by Mike Stanton
Although the authorities used lie-detector tests to probe for guilt or innocence, the assistant district attorney on the case, Gerald Boyle, knew that the results themselves were not admissible in Wisconsin. The next day, March 31, Cianci and Bandlow were ordered back to the DA’s office, with their lawyers, for further questioning. No progress was made at that meeting, so the parties were instructed to return on April 9 and appear before the number-two prosecutor in the Milwaukee County district attorney’s office, deputy Aladin A. DeBrozzo.
On Saturday, April 9, Cianci and Bandlow, with their lawyers, returned to the DA’s office. But they had barely settled into their seats when DeBrozzo received an emergency call concerning another case. The meeting was postponed for one week, until the following Saturday, April 16.
On April 16, Cianci and Bandlow returned with their lawyers to the office of the prosecutor, Gerald Boyle. According to Boyle, he told them that he didn’t think there was enough evidence to support a charge of sexual assault. He based that on an examination of the physical evidence, the lapse in time between the alleged rape and Bandlow’s initial report to the police, and Boyle’s questioning of the taxi driver who had picked her up when she left Cianci’s residence. During the meeting, Boyle said, Bandlow and her lawyer indicated that they would withdraw the criminal complaint. After the meeting, Boyle called Lieutenant Block to report that the woman had withdrawn her complaint “and is starting a civil action,” according to Block’s subsequent report. Two and a half months later, on June 29, Boyle wrote the River Hills police chief that “the matter concerning one Vincent Cianci, Jr. has been resolved.” Boyle wrote that Bandlow had signed a letter withdrawing her criminal complaint and relayed a request from Cianci’s lawyer for the police to release Cianci’s possessions being held at the state crime lab.
“My attorney didn’t think I was well enough to go on with the case,” Bandlow later told New Times. “So he told me to drop the charges and settle out of court. . . . The only reason I did it was because he advised me to. Otherwise I wouldn’t have.”
Cianci subsequently paid Bandlow three thousand dollars, half of which went to her lawyer, to settle the matter civilly. Cianci said that the settlement had nothing to do with the woman’s decision to drop the charges; he said that he paid her on the advice of his lawyer, because he was going into the army and it would have been inconvenient to return to Milwaukee to defend himself from a lawsuit.
Boyle went on to become a prominent criminal-defense lawyer in Milwaukee, where his clients included the cannibalistic serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer. Years later, Boyle said that he had heard rumors that Cianci had paid Bandlow, but that he wasn’t aware of the settlement at the time and that it wouldn’t have influenced his judgment.
The decision not to charge Cianci disappointed the investigating police officer, Lieutenant Block.
“We thought we had everything,” Lieutenant Block told New Times years later, after becoming chief in River Hills. “We thought we had enough to convict him. When you think you have enough, you send it on up to the DA. Then you hope for justice.”
In June 1966, in an update on the investigation, Block referred to the written conclusion of Milwaukee County district attorney Hugh O’Connell, “that in all his years of practise [sic] he had never experienced a more dastardly crime than that committed by Cianci, but due to lack of evidence prosecution was almost impossible.”
AFTER GOING THROUGH the police records provided by Harold Block, television reporter Nancy Laffey spent several days searching for Ruth Bandlow. Laffey finally found her living in a Milwaukee suburb, a happily married housewife. The week before Thanksgiving, in 1977, Laffey and Eisenberg visited Bandlow at her tidy brick ranch house. Laffey had called ahead to say she wanted to discuss “a personal matter.” When they arrived, they showed Bandlow a Marquette yearbook photo of Cianci.
“We’re here about this man Cianci,” Laffey told Bandlow, according to Laffey’s later account in New Times.
Bandlow looked at Cianci’s smiling photo and started to cry. Laffey recalled Bandlow’s telling them, “I can’t even look at him. . . . Look how gross he is. Look. . . . Yes, he’s the one. He’s the one.”
Bandlow confirmed her rape accusation against Cianci and said that she had settled out of court to avoid the ordeal of a trial. She also wrote her lawyer a note authorizing him to discuss the case with Laffey and alerting him that she had disclosed to the reporter her three-thousand-dollar settlement with Cianci.
But shortly thereafter, Bandlow’s lawyer called Laffey and advised her to drop the story. The lawyer wanted no further involvement in the matter, however, so when Laffey tried to talk to Bandlow again, Bandlow hired a new lawyer, Carl Krueger.
By December, Cianci’s old lawyer, Danny Weiss, knew that Bandlow had talked to the television reporter. Weiss contacted Krueger to find out what was going on. Krueger called Laffey and advised her not to use any statements from Bandlow because they had been secured “by threat and intimidation.” Krueger accused the reporter of threatening to publicize Bandlow’s married name and put a picture of her house on television if she didn’t cooperate. Any statements by Bandlow, said Krueger, had been made when she was in “a very nervous state.”
The television station, Channel 12 in Milwaukee, never acknowledged making any such threat. But the message was clear. Not only had Bandlow become an unwilling source, but her lawyer warned Laffey that any story would be met with a lawsuit.
On December 16 Krueger wrote to Cianci’s lawyer, Weiss, to summarize his dealings with Laffey. “In regard to an incident involving Vincent A. Cianci Jr., occurring 11 or 12 years ago, my client has no further comment,” Krueger assured Weiss. “At the time of said incident, there was an investigation by the Milwaukee County District Attorney and she takes no issue with the manner in which that matter was disposed of. . . . [Bandlow] feels that this matter was disposed of 11 years ago and considers it closed.”
When a similar message was conveyed to Channel 12, along with a threat of a lawsuit from Cianci’s representative, the television station backed off the story.
As 1978 dawned, Cianci had managed to keep a lid on the story, without answering any questions about what had happened that night in 1966 or why he had agreed to pay the woman who accused him of raping her three thousand dollars.
But rumors of the alleged Marquette incident were making their way eastward.
Oddly, a whisper had reached Jean Coughlin, the Mount Pleasant housewife who had run for mayor of Providence as an Independent in 1974. One night during the campaign, Coughlin said that she received an anonymous phone call at home from a man who said of Cianci: “Did you know that he raped a woman at law school? He was accused of rape. He bought his way out of a mess.” Coughlin didn’t know what to say, and she never pursued it.
“It was hearsay,” she said. “What could I do?”
Four years later, early in 1978, the story found its way from an outraged Wisconsin feminist who knew Alan Eisenberg to The Providence Journal. The woman, who had also contacted national newsmagazines and the networks, sent copies of the police records to Bert Wade, a woman who worked for the newspaper’s “Accent/Focus” section. The police reports, with their graphic descriptions of the alleged rape, spread quickly through the newsroom in the long redbrick Journal building on Fountain Street, a few blocks from City Hall.
The Providence Journal, founded before the Civil War by Yankee industrialists, was a historically Republican newspaper. An afternoon edition, the Evening Bulletin, had been launched during the Civil War to provide the latest battlefield updates. The newspaper had built a strong national reputation for investigative reporting, having won a Pulitzer Prize in 1971 for a story by Jack White revealing that President Nixon had not paid any income tax. As Rhode Island’s dominant newspaper, the Journal, or ProJo, as it was known, had the power to set the agenda for the state and to make or break politicians with its exposés detailing cronyism and corruption. Its Yankee ownership had
been tightly aligned with the Republican bosses who had run the state until early in the twentieth century, and its editorial board often clashed with the ethnic Democrats who had run the state since. The Journal had been generally supportive of Cianci, a Republican reformer, though the newspaper would draw the mayor’s ire for the occasional story pointing out Cianci confidants who had gotten city business. Cianci would yell and curse at the offending reporter, then calm down and banter with him.
The Journal’s editors discussed how to handle the Marquette story. They talked about the fact that Cianci had never been charged with a crime and about the story’s explosiveness. But they also agreed that the police reports told a tale that warranted further investigation. Wade was teamed up with Randall Richard, a veteran investigative reporter. On Wednesday, January 18, 1978—two days after Chief Ricci’s suicide—the two reporters flew to Milwaukee.
Wade seemed an unlikely choice for such a sensitive assignment. While she was the one who had obtained the police reports, she was a feature writer with no experience as an investigative reporter. A demure woman in her forties, Wade had started at the Journal as a copy clerk, in a journalistic era when women were often consigned to the women’s pages, as they were then quaintly known. In the early 1970s, when the women’s liberation movement swept across Rhode Island, with women marching into a males-only bar in downtown Providence, Wade, then assigned to the youth beat, staged her own miniprotest in the newsroom. She and another staffer complained to the new executive editor, Chuck Hauser, that some women feature writers were classified as “women’s news specialists,” earning less than full-fledged reporters. The paper changed its policy.
In Milwaukee, Wade and Richard made the rounds. They talked to Nancy Laffey, the television reporter, and had dinner with Alan Eisenberg. They also spoke to River Hills police chief Harold Block. But the police file that Block had copied for Laffey a few months earlier (and which the Journal reporters had received copies of from the Wisconsin feminist) was no longer available.
When Wade and Richard visited Bandlow at her house, she seemed nervous and upset, and refused to let them inside. She did, however, confirm that Cianci had paid her three thousand dollars to withdraw her criminal complaint.
Wade and Richard spent three days in Milwaukee, tracking down leads and trying to confirm details. They went to the district attorney and the Milwaukee County medical examiner. They also had what would prove to be a fateful interview with the dean of the Marquette Law School. During the interview, according to an affidavit submitted later by the dean, Wade told him that the problem with Cianci extended beyond the lone Marquette accusation; Wade proceeded to lay out what a court would later say were “demonstrably false accusations against Cianci in order to coax information” from the dean. Wade repeated rumors she had heard in Providence about other purported sexual incidents involving Cianci, including episodes of homosexual activity and acts involving minors.
The dean alerted someone in the Cianci camp. Soon the mayor was aware that the Journal was on to the story—a story that he knew could destroy his political career. Already dealing with the fallout of the Ricci suicide, Cianci flew into a panic and dispatched Herb DeSimone and Ron Glantz to Milwaukee. The mayor’s men huddled with Danny Weiss and Carl Krueger. According to Glantz, a two-pronged strategy emerged: seal the records and silence Ruth Bandlow. (DeSimone confirmed making the trip, but declined to elaborate, citing attorney-client privilege.) Cianci, anxiously waiting back in Providence, called several times a day for updates. At one point Glantz asked Cianci why he had had a gun in law school.
“For protection,” he recalled Cianci’s replying.
Ironically, Glantz, when he had been in private practice, had defended a man who was convicted of raping a woman on a pool table in a bar in Central Falls. The prosecutor was Buddy Cianci.
Krueger told the Journal reporters that the records had been expunged—destroyed—at Bandlow’s request, something that a criminal complainant had a right to request under Wisconsin law. But it wasn’t clear that the records had, in fact, been destroyed or sealed. DeSimone later told another reporter that the village attorney in River Hills had ordered Chief Harold Block not to discuss the case publicly. Trying to warn a TV reporter off the story, DeSimone noted that as a result of that order, it would be difficult for a journalist to authenticate the documents that had been circulating.
DeSimone and Glantz also checked for any surviving medical records and tried to track down the doctor who had seen Bandlow after her rape accusation. One morning, while they were still searching for the doctor, Glantz was dressing in his hotel room, the television on, when he heard the doctor’s name on the news. He raced out into the hallway to meet DeSimone, who had heard the same thing. It turned out, though, that the doctor they were looking for was dead; the one on TV was his son.
Meanwhile, the Journal was getting close. On Friday, January 20, the day that Cianci attended Bob Ricci’s funeral in the driving snowstorm, the newspaper decided to publish the story on Sunday. On Saturday, using borrowed desks and typewriters in the newsroom of the Milwaukee Journal, Wade and Richard began telexing information back home. In the Providence newsroom the editors and lawyers stood by as another reporter sat down and began punching a story into the computer.
The story began:
Vincent Cianci was accused of rape while he was a law student at Marquette University in 1966 and three times failed a lie detector test in connection with the case, the Journal-Bulletin has learned.
Doane Hulick, the Journal’s City Hall reporter, was standing by to get a comment from Cianci. He walked over to the mayor’s office at about 1 P.M. Cianci was edgy and upset. Although he and Hulick had a good professional relationship, Cianci refused to talk to him about this. Instead, he told Hulick that he wanted to meet with the Journal’s publisher to discuss “the conduct of one of your reporters.” Eventually, two editors and the Journal’s lawyers met in Cianci’s office with the mayor and his advisers.
During the hour-long meeting, Cianci’s lawyers described Bert Wade’s conversation with the Marquette Law dean. They said that she had said things about Cianci that she knew to be untrue, in an effort to pry information from the dean, slandering the mayor in the attempt. Her statements, they argued, demonstrated malicious intent, a necessary element for a public figure to prove in a libel suit. A law-school dean would testify to that. Cianci’s lawyers also attacked the credibility of the newspaper’s sources. Someone had dug up the Wisconsin bar’s disciplinary action against Eisenberg.
When the Journal party returned to the newsroom at 3 P.M., the editors pulled the story from Sunday’s paper, gathered up all the notes, and shipped the story to a high-security computer queue, away from prying newsroom eyes. Reporters grumbled that the paper had lost its will, been intimidated, backed down to a Republican mayor, acted too cautiously. But others realized that the paper had had no choice under the circumstances. Bert Wade had screwed up.
In the days and weeks ahead, rumors about the story that the Journal was sitting on spread through City Hall. Cianci’s enemies on the City Council began to gloat. “We’ve got the bastard,” councilmen said. “He’s in a real jam now.”
What they didn’t realize was that the story hadn’t merely been delayed; it was essentially dead. Although it remained on life support for a few months, the Journal’s editors finally pulled the plug when it became apparent that Ruth Bandlow might not cooperate in the likely event of a lawsuit by Cianci. Wade, who was briefly suspended for her conduct, went back to writing features.
The Journal’s decision to kill the story sent a powerful message to other local reporters with thoughts of pursuing it. When Paul Giaccobe, a former Journal reporter who had moved to Channel 10 television in Providence, investigated in March 1978, Herb DeSimone told him that the Journal had declined to run the story; the Associated Press and another Providence television station had made the same decision.
Giaccobe asked DeSimone if he had any
quarrel with the existence of police documents that were a matter of public record. DeSimone launched into an Orwellian discourse on how maybe the records existed at one time, but they no longer did, officially.
DeSimone told the reporter that Cianci was at the peak of his political career. Any story would be met with a lawsuit.
“The decision is a close one—legally, ethically, morally,” Giaccobe wrote to his news director. “Unless I hear differently from you, I’ll consider the file inactive.”
A MAYOR IS judged in many ways, from the direction he charts for his city to more elemental concerns: Is the trash picked up? Are the school buses on time? And when it snows, are the streets plowed? On such small things can votes be lost and elections turn.
In February 1978, still dealing with Chief Ricci’s suicide and trying to put the Marquette rape accusation behind him, Buddy Cianci faced another challenge—snow.
The flurries began late on a Monday morning, fat flakes wafting gently out of a threatening sky. Within an hour it was snowing heavily as two massive low-pressure systems, one moving east from the northern plains, the other sweeping up the Atlantic seaboard from Cape Hatteras, converged on Providence. By midafternoon, hurricane-force winds howled across the city, driving the snow horizontally and obscuring the skyline in a veil of white.
A desperate and futile evacuation of Providence began. Cars and tractor-trailer trucks were snarled in the snow, which was piling up at a rate of an inch or two an hour. Streets were quickly rendered impassable by the advancing snow and the trapped vehicles. Thousands of people were trapped in their cars, thousands more stuck in downtown office buildings and city schools. Thousands of residents lost power and heat.