The Prince of Providence

by Mike Stanton

  Captain Walter Clark, Ricci’s administrative assistant, told the mayor that it would be difficult to include the rejected candidates. They had failed background checks, and one had a minor criminal record. At that point, Ricci caught Clark’s eye and motioned that he wanted to leave. The meeting adjourned without any resolution.

  Back at police headquarters, Ricci surprised Clark by asking him to reconsider the rejected candidates. Prior to the meeting with the mayor, Ricci had told Clark to stand firm, because the chief did not want any of the five hired. But now, as a result of Ricci’s turnaround, the board agreed reluctantly to admit three of Cianci’s rejects.

  The week before the ice storm, two recruits who had not been selected sued the city. Ricci worried about having to testify about the selection process. He peppered Clark and Collins with questions and concerns. He obsessed about Cianci, asking what he should say about his conversations with the mayor. Ricci said that he didn’t want to lie on the stand. Clark told Ricci that he didn’t have to lie, that he hadn’t done anything wrong. Since time immemorial, Clark reminded Ricci, politicians had attempted to influence the selection process.

  On Friday night the ice storm hit. Ricci had to deal with Cianci regarding the city’s emergency response to the storm. But still, he could not shake the lawsuit from his mind. He had a meeting with staff and lawyers over the weekend to discuss it, then called Clark and Collins several times on Sunday. Clark thought he was going to quit, and screamed into the phone for him not to.

  Ricci’s last phone call to Clark was at 11 P.M. He was calm but downcast. He told Clark that the job was too much. “I thought the job would be chasing criminals,” he said. “I can’t figure out the system. Good-bye, kid.”

  Not long before midnight, Ricci told his wife that he had to go to the station to deal with an emergency. At 3 A.M. John Leyden was awakened by a call from Ricci’s wife, who said that her husband had called and needed him at the station. Leyden called Collins, and the two men hurried downtown. Met by Leo Trambukis, the public safety commissioner, the men went upstairs to the chief’s office, and found it locked. They broke through the glass with a crowbar, then pried open a second locked door to Ricci’s inner office. They found Ricci lying in his anteroom, his topcoat folded neatly under his head, a single bullet wound in his head, and his police-issue .38-caliber service revolver at his side.

  The three men looked at one another.

  “Can you imagine this, over a job?” one of them said finally.

  Who do you call when you’re the police and you’ve just found your chief dead at headquarters? They called the coroner. Then someone called the mayor, who was home, asleep.

  Shaken, Cianci called Ronnie Glantz and asked if he had heard anything. The mayor was concerned about whether Ricci had left a note, and if it mentioned Cianci. Ricci did leave a note. It said: “Leo—everything is too much. John—take care of my family.”

  Later that morning Cianci came to the station. He was in a state of shock. He stayed awhile, as officers reporting for morning duty stopped by and spoke in hushed tones. Hardened police officers fought back tears. The mood was equally somber at City Hall. One of Cianci’s aides said that when she heard the news on the radio, her immediate reaction was that Cianci deserved a share of the blame. The aide had heard the mayor screaming at the police chief, whom she considered a good and decent man. That day she avoided Cianci.

  The mayor called this day “the saddest I have experienced as mayor.” He declared a thirty-day period of mourning and ordered flags lowered to half-staff.

  Throughout the day, as police officials said publicly that they had no idea what had been bothering Ricci, Ted Collins agonized. After speaking to Ricci’s widow and enduring a sleepless Monday night, Collins knew what he had to do. The day after Ricci killed himself, Collins went to the press.

  “Bob Ricci died because he couldn’t lie,” said Collins. “The mayor was ramming [unqualified] men down his throat.” Collins went on to detail the pressure that he said Cianci had put on the police to take unqualified recruits. “Bob Ricci did not pull that trigger,” said Collins. “The system did. The mayor is also the victim of the same system, with political patronage what it is.”

  Publicly, the police brass lined up with Cianci, who emphatically denied ever putting any political pressure on Ricci. Privately, another ranking police official and two other knowledgeable sources, interviewed by The Providence Journal, backed up what Collins said about Cianci’s political interference.

  Walter Clark tried to put the tragedy of Ricci’s death in a less emotional context when he was called to testify before a City Council committee investigating Collins’s allegations. Ricci committed suicide not on January 16, said Clark, but on the day, sixteen months earlier, when he accepted the chief’s job. He was overwhelmed by his administrative responsibilities and was too rigid to handle the realities of politics. Slowly, the job overwhelmed him, until he “found himself in that room without doors or windows. Clearly, there was no escape.”

  The Ricci tragedy, highlighting politics and patronage in the police department, was not an auspicious start to an election year in which the Democrats figured to be more unified.

  Cianci didn’t realize that that would soon be the least of his worries. On the day that Bob Ricci was buried, during a driving snowstorm, another storm was gathering in the Midwest, concerning a story from the mayor’s past, when he was a law student at Marquette University in Milwaukee.

  Five months after Ricci’s death, Collins was demoted to nights. Later he was served with a three-year-old arrest warrant for code violations on tenements he owned. Cianci, dismissing Collins’s charges of retribution, said that the policeman had an obligation to fix his properties.

  “No person is above the law,” said the mayor.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Operation Snow Job

  When Ron Glantz was called into the mayor’s office on a January afternoon in 1978, Buddy Cianci was in a panic.

  The week of Bob Ricci’s suicide, Cianci learned that two reporters from The Providence Journal were in Milwaukee, digging into his past. They were looking into twelve-year-old allegations that Cianci had raped a woman at gunpoint during his final year at Marquette Law School.

  Cianci summoned Glantz, his acting city solicitor, and Herbert DeSimone, the former Rhode Island attorney general and a trusted adviser. He ordered them to get on the first plane to Milwaukee, find the girl, and collect all the information they could. Cianci reached into his desk drawer, took out two thousand dollars in cash, and gave it to DeSimone, for expenses.

  The winter of 1978 was stormy. It was snowing when Glantz and DeSimone flew into Chicago and changed planes for Milwaukee. On the cab ride from the airport, Glantz looked at Lake Michigan and noticed signs warning that the water was polluted, then saw pipes that local breweries used to draw water from the lake for making beer.

  Glantz and DeSimone checked into a posh hotel, the Pfister, in downtown Milwaukee. Over the next few days they made contact with a prominent Milwaukee criminal-defense lawyer, Daniel Weiss, who had represented Cianci in the original matter; met with a lawyer who represented the woman who had accused Cianci; and went to the police station in the suburb of River Hills, where the alleged rape had taken place, to see what police files existed.

  Meanwhile, Providence Journal reporters Randy Richard and Bert Wade were tracing some of the same steps. They interviewed the chief of police in River Hills, who had investigated the Cianci matter as a lieutenant in 1966. They also tried to talk to the woman, only to be rebuffed by her lawyer. When the reporters tried to see the original police file, it was unavailable. They were told that the records had been destroyed.

  The reporters also met with Alan D. Eisenberg, a flamboyant Milwaukee lawyer and classmate of Cianci’s at Marquette who had been instrumental in resurrecting the Cianci story. Eisenberg, who has been called the most obnoxious lawyer in Wisconsin, had already carved out a reputation as a hell-raiser wh
o attacked the establishment and took on controversial cases. In 1970 he had been stripped of his law license for one year for making derogatory remarks about a county judge who later committed suicide. In 1978 Eisenberg was defending a woman accused of murdering her husband and burning their house down after enduring years of domestic violence. A poster in Eisenberg’s law offices proclaimed: THE FIGHT OF THE CENTURY—MUHAMMAD ALI VS. ALAN D. EISENBERG.

  Eisenberg and Cianci had become friendly early in their law-school days at Marquette. Cianci was bright and funny, Eisenberg remembered, and obviously came from money. When he arrived in Milwaukee, Cianci bought himself a new Buick Riviera, paying cash, and moved into an apartment in an upscale lakefront neighborhood known as the Gold Coast. He boasted to Eisenberg that his father was a man of great wealth, a proctologist whose patients came from all over the Northeast and included the rich and famous, even movie stars. Cianci also told Eisenberg that his ambition was to go into politics and succeed John Pastore as a U.S. senator from Rhode Island.

  Cianci frequented various singles bars in Milwaukee, said Eisenberg. One bar, near Cianci’s apartment, was attached to a restaurant, Chico’s, run by a mob associate named Frankie LaGalbo. One night, Eisenberg and Cianci were having dinner in Chico’s when a man who worked there leaped over the bar and started beating a man, punching him repeatedly in the head.

  “Do you want to do something?” Eisenberg asked Cianci. “Should we try and stop it?”

  “No,” he says Cianci replied. “It’s the Italian code of honor.”

  Being new in town, Cianci asked Eisenberg, who dated frequently, to introduce him to some women. Eisenberg obliged, but later three of the women complained to him about Cianci’s overly aggressive advances, he said; one woman slapped him in the face for fixing her up with Cianci. When Eisenberg told Cianci, he dismissed them as liars.

  On Saturday, March 5, 1966, Eisenberg noticed a short item buried inside the Milwaukee Sentinel, underneath a review of the Albert Camus play The Just Assassins, performed by the Marquette University Players. The seven-paragraph story began: “A 20-year-old telephone operator and a 25-year-old law school senior she has accused of raping her at gunpoint have agreed to take lie detector tests next week, Asst. Dist. Atty. Gerald Boyle said Friday.” It went on to detail the woman’s allegations that the law student had lured her to his house on the pretext of offering her a typing job, then given her a drink that she thought was drugged. When she awoke, the woman said, the law student threatened her with a gun unless she submitted. The next morning she took a taxi home and told a friend, who called the police. The story did not identify the telephone operator or the law student. It ended by saying that “no charges have been lodged.”

  A day or so later, when Eisenberg went to law school, the students were buzzing about the story. The senior class contained fewer than one hundred students. Someone said that the guy was Cianci. Eisenberg said that he asked him, and Cianci replied, “Yeah, it’s a shakedown.” He said that a local defense lawyer, Danny Weiss, was handling it.

  Eisenberg heard no more of the matter until graduation, when he noticed that Cianci was not there. Nor was he present when the dean of the Marquette Law School took the graduating Class of ’66 to the Wisconsin Supreme Court in Madison—a Marquette tradition—and had them sworn in to the Wisconsin bar.

  THE MATTER LAY buried from the spring of 1966 until the fall of 1977, when it was revived by an only-in-Rhode-Island type of coincidence.

  Alan Eisenberg was frequently quoted in the media. One day, Nancy Laffey, a young television reporter for Channel 12 in Milwaukee, interviewed him. Afterward, as they chatted, Laffey mentioned that she had grown up in Rhode Island and had worked for Channel 10 in Providence.

  “I went to law school with a guy from Providence,” said Eisenberg.

  Laffey lit up when Eisenberg said it was Cianci. She told him some of the things that she knew about the colorful mayor of Providence. Then Eisenberg told her some things that he knew, most notably the rape allegation at Marquette.

  With Eisenberg’s help, Laffey pursued the story. In November 1977 they visited the police chief in River Hills, Harold Block, who had worked on the case in 1966. River Hills is one of the richest towns in Wisconsin, a quiet suburb of lavish homes hugging the Lake Michigan shore north of Milwaukee. Block had not forgotten the case. He gave Laffey police reports from the original investigation, including a handwritten statement by the victim.

  The documents made for chilling reading.

  In her written statement, the woman, Ruth Bandlow, said that Cianci approached her about working part-time for him, typing subscriptions for Time magazine. He said that he knew a friend of hers, a student at Marquette, and so she agreed to go with him, after work, to the house where he was staying in River Hills. At the house, she said, Cianci offered her a drink.

  I accepted it and after I drank it I can’t really remember what happened after I blacked out. But when I came to he was on top of me. I started screaming and got hysterical and he told me if I wouldn’t keep my mouth shut, he’d blow my brains out. Then he got the gun from the drawer and asked me if I thought he was kidding. He loaded it and put it to my head and said, you think I have not done this before where do you think I get all my money from. And he said no one would ever miss me because no one knew I was with him.

  There were certain things that interested him such as psychology, traveling and so forth. So I kept trying to keep him interested, thinking it would keep his mind of [sic] what he was trying to do to me. But finally I couldn’t keep him off me any longer. And that is when he raped me for certain. He went downstairs after that and started mixing drinks.

  Years later, in an interview with a writer for New Times magazine, Bandlow gave a further description of how, as Cianci tried to rape her, she threatened to tell the police.

  “I told him I’d go to the police, and he said that I’d make a fool out of myself . . . that he would get away with it because he knew every nook and cranny—he was going to law school. He laughed and he said that he’d get away with it. He said he could do anything he wanted . . .” Later, she said, as Cianci wielded the gun, he told her, “Look out the window—there’s a ravine there. I could throw your body down there, and no one would ever find you.”

  Afterward, when Cianci left the room, Bandlow said that she called a cab. “I was going to call the police, but I thought if a police car drove up, he would kill me. . . . When the doorbell rang, he got all excited, and he said, ‘Who’s that?’ And I ran—I pushed him aside and I ran, and I opened the door. The cab driver had come to the door. He acted very cool in front of the cab driver. He says, ‘We had a wonderful time, and I’ll call you. . . . We’ll go out to dinner sometime.’ I remember that very plain.”

  When she got home, about seven the next morning, Bandlow told the police that all she could think about was being safe and needing to sleep. Her entire body felt numb, she said, and she could hardly walk. Bandlow had been living away from home for about a year and was renting a room in a women’s residence in Milwaukee. The night after the alleged rape, she told a friend what had happened. The friend called the police. The next day, March 3, Bandlow gave her statement to the police.

  On March 4, at 9 A.M., Bandlow and Cianci were ordered to appear before the Milwaukee County district attorney. Bandlow was asked to identify Cianci, who denied her accusations.

  “We were in the judge’s chamber at the time,” Bandlow would later tell New Times. “When they first brought him in, he said, ‘Hi there! Didn’t we have a great time last night?’ He acted so cool, calm and collected. . . . And they asked him if he knew me, and he said, ‘Yes, I met her last night, and we had such a good time I wanted to take her out to dinner.’ And I just completely . . . I don’t know . . . I just flipped out. Can you imagine—my parents were there in the judge’s chambers, and he walks in like that? My dad almost went after him.”

  Cianci and Bandlow each agreed to take lie-detector tests. But the ne
xt day a distraught Bandlow took an overdose of sleeping pills and was hospitalized for ten days.

  “I didn’t want to kill myself,” she later explained to New Times. “But I was under such strain and nervous pressure. No one seemed to believe me. . . . I even felt guilty, because I did go with that man—a person that’s raped always feels a little bit guilty . . . but I think anyone would have trusted him—the way he can smooth talk, and put on a front . . .”

  In the meantime, the investigation continued. The police, with Cianci’s consent, took evidence from the house, including a German 7.65-millimeter Ortgies pistol, a bloodstained sheet, and two glasses containing the remainder of a drink. Noting that the investigation was continuing, Lieutenant Block of the River Hills Police wrote, “No warrants have as yet been issued.”

  The gun was test-fired and found to be in working condition. Tests on the empty glasses for drug residue were negative; the crime-lab report said that a low-level concentration of drugs would be difficult to detect. Investigators identified semen on the bedsheet, small spots of human blood on the sheet and pillowcase, and traces of blood at the crotch area of Bandlow’s panty girdle—an amount insufficient for further testing to determine whose blood.

  Four weeks after the alleged crime, on March 30, 1966, Cianci and Bandlow went separately to the state crime lab in Madison to take their lie-detector tests. According to a police report written by Lieutenant Block, the state’s veteran polygraph expert said that the results “showed this to be one of the most clear cut cases of rape he had ever processed in his years with the State Crime Lab. In his opinion Ruth Bandlow passed the test beyond a shadow of a doubt while Cianci failed completely on three separate testings.”