The Prince of Providence

by Mike Stanton

  As a Republican in a Democratic city, Cianci always felt insecure about his position, and consequently he spent heavily on his campaigns. He saturated television and radio with ads and hired the best pollsters and consultants, top national GOP operatives like Fred Steeper, Gerald Ford’s pollster, and Lynn Mueller.

  Former aides said that Cianci also spent campaign funds on personal expenses, even the family butcher’s bill. Rhode Island’s campaign-finance laws were looser then; in nonelection years candidates did not have to report how they spent their money. The mayor’s executive secretary, Margaret McClacken, his mother’s good friend, paid the bills. His mother, a shrewd, tough businesswoman, controlled the campaign accounts.

  At his desk next to the mayor’s office, Ronnie Glantz later described sitting at the confluence of two rivers of cash—the city funds that flowed out to city contractors and the money that came flowing back to Cianci, like the tide pushing up Narragansett Bay. According to Glantz, a lot of money found its way to a safe in Cianci’s mother’s house. One day in 1979, he said, Cianci heard that someone might try to rob his mother’s house, because there was $500,000 cash in the safe. Glantz said that the mayor called a friendly police officer and asked him to guard the house.

  As Cianci’s right-hand man, Glantz helped rig bids and fix contracts so that the mayor’s men would receive the business. Glantz said that the mayor directed him to tailor the bid specifications for the city school-bus contract to fit one bidder, United Truck and Bus. The owner, Robert Doorley, was Joe Doorley’s cousin, but he had no problem doing business with Cianci. According to Glantz, Cianci boasted that he had received a twenty-five-thousand-dollar payoff from Doorley.

  Bruce Melucci, a former Cianci aide who was unaware of any behind-the-scenes machinations on the school-bus contract, remembered Doorley as a big campaign contributor who attended the mayor’s ticket-committee meetings. Melucci also remembered Doorley’s saying, “I’m the only bidder. How can I lose?” In Melucci’s view, Cianci’s “incessant demand for money” created an atmosphere ripe for abuse. “Everybody was trying to outdo each other, to look the best in the boss’s eyes,” Melucci said.

  Other big contractors would pass by Glantz’s desk to see the mayor. Glantz became friendly with Danny and Jack Capuano, brothers who ran a trash-hauling company; engineering executive Gene Castellucci, whose firm redesigned the city sewage plant; and contractor Tony Rosciti, who drove a Mercedes convertible.

  Glantz would go to lunch up on the Hill with Castellucci, Rosciti, and Norm Roussel. He had drinks with the Capuanos at the Marriott and attended their Super Bowl party at a restaurant in Cranston. Glantz said that the contractors assumed that he knew everything that was going on and spoke freely of making payoffs to the mayor.

  Glantz also heard it from the other end; Joe DiSanto would complain that Buddy got all the money and he got nothing.

  Cianci, in his late-night discourses in the back of his limousine, or in his office, would tell Glantz that the Capuanos had kicked back hundreds of thousands of dollars for various trash-hauling and sludge-removal contracts. The mayor also confided to Glantz that he got $100,000 from Tony Rosciti for a big street-sweeping contract. Glantz said that Cianci told him about the kickbacks partly because he needed Glantz, as his city solicitor, to help dot the i’s and cross the t’s to make the contracts look legitimate. Often Cianci would tell Glantz that he wanted him to sign something first, adding, “I’m not signing anything until your name is on it.” The mayor, ever the prosecutor, was paranoid about being discovered, said Glantz. Had he covered his tracks well enough? Would the Journal find out?

  But Glantz believed that arrogance also drove Cianci to confide in him—he enjoyed proving that he could outfox anyone and showing off how well he could work the levers of power. Cianci equated money with power, said Glantz, so he needed to brag about his financial conquests.

  When Farina faded from the picture, Glantz and Joe DiSanto became the mayor’s confidants. Glantz said that they would discuss ways of writing the bid specifications so that the desired contractor would win, or splitting up a big job into smaller, no-bid jobs that fell under the fifteen-hundred-dollar threshold for competitive bids.

  Another favorite trick was the “emergency contract.” If a water main burst, or a school roof sprang a leak, city officials would exaggerate the severity of the problem and declare a fake emergency. Then a contractor could be picked without going through competitive bidding, and bill as much as he wanted. Glantz recalled Cianci, DiSanto, and Rosciti, on the sidewalk outside Glantz’s stepfather’s funeral, discussing one fake emergency, involving a downtown aqueduct.

  As the dirty deals multiplied, Glantz found himself drawn further into the mayor’s inner circle.

  One day, said Glantz, he and Cianci were visiting DiSanto, who was hospitalized with back trouble, when another big booster, Jaguar dealer Jake Kaplan, came by the hospital room and handed the mayor a thousand dollars in cash. Glantz didn’t know what the money was for—it could have been a legitimate campaign contribution or it could have been a bribe, he said. Kaplan, a flamboyant former car racer who drove a Rolls-Royce, leased property to the city.

  Another time, Glantz said, Cianci called him into his office and instructed him to drive to the Marriott Hotel and pick up a package from James Forte, a partner in a construction company that repaired city sidewalks. As Glantz described it, it was late on a weekday afternoon. He drove the short distance from City Hall to the Marriott, which was behind the State House, and waited in a quiet corner of the large parking lot. Forte pulled his car in. Glantz got out and walked over to Forte’s car. Without getting out, Forte wordlessly handed over a package wrapped in tinfoil, then drove away. Glantz brought the package to City Hall, where Cianci and DiSanto were waiting, and handed it to Cianci, who opened it to reveal stacks of hundred-dollar bills. The mayor counted ten thousand dollars and gave a thousand apiece to Glantz and DiSanto.

  One of Cianci’s former police drivers recalled walking into Glantz’s office one day, while Glantz was next door in the mayor’s office, and seeing his desk covered with stacks of money tied in rubber bands. Glantz’s fur coat was draped over the chair. Since the mayor’s office was right through the doorway, the driver found it hard to believe that the mayor wasn’t aware of what was going on. Besides, the driver said, there were nights when he would drive Cianci around to various events—charity functions, political banquets, wakes—and the mayor would stand chatting with someone by the side of his limousine as he was leaving. Wordlessly, the person would casually drop a brick-shaped package wrapped in aluminum foil on the front seat. The brick would sit there as they made their rounds. “Guard that with your life,” Cianci would say. At the end of the evening, the driver said, Cianci would gather it up with his papers and take it into his house.

  Farina, no friend to Glantz, nevertheless felt that it was ridiculous to believe that Glantz could be doing this on his own; in his view, Cianci was corrupt, too, and paid close attention to the big-money city contracts and the actions of the influential Board of Contract and Supply. At some meetings, Glantz sat by the mayor’s side.

  As the money poured in, some stuck to Glantz’s fingers. Given his position at the mayor’s right hand, people were eager to be his friend. They would stop by, shake his hand, and palm him some cash. They would buy him dinner, send him flowers, drop off Christmas presents or a bottle of liquor. “We want you to have this,” they would say.

  He also became involved in his own scam, with Tony Bucci, to extort kickbacks for the purchase of city garbage trucks in the spring of 1979. The man paying the kickbacks was Joe Doorley’s old pal North Providence car dealer Jimmy Notorantonio. But Jimmy Noto had bigger plans. In one of the wilder schemes of Cianci’s first administration, Bucci was helping Notorantonio line up financing to build a sewage-sludge incinerator on the Providence waterfront—to turn trash into cash. Cianci was under pressure to address pollution problems at the aging Providence sewage plant.
Greasy balls of sewage were washing up on the beaches down Narragansett Bay; sixty-five million gallons of raw sewage a day gushed into the bay. The federal Environmental Protection Agency was threatening massive fines. Meanwhile, the process of repairing the 1899 sewage plant was rife with corruption, from the kickbacks Glantz alleged had been paid for the contracts to no-show workers to the theft of equipment—everything from work gloves to sixty-pound cast-iron-and-steel valves. When Providence police investigating the thefts asked the plant’s forty-two workers to take lie-detector tests, all forty-two refused, on the advice of counsel.

  Jimmy Noto’s scheme to help solve Cianci’s sewage woes was elegant. In a deal orchestrated by Glantz, the city would pay Notorantonio to take the sludge off its hands. Then Notorantonio, backed by a multimillion-dollar federal loan, would build an incinerator with state-of-the-art German technology and transform the sludge into flammable bricks that could be sold for fuel. His company was named Inge—for “I Never Get Enough.” But the venture eventually collapsed in a tangle of lawsuits, fraud allegations, and criminal investigations. Someone even tried to blow up the unfinished incinerator, which never opened.

  Meanwhile, Glantz moved on to other deals. He pursued outside business interests on the side, such as a partnership seeking to build a federally funded public-housing project. He began to feel invincible, like a fighter pilot who can’t be shot down. But flying wasn’t always fun.

  In the fall of 1979, Glantz, DiSanto, and Cianci went in together on the purchase of a helicopter. The mayor was gearing up to run for governor, and he needed it to get around the state more quickly. But the partners also viewed it as a business proposition, figuring to make money by leasing it to the campaign and taking a tax write-off for depreciation.

  Glantz and DiSanto were in the helicopter one day when it tried to take off in muggy air and nearly struck some utility wires. Another time, the chopper was lifting off from the Port of Providence, bearing Cianci to Woonsocket, in northern Rhode Island, when it struck a wire. The pilot brought the wobbling copter down in one of Jake Kaplan’s car lots. Cianci started to get out when snarling guard dogs came rushing at him; he slammed the door and radioed the police for help.

  WINDS OF CHANGE were blowing across Rhode Island. In the spring of 1980 the rotors of Buddy Cianci’s helicopter stirred the air from Westerly to Woonsocket.

  He was the can-do mayor of the comeback city, the energetic urban philosopher who could cut through red tape and bring home the bacon—fifty million dollars in downtown investment since taking office in 1975, supported by another ten million in city and federal funds.

  He announced his candidacy with the slogan “What a governor he’ll make.” From his perch in the sky, Cianci could see the State House and, beyond the horizon, the United States Senate.

  Although Providence still had a long way to go, Cianci was a genius at seeing the possibilities of arcane concepts like historic preservation and “intermodal transportation centers” (a fancy way of describing a downtown bus interchange). By personally pushing a handful of high-profile projects—the reopening of the Biltmore, the construction of a new banking office tower, the rejuvenation of Federal Hill—Cianci created a sense of excitement and progress that masked Providence’s underlying corruption and fiscal chaos. In the process, he captured headlines and won votes. Cianci spoke of the “texture” of neighborhoods and of the importance of managing a city “like a violinist tuning a Stradivarius.” He made people feel good about themselves, and for that they could overlook his flaws—if they could even see them in the all-encompassing whirlwind that was Buddy.

  The mayor realized that Providence’s stagnation had been a blessing in one sense—sparing its rich stock of historic buildings from the wrecking ball of urban renewal. In May he dazzled a national forum on historic preservation at the National Gallery in Washington with a witty presentation. The forum’s participants, who included the vice president’s wife, Joan Mondale, awoke from a slumberous series of speeches to take notice of the fast-talking, wisecracking mayor from Providence.

  “Cities are great,” proclaimed Cianci, “because they make love to people.”

  The crowd oohed and aahed as he showed them before-and-after slides of the rococo Ocean State Theater, which he had helped save from demolition.

  “It kind of reminds you of being in Austria just before the war,” narrated Cianci.

  Another slide showed Cianci and his family walking down a Providence street. “That’s a political picture,” he quipped. “We’ll keep that up for a while.”

  Kenneth Orenstein, Cianci’s downtown development and preservation coordinator, recalled prepping the mayor to testify before Congress regarding tax credits for historic preservation. Cianci was a quick study who could take a few key words—noun, verb, adjective—and speak for fifteen minutes as if he owned the subject. After Cianci’s congressional testimony, a staffer from the House Ways and Means Committee told Orenstein, “I’ve seen governors, senators, representatives—I’ve seen them all—but none better than your mayor.”

  Back home, advisers to the likeable two-term governor, J. Joseph Garrahy, scrutinized their private polls and cringed. Garrahy, the affable former beer salesman, product of the Irish Democratic machine in Providence and plaid-shirted hero of the Blizzard of ’78, was surprisingly vulnerable. His focus groups found the dynamic Cianci scoring well as a leader compared with the more laid-back Garrahy, despite questions about Cianci’s personal character and the integrity of his administration. In June 1980 Cianci’s polls put him within three points of Garrahy, who six months earlier had led the mayor by eighteen points.

  The helicopter became the indefatigable Cianci’s trademark. He crisscrossed the state from dawn to well past dusk, barreling into banquet halls and senior-citizens luncheons, pumping hands at factory gates, gathering steam as the day unwound. “There’s no schedule that can make me tired,” he declared.

  Cianci characterized his campaign with a joke about a chicken and a pig who decide to cook breakfast for their farmer. The chicken suggests bacon and eggs. The pig replies: “For you, that’s a sacrifice. For me, it’s a total commitment.”

  Despite the porcine imagery, Cianci was looking svelte. His Republican handlers had sought to “Yankee him up” for the campaign, one adviser recalled. He shed fifty pounds and traded his polyester suits and wide ties for blazers and khakis. His popularity surged when the mayor was barred from the historic Fourth of July parade in Bristol, Rhode Island.

  The Bristol parade, dating back to 1785, was the oldest Fourth of July parade in the nation, a red, white, and blue pageant of Americana that drew several hundred thousand revelers to the picturesque old seaport on Narragansett Bay. Not wanting to be overrun by politicians, the parade’s guardians had a policy of allowing only elected federal, state, and Bristol officials to march. Nevertheless, Cianci had marched every year since becoming mayor, tagging along with the Rhode Island Matadors, a Providence drum-and-bugle corps.

  After the 1979 parade the organizers had written Cianci a letter “censuring” him for his participation. Now, in the weeks leading up to the 1980 parade, he was forbidden to march. As governor, Joe Garrahy could march—but not his challenger. Banned in Bristol, Cianci fired back with his own declaration of independence, vowing to show up anyway.

  “I thought we’re celebrating independence from tyranny,” he said.

  Five days before the parade, the Bristol Town Council voted unanimously to uphold the ban on Buddy. The police chief announced that two officers would be stationed at the parade’s starting point to bar uninvited guests and arrest anyone who caused a disturbance.

  “Let them arrest me,” he said. “I am going to march to celebrate the joy of being an American.”

  Back in Providence, several of the mayor’s men were also celebrating their constitutional rights—most notably the right to be presumed innocent and the right against self-incrimination.

  In May seven men were indicted in a s
cam involving no-show jobs at the Department of Public Works. Several, including John D. Melvin, the city highway superintendent, had ties to mobsters. Melvin was on the job despite his arrest the previous year on unrelated charges of using a stolen credit card and kidnapping and beating a suspected mob informant with a wooden ax handle. One of the accused no-shows had testified as an alibi witness the previous year at the trial of mobsters Gerald and Harold Tillinghast for the execution of George Basmajian.

  Anthony “Blackjack” DelSanto, an assistant highway superintendent and Cianci lieutenant, accused the Democratic attorney general of trying to smear the mayor. DelSanto’s grand-jury appearance had turned sour when the prosecutor started grilling him about alleged mob control of various Providence nightclubs. At that point he refused to answer any more questions.

  “They are trying to frame people,” complained DelSanto. “I hang with a lot of ‘wiseguys.’ I grew up with them [on Federal Hill]. What they do on the side is their own business. . . . I don’t know anything about organized crime. I work for a living.” And in case anyone wondered, DelSanto added, the nickname “Blackjack” had been in his family for three generations.

  Cianci had also testified to the grand jury, to explain a meeting that he had called with his department heads the previous fall to discuss the investigation. The mayor had gotten angry when he learned that the state police were conducting surveillance of alleged no-show employees on Federal Hill without telling him. Some of the workers had spotted the cops taking their pictures, and alerted Cianci. The mayor called Colonel Walter Stone, the legendary superintendent of the state police, to complain. Afterward, Cianci was bitter toward the state police. One day, while he was running for governor, Cianci was riding a horse in another parade when the animal defecated on the street. The mayor looked at a state trooper standing nearby and said, “Tell Stone that when I’m governor, he’ll be cleaning this up.”

  The day before the Bristol parade in 1980 there was more bad news, this time in Cianci’s police department. A lieutenant and a sergeant who headed the bad-check squad were indicted for recruiting mobster Dante Sciarra to intimidate a witness who had implicated the sergeant in a thirty-thousand-dollar bad-check scheme. Both police officers were active political supporters of the mayor. The sergeant, Robert C. Martini, sometimes spent his entire shift peddling hundred-dollar Cianci fund-raising tickets to businessmen on his beat rather than investigating bad-check complaints, according to his partner.