by Mike Stanton
For once the mayor was speechless. He turned pale under his pancake makeup. Aiken, smiling, noticed that Cianci was carrying a paper bag. He wondered, half jokingly, what was inside.
Cianci nodded curtly and hurried out of the restaurant. The redneck FBI agent definitely did not fit into the mayor’s blueprint for the Providence Renaissance.
Cianci would have been even less pleased to see Aiken had he followed the FBI agent’s career.
After leaving Providence in 1981, Aiken had risen through the ranks to become the FBI’s foremost authority on public corruption. The head of the Bureau’s Public Corruption Unit in Washington, he had helped design undercover operations that nailed California legislators, Florida mobsters, Mississippi county supervisors, and Washington, D.C., police officers. In the California case, agents posing as corrupt lobbyists had bribed state legislators in Sacramento to pass a meaningless bill. Then, to prevent the embarrassment of having the governor sign the bill into law, Aiken had instructed the agents to go back to the legislators and say that they’d changed their mind. The lawmakers dutifully took another sixty thousand to kill the bill.
“Greed,” Aiken would say, “overcomes common sense every time.”
Aiken had learned from the FBI agent who worked on Abscam, the famous sting of congressmen in the late 1970s, that undercover investigations were the way to go. The success rate was 95 percent, compared to just 5 percent for cases of “historic corruption,” where investigators try to unravel shadowy transactions that have already occurred, usually one-on-one, with untraceable cash.
Aiken had been back in Providence for about a year when he ran into Cianci. He could still remember his wife’s dropping him off for work that first day. Standing in front of City Hall, briefcase in hand like the other businessmen hurrying past him, Aiken felt like he’d never left.
His wife, Cheryl, thought that he’d hate it. Aiken had had a big job and a bright future in Washington. He worked just a few blocks from the White House and met regularly with the FBI director. He had been involved in some of the Bureau’s most sensitive cases, from the ethics probe of Ronald Reagan’s attorney general, Edwin Meese, to the investigation of dirty tricks in the 1992 presidential campaign of Ross Perot. Now he was back on the streets of Providence, as a field agent.
But that’s what Aiken wanted. He was a tenacious investigator who hated desk work. When the Bureau offered an initiative to put several hundred senior agents back in the field, allowing them to keep their management pay, Aiken eagerly accepted.
He asked to be sent to Rhode Island, his wife’s home state. He was forty-two years old, with two young children, and he’d moved eight times in his career. It was time to put down some roots.
Aiken knew that he would never be lacking for work, given Rhode Island’s incestuous politics and its notorious history of insider deals. Rhode Island was “Louisiana North.” He asked his supervisor not to assign him any cases; he would find his own.
The FBI office in Providence, which employs about twenty agents, had moved since Aiken’s last tour. Now it was on the ninth floor of an office building diagonally across the street from City Hall—a move that had not gone unnoticed in the mayor’s office, where one aide joked that the FBI had relocated to better keep an eye on Cianci.
Cianci’s paranoia was understandable, given the numerous investigations that had targeted him through the years.
In the early 1990s, during an argument with an aide, the mayor had snapped, “You wouldn’t do very well in front of the grand jury.”
In the mid-1990s, in an FBI investigation dubbed Operation Crocodile Smile, undercover agents attended the mayor’s political fund-raisers, posing as businessmen with flashy clothes and cars and girlfriends.
As part of that probe, in 1995, an agent calling himself Marco approached Cianci in Capriccio, an upscale Italian bar and restaurant, one of the mayor’s regular haunts. Wearing a wire, Marco tried to ingratiate himself with Cianci. Marco discussed his interest in landing a contract to do construction work at Providence schools. Cianci didn’t bite. He told Marco to talk to the appropriate city officials. And if any city official tried to shake him down, Cianci said forcefully, the mayor would personally “cut his cock off.” Later, the mayor laughingly introduced Marco to the Rhode Island Republican party chairman as an undercover FBI agent.
To Cianci, everything was personal. The feds were out to get him. They were jealous of his success, eager to bring him down. It was a vendetta, rooted in his Italian heritage and his split with the WASPs who controlled the Republican party in Rhode Island.
Cianci made no secret of his hatred for Governor Lincoln C. Almond, who had investigated him as U.S. attorney in the 1980s. Privately, the mayor also blamed the state GOP’s elder statesman, U.S. senator John Chafee, who, in 1976, had taken the Senate seat that Cianci had coveted.
Aiken didn’t see the world through the lens of the mayor’s old grudges and paranoia. He viewed things as more black and white. Corruption was a line in the sand that you just didn’t cross. Otherwise, honest citizens couldn’t be assured of fair treatment, no matter how popular their leaders. Digging beneath the glitzy surface of the Providence Renaissance was in some ways reminiscent of turning a shovel in the rich black soil of his native Mississippi, where a good-ole-boy network of white southerners had ruled.
Aiken was born in 1952 in Clarksdale, in the Mississippi Delta, about seventy-five miles south of Memphis. The railroad tracks ran through the center of town, dividing the ruling whites from the disenfranchised blacks. His father, a farm-equipment salesman who worked with blacks, would sneak across the railroad tracks at night to visit black friends. Instilled with his parents’ sense of fairness, young Dennis found it hard to understand when the town fathers filled in the public swimming pool with dirt rather than accept blacks, or built private schools the year after federal marshals integrated the public schools. Aiken played trumpet in an all-white rock band, the Avengers, covering Motown songs.
At the height of racial tensions, the teenage Aiken was sitting in his Southern Baptist church one Sunday. A rumor was going around that blacks were going to integrate the church. There were fears of violence. Then the door swung open and in walked Hal Fabriz, a six-foot-nine FBI agent stationed in Clarksdale, and a parishioner.
“There’ll be no trouble today,” said Aiken’s mother. “The FBI is here.” That was when Aiken decided to become an FBI agent.
He graduated from the University of Mississippi with an accounting degree, then, too young to become an agent, joined the FBI as a clerk in Washington in 1974. He was twenty-one.
His first case was Watergate.
Aiken’s role was strictly clerical—compiling a database of witness interviews—but his enthusiasm was evident when he called his mother to break the news that he was helping to investigate the president of the United States, Richard M. Nixon. His mother paused for a long moment, then cautioned her son, “Y’all be careful up there.”
When he turned twenty-three, Aiken took the agent’s exam and was assigned to Houston, where he worked on the FBI’s bank-robbery and fugitive squad. He also bagged his first corrupt public official, Houston’s assistant police chief, for soliciting a twenty-five-thousand-dollar bribe to fix a case. Aiken went into prison to tape an informant discussing the payoff, then arrested the assistant chief after he had taken the bribe, in uniform.
After three years in Houston, when he came up for a transfer, Aiken heard a rumor that he was going to be sent to New York and begged his supervisor to send him somewhere else. That’s how he wound up in Rhode Island the first time.
At first Rhode Island was culture shock, in everything from the weather to the accents. It was hard for Aiken, with his distinctive southern accent, to blend in, making “pretext calls,” where an agent anonymously calls someone’s office to verify employment or some other piece of background information. But Aiken had a folksy way about him that disarmed reluctant witnesses, combined with a direct, persi
stent manner that convinced people he wasn’t going to go away until he got the truth or read them their rights.
After reading that the speaker of the Rhode Island House was redecorating his State House office, Aiken struck up a rapport with the furniture salesman and convinced him to testify about how he had bribed the speaker. One morning Aiken appeared at the speaker’s home with a search warrant, went upstairs to his bedroom, and cut a swatch of carpet from under the bed matching the carpet in his State House office.
The speaker was indicted, but the case, tried twice in Boston because of heavy publicity, ended in two hung juries. When Aiken returned to Rhode Island in 1994, he and his wife bought a house in the suburb of Cumberland. The former speaker, long out of politics, lived nearby. Aiken’s father-in-law, a retired court administrator, had sworn Buddy Cianci into the bar in 1967.
Back in Rhode Island, Aiken wanted to believe that Cianci had redeemed himself, that the Providence Renaissance was real. But the more he poked around, the more he heard the same things he’d heard in the early 1980s—that City Hall was for sale.
If Cianci painted the Renaissance as a triumphant effort to raise Providence’s self-esteem, Aiken viewed the underlying corruption as sapping the city’s moral strength.
One of the first things that Aiken did after he came back to Providence was review the intelligence on the mayor to see if there were any viable cases to pursue.
One day he stopped by a local television station, WJAR–Channel 10, to pick up a tape of Cianci speaking on a Sunday-morning newsmakers show. Jim Taricani, a veteran investigative reporter who had known Aiken in the early 1980s, was surprised to see him again.
“Still chasing Buddy?” he asked.
“I never give up,” replied Aiken.
But all the suspicions and leads in the world wouldn’t get Aiken inside City Hall. He needed a guide.
EDDIE VOCCOLA WAS the merry prankster of Providence auto-body shop owners.
In a seedy business rife with tales of stolen cars and insurance scams, Voccola had a certain panache. Once, an insurance appraiser climbed up onto Voccola’s roof to inspect a claim of storm damage but couldn’t find any. Voccola asked him to look again. The appraiser said that he still couldn’t see anything. Voccola took down the ladder, marooning the man on the roof, and told him to look harder.
Other insurance adjusters swapped stories of being locked in one of the maze of rooms above Voccola’s Federal Auto Body, or being stuffed in the trunk of a car. In 1971 Voccola and his brother, John, a former Cranston city councilman and mayoral candidate, accosted a Connecticut insurance investigator who stopped by the garage to verify a lost wage statement. As John choked the man with his own necktie, Eddie forced him up against the wall with a chair and started punching him.
“Let’s boff him!” yelled Eddie.
“I’m going to put you in a pine box!” screamed John.
The investigator staggered from the garage, Eddie shouting after him: “This is Rhode Island—I’ll blow up your car and kill you.”
Voccola’s methods may not have been taught at the Harvard Business School, but no one could argue with his success. When Dennis Aiken returned to Providence in 1994, he couldn’t help noticing the niche that Voccola had carved for himself in Buddy Cianci’s Renaissance.
Five months after Cianci returned to office, he had signed a $750,000 lease for the School Department to rent Voccola’s garage as a registration center for Providence schoolchildren. The lease was renewed in 1994, despite complaints about the unsatisfactory conditions and high rent. Parents and children were forced to stand in line in stifling auto bays that had once borne witness to various crimes, in a dilapidated neighborhood down the street from a strip club. The floors were concrete. The bathrooms were hard to reach. There weren’t enough seats.
When Julia Steiny, a maverick School Board member and East Side playwright, fought the lease, hoping to steer more dollars to impoverished educational programs, she was warned by a school official not to buck City Hall. After the lease was renewed, Cianci dumped her from the School Board. Steiny equated the experience to “walking into a scene from The Godfather, and you didn’t have any guns.”
Around the same time, the Providence Recreation Department leased a cinder-block building that Voccola owned next to his body shop as a recreation center for senior citizens. By the spring of 1995, Voccola had the schoolkids signing up for classes in one garage and the old folks doing arts and crafts around the corner.
Then, in April, Voccola was indicted for insurance fraud. Federal postal inspectors, spying from a nearby rooftop, had watched as Voccola’s men towed cars from his garage to another building down the street, then smashed them up. Voccola was charged with using five “hit cars” to accumulate $128,000 worth of bogus accident claims. Voccola was also charged with trying to persuade a witness to lie to the grand jury.
Even as Voccola was negotiating another real estate deal with the city, a federal prosecutor pointed out at his bail hearing that a government witness had received an animal tongue in the mail, been sent roses spray-painted black, and received the telephone numbers of local funeral homes on her pager.
Voccola pleaded guilty and was sent to prison for thirty-three months. On his way to prison, he received another taxpayer-financed lease—eight thousand dollars a month to rent space to store janitorial supplies for Providence schools. The feds wound up garnishing his city rent check to help cover his half million dollars in fines from the criminal conviction.
In all, Voccola took the taxpayers of Providence for a $2.2 million ride in the 1990s. The bulk of the money came from a School Department that couldn’t afford to properly educate its largely poor, non-English-speaking students. While Cianci spoke boldly of improving the schools and bringing middle-class families back to Providence, the reality was underpaid teachers, overcrowded classrooms, crumbling school buildings, a shortage of textbooks, and underfunded arts and music programs.
Meanwhile, Cianci distanced himself from the growing public controversy over the city’s dealings with Voccola. When reporters sought explanations, the mayor’s minions played stupid.
Dennis Aiken smelled a bribe. Then he found Roger Cavaca.
Cavaca, Voccola’s longtime office manager and partner in crime, had been convicted with Voccola in the insurance-fraud case, and sentenced to eighteen months in prison. But instead of reporting to prison at Fort Dix, New Jersey, in January 1996, as ordered, Cavaca fled.
For the next year, Cavaca moved around the country, supported in part, the authorities said later, by about four hundred dollars a week from Voccola’s daughter. The feds, who monitored Voccola’s prison telephone conversations with his daughter, believed that Voccola had seen Cavaca weakening and urged him to run before he started talking to the feds.
But then, for some reason, the money stopped. Cavaca, tired of being a fugitive, started negotiating through his son in Rhode Island to surrender. In return, he offered a laundry list of crimes that he could shed light on—from scams involving vinyl siding and food stamps to public corruption involving Voccola and City Hall.
Prosecutors said that there would be no deal unless Cavaca turned himself in. But then the U.S. marshals caught up with him in North Carolina, in 1997. He was arrested and brought back to Rhode Island. That summer, Dennis Aiken drove to the federal detention center in Central Falls to debrief Cavaca.
Sitting in a private visitors’ room, Aiken came face-to-face with a flat, expressionless man in his fifties who had the faded pallor of concrete. For twenty-four years, Cavaca had blended into Eddie Voccola’s world, had seen every confidence trick with those vacant eyes. Now, facing an additional five years in prison, he told Aiken about the Providence school-registration center.
In the winter of 1991, before the lease was signed, Cavaca said that Voccola had instructed him to measure the garage for the School Department. Voccola explained that he needed the building’s dimensions so that when the city advertised for public
bids, the specifications could be drawn to fit the garage.
Voccola told Cavaca that he had arranged the deal with Frank Corrente at the Blue Grotto, on Federal Hill. Voccola confided that he was paying bribes to Corrente, Cianci’s “errand boy.”
Cavaca also told Aiken about an incident in 1992, when Voccola had sent him to the bank to cash a seventy-five-hundred-dollar check, saying that Corrente was coming by the garage to “pick up an envelope.” Cavaca brought the cash back to Voccola and watched him put it in an envelope and write “Frank C.” on it, then put it in the office safe. A day or two later, Cavacca said, he buzzed Corrente into the garage, then watched him and Voccola go into Voccola’s office. Later, after Corrente had left, Cavaca said, he had to get something out of the safe and noticed that the envelope was gone.
Aiken knew that Cavaca was a veteran con man with incentive to lie to reduce his prison time. So the agent tested him repeatedly, trying to catch him in a lie. But he said that he never did. The clincher came when Aiken subpoenaed Voccola’s bank records and found a check for seventy-five hundred dollars in 1992.
The check was a significant breakthrough. Not long after Aiken discovered it, a grand jury was convened to investigate Voccola, Corrente, and the lease.
ONE OF THE lessons that Dennis Aiken tried to teach younger agents was the importance of “shaking the bushes.” You never knew what might fall out.
Early in 1998 the investigation of the Voccola lease was grinding along. City officials weren’t eager to talk. Aiken knew that he needed more than Cavaca to get to Cianci or Corrente, and Voccola was unlikely to flip.
So he kept shaking the bushes—and Tony Freitas fell out.
Antonio R. Freitas ran a million-dollar company, JKL Engineering, that installed heating and air-conditioning systems, but he fancied himself “a little bit of a renegade.” As a young man starting out in business, he had received a visit from two Providence building inspectors who began reciting a litany of costly improvements that his building needed to conform to code. One inspector advised that Freitas could either do the repairs or make the problem go away for “two hundred bananas.”