci’s efforts to co-opt them, blasted the mayor for hiring political hacks and detailed shoddy workmanship in the city’s housing-rehabilitation program. Cianci was irked when they marched on his stately brick house on Blackstone Boulevard, which one neighbor said resembled the White House for the floodlit American flag that flew from the second-floor balcony, day and night.
In the Office of Community Development’s second year of operation, the FBI began investigating allegations that federal funds had been diverted to pay contractors to repair private individuals’ homes. In its third year, the federal government cut off funding for a three-mile bike trail from downtown through the East Side after the city ran afoul of competitive bidding regulations and spent more than two hundred thousand dollars without even finishing the trail. According to Kenneth Orenstein, who coordinated the office’s Downtown Development and Preservation Team, one of the overseers of the bike trail sat next to him—an older, tattooed man who had been given a job because he needed health insurance. One day, the man, whose desk was next to Orenstein’s, walked over to the water fountain and dropped dead of a heart attack. Orenstein also remembered the day that a group of grubby demolition contractors took over the OCD’s conference room and rigged the bids for contracts to knock down dilapidated buildings. Eventually, the director of the office, a reform-minded East Sider, quit in disgust, tired of meddling from the mayor’s office. Looking back on some of the people who worked for the OCD, Easton called it “one of the worst crews ever assembled.”
After Easton’s departure, one of Cianci’s federally funded hires, the director of the office’s H
omestead Board, was arrested for defrauding homesteaders seeking to move into abandoned houses that had been acquired by the city. When the police did a routine criminal-background check, they discovered that the director was on parole from state prison in Massachusetts for kidnapping and rape, and had been when he was hired in 1975. Besides shaking down homesteaders, he had another sideline—running a string of prostitutes who worked the streets of downtown Providence, in sight of City Hall. On rainy days, the hookers took shelter in the Homestead Board’s offices on Washington Street.
THE MOST PRIZED office in Rhode Island politics is a seat in the United States Senate.
The tiniest state has a tradition of sending senators to Washington who become giants: Nelson Aldrich, Theodore Francis Green, John O. Pastore, Claiborne Pell, and John Chafee. Each man served two decades or more, counseled presidents, shaped national and foreign policy, and steered federal dollars and patronage to his home state.
In 1975, after barely six months in office as mayor of Providence, Buddy Cianci heard the call of the most powerful club in America. Although he was young, he was hot, and some Republican leaders wanted him to run in 1976. But to get to Washington, Cianci would have to face down two dominant figures in Rhode Island politics: Pastore and Chafee.
Pastore was the epitome of the ethnic Democratic politician, a product of poor immigrant parents on Federal Hill who had gone on to become the nation’s first Italian-American senator and one of its leading liberals. He was a spellbinding orator who helped pushed through Lyndon Johnson’s landmark civil-rights bill and delivered the keynote address at the 1964 Democratic National Convention, a eulogy to the fallen president, John F. Kennedy. Pastore, who had held the seat for twenty-five years, was up for reelection in 1976.
Chafee, the son of privilege and a graduate of Harvard and Yale, was a moderate Republican who had won a Purple Heart at Guadalcanal. He served three terms as Rhode Island governor in the 1960s, running as “the man you can trust,” and went on to serve as navy secretary under President Nixon. Chafee had lost a fourth bid for governor in 1968, after saying that he would impose a state income tax—a race in which he stopped campaigning following the death of a daughter. Then he had lost a tough Senate race to Pell, a wealthy Newporter, in 1972. A prominent Yankee lawyer in Providence, Chafee wanted to return to public life.
The skirmishing began in the spring of 1975, when Cianci and Pastore addressed the Rhode Island Verrazzano Day banquet. Cianci talked about the contributions of Italian-Americans, then added pointedly that he and Pastore represented “the movement from one era to another in public service,” suggesting that Pastore’s day was done.
“That really burned him up,” Cianci laughingly told people afterward.
Over the next several months, Cianci delighted in tweaking Pastore and telling derogatory stories about the senator in private. He boasted that Pastore got mad when the mayor sat in the front row at the Providence College graduation, while the senator was in the second row, with the rest of the congressional delegation.
Pastore was a short, dignified man with a bristly mustache. He was fiercely protective of his position as a role model for Italian-Americans and would storm out of restaurants on Federal Hill if he saw a mobster eating there. One Sunday morning in the late sixties, Pastore was eating alone at the counter at the East Side Diner; farther down, also eating alone, was Raymond Patriarca. They ate in silence, without acknowledging each other. As Pastore reached into his pocket to pay, a nickel fell to the floor. According to someone working there at the time, the senator and the mob boss each reached down for the nickel; Pastore got it and left with-out a word.
The senator liked being compared to the Rhode Island Red, a fiery bantam rooster that was the state bird. In his last campaign, in 1970, at the height of the Vietnam War, the hawkish Pastore had faced a stiff challenge from a Jesuit priest, John McLaughlin, who went on to host The McLaughlin Report, a national political commentary television show out of Washington.
“If I could win against Father McLaughlin, and I did, then certainly Cianci doesn’t frighten me,” Pastore told a Democratic audience at a summer clambake.
There was a movement afoot in the Democrat-controlled state legislature to pass a law that would have forced Cianci to step down as mayor if he wanted to run for Senate. Pastore issued a public challenge, saying that he would resign the remaining months of his term if Cianci beat him, if Cianci would promise to give up the final two years of his term as mayor if Pastore beat him. “The idea that because he’s safe to turn his back on the people of Providence and then crawl back if he’s beaten—the people of Rhode Island aren’t going to buy that,” said Pastore.
Clearly offended at what he considered Cianci’s disrespectful behavior. Pastore, who had known Cianci’s father, joked that he had bounced little Buddy on his knee, and that he must have bounced him one time too many, because Cianci had become a Republican. (Cianci teased that since Pastore’s first name, in Italian, was Giovanni, his initials were G.O.P.)
Pastore also scolded Cianci for not working together with the state’s congressional delegation in his efforts to land a federal office building for Providence. Pastore said that Cianci had been ignoring him, even though Pastore sat on the Senate committee that controlled the funds. “He should know, if he doesn’t know already,” that his projects “will never come to Providence without the help of John Pastore.”
Cianci fired back by accusing Pastore of making “veiled threats.” The dispute came to a head a few nights later, when Pastore and Cianci shared top billing at the annual banquet of the San Biagio Society. Cianci and an allied councilman criticized Pastore again over the federal building. A fuming Pastore, believing that Cianci had come to the banquet “looking for trouble,” responded by lecturing the mayor. Cianci, said Pastore, was “an ill-mannered person.” As Cianci listened uncomfortably, Pastore reminded him that he, John Pastore, whose political ideals had been forged in the Great Depression and the New Deal, was still the principal spokesman for Rhode Island’s Italian-Americans—not some young, upstart Republican son of privilege who had yet to pay his political dues.
A few days later Cianci and Pastore studiously ignored each other as they waited with other political leaders at Green Airport to welcome President Ford, who was flying in for a political fund-raiser in Newport.
But there would be no Pastore-Cianci race. In October Pastore announced that he would not seek reelection. He was sixty-eight years old, he said, and it was time to come home. The political experts predicted that Pastore would have beaten Cianci. One of Cianci’s top aides told the mayor that his mother, like leagues of older voters, would never go against Pastore. But it would have been a fiery campaign, between an old warhorse, perhaps the finest public speaker Rhode Island had ever known, and a young lion, who was winning favorable comparisons.
Pastore’s announcement seemed to open the door for Cianci. The state Republican chairman said that the nomination was his, if he wanted it. It was a question of timing. On one hand, Cianci did not want to seem overeager, given his inexperience, and jeopardize a bright political future. And winning would be tough; Rhode Island had not seen a Republican senator since the Democrats had become the state’s dominant party during the Great Depression. On the other hand, Senate seats didn’t open up very often. Cianci should pounce while his popularity was high, especially among Italian-American voters, who would be more likely to support him with Pastore out of the race. If Cianci lost, he’d still have two years left on his term as mayor.
Cianci played it close to the vest, restricted in part by strict new federal campaign-spending laws that would have kicked in had he too openly declared his interest. One day he confessed to experiencing political vertigo. He said that he felt like he was “in an elevator on about the eighth floor of the Empire State Building, heading all the way to the roof.”
But Cianci was not alone. Standing silently in the background, biding his time, was John Chafee.
THA
T FALL AND winter, Chafee and Cianci circled each other warily, like the schoolboy wrestlers they had once been. The two men represented the Yankee and Italian wings of the Rhode Island Republican party, which coexisted uneasily. They were cautious but firm in their public remarks, eager to avoid a divisive primary but determined to show their resolve.
“I am positive I could get the endorsement of the Republican party if I so choose,” said Cianci. The mayor added that he had conferred with Chafee, and gave the impression that Chafee would not contest him.
Countered Chafee, “In the final analysis, I don’t think I will be controlled by what his [Cianci’s] decision would be.”
Behind the scenes, the two men jockeyed for position. At a state Republican-party dinner at the West Valley Inn in West Warwick, Cianci fumed as he waited outside for Chafee to show, wanting to upstage his rival by coming in later and being the last to speak. But Chafee, apparently sitting in a car nearby, outwaited him. Finally, after Cianci gave up and went in and started speaking, Chafee arrived and upstaged him with a huge ovation.
One of Cianci’s aides, Joe Vileno, was sitting next to an elderly matron from South County, a frugal Swamp Yankee who told him in her blue-blooded voice that she didn’t usually attend political functions, “but I came out for John.” All the old Yankees had come out. In a low-turnout Republican primary, that kind of fealty could prove decisive. Cianci was a long way from the Fourth Ward, where Tony Bucci could turn out the Democratic vote. At that moment, recalled Vileno, “I knew there was no way we’d ever win a primary.”