by Mike Stanton
The governor, J. Joseph Garrahy, declared a state of emergency and advised Rhode Islanders to prepare for a few days of isolation. Cianci urged motorists to stay out of Providence; a panicky aide, having just surveyed the traffic nightmare outside City Hall, amplified the mayor’s comments: “Just stay the hell out!”
Nearly three feet of snow—thirty-five inches—fell on Providence in the span of a little more than twenty-four hours, the worst blizzard in the city’s recorded history. The death toll statewide was twenty-one. The Providence police headquarters became a temporary morgue, a makeshift hospital, and a refuge for more than fifty stranded pedestrians. Hundreds more slept on cots and on the floor at the Providence Civic Center, which one observer said looked like the hospital scene from Gone With the Wind. Others took refuge in downtown bars, restaurants, and hotels, where food supplies quickly dwindled to cheese and crackers and, fortuitously, plenty of liquor. Ash Wednesday services were canceled for the first time in the history of the Providence Roman Catholic diocese. Kennedy Plaza resembled Moscow’s Red Square, as bundled-up pedestrians picked their way past snowdrifts taller than a grown man.
Meanwhile, where were the city’s snowplows? Ominously, when a big snowstorm had struck Providence a few weeks earlier, they had all broken down. They were hardly ready this time, either, even though meteorologists had been predicting a major storm for two days. The city’s plowing army was caught unawares and stranded at the Public Works garage. Privately owned plows that the city rented were stored in surrounding towns and unable to get into the paralyzed city.
And what about Buddy? After the storm ended and the sun reemerged, day after day passed and, still, the streets of Providence remained impassable, marked only by boot prints and ski tracks. In wards that hadn’t seen a snowplow in nearly a week, the grumbling about the mayor intensified. Why had he kept such a low profile in the early days of the crisis? Why hadn’t the city’s plows been mobilized sooner? Why was Cianci’s office telling the public early on that the city had more than one hundred pieces of equipment clearing the city’s 420 miles of streets, when in fact the number was actually eight?
Some of Cianci’s City Council foes considered meeting in emergency session to wrest control of the city from the mayor, then thought better of adding to the chaos. Others carped that Cianci was providing preferential plowing to politically important neighborhoods, like Tony Bucci’s Fourth Ward.
“To say we plowed [the Fourth Ward] because it was an Italian ward that we lost by a few hundred votes is ridiculous,” responded Ronnie Glantz. Echoed Cianci, “You can’t plow for political or nonpolitical reasons without equipment.”
The criticism was exaggerated and somewhat unfair. It would have been difficult for the most efficient plowing operation to cope with such a cataclysmic blizzard, especially with two thousand abandoned cars blocking city streets. Still, the city’s sluggish response exacerbated the problem and reflected poorly on Cianci, the man in charge. Had that year’s election been scheduled for February instead of November, angry voters said, Cianci would have lost in an avalanche.
The mayor’s slippage—literally as well as figuratively—was evident on the second day of the storm as he struggled to make his way by snowmobile from his house on Blackstone Boulevard to City Hall. It took him two hours to navigate the two miles through a wintry wonderland. Three times he attempted to scale high drifts, like some urban Admiral Peary, and three times his snowmobile tipped over, tumbling him into the snow.
Providence became the laughingstock of the state. Long after Rhode Island’s other major cities had dug out, entrepreneurial pilots on Block Island offered fifteen-dollar airplane flights over Providence, so that islanders could see the mess firsthand. A headline in the Sunday Journal, six days after the storm, announced, PROVIDENCE WON’T OPEN TOMORROW. As the crisis deepened and the political ramifications became apparent, Cianci fought back. The night after the storm ended, he spent four hours riding on a city payloader through the snowbound streets.
The mayor also picked a political snowball fight with the Democratic governor, Joe Garrahy, whom he blamed for not clearing Interstate 95 quickly enough to make room for cars trying to escape from Providence when the storm hit. Cianci assailed a work slowdown in the blizzard’s critical early hours by the state’s unionized snowplow drivers, who were in the midst of a contract squabble with the governor. Worse, in the mayor’s eyes, was his belief that Garrahy had steered National Guard cleanup equipment and U.S. Army reinforcements to assist areas outside Providence first—all to discredit Cianci, a potential political rival.
Joe Garrahy, an affable former beer salesman, had come out of Joe Doorley’s Elmhurst neighborhood, where he still lived, part of a coterie of influential Irish Democrats. It was no secret that Cianci, having passed on the 1976 Senate race but still looking to move up, was weighing a challenge to Garrahy that November.
Garrahy, who had struggled three hours home through the snow from a speaking engagement in Newport, had been quick to take charge of the blizzard. He petitioned President Carter to declare Rhode Island a national disaster area and went on television early to reassure citizens with his folksy manner. Throughout the crisis, Garrahy wore a red-and-blue flannel shirt that gave him a comforting presence.
It galled Cianci to be branded a villain while a rival seized the spotlight. The state had been just as poorly prepared to cope with the storm, and there had been virtually no coordination between city and state in how to respond to the blizzard. Incredibly, Providence had been left off a priority list of communities for additional army equipment because of a communications snafu between state and city officials. The operations officer for the army’s snow-removal task force, who had followed priorities set by the governor, seemed troubled that more equipment wasn’t sent to Providence sooner. When he finally arrived in Providence late on Friday night, he was stunned to find so little equipment there.
On Thursday, two days after the storm, Cianci skirmished with Garrahy over credit for discovering an armada of more than seventy bulldozers, front-end loaders, and other heavy equipment sitting at a naval base in southern Rhode Island, and manned by navy Seabees flown in from Gulfport, Mississippi. Cianci went on television and boasted that he had found the equipment and appropriated all of it for Providence, only to go wild later in the day when Garrahy officials said that it was the governor’s decision where it would be sent.
“I’m sick and tired of taking crap. . . . The state is running the snowstorm like they’re running the prisons,” fumed Cianci. “The governor gave me his word and now he’s backing off.”
When Cianci called Garrahy’s disaster-relief officials at the State House and confronted them, they relented and released the Seabees to Providence. The mayor gloated and smiled his I-told-you-so grin. When the Seabees arrived at Providence’s Fields Point the next night, Cianci was at the waterfront to greet them.
The mayor established a command post at City Hall, grabbing catnaps in his office as outside his window Kennedy Plaza filled with arriving army equipment and troops. The city was placed under a military blockade, with all entrances barricaded by National Guard trucks and police cruisers to keep the streets free of curiosity seekers, who had impeded the removal effort. Cianci declared a curfew, after scattered reports of looting. Anyone who ventured into downtown, even pedestrians, required a pink pass signed by the mayor.
Through the weekend, the Seabees, working with reinforcements from the army, fanned out across Providence, attacking the snow. The army’s 483rd Engineer Battalion, comprising men from Massachusetts and Connecticut, established a beachhead in Fox Point and plowed north toward College Hill and Brown University. Meanwhile, troops from the army’s 36th Engineering Group, from Fort Benning, Georgia, attacked the streets of Olneyville, driving north and northwest toward the North End, Mount Pleasant, and Smith Hill.
Finally, by the middle of the second week, some ten days after the Blizzard of ’78 began, the city returned to a semblance
of normalcy. The storm and its aftermath had brought out the best and the worst in people, from untold acts of kindness and heroism to looting and snow rage. The Sunday after the storm, thousands of people showed their ability to triumph over adversity by walking or skiing to the Civic Center to cheer on the scrappy Providence College Friars basketball team as they upset the nationally ranked University of North Carolina. The Tarheels, advised that food supplies were low in Providence, had flown in carrying their own supply of T-bone steaks.
The blizzard also exposed the ugly side of Rhode Island politics, from the lack of preparedness to the inept coordination of the rescue effort to Cianci’s shrill attempts to blame Garrahy. The outrage mounted when city Public Works employees submitted their overtime bills for the storm. Topping the list was Slim DiBello, Cianci’s acting Public Works director and Tony Bucci’s Fourth Ward sidekick, who put in for the equivalent of fourteen straight twenty-two-hour days.
Cianci demanded an investigation into the state’s role and testified before a Senate subcommittee in Washington organized by John Chafee. But the hearing provided few answers. Nor was there ever any substantiation of Cianci’s charge that Garrahy had deliberately withheld equipment from Providence. Cianci conceded that the city’s response to the storm had been disappointing but hoped that voters would understand. “I would like to think that people would have some understanding that this was a disaster,” he said.
In other words, Cianci might have said, Mother Nature was a Democrat.
THE SNOW EVENTUALLY melted, but relations between Cianci and the City Council remained icy. Their three-and-a-half-year struggle for primacy in Providence was reaching a pivotal point as the mayor geared up for his reelection campaign.
On a raw, damp morning in April 1978, Cianci strode triumphantly into the festive ballroom of the Marriott, in the shadow of the State House, to the cheers of one thousand supporters. Uniformed policemen cleared a path for the mayor as Tony Polito’s Dixieland band struck up “My Buddy.” Making his way to the podium and standing beneath a large photograph of himself, Cianci declared that he would run for mayor again, and not governor.
“Providence has been transformed,” said Cianci, “from a machine-dominated oligarchy to a grassroots, participatory democracy.”
Recent statewide polls showed Cianci’s popularity slipping. Ricci’s suicide and the blizzard had not helped Cianci’s image, and his Democratic enemies kept harping on the city’s growing deficit, rising taxes, and declining services.
The honeymoon with Larry McGarry was over, too. Cianci had cast aside his onetime Democratic mentor. Ron Glantz, who had acted as an intermediary between the two when McGarry wanted patronage jobs, said that Cianci strung McGarry along on some request until McGarry grew disgusted and said, “Just tell him it’s over.” When Glantz relayed the message, Cianci’s reaction was “Fuck him.” Cianci didn’t need McGarry anymore, especially since he still had Tony Bucci.
McGarry subsequently announced that he would run in the 1978 Democratic primary for mayor, but he was sage enough to know that his glory days were behind him. He approached the race more with the nostalgic air of a historian of Providence politics than as a candidate who seriously thought he could win. He ranked Cianci as the most political mayor he had seen in more than twenty-five years, a well-meaning showman but a poor administrator. His election in 1974 had been a “fluke.” Beyond the East Side and Silver Lake this year, McGarry said, “I see nothing but trouble for him.”
Mingling in the crowd at the Marriott was a young freelance writer from Massachusetts, Craig Waters. He was pursuing the story of the Marquette rape accusation for New Times magazine, a small but feisty national publication based in New York that specialized in muckraking pieces.
Out in the lobby, councilman Ed Xavier, one of Cianci’s most vocal critics, sat on a couch, taking attendance of “these so-called Democrats” who were with Cianci. “Good morning!” he called out over and over, his gravelly voice full of mock cheer.
At a subsequent dinner of the Republican City Committee, Cianci reminded his supporters that he controlled seven million dollars in federal money, which was about to be spent on road repairs; six million to rebuild a pedestrian mall downtown; and another four million for improvements to Roger Williams Park. The mayor also had a commanding campaign war chest that he placed at $250,000 but that Democrats believed was actually closer to $400,000—a lot of money for a mayor’s race in that era.
Meanwhile, Cianci had a plan to smash his opposition on the City Council once and for all. It would go down in the annals of Providence political history as the Wednesday Night Massacre.
Council president Robert Haxton had kept a low profile since his arrest on the morals charge in connection with the boy he had picked up outside the Columbus Theater back in 1975. But he still showed up for meetings, said Democratic chairman Frank Darigan, because “we needed his vote.”
The case had finally gone to trial in the fall of 1977. Haxton’s lawyer felt he could show that his client had been set up as part of a political vendetta. But an entrapment defense would have opened the door for the prosecution to explore Haxton’s secret life. The price of that approach was made clear when the policeman on the case, Alfred Mintz, the Cianci supporter who had since been promoted, subpoenaed a black transvestite to testify. The witness showed up in the hallway at the courthouse but never actually took the stand. Haxton’s lawyer didn’t pursue the entrapment defense. The only two witnesses to testify were Haxton and the boy. Haxton was convicted.
By the spring of 1978, Haxton had been sentenced and had chosen not to appeal, and Cianci decided it was time to force the council’s hand. It was an opportune moment because two other Democrats on the council who had opposed the mayor, both from Federal Hill, had also been found guilty of separate crimes. Anthony Merola had been convicted of insurance fraud. Mario Turchetta was in the federal detention center in New Bedford, Massachusetts, en route to begin serving two years in prison for a racetrack tax-cheating scheme known as “10-percenting.”
Cianci invoked the city charter, which stated that officeholders convicted of felonies or crimes of “moral turpitude” shall forfeit their positions, and demanded that the council remove Haxton and Merola. (Turchetta still had an appeal pending.)
“The incidence of convicted felons in the general population is about one in fifteen thousand,” said Cianci. “On the Providence City Council, it’s one in eight.”
At a raucous meeting on April 24, the council moved reluctantly, by a vote of 13–10, to remove Haxton and Merola.
Merola, whose brother would later be convicted for the murder that month of a Federal Hill wiseguy known as “Joe Onions,” marched defiantly into the council meeting with fifty backers, carrying petitions containing the signatures of three hundred more.
“This whole thing is political,” said Merola, who had been convicted of defrauding an insurance company of twenty-one hundred dollars in a phony lost-wages claim following an automobile accident. “My people knew about this case even before the election. They elected me anyway. Now, what do you think that means?”
After the council voted to throw him off, Merola straightened the knot on his tie and, like General MacArthur, predicted, “I’ll be back.” (He ran and won in the September primary but lost in November.)
Although the council had succeeded for three and a half years in blocking Cianci’s appointments, denying the mayor control of key boards and commissions and frustrating him on taxes and the budget, it had also unwittingly helped him. The more the council blocked Cianci, the more it made him look like a martyr to the voters.
“We could send them the cure for cancer,” Cianci and his aides would joke, “and the vote would be fifteen to ten, against.”
The council, with its collection of roguish characters and parochial interests, proved a perfect foil for the nimble Cianci. One councilman was so obsessed with having potholes in his ward repaired that Cianci and his aides called him “Council
man Pothole.” Two others nearly got into a fistfight one night at City Hall during an argument over what date to hold a public hearing. Vinny Cirelli, a leader in the Cianci opposition, held Democratic caucuses at his Old Timer’s Tap on Mount Pleasant Avenue, a dark, smoky bar where you could also place bets; the bar served only Narragansett beer—“made from the sparkling waters of the Scituate Reservoir,” which also happened to be Providence’s drinking-water supply—until the brewery went out of business. Another councilman favored baggy, 1940s-style zoot suits.
A favorite target was Eddie Xavier, a gruff Teamster who drove a truck that delivered deli meat from New York and also worked as a checker on the docks in Fox Point. Xavier grew up on the waterfront, in a crowded tenement with a large extended Portuguese family that had come to Rhode Island around the turn of the century from the Azores, an island chain off the coast of Africa. One grandfather had cleaned trolleys; the other had worked for the city of Providence, until he fell off a dump truck, landed on his head, and went blind.
Xavier, who boxed at the Fox Point Boys Club, was well known around the neighborhood for getting his people jobs with the city. Portuguese men would show up at the Public Works garage, say that Eddie had sent them, and be put to work on a garbage truck. Xavier used to complain to Larry McGarry at Public Works that the Irish had a formula for handing out jobs: the Irish in City Hall, the Italians on the highway, and the Portuguese picking up garbage.
When Cianci took office, Xavier became one of his most strident critics. Xavier hated Cianci. Had Joe Doorley won, Xavier would have had tremendous pull. “I would’ve got everyone in Fox Point a job,” he said wistfully.
Xavier led council inquiries into Cianci’s firing of Lloyd Griffin and, after Chief Ricci killed himself, into the selection of police recruits.
He shunned Cianci’s entreaties. Once, at a reunion of the Fox Point Boys Club at the Alpine Country Club, the mayor arrived and stood outside, waiting for Xavier, who had also just arrived.