by Mike Stanton
Rhode Island’s Bloodless Revolution sent reverberations across the country. The New York Times applauded it. But the conservative Chicago Daily Tribune condemned it as unconstitutional; its editor, Colonel Robert McCormick, ordered one star cut out of the American flag.
Cianci’s Wednesday Night Massacre inspired similar mixed reaction, on a local scale. The mayor’s supporters called it a dazzling coup, a shrewd maneuver worthy of Rhode Island’s old-fashioned political bosses. The furious Democrats called it a “shoddy trick,” and challenged Cianci in court. Glantz, who defended the mayor in court, brought in two expert witnesses from the American Institute of Parliamentarians, in Des Moines, Iowa, to debate the finer points of Robert’s Rules of Order. Then, to put Robert’s Rules in the context of the Providence City Council, Glantz said that Eddie Xavier was so dumb that he “thinks a caucus is what’s left when you shoot a moose.”
While the judge weighed his decision, he ordered the fifteen city boards and commissions affected not to transact any official business. That threw City Hall, already reeling from yet another budget crisis, with its cash shortages and threats of layoffs, into further turmoil. Glantz warned that deposed members who attempted to reclaim their positions would be forcibly removed from meetings, if necessary.
Two days after the massacre, Skip Chernov appeared before the Board of Licenses to confirm that he did not need a peddler’s license to sell his fourteen hundred copies of New Times magazine, which were at that moment en route to Rhode Island. Chernov was greeted by two dueling Boards of Licenses, attempting to conduct separate meetings at the same table and trying to outshout each other under the watchful eyes of television cameras and police officers posted there in case things got out of hand. Unable to get a clear answer, Chernov went ahead without a license. Two of his vendors hawked the magazine, with Cianci’s smiling face on the cover, on the sidewalks beneath the mayor’s office, without incident.
Meanwhile, Providence was running out of money. The council needed to meet again, to pass a budget. But the Democrats were fearful of another Cianci ambush. Then, reversing course, they met and tried to undo Cianci’s appointments, creating even more confusion for the courts to unravel.
With all the uproar, council meetings had taken on the aura of the Christians against the lions. Hundreds of spectators crowded the hot, smoky chamber to boo and shout and rain catcalls onto the floor, regardless of who was speaking or which side they were on. City workers serenaded the council with a thunderous chorus of “M-I-C-K-E-Y M-O-U-S-E.” The police sent a paddy wagon to City Hall to arrest one spectator who had climbed over the wooden rail, jabbering incoherently; he later told the police that he didn’t know it was a crime to disrupt a City Council meeting.
Before the meeting, Glantz had predicted that ailing Silver Lake councilman Louis Stravato, who had missed the Wednesday Night Massacre because of a slipped disc, would be there.
Stravato, who had spent the last seventeen days in the hospital, did not disappoint. Signing himself out of the hospital, against his doctor’s advice, he was pushed into the council chambers in a wheelchair, his arms shaking and his brow sweating, then helped onto a walker, and, finally, into his council seat. “I’m here at my own risk,” he announced. “I feel that the meeting on the twelfth was illegal.”
Spectators winced each time Stravato rose to speak. Although his voice was strong, his hands trembled and he had to be supported by a nurse so that he wouldn’t collapse. He vented much of his anger at Tony Bucci, who, he said, had asked him, in Bucci’s downtown law office two weeks before the massacre, to back Cianci. Bucci had since denied that, prompting the councilman to invoke a point of personal privilege to respond.
“Mr. Bucci, you are the liar, and I challenge you anywhere, anytime,” said Stravato, his voice rising.
With that, Stravato slumped down and was taken back to the hospital, where he spent another few weeks recuperating.
The day after the meeting, a superior-court judge ruled in favor of Cianci and said that the appointments were legal. The judge also criticized the Democrats who walked out of the meeting for trying to “thwart the proper conduct of business.” But two weeks later the Rhode Island Supreme Court reversed that decision and ruled the Wednesday Night Massacre illegal.
Francis Darigan, Cianci’s leading Democratic challenger for mayor, said that Cianci “took his best shot and lost. It was almost like he was in a crap game and he tried to roll a seven while everybody else was looking the other way.”
The mayor vowed to fight all the way to the United States Supreme Court, if necessary. His supporters sued in federal court, accusing the council of crossing “the fine line between democracy and anarchy.” Meanwhile, the Journal reported that Slim DiBello and another Cianci appointee had collected city paychecks while their appointments were in limbo.
THE FUROR OVER the Wednesday Night Massacre had barely died down when the mayor’s 1978 reelection campaign heated up. In September Cianci cruised to victory in the Republican primary over Skip Chernov, who mustered only seventy-three votes. The mayor would face a more formidable challenger in November in Democratic city chairman Frank Darigan, who won his primary convincingly over Larry McGarry and Federal Hill lawyer Frank Caprio. Determined not to repeat the mistakes of 1974, the defeated Democrats vowed to unite behind Darigan. “I’ll make a flat prediction,” McGarry said of Cianci. “This guy is going to get bombed.” (This truly was Mr. Democrat’s last hurrah; he receded from city politics and was appointed by Governor Garrahy to the state racing commission, where he could follow his other love, the ponies.)
Throughout the campaign the polls showed Cianci and Darigan neck and neck, with a large percentage of voters undecided. Even the bookies were offering even money—not an auspicious sign for an incumbent mayor. Councilman Vinny Cirelli, one of Cianci’s leading foes, was even more confident—when mayoral aide Joe Vileno stopped by the Old Timer’s Tap for a drink, Cirelli offered to put up five hundred dollars, at three-to-one odds against Cianci.
Darigan hammered away at Cianci for raising taxes every year, for running budget deficits, for mishandling the blizzard, and for handing out city contracts to cronies like Norm Roussel, his political advertising man. Addressing a large Democratic gathering at the 1025 Club, Darigan shouted, “I’m going to eat this guy up like he’s never been eaten before.” As fourteen hundred party faithful dug into their macaroni and chicken, the Rhode Island secretary of state predicted that Cianci was “going out on his backside” and that nothing less than the “survival of the Democratic party in the city of Providence” was at stake. The state treasurer dismissed Cianci as a spacone, which Silver Lake power broker Vincent Igliozzi, Darigan’s campaign manager, defined as “a flashy, boastful big shot.”
Cianci fired back that Providence was moving in the right direction under his leadership. He pointed to new construction projects around the city and the revitalization of Federal Hill and other neighborhoods and blamed the intransigence of the City Council for the city’s fiscal problems. The month before the election, Cianci attended the reopening of the restored Ocean State Performing Arts Center, a once-opulent downtown movie palace that he had rescued from demolition. The mayor beamed as Ethel Merman belted out “There’s No Business Like Show Business.”
Privately, Cianci was worried. It had been a tumultuous year, beginning with Robert Ricci’s suicide and continuing through the blizzard and the New Times story and the Wednesday Night Massacre. Although Darigan didn’t make an issue of the Marquette matter, it hovered in the background, an unknown variable. Vandals scrawled “Vote Rapist” on the mayor’s campaign signs. Officials at Brown were angry when the Providence police questioned employees at the university’s Women’s Center about one such incident.
But Cianci was not without advantages. His charisma shone through the city’s political turmoil. Voters liked him. Greeted by thunderous applause when he entered the 1025 Club during a banquet for the Federal Hill Little League, the mayor s
at at the head table with deposed Federal Hill councilman Anthony Merola, who was pursuing his comeback after his conviction for insurance fraud. Shaking hands with supporters, Cianci noted: “I have been doing this ever since we were elected. Darigan is trying to do in six weeks what I have been doing for four years.”
Cianci adviser Patrick Conley, a historian and Irish Democrat who had defected to Cianci after a spat with Governor Garrahy, viewed Darigan as too reserved for the more image-conscious politics of the seventies. Handsome, decent, and moral, Darigan would have been a picture-perfect candidate in the fifties, before television transformed American politics. Pitted against the glib Cianci, however, Darigan was too stiff, said Conley—“an eight-by-ten glossy.”
Darigan had other problems. Despite the public show of togetherness, he knew that the Democratic party was not truly united. Cianci had made a strong push for Italian Democratic voters, doling out patronage and steering millions of federal dollars into the voter-rich neighborhoods that formed what he called the Fertile Crescent—an arc stretching across the northern part of the city from Silver Lake to Federal Hill to the North End to Mount Pleasant and Smith Hill. He also courted the public-employee unions and pulled off a historic feat by winning both the labor endorsement and the endorsement of The Providence Journal. The newspaper noted his shortcomings as an administrator but praised the mayor for “seizing opportunities where others saw only despair.”
Tony Bucci, the Fourth Ward’s Democratic boss, was strong with Cianci. Although Darigan was the Democratic nominee, he couldn’t even get Democratic leaders in T.B.’s ward to pose for pictures with him. One Sunday morning shortly before the election, Darigan recalled, he was driving through the deserted streets of the Fourth Ward, past Cianci’s campaign headquarters on Branch Avenue, when he saw Bucci and another Cianci lieutenant, Councilman Charles Mansolillo, emerging with stacks of red-and-white bumper stickers. The stickers said: GET THE GARLIC OUT OF CITY HALL. VOTE DARIGAN MAYOR.
Similar signs had sprouted on Federal Hill shortly before the 1974 election—signs that Cianci’s then campaign manager, Mickey Farina, would years later attribute to the Cianci campaign. A few days before the 1978 election, the bumper stickers that Darigan had seen appeared throughout the North End and elsewhere. Some were plastered on Cianci campaign posters; others were distributed at Mount Pleasant High School.
Incredibly, when the Journal wrote about the mysterious bumper stickers and Darigan denied responsibility, he failed to disclose what he had seen. Later, he would acknowledge that that was a mistake. But he had chosen to campaign on the issues and thought that the voters would see through the ploy. Instead, he said, the stickers helped inflame the passions of Italian-American voters, playing into their historical mistreatment at the hands of the Irish bosses.
Three days before the election, Cianci publicly welcomed another old ally back into the fold—mail-ballot king Lloyd Griffin, whose magic had been instrumental in Cianci’s narrow 1974 victory. Fired two years earlier as building inspector, the opportunistic Griffin, now a South Providence city councilman, said that he was supporting Cianci because he viewed the mayor as more vulnerable, and thus more willing to compromise than the Democrats. Griffin also felt that Cianci was more supportive of hiring minority police officers—ironically one of the factors in the mayor’s police-hiring dispute with the late Chief Ricci. And Griffin was angered by a flyer circulating in black neighborhoods that attributed his firing to his being black. It wasn’t racism, said Griffin—just politics.
Conley nicknamed him “Satchel” after seeing the lanky, six-foot-three-inch Griffin, who resembled the great Negro League pitcher Satchel Paige, stride into the mayor’s office with a carpetbag and dump hundreds of mail ballots on Cianci’s desk. Griffin, said Conley, loved it.
Cianci was still nervous going into election day. One campaign operative remembers staying up all night guarding the mayor’s campaign headquarters in the Fifth Ward so nobody would cut the phone lines—something that had happened earlier in the campaign. “If you don’t have your phones on election day,” the aide said, “you’re dead.” As a preemptive measure, he asked the state Board of Elections—located, fittingly, across Branch Avenue from Providence’s North Burial Grounds—to impound the voting machines after the polls closed.
Late that afternoon Darigan was standing vigil outside the John F. Kennedy School in the Fifth Ward, at the state’s largest Democratic polling place, when the mayor’s limousine pulled up and Cianci bounded out. The two men shook hands coldly. The mayor stayed for less than an hour. As he left, Darigan observed confidently: “There’s the look of a worried man. We chased the mayor out of here.” Darigan was counting on wards like the Fifth, Joe Doorley’s old stronghold. He hoped that his criticisms of Cianci’s soaring taxes would resonate with the solid middle-class voters of Mount Pleasant and Elmhurst, around Providence College.
That night, after the polls closed at 9 P.M., Cianci’s campaign supporters gathered nervously in the ballroom at the Holiday Inn and waited for the returns. There were anxious whispers about the Marquette rape allegations, and all of the other negatives that had besieged the mayor in 1978. Cianci remained incommunicado. Roussel paced about the ballroom, smoking and chewing gum at the same time. He tried to remain upbeat, but when a reporter apprised him that the bookies had the mayor at even money, Roussel’s smile vanished. “They’re crazy!”
Darigan’s forces weren’t overly confident either. The night before the election, Joe Vileno had stopped by the Old Timer’s Tap and tried to take Vinny Cirelli up on his earlier five-hundred-dollar bet against Cianci. But Cirelli refused. And Darigan, during his rounds on election day, had stopped at one polling place in the Fifth Ward to find the chief of police, Angelo Ricci (no relation to Robert Ricci), standing outside, leading the charge for Cianci.
Sure enough, shortly after 10 P.M., the first returns came in, and they were from the Fifth Ward. Cianci won one of the most populous Democratic wards in Rhode Island by about a hundred votes. At the Holiday Inn Angelo Ricci started hugging people and the celebration began. Cianci rolled to a stunning victory. He captured 56 percent of the vote, taking nine of the city’s thirteen wards. He had outspent Darigan seven to one, including $107,000 to $7,000 on political advertising in the final month.
“We fought a machine four years ago and we barely won!” shouted an exultant Cianci. “Four years later we fought the machine and we pounded them.”
Amidst the drinking and dancing and celebrating, one weary but relieved man leaned against a wall and sighed. “My Gawd,” he said. “Now I can go to Vegas in peace.”
Cianci’s foes on the City Council awoke the morning after to the grim reality.
“The voters made Little Caesar a little bigger, that’s what they did,” grumbled Eddie Xavier. “I tell you, there will be a lot of heads rolling.”
Vinny Cirelli, whose Sixth Ward had joined the surge to Cianci, retreated to his Old Timer’s Tap on Mount Pleasant Avenue to grumble with his allies and drown his sorrows.
Cirelli and some of the other Democrats commiserated with Governor Garrahy. Cianci controls all the patronage, they complained. We need jobs. We don’t know what to do. Garrahy responded, “Politics is the art of compromise.”
A few days after the election Cirelli saw an unlikely sight: Buddy Cianci barreling through the door of the Old Timer’s Tap. The mayor, stunned and elated by the size of his victory, was going through the wards of Providence, thanking people and trying to expand his base.
“Vinny, I need you,” said Cianci. “Will you be with me? I’m Italian, you’re Italian. Maybe we should join ranks and put the city where it belongs.”
Cirelli decided that it was time to “bend.” He even held a fund-raiser for Cianci. The mayor clambered up a stepladder onto the bar and said, “I never in my lifetime thought I’d be standing here, in Vinny Cirelli’s bar, the Old Timer’s Tap.”
But there he stood, towering above his city, the undisputed princ
e of Providence.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Education of Ronnie Glantz
In the spring of 1979 there was a sense within Rhode Island’s political world that Buddy Cianci was going places.
With his decisive reelection, he was positioned for a move up to the big leagues. The governor’s seat seemed within his grasp in 1980. But the little mayor had even bigger ideas. He wanted to be vice president of the United States.
Late in March Cianci flew to Southern California for what he said was a vacation. But he was secretly there to audition for a spot on the 1980 Republican national ticket. He visited his old political benefactor, former president Ford, in Palm Springs, and also met with Ronald Reagan, one of the GOP contenders for president.
Cianci sold himself as someone who could win votes in traditionally Democratic areas—the urban, ethnic strongholds of the Northeast. Back in 1976 he had made no secret of his belief that Ford should have chosen as a running mate an urban Italian-American—he pointed to ex–Massachusetts governor John Volpe or Massachusetts congressman Silvio Conte—rather than Bob Dole. While the vice-presidential pipe dream never panned out, it spoke to Cianci’s desire to move in high-powered circles. He might have been the mayor of Providence, but he was also someone who, when in Palm Springs, could drop in on Frank Sinatra.
No matter where Cianci went, though, Providence never seemed far behind. In Sinatra’s Palm Springs home, Cianci noticed a picture of Raymond L. S. Patriarca, the New England mob boss. When Sinatra’s bartender heard that Cianci was from Providence, he asked, “How’s Raymond?”