by Mike Stanton
Freitas, a naïve kid of twenty-two, looked perplexed. “Why would you want two hundred bananas?” he asked.
“Kid, look at me,” the inspector said, rubbing his fingers together. “I mean two hundred bananas.”
When Freitas finally caught on, he was furious. He had grown up in the Azores, where corrupt government bureaucrats under the Portuguese dictator Antonio Salazar always had their hands out for a grata. When an immigration official had tried shaking him down for his visa to the United States, the thirteen-year-old Freitas flashed him some money, then shoved it back in his pocket when the official handed over the visa first. Now, concealing his anger, Freitas told the Providence building inspectors to come back in a week. They returned, smiling. Freitas led them into the back of his shop, where his coworkers had just uncrated some air conditioners, and called out: “Hey, are those two boxes ready yet? Let’s put them in.” The smiles vanished from the inspectors’ faces. Freitas grabbed a two-by-four and chased them out of the building, screaming, “I’ll throw you in the Providence River!”
Freitas’s office was just down the street from Eddie Voccola’s garage. Cavaca had seen Freitas at Voccola’s garage, talking to Joseph Pannone, the chairman of the Providence Board of Tax Assessment Review. Cavaca said that Voccola had bribed Pannone to lower his taxes, and thought that Freitas may have, too.
Aiken wanted to size up Freitas, and see how he’d react to the accusation. The FBI agent was also aware, through reading the newspaper, that Freitas was angry with the School Department. The grand-jury investigation of Voccola had become public, increasing pressure on the city to find a new home for the school-registration center. Freitas had put in a low bid to move it to a building that he owned, but he had been rejected. The registration center remained, at least temporarily, in Voccola’s garage.
The paperwork for Freitas’s spurned school bid was strewn on the floor of his office when Aiken stopped by. It was January 27, 1998, the day before Freitas’s forty-ninth birthday. For an hour Aiken listened to Freitas rant about the lease in his heavy Portuguese accent. Then Aiken asked Freitas if he had ever bribed Joe Pannone for help with his taxes. Freitas was appalled. He said that he had met Pannone at Voccola’s garage a few years earlier, when he had stopped by to check on repairs to one of his trucks. Freitas had mentioned a mix-up on his taxes, and Pannone had offered to help straighten things out. After the problem was resolved, Pannone had even stopped by Freitas’s office and mentioned that he was about to take his annual winter trip to Florida. But Freitas failed to pick up on the hint that he should throw Pannone some spending money for his assistance.
Freitas told Aiken that he would take a lie-detector test. Aiken countered that Freitas could invite Pannone over and ask him directly if Freitas had ever given him a bribe. The FBI agent could secretly tape the conversation. If Freitas had bribed Pannone, Aiken reasoned, he wouldn’t want to do that.
But Freitas didn’t flinch. “I have a better idea. Why don’t I wear a wire? Then I can help you clean up this city.”
Now Aiken was convinced of Freitas’s honesty—but worried about his sanity. What person in his right mind would agree to wear a wire in Providence?
Aiken knew from experience that not everyone is capable of working undercover. It takes brains and guts. He also needed to know that he could control Freitas—that he wouldn’t do something crazy to jeopardize the operation or their safety.
In the coming weeks, as Aiken felt out Freitas, he liked what he saw. He seemed smart enough and gutsy enough to pull it off. Freitas was also an honest businessman, not someone cooperating to avoid prosecution, so he would be more credible. When Aiken said that the FBI would be willing to pay Freitas for the time that his undercover work would take away from his business, Freitas said no. He didn’t want any money; he just wanted to clean the “cockroaches” out of City Hall. Aiken liked that Freitas was established in the community. He would be less likely to arouse suspicion than an outsider like Marco. Their biggest challenge would be passing Freitas off as a corrupt businessman, after he had been so publicly critical of City Hall. Aiken reasoned that Freitas would be the man who had seen the light, who was willing to pay bribes and needed a teacher. He already had an entrée to City Hall—Joe Pannone, the tax official he had met at Voccola’s garage. The FBI would install hidden cameras in Freitas’s office and wire him up for visits to City Hall with the latest in miniaturized gadgetry and record his lessons in corruption.
To shield Freitas’s identity in internal FBI paperwork, Aiken had to assign him a code name. He chose the name of a chemical coolant found in the air conditioners that Freitas installed; Freitas became Mr. Freon.
Aiken also needed a name for the investigation. Like hurricanes, the FBI names its undercover operations. Aiken was brainstorming at his kitchen table one day when his teenage daughter, Karlene, mentioned the black dome atop City Hall, fringed with green copper. Aiken thought about what went on beneath the dome. He named the investigation Operation Plunder Dome.
AT THE AGE of seventy-five, Joseph Pannone had not lost his taste for money or the things that it could buy in Providence—a seat on the city tax board, the fried calamari at Andino’s on Federal Hill, blow jobs from a young hooker.
Tony Freitas and the FBI could not have found a more willing teacher.
“Understand, there’s nothing for nothing,” Pannone told Freitas. “There’s no free lunches. It’s money that counts, Tony.”
People too curious about his business had picca naso—nose trouble. A deputy assessor who helped him fix people’s taxes “bends, know what I mean? I just show some green and she’s all right.”
Discussing the secretary for a lawyer he did corrupt deals with, Pannone said: “Ah, he’s been banging her for years. . . . I wouldn’t even screw that broad. . . . She’s got to be at least forty.”
Freitas called him Uncle Joe. The stooped Pannone, with his white hair and thick glasses, reminded him of “the guy who did the movie Oh, God! . . . [George] Burns.”
“Hey, I’m learning with Uncle Joe,” Freitas said.
“Money talks, bullshit walks,” Pannone answered.
“Hey, I like those pants you have on, Uncle Joe,” Freitas said one day.
“You want to buy them?”
The married Pannone was a man on the make. He received twenty-five-dollar blow jobs from a young, blond exotic dancer at the Satin Doll, who serviced him in an office above an auto showroom whose owner Pannone had assisted in lowering his taxes. Pannone also had an older girlfriend who worked at the city water-supply board.
Pannone’s relationship with Freitas began in April 1998, after Freitas left a message for him at the tax assessor’s office at City Hall.
Freitas had filed an application with the Board of Tax Assessment Review to lower his taxes on some boarded-up buildings he had purchased. He was legitimately entitled to the reductions, since he had fixed up the property. But Aiken wanted him to approach Pannone through the back door, to see what would happen.
One day, Pannone showed up, unannounced, at JKL Engineering. The visit surprised Freitas and Aiken. The FBI wasn’t ready to start recording their conversations. After Pannone left, Freitas called Aiken in a panic. Pannone had talked about how the mayor was taking money, how Corrente was the mayor’s bagman, how Voccola had paid bribes—everything that Aiken wanted to hear. But it sounded too good to be true.
“Tony, if it’s not on tape, it didn’t happen,” said Aiken.
“I’ll get him back here, and he’ll say the same things,” vowed Freitas.
Pannone came back, many times. He had served on the tax board since the early 1980s, when Cianci first appointed him, and had known Cianci when the mayor was a little boy, playing at Joe’s sister’s house after school with her son. Pannone was from the Italian working-class neighborhood of Eagle Park, where he had run a fish-and-chips restaurant for years and been active in ward politics. The weekly meetings at City Hall gave him something to do in retirem
ent, and he also liked the free Blue Cross coverage.
Pannone was a spaccone, a wannabe. When he wasn’t attending to tax-board business, he hustled Cianci campaign tickets and his own deals. He was a harmless-looking old Italian man, serving in relative obscurity on a little-noticed board, one of the mayor’s foot soldiers. He hung around City Hall, wandering in and out of various offices, and was a frequent visitor to Frank Corrente’s. He called himself an “in-between man” who facilitated deals and took his own cut, much as Corrente acted, on a higher level, as the mayor’s in-between man.
“Buddy doesn’t take nothing,” Pannone explained one day. The money, he said, went through Corrente.
Lubricated by cash from Freitas, Pannone was eager to show him the ropes and pass on lessons that he claimed to have learned from Cianci.
“Know what the mayor told me one time? There was a café on Cranston Street that wanted to give me two thousand dollars to stay open until two o’clock [in the morning]. I said, ‘Buddy, I can get you two thousand.’ ” The mayor advised him to be careful, Pannone confided. “He said to me, ‘Joe, I want to tell you something. You know we’re friends a hundred years. Never talk on the telephone—’ ”
“He should know,” Freitas interjected. “He was a prosecutor.”
“He said, ‘Never talk on the phone, never get a check, but get cash when you’re one-on-one.’ I said, ‘Well, okay, Mayor.’ He said, ‘I just want to clue you in.’ ”
Pannone may have seemed like a doddering old fool, puffing himself up behind the mayor’s back to grab some cash. But he had been around City Hall a long time. Behind his bluster, much of what Pannone said rang true to Aiken, particularly his comments about the voracious Cianci campaign fund-raising machine and its influence over city jobs, promotions, contracts, and favors.
“Boy, I’m telling you,” Freitas said one day. “It’s like a movie.”
“Yeah, I’ll tell ya, Providence,” said Pannone. “I’m gonna tell ya this has been going on since day one. But it was small.” In the old days, if you wanted a job with the city, Pannone said, you gave your first week’s pay to your councilman and said, “Thank you for the job.” But now “there’s no control no more. Now see my job? My job I got? I give [Cianci] a thousand dollars every year. . . . And then the tickets I sell, that makes him happy.”
Some of the money came in by check and went into the campaign. The rest, in cash (which was illegal under Rhode Island election law), “goes south,” said Pannone.
“Yeah, cash, good,” Pannone said as Freitas counted out $250 for two tickets to a Cianci fund-raiser.
Ironically, that same day, the mayor announced the apprehension of two small-time bank robbers who had been hitting Providence banks. “They didn’t even take what you can make at a decent fund-raiser,” joked Cianci.
Pannone said of Cianci: “He’s into the green. He’s got that boat. He’s got to fix his hair. . . . I’d like to have the money that he gets that is not registered. You know what I mean? Just handed to him.”
Pannone and Freitas would meet in an office in the basement of JKL Engineering, which the FBI equipped with hidden cameras and microphones. On one of his first visits, Pannone sat down on a wire coat hanger and leaped up, shouting: “Jeez. That thing went right up my ass.” He moved to a second chair in front of Freitas’s desk, where the camera angle turned out to be so good that Freitas left the hanger where it was for months, so that Pannone would always take the other seat.
Aiken monitored their conversations from a utility closet down the hall, where he had a television monitor and wore headphones. One day, early in the investigation, he was sitting in the closet, listening to Pannone and Freitas, when two meter readers showed up from Narragansett Electric.
The FBI agent couldn’t see them coming. Freitas jumped up and announced their presence, stalling them for a few minutes, giving Aiken time to think. Aiken realized that if the women screamed and gave him away, the operation could be blown; he might even have to arrest Pannone on the spot, well before they managed to penetrate City Hall.
The two Narragansett Electric women proceeded down the hallway and opened the door to find Aiken sitting there, headphones in place, index finger to his lips. He flashed his badge and asked them to remain quiet, as Freitas hustled Pannone out of his office. Then Aiken told the meter readers that Freitas was helping him catch a dangerous drug dealer; his life would be in danger if they told anyone. They left, shaken but promising not to breathe a word.
Freitas continued to meet with Pannone through the spring, summer, and fall of 1998. Pannone, secure in Freitas’s basement, spilled the secrets of City Hall.
He described how he had saved a convicted felon and mob associate, Paulie Calenda, sixteen thousand dollars a year in taxes, by lowering the assessments on three buildings he owned—one of which had burned in an arson fire. Coincidentally, Calenda received the tax break just before going to federal prison for possession of an Uzi submachine gun. Pannone explained that the Calenda tax deal had gone through a lawyer who represented taxpayers before the board, John Scungio—a guy “so fucking cheap, it ain’t even funny.”
Pannone also discussed his reliance on the deputy assessor, Rosemary Glancy—“the fat girl”—to do the numbers on illicit tax breaks. In return, he’d throw her fifty or a hundred bucks, and take her to lunch at Andino’s on Federal Hill.
“Have you seen her? Rosemary? She’s like this, you know,” said Pannone, spreading his arms wide. “Three hundred pounds. Well, somebody says that fucking Joe, he’s getting hard up. But, heh, she’s my right arm.”
Over lunch at Andino’s one day—Pannone favored the “fried calamaris”—he described how he and Glancy had commiserated over the School Department’s decision to reject Freitas’s bid for a lease. “I said, ‘That’s a joke, Rosemary.’ She said, ‘Everything in Providence is a joke.’ ‘If you don’t pay, forget it. And that’s not right.’ And Rosemary goes, ‘You’re right, Joe, but what are you gonna do? What are you gonna do?’ ”
Pannone told Freitas that he had lost out on the lease because he didn’t pay. Voccola, he said, “used to give them money every fucking week.” Pannone volunteered that Voccola had also taken care of him, for lowering his property taxes. He boasted how he had outfoxed Dennis Aiken when the FBI agent questioned him about Cavaca’s allegations that he took kickbacks.
On October 2, 1998, as Freitas counted out twenty-four hundred dollars in bribes, Pannone said that Aiken would never pin the Voccola bribes on him, just as he’d never know about the money from Freitas—“unless you got spies here,” he added, laughing.
Another time, Pannone walked in and joked about whether Freitas had a hidden camera in his office. Freitas pointed at the concealed camera and said that it was right there.
Pannone’s willingness to reveal secrets became a running joke between Aiken and Freitas. One day Pannone not only described a half-million-dollar tax break that involved a bribe directly to Cianci—he obligingly spelled the taxpayer’s name.
From his perch in the utility closet, Aiken would call Freitas on his cell phone and tell him what to ask Pannone. One day, Aiken challenged Freitas to find out where Pannone hid his money. Within minutes Pannone revealed that he kept it in the drawer of the nightstand beside his bed—under a picture of a saint. “My wife doesn’t even know that,” said Pannone, laughing. “I just told you a secret, Goddammit.”
Aside from providing the FBI with a road map to Providence corruption, Pannone also hooked Freitas up with Frank Corrente, the number-two man at City Hall.
Pannone told Corrente that Freitas was willing to kick back at least twenty-five thousand dollars a year for a school lease. To get Corrente’s attention, Freitas put cash in an envelope—three hundred one time, eight hundred another—and gave it to Pannone to deliver to Corrente.
“See, I’m taking myself out of the picture,” said Pannone. “I want you to be tight with Frank. . . . I want that name Tony Frazier [sic] to sink in his
head.”
Freitas began meeting directly with Corrente in his office at City Hall. Pannone warned Freitas to be careful discussing money—Corrente was still spooked by the Voccola investigation, and wary of FBI bugs. “He didn’t know if you gotta pig on you,” said Pannone, using slang for a hidden wire. Corrente was so paranoid about someone eavesdropping that he would say no to a bribe even as he took it. He inhabited a culture, explained Pannone, where “no, no, no means yes, yes, yes.”
Corrente’s paranoia was evident the first time Freitas visited him. He started touching Freitas on the chest, as if checking for wires. Freitas took Corrente’s hand and moved it down to his crotch. He was sending Corrente a message, he explained later: “If you don’t trust me, touch me there.” Corrente snatched his hand away and said, “Are you crazy?”
But Corrente didn’t count on Freitas carrying a briefcase with a hidden camera inside.
On December 3, 1998, the camera captured Corrente taking a thousand-dollar payoff from Freitas, in return for his help securing a School Department lease. A month later, on January 3, 1999, Freitas dropped another envelope containing a thousand dollars on Corrente’s desk.
“What the fuck are you doing?” asked Corrente, sounding exasperated. “It’s not necessary. Do you hear me?”
“Frank, I appreciate,” said Freitas, in his broken English.
The telephone interrupted Corrente’s protests. Corrente waved his hand, as if in disgust, and answered the call. While Corrente was on the phone, Freitas picked up the envelope and counted the money, fanning the hundred-dollar bills for the camera, then put it back on the desk.
Corrente, still talking on the phone, picked up the envelope and slid it quickly into his desk drawer. When he hung up, he called an official at the School Department and directed him not to give Freitas any trouble on the lease.