The Prince of Providence

by Mike Stanton

  With a name like Tillinghast, Gerald was not your typical mobster. He was a descendant of Pardon Tillinghast, the colonial farmer, merchant, and Baptist pastor, and friend to Rhode Island’s founder, Roger Williams. Tillinghasts fought in the Revolutionary War and got rich trading slaves and running textile mills. Tillinghasts married Chafees, dined at the Hope Club, served on the state supreme court, and helped run Brown University. But Gerald Tillinghast, the son of a bricklayer who came from a penniless tributary of the clan, made his money the old-fashioned way—he stole it. Hired by the city when Doorley was mayor, he developed a reputation as a notorious mobster. Two years after Tillinghast’s acquittal in the bonded-vault case, Vespia was conducting surveillance on him and his brother Harold one night as they drove near the airport in a stolen yellow sedan with loan shark George Basmajian. Minutes later, after the car was obscured by a snow fence, Vespia and an FBI agent came across Basmajian’s bullet-riddled body in the backseat. Vespia caught up with the Tillinghasts about a half hour later at Michael’s Lounge, a mob haunt in Providence, and arrested them. There was blood all over Gerald Tillinghast’s black nylon softball jacket. The Tillinghasts were convicted of murder, despite a dozen alibi witnesses, including a fellow Public Works employee, who said they were at the bar.

  Cianci tried a few times to hire Vespia as his police chief, but it never worked out. The first occasion was in 1976, when Cianci forced out Doorley holdover Walter McQueeney. But Colonel Walter Stone, the head of the state police, was not a fan of Cianci’s and refused to grant Vespia a leave to take the job. Vespia also wondered if he could work for Cianci, given his domineering nature. The friction between Cianci and McQueeney had been no secret. Frank Darigan, who had been elected city Democratic chairman, recalled meeting McQueeney at the Holiday Inn one day; the crusty old chief was talking about Cianci when he suddenly started crying and sobbed, “What this guy is making me do . . .” McQueeney implied that Cianci had pressured him over jobs and promotions but didn’t go into detail, recalled Darigan.

  When Vespia dropped out, Cianci, eager to hire an Italian-American police chief, chose Captain Robert E. Ricci, the head of detectives and, before that, head of the vice squad for ten years. Vespia considered Ricci one of the most honorable police officers he had ever known, ramrod straight and not at all political. There was no speculation about how Ricci and Cianci would get along as the mayor swore him in at a ceremony attended by several hundred people at Roger Williams Park on September 13, 1976. Standing in the white marble Temple to Music, Ricci smiled as the Providence bishop bestowed his blessing and the outgoing chief pinned the colonel’s badge to his uniform. Flanked by his wife and his teenaged son and daughter, Ricci found it difficult to express his joy. “I feel my cup has runneth over,” he said.

  THE JOB SEEMED to bring out Buddy’s best and worst sides, the cheerleader and the bully.

  In the beginning there was a sense of excitement and challenge that made the job fun. At the end of the day on Friday, Cianci presided over weekly staff meetings in the conference room off the mayor’s office. Take-out food would be brought in. The mayor and his aides would talk and laugh about the week’s events, the crazy things that had happened. Cianci played the role of father, telling them: “We’re family. I’m here for you.”

  Cianci’s forceful personality generated a merry kind of chaos around the office when he was in. He would talk to anyone about anything, and so his appointments would back up. One day Cianci burst into hysterics after his secretary told him that the president of the Alzheimer’s Foundation had forgotten about their appointment. The whimsical mayor took an owl from the zoo and set it on the mantel of his office fireplace, delighting in the fact that visitors didn’t know it was alive.

  People of all stations would see the mayor’s black limousine outside City Hall and wander in off the street. One little old lady, known as the Flower Lady, was constantly bringing flowers for the mayor. Cianci’s secretary kept after him to see her, and finally, one day, he did. When Cianci came out of his office to greet the Flower Lady, she took him by the arm and escorted him back into his own office. They were in there for so long that his secretary finally buzzed Cianci to rescue him. After the Flower Lady left, Cianci grabbed his secretary’s shirt in mock anger, laughed, and said, “She hit me up for five hundred bucks.”

  A former police officer remembered a chaotic scene when he reported for his first day as the mayor’s driver. It was St. Patrick’s Day. Irish music blared through City Hall, the green beer flowed freely, and drunks staggered in the corridors. The policeman opened the door to the mayor’s outer office and saw three men wrestling on the floor—two other policemen and a large man in coveralls. The secretaries were screaming for help. The man in coveralls was an unemployed carpenter, frustrated at his inability to get city work, who had gotten drunk and come down to City Hall to demand a job. Cianci burst out of his office as the officers subdued the man and said, “What the hell is going on?” The carpenter started blubbering, “Mayor, Mayor, Mayor,” and then launched into his tale of woe. “Well, come on in,” said Cianci, who talked to the man for a while and then ordered a city official to give him some work.

  As the tensions from the constant political battles grew, Cianci became more difficult to work for. The pace became so hectic that the Friday staff meetings were phased out. The mayor was notorious for his temper tantrums. One day Cianci flew into a rage after a favor seeker slipped past his security guard and got into his office. Screaming and cursing, Cianci stormed into the reception area, where there were four or five chairs, and started throwing them into the hallway.

  The mayor also became legendary for the abuse he would heap upon his police chauffeurs. One former police bodyguard, Joseph Agugiaro, remembered that Cianci would hit one particular driver about the neck and face with the car phone. Once, the day after an evening fund-raiser, Cianci had a manila envelope stuffed with contributions that had not been deposited at the bank. Hurrying to another political event in his limousine, he lost his temper as he tried, unsuccessfully, to stuff the large envelope into the small glove compartment. By the time they arrived at their destination, Cianci had dismantled the dashboard and was cursing and screaming and hitting his driver with the telephone, said Agugiaro. Politicians and other dignitaries stood around the limousine in the parking lot, waiting for the mayor’s tirade to subside. Cianci ordered the policeman not to leave the car for a second, not even to go to the bathroom, and then composed himself and went inside to work the crowd.

  Another former police bodyguard, Urbano Prignano, Jr., remembered a wild ride with the mayor that began on Federal Hill. A car shot through the intersection in front of them. A woman was driving and a man was hanging out the driver’s window, being dragged along and trying to grab the steering wheel. The cops wanted to chase the car, but Cianci, late for an appointment, told them to keep going. They argued back and forth for a few seconds until finally the police driver swerved around the corner in pursuit, nearly sideswiping a bus. They finally forced the car to stop, and discovered that the man was one of Prignano’s informants, who had been arguing with his girlfriend when she tried to drive off with his car. As Cianci and Prignano walked back to the limousine, Prignano said, the mayor turned to him and said, “If that had been a real robbery, you know I would have had to make the arrest.”

  Aware of his tenuous, 700-vote margin of victory, Cianci was perpetually campaigning, mindful that a swing of 351 votes would spell defeat. The mythical 351st voter always seemed to hover over his shoulder. Cianci would remind his staff, “Whoever pisses off the three hundred fifty-first voter is in trouble.”

  With his sharp wit, glib tongue, and agile mind, Cianci cultivated reporters and mastered the medium of television. He was cunning at slipping information to a reporter about a political foe, prefaced with the hushed caveat “You didn’t hear this from me. . . .” He transformed his office into a stage set for press conferences and wore pancake makeup for the television lights.
When the six o’clock news came on, Cianci sat in his swivel chair with two remote controls to flip channels on the two television sets in his office. His staff recorded the evening news so that it could be critiqued for its coverage of the mayor.

  Cianci created a cult of personality that overlaid the old-fashioned political machine he had assembled. In the process, his tireless promotion of Providence blurred into self-promotion. Cianci wanted to do good for Providence, but he also needed to look good in the process.

  One night Cianci decided that he wanted to go see a jazz singer at Ballard’s, a nightclub in the moribund downtown. He ordered a staffer to go arrange for a front-row table, then swept into the half-empty club at the appointed hour with his retinue, as if he were Jimmy Walker.

  Cianci enjoyed making a grand entrance. He used a helicopter, then professed ignorance when The Providence Journal reported that city workers had installed a helicopter landing pad near his East Side home. He badgered an aide, Ron Glantz, to call the major automobile companies in Detroit to see if they would provide Cianci a new official limousine, for a discount. Ford had a program to lease Lincoln Town Cars to cities, at cost, but an executive informed Glantz that Providence wasn’t big enough to qualify. Finally, Glantz said, he arranged for a car with a local dealer.

  The public and the media were fascinated with the Imperial Buddy. He was praised for restoring pomp and circumstance to a dying city, and for nourishing the arts and entertainment even as he became Providence’s principal entertainer. When the Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey Circus came to town, Cianci served as honorary ringmaster. “They tell me that we have a circus going on at City Hall every single day,” he quipped.

  The mayor drew comparisons to Napoleon, Nero, and Caesar. About six months into his reign, Cianci showed up for work with a toupee to mask his receding hairline. He ordered photographs of himself hung in city offices and in the lobbies of Providence’s fourteen federal housing projects. A Providence Journal editorial writer waxed poetic about “Prince Vincent” after observing him preside over a musical Midsummer Night Festival one evening outside City Hall. The writer called Cianci a throwback to the flamboyant former mayor of New York, Fiorello La Guardia, who was known as “the Little Flower.”

  “Bravely and confidently, he romps through the first year of his reign. Clean-cut features, strong without pudginess, endow him with a remarkable resemblance to ‘the Little Flower’ of happy memory. He stands in our dream on one of the higher landings of the great granite front staircase of City Hall. His smile is as broad as a crescent moon as he waves his upraised arms.”

  At other times, however, Cianci’s self-aggrandizement was problematic. He had a tendency to shoot from the hip in search of headlines, and then not follow through on certain projects. Another Providence Journal editorial criticized him for jumping the gun on announcing a new federal building for Providence and for making reckless remarks that threatened to disrupt carefully laid plans for a new state courthouse in the city.

  “If Mr. Cianci wants to strut on the bridge and display his gold braid, he should be aware that showmanship is not going to move the city off dead center. That takes seamanship. . . . The good ship Providence is on the rocks, and all that gold braid looks pretty silly.”

  IT WAS THE second Sunday in January 1978, and a sheet of ice had blanketed Providence in what was being called the worst winter storm in years. Still, Margaret Ricci, the wife of police chief Robert Ricci, thought nothing of it when her husband told her late that night that he had to go into the office to handle an emergency.

  Ricci was a cop’s cop, rigid and taciturn, six foot four with silver hair and a military bearing. Sixteen months after Cianci had put him in command of New England’s second-largest police department, the job was still all about chasing criminals. As a beat cop in South Providence and West Elmwood, Ricci had won five commendations for outstanding police work. He was promoted to detective and rose steadily through the ranks, developing a reputation for incorruptibility as the head of the C-Squad, which fought drugs, prostitution, and gambling. Vin Vespia remembered how it had bothered Ricci when the state police sometimes conducted raids in the city without alerting the Providence Police Department, implying that some of his men were on the take and couldn’t be trusted.

  Now Ricci had other problems. Dressed in his uniform on an icy winter’s midnight, with many of the city’s residents lacking power or heat as a result of the storm, city streets impassable, and a state of emergency in effect, the chief sat in his darkened third-floor office at Providence police headquarters and pondered how it all went wrong.

  Ricci was torn between his duty as a police officer and his loyalty to the mayor. For weeks he had agonized over the selection of recruits into the new police academy. Cianci had pressed him to admit five recruits whom the police selection board had rejected. As a result, three were subsequently admitted. Meanwhile, two applicants who had been rejected had filed lawsuits against the city the previous week. That weekend Ricci had met for several hours at the police station with top police brass and Cianci’s acting city solicitor, Ron Glantz, to discuss the case. Ricci expected that he would have to testify. He dreaded being asked whether political pressure was a factor in choosing new police officers.

  Politics has always played a role in the Providence Police Department, as it has anywhere. Politicians want certain police officers hired or promoted. Some officers, eager to advance, are influenced by political considerations about whether to aggressively pursue an investigation or drop it. A smaller number of corrupt cops are willing to gather dirt on political enemies or even set them up on bogus charges. There is an inherent tension in the relationship between a mayor and his police chief. The chief serves at the mayor’s pleasure, but not for the mayor’s pleasure.

  In Buddy Cianci’s Providence, a growing number of police officers said privately that the mayor had politicized the police department more than his predecessor Joe Doorley had. They pointed to the arrest of the City Council president, Bobby Haxton, and the aggressive investigations of political foes. In addition, with political campaigns becoming more expensive because of television, there were charges that police officers were pressured to buy and sell campaign fund-raising tickets for Cianci. When former president Ford had come to Providence the month before for a Cianci fund-raiser, officers later complained, pro-Cianci cops had pushed them to buy hundred-dollar tickets to the event. John J. Leyden, a major, said that he had received phone calls from Cianci, who said that he wanted the police veteran at his fund-raisers. Leyden, who was working extra nighttime details to support his family, put the mayor off, saying that he had five kids to feed.

  Ricci had received similar calls, said Leyden, and it bothered him. Politics had no place in Ricci’s life, which revolved around family and duty. He saw things in black and white, not shades of gray. He also kept things to himself. Shy and withdrawn, he was sometimes mistaken for aloof. He addressed longtime associates as “Mr.” and didn’t socialize with other officers, not even to attend the annual policemen’s ball. Every morning he faithfully visited his elderly mother. At lunchtime the chief would grab his police radio and patrol the streets of downtown, on foot and alone. At night he went home to his family.

  But Ricci, who knew every thief and bookie in Providence, didn’t know how to deal with the mayor. Only a handful of Ricci’s trusted lieutenants saw the strain that dealing with City Hall put on him.

  Lieutenant Edward J. Collins, Ricci’s personnel director, was known for the high standard of conduct he demanded from officers. One day Ricci ordered Collins to discipline a patrolman for not handling himself properly at a break-in. Collins put an administrative warning in the officer’s file, then thought nothing of it, until he received a call from the mayor’s office to come down to City Hall. Collins, who had never met with Cianci before, walked into the mayor’s office, which he found imposing and cathedral-like. Before he could get comfortable, Cianci was all over him, screaming and cursing ab
out the disciplinary action. Collins tried to explain, and the mayor grew angrier, yelling within inches of Collins’s face. The disciplined officer’s father was a key neighborhood supporter of Cianci’s in South Providence. Collins, a fiery Irishman, yelled back at Cianci. Ron Glantz, who was also there, had to get between the two men to calm things down.

  The next day Ricci approached Collins and apologized. Ricci felt bad, since Collins had acted on the chief’s orders. It was apparent to Collins, and former Cianci aides confirm, that Ricci had been subjected to similar verbal abuse from the mayor.

  Over time, Collins noticed Cianci becoming more involved in the police department. The mayor would want certain people hired and promoted. Collins pointed to the day that Cianci overruled Ricci on which officer to put in charge of the property room, which holds seized drugs and other evidence, as the day that Ricci found out he wasn’t the chief. Ricci was exasperated by some of Cianci’s personnel moves, said Collins, but he always went along. Collins wanted Ricci to stand up to Cianci. But Ricci said that he would remain loyal.

  A few weeks before the ice storm, the mayor’s office sent Ricci a list of twenty people he wanted in the next police academy class. Ricci, who didn’t normally involve himself in the selection of new police recruits, passed the list on to the police selection board, which admitted fifteen. One week before the academy was to open, Ricci and other police officials were summoned to Cianci’s office. Cianci was upset that some of his applicants had been rejected. One of his concerns was that the roster of those admitted did not reflect the city’s affirmative-action goals for hiring more minority officers.