by Mike Stanton
Former major John J. Leyden, who led the investigation, said that Cianci’s police chief, Angelo Ricci, tried to squelch the case because Martini was a big fund-raiser for Cianci. When Leyden decided to wire up the informant so that he could tape Sciarra threatening him, the major deliberately didn’t tell Ricci, because the chief was also part of the investigation, he said.
The Fourth of July dawned hot and hazy. Late in the morning the mayor’s helicopter descended out of a sweltering sky on the town of Bristol.
“If they want to make an arrest, they’ll have to prove that they’re right,” he had said a few days before. “If they’re going to stop me, they will have to suffer the consequences personally.”
The parade committee had voiced similar resolve. “Cianci comes down here looking like some rhinestone cowboy, but I’m not afraid of him,” grumbled one committee member.
But when the mayor’s helicopter touched down at Bristol High School, he was met only by Miss Rhode Island and her entourage, who climbed a hill to greet him. Town officials had backed down in the face of overwhelming public sentiment for Cianci. As the mayor rounded the corner onto red, white, and blue–striped Hope Street, near the parade’s start, the crowd roared its approval.
“Hey, Buddy, you made it!”
“Congratulations, Governor!”
Sweating in the ninety-degree heat in his blue blazer and white pants, Cianci beamed as well-wishers mobbed him, offering hugs, kisses, handshakes, and cold drinks. Two women held up a banner that said BABES FOR BUDDY. A friend jokingly tried to slip a pair of plastic handcuffs on him. The crush of people forced Cianci to repeatedly fall behind the Matadors’ color guard.
The mayor received by far the biggest cheers—bigger than the response for Governor Garrahy or Senators Chafee and Pell or Rhode Island’s two congressmen. A record three hundred thousand spectators had turned out, twice what had been forecast, many eager to see what would happen to Buddy.
A few weeks after stealing the show in Bristol, Cianci spoke at the Republican National Convention in Detroit, where he blasted Jimmy Carter—“a president who promised plums four years ago and delivered us peanuts instead”—and praised Ronald Reagan. In the greenroom before going out, Cianci rubbed elbows with Billy Graham and Marie Osmond, and rehearsed in front of Wayne Newton. Cianci told Newton that if he lost the governor’s race, maybe he could join the entertainer’s Las Vegas act. Newton responded by predicting a Cianci victory.
Back home, while Cianci campaigned for governor, Ronnie Glantz was the de facto mayor. During a strategy session early in the year, the subject of the city’s troubled finances had come up. Cianci couldn’t afford a budget crisis this year, when he was running for governor. Glantz reassured Cianci that he could keep a lid on things. But he couldn’t.
A summer of scandal, with the police and Public Works indictments, was followed by a fall of fiscal failings. In September officials conceded that the city was running a projected deficit of twelve million dollars. In October Cianci said he might have to lay off several hundred city workers. In protest, garbagemen staged a work slowdown. Trash piled up around the city. One East Sider complained, “If he wants to run the state, God help us.”
Compounding his problems was the boorish nature lurking behind Cianci’s charismatic exterior. That summer he publicly bullied the chairman of a citizens’ review board looking into how he had spent millions of dollars in federal community-development funds. Afterward the chairman accused Cianci of practicing “gangster politics.”
Cianci could be even worse in private, as officials at Brown University learned in the spring of 1980, when the mayor’s nephew was denied admission.
Two of Cianci’s nephews had applied to Brown. One was accepted, the other rejected. Before the letters went out, Brown admissions director James H. Rogers called the mayor, a courtesy he normally extended to prominent people. Cianci was furious. He screamed about the injustice of the decision, given everything that he had done for Brown, and shouted, “Don’t you know who I am?” Rogers tried to speak, but Cianci kept cutting him off. Finally, the admissions director lost his temper and shouted into the phone, “Shut up, you jerk!”
There was a sudden silence. Then, calmly, Cianci said, “It’s not nice to call the mayor a jerk,” and hung up.
Not long afterward, Brown’s athletic director, John Parry, learned that the city had delayed what should have been routine zoning variances for the university’s new athletic complex, the Olney-Margolies Center. Shortly thereafter, said Parry, he encountered Cianci at the St. Joseph’s Day parade and asked the mayor about the holdup. Cianci, according to Parry, replied that Brown’s zoning application would sit for as long as his nephew’s rejected application did.
Parry reported the threat to Howard Swearer, then Brown’s president. Swearer talked to Cianci and told him that it didn’t make sense for the mayor to act this way, especially since he was running for governor. The mayor relented. Brown got its variances, without admitting Cianci’s nephew. (In later years, however, when Cianci told the story he implied that the nephew did get in.)
By early October the race for governor was essentially over. Three weeks before the election, polls showed Garrahy with more than 70 percent of the vote. Publicly, Cianci clung defiantly to hope and maintained his frenetic campaigning, but the helicopter had lost its lift. Earlier that year Jimmy Breslin, speaking at Roger Williams College in Bristol, had watched Cianci’s aerial entrance in disbelief.
“What the fuck is that?” he asked his companion, Rhode Island writer Bill Reynolds.
“The mayor’s helicopter,” answered Reynolds.
Breslin shook his head. “If that was New York,” he said, “we’d shoot the fucking thing down.”
In the waning days, Cianci’s campaign for governor went from bad to worse. Two weeks before the election the mayor issued layoff notices to nearly three hundred city workers. City Hall offices went dark as several hundred more workers walked out in protest. Glantz fumed when two Public Works engineers who had gotten pink slips refused to man the hurricane barrier during a storm that had sent floodwaters rising.
Shortly after that storm subsided, Glantz acknowledged to a Providence Journal reporter, four days before the election, that city taxpayers could face a midyear tax increase to plug the deficit. Then he headed to Yonkers, New York, to interview for the vacant city manager’s job.
Cianci angrily denied Glantz’s prediction, but the damage had been done. Close in the polls after his triumphant Fourth of July march, Cianci was swamped by Garrahy on election day. He lost every city and town in Rhode Island, and every ward in Providence. In fact, he carried just one polling place in Providence—St. Bart’s Hall, in his native Silver Lake.
He greeted his tearful supporters in the seventeenth-floor Biltmore ballroom with humor and grace, invoking Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy on the pain of defeat. He wanted to “show the people of the State of Rhode Island that I know how to lose, too.” Then he smiled and said, “I really appreciate the overwhelming mandate from people all over the State of Rhode Island to continue my work in the City of Providence.”
He had two years left in his term as mayor, but Cianci’s loss was so lopsided, and Providence’s financial problems so severe, that it seemed his days in City Hall were numbered, too.
Ronnie Glantz realized that it was time for him to leave. He was tired of the manic pace. And the feds were starting to circle City Hall. Subpoenas were flying around the building. Glantz recalled Cianci’s calling in employees after their grand-jury testimony to debrief them, his pen tapping nervously on his desk.
Glantz was convinced that it was just a matter of time before someone got indicted. There was, he said, “an atmosphere of absolute looseness.” One day, after he had stopped by Joe DiSanto’s house to say that he’d had enough, the doorbell rang. It was a federal prosecutor and four FBI agents, stopping by to “chat.”
Cianci also contemplated leaving. He angled for an ambass
adorship from the newly elected president, Ronald Reagan, preferably to Italy. But his star had diminished. He was never seriously considered. With no Washington appointment forthcoming, Cianci put a halt to the speculation.
“My challenge is right here,” he said. “I don’t know what my political future will be, but I’m going to be here for a while.”
Privately, Cianci was devastated by his first electoral defeat. It was a resounding personal rejection of a man who lived for public affirmation. In the days that followed, an aide recalled, Cianci sat morosely in his office, drinking vodka.
“Those sons of bitches,” he said.
THE YEAR AFTER his ill-fated run for governor, Buddy Cianci returned to a city in disarray.
Providence was on the verge of bankruptcy. A committee of bankers and businessmen took control of the city’s finances. Angry taxpayers demanded the mayor’s resignation after he imposed a midyear tax hike. (Glantz’s prediction had proven accurate.) Protected by a half-dozen policemen, Cianci marched through an angry mob at City Hall to beseech the City Council to approve his tax increase so that Providence wouldn’t go the way of Cleveland, a bankrupt city whose polluted river had burst into flames.
The accompanying budget cuts and layoffs pushed the city’s biggest labor union into open revolt. Much of the turmoil centered around the Department of Public Works, the department responsible for paving the roads, plowing the streets, fixing the sidewalks, collecting the trash, and maintaining the sewers, and the traditional dumping ground for political hacks and wiseguys.
Following his reelection in 1978, Cianci had put Democratic chairman Tony Bucci’s brother-in-law, Clement Cesaro, in charge of Public Works. One of Cesaro’s first actions had been to sign off on a deal orchestrated by Bucci to buy garbage trucks for the city from a North Providence car dealer—a deal that involved seventy-seven thousand dollars in kickbacks to Bucci and Glantz.
But by the middle of 1979, the Bucci-Cianci alliance had ended. Cesaro said later that the falling-out occurred because Cianci had broken a promise to Bucci to become a Democrat after the 1978 election. Others said that the split was inevitable, given the sizeable egos of the two men and Bucci’s heavy-handed nature. Bucci, known as “Mr. Asphalt” after he took a case involving import restrictions on liquid asphalt all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, had once threatened to put an opponent’s political career “in a pine box.” On nights the City Council met, Bucci would leave the light on in his downtown law office, which was visible from City Hall, to signal members how they should vote.
Stuck with Cesaro at Public Works, Cianci turned to two of his deputies, Edward “Buckles” Melise and Anthony “Blackjack” DelSanto. Their names would become catchphrases for the massive municipal corruption probes to follow, embodying the sense of lawlessness that overtook Buddy Cianci’s City Hall in the early 1980s.
Buckles and Blackjack came from Federal Hill, where they served on the Thirteenth Ward Democratic Committee, which had endorsed Cianci. Cianci made them his men at Public Works. He put Buckles in charge of vermin control. Blackjack controlled the highways.
Bucci explained their rise this way: “Good waiters get good tips.”
Buckles, who drove a pink Cadillac and had a weakness for crap games, was the more politically active of the two—and ultimately the one whom the authorities would zero in on. Cianci would refer to Buckles as a “dese, dem, and dose guy.” As the city’s chief rat exterminator, he was so enthusiastic that he bought rat poison in record quantities—twice as much as the City of Cleveland, which was four times as big. His program wound up feeding the rats instead of killing them. Bristling at criticism that he was incompetent, Buckles said that he had studied up on the subject—he had even gone to the library and “breezed” through a book about it.
Buckles and Blackjack would saunter into the mayor’s office on city business in their jeans and leather jackets. DelSanto, a big man who enjoyed clowning around, would joke with the mayor’s secretaries. “Is the mayor bothering you? Should I break his legs?” Cianci laughed along. The mayor who had met the queen of England and impishly given her a china plate depicting the Revolutionary War–era sloop Providence, which had fought the British, could also mix it up with Buckles and Blackjack.
According to Buckles’s friend Tommy Ricci, the contractor who had grown up across the street from him on Gessler Street in Federal Hill, Buckles was one of Buddy’s bagmen. Cianci’s former police driver, who had recalled seeing money on Glantz’s desk and Cianci’s receipt of foil-wrapped packages on their evening rounds, also remembered sitting in the mayor’s outer office on different occasions and seeing Buckles go into the mayor’s office with a bag and leave emptyhanded.
But Buckles had a weakness for crap games and couldn’t always be counted on to come back with the money. Ricci recalled accompanying Buckles on a gambling junket to Atlantic City, where many of the casino regulars knew him. The allure of the dice led to Ricci’s taking over Buckles’s collection duties for about a year in the late seventies. Every week, Ricci recalled, someone at City Hall would leave a shoebox with a list of names and Ricci would make his rounds. He’d throw a gym bag in the trunk of his Lincoln and then pop the trunk and let the contractor make his own deposit. He brought the bag back to City Hall in the early evening, after most workers had departed, and threw it on a table in a room where Cianci and a handful of aides were waiting.
Ricci described a system that was loose and disorganized. Sometimes, he said, he would palm the mayor a couple thousand dollars; on other occasions, he would give it to someone else. There were periodic shakeups, if someone was suspected of skimming, and as Cianci sought to insulate himself.
Ricci was an unshaven street philosopher, a hulking, scary-looking man with dirt under his fingernails and a line of tattoos marching up his muscular left forearm—a can, an eye, a screw, the letter U, and a question mark. “All I did was give kickbacks,” he said. “Is that a crime or what?”
His father was a contractor, and when Ricci was seventeen he struck out on his own. While Joe Doorley was mayor, Ricci started getting small jobs with the city, such as fixing school roofs. He learned the nuances of City Hall—how to bid on a job and how to split a bigger job into two smaller jobs so that it wouldn’t have to go out to bid. He learned that you could charge more when it was an “emergency contract.” He set up a myriad of companies, including the Busy Bee Construction Company, to conceal how much city work he was actually getting.
Ricci also learned the value of politics. He bought sound equipment and put it on a used car for campaigns. The city work poured in. When Cianci challenged Doorley in 1974, Ricci publicly supported Doorley but privately hedged his bets, steering relatives, money, and cars with sound equipment to the Cianci campaign. When Cianci won, Ricci jumped on the bandwagon. He and his friend Caesar Brown, an electrician and chairman of the Seventh Ward Republican Committee in Silver Lake, threw fund-raising parties for Cianci.
As Ricci’s influence grew, he received more and more city work. But after some negative publicity about a roof job at a school, he said, he had to slip Cianci twenty-five hundred dollars in cash, plus a box of expensive Cuban cigars, or “heaters,” to get back on the list. Ricci said that he also did free work on Cianci’s house before receptions for dignitaries—once for presidential candidate John Connally, another time for Henry Kissinger. Ricci said that he made his money back on one of the mayor’s house jobs by padding a city contract to redo the Gessler Street swimming pool, in his and Buckles’s old neighborhood. (Farina also was aware of Ricci’s and Buckles’s roles as bagmen, Buckles’s gambling problem, and Ricci’s gift to the mayor of a box of “Cuban heaters,” as well as his padding on the Gessler Street pool job to cover work at Cianci’s house.)
In 1977, Tommy Ricci got to meet Gerald Ford when the former president came to Providence for a Cianci fund-raiser. The evening represented a clash of the two cultures that made up Buddy’s world. After a private City Hall reception for s
uch dignitaries as John Chafee, John Pastore, Larry McGarry, the bishop of Providence, and prominent businessmen, Ford went to the Marriott, where Secret Service agents watched nervously as he shook hands with the likes of Ricci, city workers, and ward heelers.
After greeting Ford, Ricci and his pals left the ballroom and headed for the bar off the lobby of the Marriott. A woman joined them. A guy she had been with, who was drunk, got mad and took a swing at her. Then he charged Ricci’s friends. In the melee that followed, the man staggered to his feet, a gun in one hand and a police radio in the other to call for help; he was an off-duty Providence cop. Someone punched him and he collapsed. Suddenly, the Marriott bar was filled with Providence police and Secret Service agents brandishing weapons.
Later, after being hauled down to the police station for questioning and then released, Ricci and his pals laughed. “Where else can you get arrested,” he asked, “while visiting the president of the United States?”
Ricci was always on the lookout for new opportunities. In the years following the Blizzard of ’78, he went to Buckles, who was in charge of snowplowing at Public Works, and got put on the list of “stand-by crews”—plowers who would be called in, and paid, when there was the threat of a storm. Ricci’s annual Christmas parties became larger and livelier. He moved them from his garage on Hartford Avenue to nice restaurants. He hired bands and a magician. One year, as the magician performed, one of Ricci’s friends shouted, “Can you turn snow into money? Tommy can!” Later it began to snow. The party-goers rushed out to get their plows.