The Prince of Providence

by Mike Stanton

  Back in Providence, the grind of being mayor could be draining, despite Cianci’s tremendous vigor. Shortly after his California trip Cianci was back at City Hall, welcoming a new card-and-gift shop downtown, announcing improvements to the dog pound, leading an antilitter campaign—the mundane tasks of being a mayor that seemed far removed from being a statesman.

  “Governors aren’t like this,” he complained to aide Joe Vileno one day. “They can keep people at arm’s length. Here the people lean over your desk and you can smell their armpits.”

  But in Providence Buddy was the man. When Sinatra wanted help getting a friend’s child into Brown University, the Chairman of the Board turned to Cianci, not Patriarca. As Cianci told the story, according to former aide Paul Campbell, Sinatra called him one night, between sets of a concert, and asked the mayor to intercede at Brown. Cianci pulled some strings, and Sinatra’s friend’s kid became an Ivy Leaguer.

  In the spring of 1979, when former San Francisco mayor Joseph Alioto came to the Verrazzano Day banquet, honoring Cianci as its man of the year, he paid homage to the prince of Providence. Cianci drove Alioto around Providence and, when he showed him the Fourth Ward, joked, “If Machiavelli were alive today, he would be a politician in the Fourth Ward.”

  Quipped Alioto: “Since they elected a [Republican] mayor, I’m sure that Machiavelli is alive and living in City Hall.”

  If Machiavelli had been around, he might have reminded Cianci of his dictum “The first impression that one gets of a ruler and of his brains is from seeing the men he has about him.” Cianci, in his quest for power and a springboard to Washington, had surrounded himself with a motley crew—thugs and mob associates and political wheeler-dealers with their own scams and agendas.

  He had married himself to Tony Bucci, the Fourth Ward kingmaker who favored expensive silk shirts and used his political connections to build a lucrative downtown law practice. And Cianci relied on a cast of characters with names like Buckles and Blackjack to bring in the votes and sell campaign fund-raising tickets and help him control the patronage-rich Public Works Department, Larry McGarry’s old power base.

  When they weren’t doing the mayor’s bidding, they were extorting snowplow contractors and shaking down garbage-truck dealers and stealing asphalt and perfecting the art of the no-show job, a proud Providence tradition. They were looting city equipment, right down to the manhole covers, which were sold for scrap metal. They were trading contracts for cash, rigging bids, consorting with mobsters.

  Ronald Glantz, Cianci’s top aide, said that Cianci also tolerated corruption for another reason—because the mayor was the biggest crook of them all. Glantz said that he was an eyewitness to the corruption at City Hall—that he was Buddy’s bagman.

  LATE AT NIGHT the mayor’s limousine would glide up to Ron Glantz’s house on Overhill Road, on the East Side of Providence.

  Glantz would be in bed when the phone rang, at 2 or 3 A.M. It was the mayor, saying that he was outside. Glantz would throw on a pair of jeans and a shirt, go downstairs, and slide into the backseat with Cianci. If the weather was warm, the mayor would tell his police driver to take a walk. In winter, Cianci would raise the glass divider so that he and Glantz could speak privately.

  While the city slept, the mayor’s mind was restlessly turning. He and Glantz would talk politics and strategy, trade gossip, laugh or bitch about who was screwing who at City Hall, plot and scheme. They would discuss bids and contracts and the thousand details involved in running a city.

  Cianci leaned heavily on Glantz for information and advice, and to execute his orders. In the Mayor’s War Room, as his office was known, Glantz was Cianci’s top general. He was the city solicitor and the mayor’s de facto chief of staff. He was Cianci’s troubleshooter, handling crises with the city budget, going to Milwaukee to deal with the story of the Marquette rape accusation, and helping to orchestrate the Wednesday Night Massacre.

  His detractors referred to him as “Mayor Glantz.” One councilman called Glantz “the finest example of what a mayor or governor could want in terms of loyalty, ability, and political savvy—which is not to say that he’s a fine human being.”

  Around City Hall, everyone called him Ronnie. He was a large, round-shouldered man with a quick wit and an easy smile, the political equivalent of a vaudeville act. His second cousin was Milton Berle. Glantz enjoyed power, was seduced by money and the good life, but also appreciated the humor in public service.

  Once, when he was prosecuting Providence police cases as an assistant city solicitor under Joe Doorley, Glantz asked a witness to a South Providence grocery store shooting where the victim had been shot.

  “In the chickens,” the witness said.

  Glantz, not sure he had heard right, asked again.

  “In the chickens,” the man repeated.

  “Where’s that?” asked the perplexed Glantz.

  “Between the frozen food and the bread.”

  Glantz grew up in a Jewish neighborhood in South Providence. His father, who divorced his mother when Ronnie was twelve, managed a toy discounter and, Glantz remembered, “had the facility to make and lose money several times.” The son became a lawyer, partly because he was idealistic and partly because his roommate at Boston University applied first. Glantz found that he liked constitutional law and the chance to help the underdog.

  It was that spirit that inspired him to work in Joe Doorley’s upstart campaign against the Democratic machine in 1964. Glantz’s father also supported Doorley, even bringing in his cousin Milton Berle for a fund-raiser. When Doorley won, he gave Ronnie a job as the fifth assistant city solicitor. Glantz was a bit player in the Doorley administration. Sometimes he’d drive the mayor to work or help out with the inventory at Doorley’s Plantations Room at the Biltmore. Former Doorley officials remembered Glantz as a likeable guy who didn’t always follow through and never told you anything you didn’t want to hear.

  The job permitted Glantz to witness firsthand the upheaval of the 1960s. He volunteered twelve hours a week as a legal adviser in South Providence, listening to residents’ complaints about rats and sewage in their basement and trying to direct them to the appropriate city agency. He saw his old neighborhood, around Prairie Avenue, transformed into a war zone as protestors clashed with cops throwing tear-gas bombs.

  Glantz also witnessed the city’s mob culture up close. As a city lawyer assigned to police cases, he went to Pannone’s Market in Silver Lake the day that bookies Rudy Marfeo and Anthony Melei were gunned down in 1968. He had never seen a dead body before, and he remembered picking his way around the bullet-riddled corpses in a state of shock. He also recalled the brouhaha that followed when Marfeo’s family accused the cops of stealing Rudy’s roll of money, which had vanished. Not long after that, he said, one of the officers bought a house in Narragansett.

  Tony Bucci had been a partner in the law firm where Glantz had worked before going to City Hall, and the two remained friendly. When Bucci and Larry McGarry defected from Doorley in 1974, Glantz followed. He became the public face of Democrats for Cianci and a secret messenger between the McGarry faction and Buddy Cianci.

  After Cianci won, he hired Glantz as a special adviser for legal affairs and stuck him in a small cubby in a back room of the mayor’s executive offices. Then people started coming in, asking Glantz questions about this and that, how to get things done. Cianci reminded Glantz of Robert Redford in the movie The Candidate, who wins the election only to ask, “What do we do now?” Within a few months Glantz moved to the front office, to the large chamber just outside Cianci’s door. Anyone going in to see the mayor had to pass by Glantz’s desk. A new organizational chart showed most lines of authority flowing to Cianci through Glantz.

  Glantz and Cianci would laugh and argue like a couple of frat brothers; an observer recalled one day seeing them fighting good-naturedly over a winning lottery ticket. When Cianci lost his temper, Glantz acted as a buffer between the mayor and his staff. He would defuse
the tension by dancing around the office twirling an umbrella, in a pantomime of Gene Kelly in Singin’ in the Rain, or pushing one of the secretaries down the hallway in her swivel chair. Once, Glantz came out of the mayor’s office after an argument with Cianci, walked into a closet, shut the door, and let out a mock scream, then came out grinning.

  Glantz had to laugh at the uproar that followed Cianci’s decision in 1979 to cancel a concert at the Civic Center by the Who shortly after a stampede at a concert by the British rock group in Cincinnati killed eleven people. Cianci reveled in the national publicity he received, and Glantz led the cheers—“The mayor was on during San Francisco drive time,” he exulted after one West Coast radio interview. When fans of the Who urged the mayor to reconsider, pointing out that the group’s next concert in Buffalo had been fatality free, Cianci responded: “They perform in Cincinnati with eleven deaths and Buffalo with no deaths. That means when they perform, their average is 5.5 deaths.” (Cianci eventually relented in the face of strong criticism, including rock fans chanting “Ayatollah Cianci” outside City Hall, but it was too late—the Who had decided they didn’t want to play Providence.)

  “Anybody that takes this business seriously, you’re crazy,” said Glantz, in a 1978 Providence Journal profile. “Politics is a hobby. The plotting and planning is fun. But the minute it becomes a profession, you have prostituted it.”

  Cianci began to rely more heavily on Glantz after his first year or so in office, when the mayor had a falling-out with his closest confidant, Mickey Farina.

  Farina, the former Cranston real estate salesman, had been with Cianci from the beginning. He had managed his 1974 campaign and continued, after Cianci took office, to serve as his top political adviser. Cianci rewarded Farina by making him the director of Public Property, an influential department that handled city real estate and oversaw new construction and repairs to city buildings.

  Elected as the anticorruption candidate, Cianci vowed to reform government. He opened previously secret board meetings, such as the Board of Contract and Supply, to the press and the public.

  But that wasn’t all that was wide open at City Hall.

  One flight up from the mayor’s office, on the third floor, Farina would throw parties that were well attended by city contractors. One contractor, Tommy Ricci, said that it was like a Dean Martin roast, with booze, broads, and merrymaking. Guys would sit around and talk about various scams—padding contracts, billing for phantom work. Eager to soak it all up, Farina picked the contractors’ brains, recalled Ricci. “He wanted to learn quickly.”

  Eager to land city work, Ricci did his best to ingratiate himself with the director of Public Property. He said that he put a second floor on Farina’s house in Cranston and did other work for him.

  Cianci would stop by Farina’s parties in Public Property and be envious, according to both Ricci and Glantz. He fumed that the cases of liquor weren’t being sent to his office, and that Farina seemed to be building his own private fiefdom. Cianci wasn’t stupid; he knew about Farina’s dinners at the Old Canteen with city contractors, noticed the photographs on his walls of Farina with different people.

  “Oh, you’re doing pretty good,” Cianci would mutter, drumming his pen furiously, according to Glantz.

  Publicly, Cianci continued to emphasize running a clean government.

  In the fall of 1975, during his first year as mayor, Cianci was in his office with Glantz, Farina, and an old friend, Anthony DiBiasio, a freelance contributor to The Providence Journal. DiBiasio was following Cianci around for a Sunday-magazine story about the mayor’s style. According to DiBiasio’s subsequent account, the mayor received a phone call from someone seeking his assistance. As Cianci greeted the unidentified caller, he scribbled the man’s name on a piece of paper and held it up for Farina and Glantz to see.

  “Watch it—that guy’s a rat!” Farina exclaimed in a hoarse whisper.

  Cianci listened for a while, then said, “Okay, let me tell you, I can’t play it that way—you want it, you got to go to the boards like everyone else. I mean we just can’t—”

  The conversation continued until Cianci finally cut the caller off, saying, “Look, that’s the way it’s gotta be; give it a try that way, through channels, and see what you come up with. I’ll help if I can, but it’s got to go straight.”

  Hanging up, Cianci swiveled in his chair. “F’chrissakes, these guys are something else . . . all the time telling me how much they’ve done for me, and—”

  “And it’s usually the ones who didn’t help when we needed it,” interjected Farina.

  “Regardless,” continued Cianci. “I know you gotta treat people right, but I’m not going to screw up in this job over a guy like that.”

  “And you can’t trust him, anyway,” added Farina.

  Cianci stood up and paced around his office. “What the hell, I—me and my mother—provided the bulk of the campaign money. Sure, others helped, but all I ever see and hear are these other names showing up for contracts and fees and everything, like they own me or the city.”

  He sat heavily back in his chair. “I want it up front, you hear?” Cianci continued, pointing at Farina and Glantz. “I’m not going to blow all this work for petty baloney like that. No way!”

  Behind the scenes, Cianci’s relationship with Farina was fraying. One day Glantz witnessed a blowup between the two men in the mayor’s office. They started screaming and swearing at each other, then asked Glantz to leave. By early 1976 the break was public, though the reason remained a closely guarded secret. Cianci tried to fire Farina but couldn’t, because he lacked the votes on the City Council.

  Instead, Cianci tried to reassign Farina’s purchasing power to a deputy who demonstrated his loyalty to the mayor by selling ten thousand dollars’ worth of Cianci fund-raising tickets in the spring of 1977, many to city vendors. Shortly after the move, Farina struck back. He leaked a story to the Journal’s City Hall reporter, Doane Hulick, detailing how the deputy had often split up purchases from a chemical company with ties to Cianci—a tactic that circumvented the competitive-bidding requirement for purchases of $1,500 or more. For instance, when the Custom Chemical Corporation sold the city five fifty-five-gallon drums of antifreeze for $2,062, the purchase was split into two orders, each below the $1,500 bid threshold. Hulick found that Custom Chemical, one of whose partners was married to Cianci’s cousin, and whose owners contributed generously to Citizens for Cianci, had seen its city business triple to $262,000 in the mayor’s first two-plus years.

  Glantz considered the split between Cianci and Farina a falling-out of thieves—Farina had gotten too greedy. Farina put the blame on Cianci and said that the two men began drifting apart after Farina urged the mayor to challenge John Chafee for the U.S. Senate in 1976, a suggestion Cianci rejected; Farina was no saint, but he had wanted to escape to Washington before the sewer of corruption in Providence sucked them in and made it harder to leave. In one instance, Farina allegedly learned from a City Hall janitor that Glantz had slipped into the Public Property office one weekend and steamed open envelopes containing sealed bids for a large garbage contract, in order to rig the bid for a company paying kickbacks.

  Glantz said that Cianci feared Farina and what he knew. And Farina knew how to push Cianci’s buttons. He told Glantz to tell “that fathead” that if Cianci did succeed in firing him, Farina would make a speech on the courthouse steps. Cianci ordered Glantz to have no further dealings with Farina.

  Sitting in his limousine late at night, outside Glantz’s house, Cianci would fret about Farina. “Is he going to the grand jury?” asked Cianci. “Do you think he’s gonna do it?”

  AFTER HIS REELECTION in 1978, Cianci finally mustered the council votes to oust Mickey Farina. The man who had been instrumental in Buddy’s rise left City Hall quietly. There were no speeches, on the courthouse steps or elsewhere.

  But the air of looseness remained as city business flowed to the mayor’s cronies. Cianci’s mentor,
former attorney general Herbert DeSimone, received city legal work. His advertising guru, Normand Roussel, was hired to do promotional films, paid for with federal HUD funds. His Republican city chairman, Joseph DiSanto, received no-bid contracts for his family company, Henry Oil. (In 1979 another Cianci aide, Joseph Vileno, accused DiSanto of threatening to have him fired if he didn’t steer emergency heating work to Henry Oil.)

  The mayor’s campaign contributors shared in the largesse, reaping lucrative city contracts for trash hauling, sewage-plant repairs, snowplowing, street paving, street sweeping, school repairs, construction projects, school-bus contracts, city leases.

  They would all gather regularly in the mayor’s office for meetings of his campaign fund-raising committee. It was a large group, forty to fifty strong. All the department directors would attend, as well as contractors and subcontractors who worked for the city. Cianci would sit at his desk while his supporters reported their progress. The room was heavy with large stomachs and gold jewelry. The mayor’s mother, Esther, sat at a card table, tracking ticket sales and collecting the money. Cash—legal then—was preferred.

  If someone didn’t sell enough tickets, Cianci would pressure them to sell more. Everyone was expected to contribute; the mayor was quick to remind people where their loyalty should lie, saying things like “Do you like your paycheck?” An internal Citizens for Cianci memo laid out a fund-raising strategy that included a birthday party for the mayor, “to allow people to pay homage.”

  Therese S. Kelly, who headed the mayor’s Office of Community Development, said that Cianci once ordered her to fire an aide who had refused to buy a hundred-dollar fund-raising ticket. She bought a ticket for him instead. “It didn’t surprise me at all,” she later said, “because that was the way the mayor operated.”