by Mike Stanton
In his first year he plugged the budget deficit by pushing a tax increase through a reluctant City Council. He proposed an ambitious hundred-million-dollar “Providence Plan,” to replace old housing and spruce up the city over the next several years—where the money would come from was less clear. He rescued Trinity Rep with a two-hundred-thousand-dollar city loan.
Cianci also preached the need to redistribute the wealth of the suburbs to Providence, the heart of the city-state, which added so much to the vitality of Rhode Island.
“Elephants cost a lot to feed these days,” he told a Chamber of Commerce breakfast. “Even the birds don’t sing for nothing. They want to charge you a fee.”
Looking around the room, filled with suburban business types, Cianci continued: “Now, I like the people who live in Barrington and East Greenwich. But think about it. They come into Providence in the morning to drop off their children at Moses Brown or the Wheeler School—great taxpayers for the city. Then they go to the Providence Public Library to drop off a book that’s overdue. Then they say, ‘Let’s go see Grandma at the hospital.’ Then maybe they go to the zoo to see the penguins. And then end up saying, ‘Why don’t we go catch something at Trinity tonight?’ But you know who pays for all those services? The taxpayer in Providence, the elderly lady sweeping in front of her house, because the city can’t afford to provide the street sweepers anymore.”
Privately, the mayor could be more caustic, fueled by his resentment and envy of the old Yankee elite. During a meeting in his office with Rhode Island Hospital executives, who wanted to start a South Providence job-training program, he harangued them for not living in Providence.
Another time, seeking corporate assistance for the city, the mayor attended a breakfast meeting at the Turks Head Club, a preserve of Providence’s old-line business establishment. The president of Narragansett Electric was there. So were the head of the gas company, the publisher of The Providence Journal, bankers, lawyers, and corporate executives.
As Cianci later told the story, disparagingly: “These guys get up early. They were eating eggs. I had tomato juice and coffee.” At one point, he turned to Alan Hassenfeld, chief executive of the Hasbro toy company, which his father had started, and lectured him: “Let’s get one thing straight. You make fucking toys. I run a city. I have a police department, a fire department. You make fucking toys. And the only reason you do that is because your father left you the company, because you’re a member of the Lucky Sperm Club.”
Given Cianci’s legacy of corruption, suburban lawmakers were reluctant to throw money into the urban sinkhole. But the mayor found a sympathetic ear in the new Democratic governor, Bruce Sundlun.
The son of a tough, self-made Jewish lawyer from the East Side, Sundlun was a wealthy executive who had run a Providence television station and developed an interest in political office later in life. He had served on the business task force that rescued Cianci’s city from the brink of bankruptcy in the early 1980s, and later sold his carriage house on Power Street to Cianci. He had spent millions of dollars on three campaigns for governor, finally winning in 1990.
Arrogant and imperious, Sundlun was in his sixties and on his third wife but still had an eye for younger blondes. While he was governor, an illegitimate college-aged daughter popped up threatening a paternity suit, and state environmental officials investigated him for shooting raccoons at his Newport estate.
Cianci and Sundlun struck up a jocular friendship. The mayor teased the governor about his wooden style. Sundlun, who wanted to be one of the political guys, kidded Cianci about his toupees. Sundlun rode to Providence’s rescue with a bundle of state aid—with less accountability for how it was spent than some leaders would have liked.
The irony was that Sundlun, as a businessman in the early eighties, had served on the Providence Review Commission, which had been created to rescue the city from bankruptcy and Cianci’s fiscal mismanagement. The city’s finances had been in such a shambles, Sundlun recalled, that there were “hundreds, thousands” of uncashed checks stuffed in desk drawers throughout City Hall. But as governor in the nineties, Sundlun believed that the state’s fortunes were inextricably linked to the city’s, and he considered Cianci the only one with the political skills to hold the city together.
Sundlun’s favorite story about Cianci’s showmanship involved the time that the mayor was “discovered” by a Hollywood producer. It happened in the early eighties, when Sundlun, then chairman of Outlet Communications, brought executives from Columbia Pictures to the mayor’s office when they were in Providence on business. For about an hour, Cianci regaled the executives with political yarns and one-liners. Afterward, Ray Stark, producer of the movie Funny Girl, pulled Sundlun aside and asked, “Is this guy for real?” Then he asked how much Cianci made. Sundlun told him. Stark replied: “You tell that guy that I’ll pay him two hundred fifty thousand dollars, give him a three-year contract, and run him in a sitcom. We’ll call it The Mayor.” Stark insisted that he was serious, that Cianci had real talent. But though Cianci was flattered and would tell the story for years, he wasn’t ready to give up the political stage.
The mayor was a master at grabbing what he liked to call “other people’s money.” And he could be a showoff about it. Sitting in his office with union leaders, he hatched a scheme on the spot to get state funds for a project. According to Rick Brooks, president of Rhode Island’s United Nurses & Allied Professionals union, Cianci turned to the union men and said: “Watch this. I’m going to call the governor, convince him to come up with the money, and make him think it’s his idea.”
Brooks watched as Cianci got Sundlun on the phone and schmoozed him. “Hi, Bruce . . . great things in the works . . . great opportunity for the governor to show his support of the unions.” All the while, Cianci was winking and waggling his eyebrows at the union men—showing them that the governor was going for it.
Walking into Cianci’s office, said Brooks, could be like stepping into a Fellini film.
When a Westin Hotel was being built in Providence in the early 1990s, Brooks’s union set up a meeting with a hotel executive from Florida to discuss jobs for low-income residents. As they waited in the mayor’s anteroom, the straitlaced exec found himself being entertained with card tricks by Walter Miller, a disheveled, gap-toothed denizen of downtown who had become Cianci’s unofficial mascot. Walter, who was also a racetrack tout, loved Buddy. He hung around in the outer office, prompting one secretary to light a candle to cover his body odor, and carried a battered boom box plastered with Cianci bumper stickers. He liked to make up songs about Buddy, which he sang in a fast, scratchy voice. Once, when Umberto Crenca, the artistic director of AS220, a nonprofit arts center and café downtown, came to see Cianci about renegotiating a city loan, the mayor told him, “I’m going to have you negotiate with Walter.” He put them in a room off the mayor’s office, where Miller proceeded to scribble numbers and gibberish on a piece of paper as Crenca made his pitch. Finally, Cianci, who had been agreeable to the deal all along, came in and asked, “Okay, Walter, what did you decide?” Miller said that Crenca seemed like a nice guy and gave him the thumbs-up.
When Cianci finally arrived for the Westin meeting, he made a fuss over the exec, then called out to Walter: “Make the noise. Make the noise.” Walter made a gurgling, clicking sound deep in his throat.
The meeting moved into the mayor’s office, where Cianci launched into a monologue spiced with jokes and lewd remarks. He was simultaneously charming and subtly menacing. “I met your CEO a few weeks ago,” he began. “Nice guy. Smooth as a minister’s dick.”
Eventually, Cianci got to the point. The Westin was a public hotel, and the mayor expected the company to work with the unions and hire Providence residents. “I still control the liquor licenses in this city, and I’ve never yet seen a hotel that’s been able to make money selling iced tea,” he said.
Cianci ended by arranging a police escort to the airport, so the man wouldn’t miss his
plane. The mayor sent the dumbstruck executive off with a coffee-table picture book of Providence, which he autographed “To my friend Harry.”
Other establishments that served the mayor did not always fare so well.
One of the mayor’s favorite haunts was Amsterdam’s Rotisserie and Bar, a trendy yuppie spot on South Main Street. The mayor’s limo would glide up to the curb, where a line of customers waited on the sidewalk, and sweep past with his entourage as the wait staff hurried to clear a prime table.
Cianci ordered a steak, read the newspaper, held court. He drank B&B on the rocks, from a snifter. Often he would leave without paying the tab, said the owner, Peter Dupre, who wrote it off as “the cost of doing business.”
Toward the end of his first year back in office, on December 16, 1991, Cianci tried to breeze in as usual, this time with Wendy Materna and another couple. There was music that night, and the place was crowded. Although Cianci had come for dinner, the bouncer, who was new, refused to let him in without paying the two-dollar cover charge. Cianci argued in vain, telling the bouncer, “I’m the mayor of Providence, here.” Then he walked away. A short time later, the city fire marshal pulled up in a big red van, accompanied by a fire truck, its lights flashing. Amsterdam’s was closed down for overcrowding. Two days later, its temporary entertainment license was suspended.
On the advice of a patron who worked for the city, Dupre went to City Hall to make peace with the mayor. He had made an appointment for the morning but was kept waiting most of the day. Finally, late in the afternoon, Dupre was shown into Cianci’s office. As Dupre later described it, their fifteen-minute meeting was not pleasant.
Cianci asked Dupre if he was aware that Amsterdam’s had exceeded the legal occupancy limit. Dupre tried to explain that the bouncer had a clicker to count the people coming in and out. Cianci didn’t want to hear it. Then the mayor changed tack.
“I have it on good authority that you’re selling drugs in that place,” Dupre recalled Cianci’s telling him.
Horrified, Dupre protested that it wasn’t true.
“Well, if I say you’re selling drugs, you’re selling drugs,” Cianci insisted.
The mayor chastised Dupre for his bouncer’s disrespectful behavior and threatened to run the restaurateur out of town on the next bus. Dupre tried to be humble and low-key, but every time he tried to explain, Cianci cut him off. “You don’t want to get into a pissing match with me,” said Cianci, “because you’re a cup of water, and I’m Niagara Falls.”
Eventually, Amsterdam’s was allowed to reopen. The restaurant was fined $250 for overcrowding. And Dupre, on the advice of his City Hall patron, donated $250 to Cianci’s campaign. Until he closed Amsterdam’s and went back to New York a few years later—largely because of Cianci, he said—Dupre lived with the lingering fear that he might be set up with drugs someday.
Although Dupre and his partners kept their mouths shut, word spread quickly through Providence’s restaurant community. Other club owners approached him sympathetically and said, “You think you’re the only one?”
JOSH FENTON KNEW that he had arrived as a member of the loyal opposition to Buddy Cianci when he started seeing the unmarked police cars outside his house.
Elected to the City Council in 1990, at the age of twenty-seven, Fenton was bright and brash and full of questions. Why, for instance, did city employees who worked outdoors receive a paid day off when the temperature hit ninety degrees? Why were elected officials allowed to collect pensions from the municipal labor union whose contracts they ratified? Why were more than 90 percent of the city’s firefighters going out on costly disability pensions? And why was the mayor, with his million-dollar staff and personal expense account and four police drivers and city limousine, always trying to raise taxes instead of cutting costs?
As the only Independent on the otherwise all-Democratic City Council, Fenton was the de facto minority leader. As a minority of one, he sometimes questioned the council’s actions as well; for instance, holding its annual Christmas party at Andino’s, a Federal Hill restaurant owned by a convicted mob killer. (The killer’s picture appeared in an old state police organizational chart of the Providence Mafia that Fenton had found one day, jammed in the back of a file cabinet in his office at the state Department of Environmental Management.)
If Fenton seemed politically savvy beyond his years, perhaps it was because he had worked in Washington as an aide to two U.S. senators, Maine’s George Mitchell and Rhode Island’s John Chafee. After a difficult childhood in Providence’s Mount Hope neighborhood, a pocket of lower-income families and blacks amidst the wealth of the East Side, Fenton won a scholarship to Suffield Academy, a Connecticut prep school. In 1990, newly married, he ran for council in his old neighborhood, part of the Third Ward, and beat the Democratic incumbent by sixteen votes.
The council was an elected position; Fenton’s full-time job was as a state environmental lobbyist. He was also working on a master’s degree in environmental studies at Brown University; for his thesis he was analyzing the quality of life and health risks in Providence’s twenty-five neighborhoods.
On the City Council in the early 1990s, Fenton emerged as Cianci’s leading critic. He questioned government waste, generous spending on the mayor’s cronies, and Cianci’s giveaways to the politically powerful unions. He called the mayor “a spending maniac,” more interested in his self-aggrandizement than in cutting the city’s runaway labor costs. As a result, Fenton argued, Providence was “wallpapered with FOR SALE signs” as the middle class fled to the suburbs, further eroding the city’s tax base, its neighborhoods, and its schools.
Cianci tried to dismiss him as “a youthful and ambitious politician.” But Fenton remained an effective critic. In 1991 he helped lead a council revolt against Cianci’s efforts to raise taxes. But the mayor, who had been outmaneuvering the council when Fenton was in grammar school, persuaded four members to change their votes at the last minute, and prevailed.
In Fenton’s view, he was a mystery to Cianci. What did he want? Following his dictum to “marry your enemies,” the mayor offered Fenton a city job, running the Parks Department. He declined.
Late one night in the spring of 1991 Fenton and his wife were walking down Thayer Street, near Brown, when they saw Cianci sitting alone in Andrea’s. He motioned them in. This was shortly after Desert Storm. Cianci told them how he had recently met with Kuwait’s consulate general about establishing some sort of relationship between Kuwait and Providence. He asked Fenton if he would like to go to Kuwait, to represent the city; of course, everything would be paid for.
Fenton never did get to Kuwait. He remained in Providence, pushing the mayor. In the summer of 1992, Fenton was increasingly frustrated by Cianci’s failure to tackle the city’s fiscal problems. One night he was on the telephone with Rita Williams, the councilwoman from the neighboring Second Ward, discussing the latest budget impasse.
“Why don’t we just freeze taxes?” said Williams.
“I’ll second that,” said Fenton.
Out of that grew the Zero Eight—eight of the council’s fifteen members rebelling against Cianci. The next day, a Wednesday, Fenton typed a letter calling for a special council meeting, with a cover letter pledging to vote for a tax freeze. He asked everyone to sign it, so it would be harder to back out.
The meeting was set for that Friday, July 24, at 5:30 P.M. Cianci requested a special council meeting of his own the same day at five—in the mayor’s chambers.
Fenton and several other council members skipped the meeting with the mayor, fearing that it would violate the state’s open-meetings law. A previous meeting with the mayor and council members had turned ugly. In that session, Cianci had bluntly told one councilwoman that she owed him her vote because he had given her boyfriend a city job. He called another councilwoman a hypocrite because she and her husband collectively had three government Blue Cross plans. Then he stalked over to his bar, poured himself a double Scotch, and asked a co
uncil staff member, “How do you work with these people?”
Still, several council members did show up that Friday in the mayor’s office, including Rita Williams and other members of the Zero Eight.
Cianci, flanked by his top aides—Almagno, Corrente, and Rossi—was seated at his desk when the meeting began, but he quickly began pacing around the room. He demanded to know what they proposed to cut from the budget if they refused to pass his tax increase. Someone suggested closing unnecessary fire stations; one of Fenton’s most persistent criticisms was that the Fire Department was overstaffed.
The mayor turned to Williams and threw rapid-fire questions at her, like a prosecutor. “Which stations do you want me to cut? Tell me which ones, which ones do you want to cut? . . . You sit in that [mayor’s] chair and tell me what to do.”
Williams offered to close a station in her ward. “Fine,” said Cianci. “Send a letter to your area and see if it gets support.”
Williams also suggested reducing Fire Department overtime. Cianci countered that he could cut the Downtown Providence Improvement Association, which her husband ran. Offended, Williams stood up to leave.
“Walk out and abdicate your responsibility,” snarled Cianci.
She came back.
The meeting wore on, as surly union members gathered one floor up in the council chambers and railed against the Zero Eight.
When the meeting with Cianci finally broke up, after two and a half hours, several of the council members appeared dazed. The mayor’s “brain-washing exercise,” as one called it, had been hard to resist. Even Williams, who had suggested the freeze, was weakening.
Walking into the council chambers, Williams, Fenton, and the rest of the Zero Eight were confronted by five hundred screaming, cursing union members. Fenton looked around at the line of uniformed police officers that held back the crowd and wondered how quickly the unionized police would come to his defense if something happened. Before the meeting, some firefighters had burned Fenton in effigy.