The Prince of Providence
Page 27
Ron Glantz recalled having witnessed Cianci and Joe DiSanto argue about Buckles over lunch one day at the Old Canteen. Buckles was in prison, and his wife needed money. Glantz says that DiSanto brought up the fact that Cianci had promised to take care of him, by giving him five thousand dollars, and that they should pay him. But Cianci, according to Glantz, said, “Fuck him.” DiSanto was upset, says Glantz, but Cianci didn’t want to discuss it. Buckles subsequently testified against DiSanto and Jake Kaplan about the alleged fifteen-thousand-dollar kickback in the 1981 sale of the Providence garbage trucks. But they were acquitted.
The feds put a lot of pressure on DiSanto, Cianci’s confidant and former Public Works director. In addition to the garbage-truck case, DiSanto also was indicted, with Richard Carroll, former chairman of the Water Supply Board, for extorting twenty-one thousand dollars from a plumbing-and-heating contractor. DiSanto beat that case, too. He was convicted by a jury, but the judge later threw out his conviction. DiSanto went to trial again, and this time was acquitted. (Carroll, his codefendant, was convicted and sent to prison.) In the midst of fighting the criminal charges, DiSanto was hauled into divorce court by his ex-wife, in a dispute over their property settlement. She accused him of bringing home a briefcase full of cash from a Cianci fund-raiser, and of storing cash in coffee cans in the basement of his house. DiSanto angrily denied the charges. Lincoln Almond, the U.S. attorney in Rhode Island, believed that DiSanto would have cooperated against Cianci had he been convicted. DiSanto was later convicted of state charges that he approved bogus overtime in Public Works. But by then the statute of limitations had expired on other possible crimes that Almond was looking at.
Cianci “kept close tabs on people,” said Almond. In the fall of 1985, just before DiSanto went on trial the first time for the plumbing extortion, DiSanto and Cianci showed up at the U.S. attorney’s office with a bizarre tale that illustrated the Byzantine nature of Rhode Island politics. DiSanto described a chance encounter that he had had the previous winter in Florida with a Rhode Island prosecutor, Henry Gemma, Jr. The respected chief of the attorney general’s Criminal Division, Gemma had worked with Cianci when he was a prosecutor and had felt uncomfortable when he was assigned to the prosecution team in the DeLeo case. DiSanto and Gemma had a mutual friend, William Riccitelli, who was DiSanto’s civil lawyer. Through Riccitelli, they bumped into each other one night in DiSanto’s condominium in West Palm Beach. Then the story turned weird. DiSanto claimed that Riccitelli took him into another room and said that he could get the state charges against him dropped for a forty-thousand-dollar payoff to the attorney general, Dennis Roberts II. DiSanto refused. Gemma and Roberts called the accusation ludicrous. Gemma speculated that DiSanto had made up the story to try to have the charges against him dismissed.
Contractor Tommy Ricci, the owner of the Busy Bee Construction Company, was also in the crosshairs of state and federal grand juries—for snowplowing contracts, for school-repair work, and for stealing city equipment. According to an informant, one dump truck went into the Public Works garage with the CITY OF PROVIDENCE seal on the door and came out with another seal that said BUSY BEE.
Dogged by investigators who seized his equipment, subpoenaed his records, summoned him repeatedly to the grand jury, and even snooped through his trash, Ricci refused to cooperate. Years later he self-published a book about his experiences, In-Justice, with a dagger dripping blood on the cover and a wintry picture of City Hall on the back with the caption “A decade of corruption emanates from within these once hallowed halls.” Today Ricci freely admits that his city work skyrocketed as he contributed to Cianci.
Ricci said that he went to the grand jury twenty-seven times. The feds “wanted me to roll on Buddy.” Once, a prosecutor put his arm around Ricci and said, “We’re going to make you sing.” Ricci, who had always been a ball buster, went into the courtroom and started singing “Fly Me to the Moon.” After his grand-jury appearances, Ricci said he would stop by Cianci’s house on Power Street to tell him what had happened. The feds offered him money and the return of his equipment to testify against Cianci, Ricci said, but he refused. He didn’t want to be labeled a rat. Cianci cursed the prosecutors and urged Ricci to confront them. “Confront them yourself,” Ricci replied.
Ricci was never convicted of any corruption charges. But he did plead guilty to income-tax evasion and did four months in federal prison. He said that he pleaded on the advice of his lawyer, who said that the feds were going to keep gunning for him, so he might as well get it over with. He said that he kept his mouth shut about Cianci.
Meanwhile, Ronnie Glantz had his own decisions to make.
In 1985, Glantz and Tony Bucci were indicted for extorting seventy-seven thousand dollars in kickbacks from businessman James Notorantonio for the 1979 purchase of garbage trucks. They refused overtures to cooperate. Glantz said that he talked it over with his wife but couldn’t bring himself to be a rat. He and Bucci were tried and convicted in 1986. One month later Glantz was indicted again, for obstruction of justice and perjury. This crime concerned his lying to a grand jury to cover up his participation in a fraudulent land deal involving a proposed hazardous-waste recycling plant. Glantz went to trial again and was convicted in December 1986. The government’s star witness was Glantz’s partner in the recycling plant and another former Cianci confidant—Mickey Farina. Farina, who had pleaded guilty to making false statements, testified under a grant of immunity. He said that he turned on Glantz because his old friend had misrepresented him in his divorce back in 1978, by failing to file the divorce decree—which later complicated his second marriage. Glantz countered that he gave the decree to Farina, who didn’t file it because he was trying to conceal his assets from an investigation.
Either way, Glantz was screwed. Early in 1987 he was sentenced to eleven years in federal prison; the soonest he would be eligible for parole was in four years. That spring, at the age of forty-nine, Ronnie Glantz, the onetime jokester of City Hall, reported to Allenwood Federal Prison Camp in Pennsylvania, leaving his wife and four children and East Side home for a bunk bed in a dormitory room with nineteen other convicts. Allenwood was no country club. Glantz was thrust into a militarylike regimen—breakfast at six, report to his prison job by eight, mandatory head counts at 4 P.M. and 7 P.M., standing at attention beside his bed; lights out at nine. He was locked up with New York mobsters and inner-city drug dealers. He learned to avoid the TV room, where fights often broke out, and to be wary in the telephone line, where an inmate coming off a bad call home—his wife was leaving him, his kids hated him—might erupt and take a swing at the nearest inmate. He witnessed the ganglike rivalries between the black inmates from Washington and those from Philadelphia and New York. One summer day Glantz was assigned to a work crew picking dandelions on the prison grounds. Some of the other inmates took some yeast from the kitchen and put it in a plastic garbage bag filled with dandelions and let it ferment in the sun to make dandelion wine. It was a far cry from the vintage wines that Glantz had enjoyed on Federal Hill during his years as the second-most powerful man in City Hall.
His first summer in prison, Glantz wrote to the Rhode Island State Police, offering information regarding the hazardous-waste plant that he had been a partner in. The state police sent two investigators to visit Glantz in Allenwood. He talked generally about the plant and also about the corruption at City Hall. He said that Buddy Cianci, Joe DiSanto, and Mickey Farina had solicited and received bribes from a number of contractors. He said that he had been present for their conversations and, in some cases, the actual payoffs. In exchange for immunity, he offered to provide details of bribes and bid rigging.
Captain Michael J. Urso, Jr., then detective commander of the state police, met with Glantz and came away feeling that his story carried “the ring of truth.” Colonel Steven M. Pare, then a young detective and today the head of the state police, said that he found Glantz’s accounts of City Hall corruption convincing, including his description o
f the various bribery schemes involving contractors, his role as the bagman, and his accounts of cash payoffs being turned over to the mayor.
Glantz received immunity and continued to talk to the authorities. That fall, U.S. attorney Lincoln Almond said publicly that Cianci’s indictment was imminent, hoping to convince other witnesses to come forward. But it never happened. Although prosecutors didn’t doubt that Glantz had been involved in corruption with Cianci, they were concerned about his credibility, given his perjury conviction. They also had trouble finding other witnesses to corroborate his story. The five-year statute of limitations was also a problem—the clock had run out on many of the alleged crimes that Glantz had described.
Publicly, Cianci seemed unperturbed by the ongoing scrutiny. “Frankly, the whole thing is getting a little boring,” he said.
In February 1989 Almond announced the end of the Providence probe. He called the seven-year investigation a success, “despite the fact that some will go unpunished.”
“It can be disappointing,” said Almond, “but it happens quite often.”
WHILE RONNIE GLANTZ sat in prison, Buddy Cianci became a high flier in the world of real estate and contemplated his future in politics. It was the late 1980s, a boom time, and there was money to be made if you had the right connections and a willingness to take risks.
Cianci speculated in South Providence land, bought and sold a downtown office building for a million-dollar profit in just eight months, and opened two restaurants. One, Flyer’s, was near the airport in Warwick; the other, Trapper John’s, near Rhode Island Hospital, had a M*A*S*H theme. Another deal, netting Cianci and his partners an $850,000 profit, was sketched out on a napkin over drinks in a bar. Flush from his success, Cianci bought his rented carriage house on Power Street for $625,000, outbidding the president of Fleet National Bank, Terrence Murray, and borrowed $200,000 to purchase his yacht, the Nicola.
Two of Cianci’s former aides, Patrick Conley and Paul Campbell, brought him into the South Providence real estate ventures. Conley, the founder of the business, had attracted controversy when Cianci was mayor, for allegations that he received inside information from the mayor’s office about property that the city was going to offer at tax sale. Neighborhood activists criticized their dealings for contributing to neighborhood blight. One tenement house that Cianci and his partners purchased was cited for several housing-code violations.
Conley said that he and Cianci formed a partnership with another man, a real estate broker, who picked up run-down property at tax sales. They named it Solid Investment; Solid stood for “Scavengers of Land in Decline.” According to Conley, Cianci used his connections to obtain a two-hundred-thousand-dollar line of credit from First Bank & Trust, which had received city deposits when Cianci was mayor.
Cianci’s foray into real estate also received a boost from two crooked businessmen, Joseph Mollicone, Jr., and Joseph Cerilli, high rollers who defined the greedy eighties in Rhode Island. Mollicone, the driving force behind the deal, was the son of a Federal Hill banker, “Puppy Dog” Mollicone, who had been Raymond Patriarca’s personal banker.
In the early 1980s, when Cianci was mayor, Mollicone and Cerilli refurbished the historic Old Providence Journal Building. Cianci, who encouraged the project as part of his blueprint for downtown renewal, steered the city solicitor’s and building inspector’s offices into the building as paying tenants. Around the same time, Mollicone purchased Cianci’s house on Blackstone Boulevard, during the mayor’s divorce, for $345,000—a price that critics called high.
Mollicone and Cerilli would later allege that they paid off Cianci for his assistance. Mollicone said that they gave him seventy thousand dollars. Cerilli said that they gave him cash, after he left office, and booked it as “legal fees.”
After Cianci left office, Mollicone helped him launch his real estate career by selling him two condominiums in a medical office building. Cianci had to put down only $1,000, borrowing the remaining $155,000 from Mollicone’s bank. Later, in a standard transaction to delay capital-gains taxes, Cianci swapped the two condos to Mollicone for a restaurant near the airport, and became a restaurateur.
In the late 1980s Cianci’s fortunes turned. After earning $780,000 in 1987 and $212,000 in 1988, he lost money over the next two years, as the real estate market declined and the restaurant business slumped. His house and his other properties were heavily mortgaged.
Meanwhile, the mayor’s job was opening up. Joseph Paolino announced his candidacy for governor in 1990. In April Conley, who was also a prominent Rhode Island historian and a former Providence College professor, formed a nonprofit group called the City Symposium, to discuss economic and political issues facing Providence. But the group’s real purpose was to convince Cianci, who was on the fence, to run for mayor. Besides Conley, the group consisted of old allies like Norm Roussel, Paul Campbell, and Frank Corrente, an accountant who had been city controller at the end of Buddy I, and Thomas Rossi, a state representative from the politically important Fourth Ward, Tony Bucci’s old territory. Rossi was the only elected official to publicly support Cianci.
The City Symposium raised fifteen thousand dollars to conduct a poll of how voters would view a Cianci candidacy. Conley said that the poll found a die-hard core of 23 percent of the voters willing to support Cianci “even if he raped a girl in Kennedy Plaza or robbed a bank at gunpoint.” The poll also showed other voters willing to consider Cianci, which gave him hope that they could pick up another 13 to 14 percent and win a three-way race. Cianci’s consultants drew up a twenty-page strategy paper stressing the “second chance” theme. They assumed that 58 percent of the city’s voters would never vote for Cianci, but that didn’t matter. They were banking on a three-way race and needed just 34 percent of the vote.
But first they needed a candidate. In strategy sessions at the “Crime Castle,” as some of his followers dubbed his house on Power Street, Cianci was hesitant. He knew that he would be a long shot, and worried about raising money, especially with his personal financial troubles. He confided to Wendy Materna that he wasn’t sure he wanted to return to the craziness of politics. It had also been a turbulent year personally. His mother had died of throat cancer in 1989, on Mother’s Day. And his sixteen-year-old daughter, Nicole, struggling with emotional problems stemming from her parents’ divorce and her attempts to win her father’s approval, had moved in with him.
But Materna knew Cianci too well. Although he seemed generally happy, there was an undercurrent to their conversations. For four years, she had listened to him begin his sentences, “When I was mayor . . .” Although she loved their life together, she gave him the final push.
A few weeks before the June filing deadline, Materna slipped into City Hall, incognito, to pick up blank nomination papers. She had just come off a boat from Prudence Island in Narragansett Bay, where her family had a summer home. She walked into the Board of Canvassers office, flecks of seaweed in her hair and salt spray on her face, and asked for papers for mayor. The workers looked curiously at the leggy blonde in shorts and baseball cap.
As the filing deadline approached, the public speculation about Buddy’s plans intensified. Even President Bush, during a White House luncheon with reporters from around the country, asked Providence Journal political columnist M. Charles Bakst about Cianci. “Talk about a guy who liked to mix it up,” Bush said.
On June 27, the filing deadline, Patrick Conley went to Cianci’s house in the morning and found him lounging in bed. Conley had written an announcement speech. Cianci asked him to read it. Conley stood at the foot of Cianci’s bed and delivered the speech in his deep, theatrical voice. Then he tossed it on the bed and left, saying: “Jeez, Buddy, you can win. Between now and the end of the day, grow some testicles.”
Later, after lunch, Materna went to Power Street and found Cianci still in bed, and uncertain. “Let’s go,” she told him. He got up and got dressed. His driver took them to WHJJ for his show, which began at 3 P.M.
Upstairs, in his second-floor office, Mayor Paolino leapt up when he heard the news. Paolino, expected to win the state Democratic-party endorsement for governor that night, headed for the door. “That does it,” he declared to some aides. “Somebody’s got to stop him. I’m going downstairs and file to run against him.” But Paolino’s aides urged him not to act so hastily, delaying him long enough so that he missed the deadline. (Cianci’s advisers had concluded that he couldn’t beat Paolino.)
About twenty minutes later, Cianci and Materna took a preliminary victory lap through City Hall, trailed by television cameras. He was cheered by city workers who rushed out of their offices and hung over the stairwell railings. Some cried.
Cianci’s comeback bid made national headlines—and, local critics said, further embarrassed a city with a legacy of chicanery. (A few years earlier, the city had adopted the tourism slogan “Providence harbors the best,” which some people said made the city sound like a haven for fugitives.) The Wall Street Journal, in a front-page story headlined AMAZING COMEBACK: BUDDY CIANCI IS TOAST OF PROVIDENCE, said that a Cianci comeback “would be the envy of Richard Nixon.”