by Mike Stanton
Then the chant began: “Councilwoman Williams, why don’t you lay off your husband?”
Fenton cajoled Williams to stick to her commitment and not hang the rest of them out to dry. He promised to go door-to-door with her in her ward and support her. Fenton, who had been in the U.S. Senate with Chafee in 1986 during the historic tax-reform debate, said that this was as dramatic as anything he’d witnessed.
Not wanting to waste any time, the council voted. Fenton wasn’t sure which way Williams would go. When her turn came, she voted against Cianci. The Zero Eight had held. Fenton knew that the balance of power had shifted when Local 1033’s business agent, who had always ignored him, suggested that they have lunch.
“The city just changed directions,” Fenton declared, exultant.
Downstairs, listening on the speaker in his office, Cianci was furious. As Fenton later put it: “The king wasn’t the king for a while. It stung.”
Fenton had emerged as a potential rival to Cianci in 1994. On Friday nights his former boss and Cianci’s old nemesis, John Chafee, would call him at home to offer encouragement. In 1993, with Fenton considering a run for mayor, Senator Chafee cosponsored a political fund-raiser for him along with another political heavyweight and onetime Cianci rival, former governor Joe Garrahy.
Fenton began to notice cars outside his house on the East Side, off-duty cops or firefighters behind the wheel. Some were the men he had criticized for obtaining fraudulent disability pensions. Often, he said, he was watched by Providence patrolman Rodney Patterson, who had been assigned by Cianci to an elite anticorruption unit when the mayor returned to office. (Patterson and two other members of the five-officer unit had criminal records.) Meanwhile, Fenton said, a union official who served on the board of the United Way, where his wife worked, tried to have her fired.
For the most part, it was merely a nuisance. The one time Fenton feared for his life was when an ex-cop whose disability pension he had questioned left a message on his answering machine, threatening to kill him. Fenton told some state police detectives he knew. After they had a chat with the ex-cop, he left Fenton alone.
After several months, Fenton got tired of being followed all the time. He complained to Frank Corrente and threatened to hold a press conference and show pictures that he had taken of the cars. Corrente denied that they were responsible but promised to look into it. Afterward, said Fenton, the harassment stopped.
Following the Zero Eight vote, Cianci, as promised, eliminated the Downtown Providence Improvement Association, run by Rita Williams’s husband. Lyman Williams was demoted to a Public Works maintenance job. The following year, after he underwent double-bypass heart surgery, the city fought his efforts to collect worker’s compensation.
Two policemen in Cianci’s anticorruption unit, Rodney Patterson and Nic Ricamo, started following Lyman Williams. According to Williams, on Yom Kippur they followed him to his synagogue in Barrington and later videotaped him as he relaxed on his boat in a nearby marina. Cianci publicly charged that the tapes showed Williams working on his boat, proving that he had filed a fraudulent worker’s-comp claim. But the city never produced the tapes to back up the mayor’s claim. Instead, after the case dragged on for two years, the case was settled in Williams’s favor.
The mayor did make one last overture, the Williamses said. After Lyman Williams recovered from his surgery, Cianci offered him his job back—on the condition that the Second Ward Democratic Committee, which Lyman Williams chaired, back Cianci in 1994. “No one works for me who doesn’t support me,” said Cianci.
Lyman Williams refused and took early retirement instead.
Meanwhile, as a result of Cianci’s failure to address the city’s longer-term financial problems, he failed to win a tax increase in 1992, which further depleted the city of needed revenue. In the opinion of the council’s auditor, Stephen Woerner, that set the city on a downward spiral. To compensate, the mayor embarked on a series of questionable moves that would jeopardize the city’s long-term financial health for years to come—most notably, drastically reducing the city’s annual contributions to the pension system. By decade’s end, the system would be underfunded by several hundred million dollars. As a result, the Providence Renaissance that began to emerge in the mid-1990s was built on quicksand.
Meanwhile, Cianci was preoccupied with being Providence’s head cheerleader. To inject more life into the city center, he flew to Anchorage, Alaska, in 1992 to woo the 1996 National Figure Skating Championships. Three weeks later, Cianci landed the Bruins, a minor-league hockey team from Maine, for Providence and helped the team sell three thousand season tickets before its first game that fall. “Anything we can do to put a little life and money into the downtown area has to be considered a plus,” he said.
The Providence Bruins were a hit. During their first winter, in 1992–93, they played before ten thousand fans a night at the Civic Center. Cianci was a regular, if habitually late, fan. As the hockey players chased the puck around the ice, the mayor would make a grand entrance to his seats at center ice, carrying a bottle of champagne and squiring Wendy Materna.
Trailing behind was the mayor’s court jester, Walter Miller, who carried a plastic totem pole. During lulls in the action, Walter would riffle a worn deck of cards and entertain the mayor with card tricks. “What number do ya like, Mayor, what number do ya like?” prattled Walter.
But not even Cianci’s showmanship, or Walter’s sleight of hand, could make the mayor’s financial problems disappear. Buddy, like his city, was nearly broke.
IN 1992, AS the tax debate with the City Council raged, Cianci was fighting another battle; this one, which played out behind the scenes, was to avoid personal bankruptcy. Creditors were banging on his door, threatening to foreclose on his house, seeking to attach his salary.
The real estate empire he had built while in exile had collapsed as a result of the recession and the state banking crisis. His two restaurants had gone out of business, leaving a trail of debts. His million-dollar house on Power Street was heavily mortgaged. He owed about $700,000 on the failed restaurant near the airport. He had a $140,000 note on his yacht. A personal financial statement prepared during the summer of 1992, while he was battling the Zero Eight, revealed a negative net worth of $1.4 million.
Declaring bankruptcy might have made sense financially, but it would have been devastating politically, especially for a mayor trying to shake a reputation for fiscal recklessness. Instead, Cianci relied on a web of aides, city employees, lawyers who represented the city, and businessmen. Wendy Materna also helped, cosigning on the $140,000 loan with him; this gave her an interest in his yacht, which already carried $189,000 in debt. He also borrowed heavily from Wendy Materna.
In December 1992 Cianci sold a piece of his house, which had been divided into condominium units, to Michael Kent, who operated several bars in Providence, for $200,000, averting foreclosure. The mayor said that he paid rent to Kent, which in effect made Kent the mayor’s landlord. The arrangement raised questions among Providence police officers and other club operators, who felt that the city wasn’t aggressive dealing with rowdyism and underage drinking at Kent’s bars.
The mayor also used city lawyers to help negotiate with his creditors, and he borrowed money from city employees, most notably Frank Corrente and another aide, Artin H. Coloian.
Through the 1990s Corrente and Coloian lent the mayor $150,000 between them, according to federal court proceedings. Corrente and Coloian also worked quietly to help dig Cianci out of debt—holding meetings, dealing with various parties, and trying to regulate the mayor’s spending.
For all his maneuvering, the financial fate of Buddy Cianci ultimately came down to whether the Hooters girls would save him. Early in 1993, Hooters, the national restaurant chain known for its busty waitresses, was considering leasing Cianci’s defunct airport restaurant. The mayor had already staved off foreclosure by going to Hartford, Connecticut, and convincing the president of Northeast Savings B
ank, which held a $700,000 note on the property, to reduce his debt to about $400,000. Coloian then lined up a local financier, Gregory Demetrekas, to lend Cianci the money to repay the bank. Now the mayor, who also owed more than $70,000 in back taxes, needed a paying tenant so that he could make his loan payments to Demetrekas. Enter Hooters, which had been called America’s first “breastaurant.” The deal almost fell through when Hooters executives rejected the location, feeling that it wouldn’t attract enough traffic. Cianci’s representatives convinced the franchisees to appeal to Hooters headquarters in Atlanta. The businessmen flew to Atlanta on April 1 and won the approval of the company’s chairman just hours before his son was killed in a plane crash along with NASCAR racing champion Alan Kulwicki. Had the meeting been any later, the deal might never have been approved. Instead, the mayor had wriggled out of another financial jam.
Meanwhile, old Cianci allies like Pat Conley and adman Norm Roussel felt the sting from their financial ties to the mayor. Conley wound up declaring bankruptcy and losing property in South Providence that he and his wife had put up as collateral for some of his business ventures with Cianci, whom he subsequently sued. One day when Conley was in court, he said, he bumped into Roussel, who had been sued by a bank and ordered to repay $124,000 on the campaign loan he had cosigned for the mayor during his 1990 comeback. Roussel subsequently closed his advertising firm, which Cianci had used in each of his mayoral campaigns, and declared bankruptcy. He soon found a job at City Hall as Cianci’s $50,000-a-year communications coordinator. Cianci said that the job had nothing to do with the loan, and that he had repaid it himself.
“Buddy is like crime,” a bitter Conley said. “He never pays.”
Wendy Materna could attest to that. She said she grew accustomed to walking into restaurants with the mayor and never having anyone present him with a bill. Even Materna’s longtime family dentist, a political junkie, didn’t send her a bill for nine years, to ingratiate himself with Cianci, she said.
Adding to Cianci’s financial turmoil, the state receiver for Joe Mollicone’s failed bank sued Cianci, seeking repayment of $150,000 in unpaid loans. Cianci fretted about the publicity, given Mollicone’s notoriety as a $13 million embezzler, and said that he barely knew him.
Then, in the spring of 1992, Mollicone resurfaced, turning himself in to the authorities; he had been hiding in Salt Lake City for the past eighteen months. At a neighborhood groundbreaking in Mount Hope, Cianci made a crack to Josh Fenton about an ethics complaint that had been filed against the councilman; Fenton shot back that he heard things weren’t going well with Mollicone in the grand jury. Cianci, he said, turned white and walked away quickly, then came back and apologized.
His critics wondered how he managed to support his extravagant lifestyle, the house, the boat, and his other debts on his annual mayor’s salary of $114,000. It didn’t add up. Josh Fenton gathered public records about the mayor’s finances—his mortgages, his yacht registration, his campaign-finance reports, and his state ethics commission filings—and went to Lincoln Almond, who was still the U.S. attorney for Rhode Island. “How do these two things jibe?” asked Fenton. Almond was sympathetic; he said that he’d been investigating Cianci for years.
Cianci lived “on the brink,” said Roussel, “because he enjoys the finer things in life.” He didn’t let his debts diminish his quality of life. The mayor used public funds to eat in fancy restaurants and spent campaign funds on meals, trips, hair grooming, Christmas gifts for family members, even birthday parties for his young grandchildren, featuring Danoe the Clown and Barney the Dinosaur.
City vendors were also happy to help; the pony-ride concessionaire at Roger Williams Park gave Cianci a deal on pony rides for his granddaughter’s seventh birthday. Later, Coloian would note that the children at the birthday parties were future voters. Cianci justified the expenditures, saying, “Everything in my life is political.”
According to one party to the discussions, Corrente, who doubled as Cianci’s campaign treasurer, asked about the tax implications of the mayor’s taking an interest-free loan from the campaign. A tax adviser warned that the IRS would regard it as income if he didn’t make regular payments on the loan and pay interest.
The blurry line between the mayor’s private and political finances caught the eye of the IRS, which audited both. No public action ever resulted; privately, Cianci boasted that he came through the audit clean. When a city auditor questioned Cianci’s public spending on restaurants, Corrente brushed him off; when the auditor persisted, his job was eliminated.
Even the Mayor’s Own Marinara Sauce, sold to benefit the mayor’s nonprofit scholarship fund for needy college-bound Providence youths, straddled Cianci’s personal and political finances. In 1995, he started a private company, Capital Innovations, to market his marinara sauce and other products. Since the company’s books are private, it is impossible to determine how much money went to the mayor for expenses before proceeds from the sale of the sauce went to the scholarship fund. Capital Innovations sold sauce to the Friends of Cianci campaign organization, which used the sauce at fund-raising events and also for handing out to dignitaries. The mayor also used Capital Innovations to pay some of his daughter’s personal expenses; after she got into an auto accident, the Providence police said that her car insurance had been paid by Capital Innovations. And the company was paid “finder’s fees” by Incanto Soprano, a Providence company run by two old Cianci friends that produced olive oil from a vineyard in the Puglia region of southern Italy. Cianci said that the fees were for his help in brokering the sale of olive oil to a food wholesaler in Maryland. A few years later, Incanto Soprano—Italian for “enchantment of the highest order”—began producing the Mayor’s Own Extra Virgin Olive Oil to benefit his scholarship fund. When the mayor held a press conference to unveil the olive oil, Incanto Soprano was delinquent on a $50,000 economic-development loan from the city. The city held off on foreclosure after the company said that it had a $75,000 order in the works, for 1,876 cases of the Mayor’s Own Extra Virgin Olive Oil, which was bound for Providence on a freighter from Naples.
Corrente was quickly establishing himself as the mayor’s go-to guy at City Hall. A native of the North End, where his father had worked in a macaroni factory, Corrente controlled jobs, contracts, union negotiations, and the mayor’s campaign fund. Hired by Joe Doorley in the sixties, Corrente rose to the position of city controller under Cianci and was a loyal political fund-raiser; he also grew familiar with the grand jury, answering a number of document subpoenas during the myriad corruption probes that marked Buddy I. He had an old-school political mentality, bred in the North End and the Fifth Ward—you helped your friends. The lines defining ethical conduct were blurry. When Corrente’s wife, Thelma, a Providence school nurse, received a promotion and became the School Department’s health services administrator, a school board member said that she was pressured by Frank, which he denied.
Corrente negotiated city labor contracts with the Laborers’ Union, whose national general president, Arthur A. Coia, was an old family friend. Corrente’s son, a lawyer, was married to Coia’s daughter and worked at Coia’s law firm, which did union legal work. “It’s better to negotiate with a friend than with an adversary,” said Corrente. When the Laborers’ legal-defense fund, which the city funded, bought a Providence office building from a partnership that included Corrente and Coia for $2.3 million, Corrente denied any conflict. He had been unaware of the details of the transaction, or even the identity of the buyer, he said. The sale occurred in the fall of 1994; the following month, the U.S. Justice Department notified Coia that it was planning a government takeover of the 770,000-member union because it was controlled by the Mafia. (Coia, a big supporter and labor confidant of President Clinton who was an overnight guest in the Lincoln Bedroom, subsequently convinced the Justice Department to allow him to supervise his own cleanup despite the fact that federal prosecutors had identified him as a mob puppet.)
Whi
le Cianci was out cutting ribbons and holding press conferences, Corrente saw that things ran smoothly and protected the mayor from embarrassment. As Corrente explained his job to another aide, “All you have to do, boss, is make sure the king’s ass is firmly in the chair.”
An accountant by trade, Corrente was a gangster at heart. People referred to him as the mayor’s “strong arm.” He favored hallway meetings, paranoid that his office was bugged, and spoke in a high-pitched, staccato voice, frequently mangling his sentences, to Cianci’s amusement. Subpoenaed to appear before a grand jury investigating a city employee, he said nonchalantly, “I don’t care if I have to go to jail—as long as it says on my gravestone, ‘He was a stand-up guy.’ ” Still, he was well liked by many people, including Cianci’s opponents, because he was a man of his word who got things done.
Corrente, who had made money from real estate investments, said that he didn’t need the paycheck at City Hall; he could always retire and play golf. But he liked the power and the action. A wiry man in his sixties, with a silvery toupee, the married Corrente chased younger women. He had long-running affairs with at least two City Hall employees. He heaped gifts upon them. Both women received raises and promotions that set their coworkers grumbling. City employees would corner Cianci at events and complain that they wanted a raise like Frank’s girlfriend had gotten.
It made for a long-running soap opera at City Hall, as the rival mistresses confronted each other, or Corrente’s wife stormed into the building to confront her cheating husband and the other women. One time Corrente took one of his girlfriends to Cape Cod, where she left her tennis bracelet in their hotel room. The hotel called Corrente’s wife to report that they had found her bracelet, which sent her charging down to City Hall to yell at Frank.