by Mike Stanton
The son of a tailor, Pannone had spent his whole life in Eagle Park, a working-class Italian neighborhood near Providence College. He was the proprietor of the Dairy Del and later ran Carrie’s, a popular fish-and-chips restaurant, named for his wife. He had always been involved in politics in the Fourteenth Ward, part of the fractious North End. Cianci had courted Pannone’s support in the 1970s, when the mayor was battling the remnants of the Democratic machine. Pannone had known Cianci since the mayor’s childhood, when little Buddy played with Joe’s nephew at Joe’s sister Millie’s house, a few blocks from the Ciancis’. Years later, Pannone recalled, the mayor would joke, “I gotta reappoint Joe because his sister used to make me spaghetti.”
Pannone remembered the first time Cianci ran for mayor, against Joe Doorley in 1974. A friend who worked for the city asked Pannone to put up a big Doorley sign outside Carrie’s. Pannone was reluctant, because he knew Cianci, but the friend pleaded with him, saying that he could lose his job. After Cianci beat Doorley and took office, Pannone said, a black limousine pulled into the parking lot of Carrie’s one day. “I say to myself, ‘Oh, geez, here we go.’ Buddy gets out and says, ‘Joe, what happened?’ I said, ‘Buddy, I voted for you, but I owed a guy a favor.’ Buddy says, ‘Tell me who made him put the sign up and I’ll fire him.’ I said, ‘Nah, that’s not my style.’ ”
In the early 1980s Pannone sold Carrie’s and retired. Cianci appointed him to the tax board. Pannone enjoyed the job; it gave him somewhere to go on Mondays and made him feel important. In later years, he got himself a police-style badge, identifying him as the chairman of the tax board. He liked riding around Providence, checking on property, schmoozing with people, wheeling and dealing. One of his haunts was Eddie Voccola’s garage, where he occasionally picked up envelopes of cash, for helping lower Voccola’s property taxes.
Pannone also kept busy with other part-time jobs, which occasionally landed him in trouble. He lost a state patronage job as a urine inspector at Lincoln Greyhound Park because he rarely showed up. Another job, as a bus driver, also landed him in trouble when he drove the jurors during the 1983 gangland murder trial of mobster Louis “Baby Shacks” Manocchio.
Manocchio, who had been on the lam for more than a decade, traveling in Europe and occasionally disguising himself by wearing women’s clothes, was being tried for accessory to murder in the 1968 shotgun slayings of bookies Rudy Marfeo and Anthony Melei at Pannone’s Market. That was the famous murder case in which Buddy Cianci, as a young prosecutor, had crossed paths with New England mob boss Raymond L. S. Patriarca. Joe Pannone was not related to the proprietors of Pannone’s Market, but one of the jurors claimed that he had told them he was related to one of the victims, Melei. Manocchio, who was convicted, moved for a new trial, in part because of Pannone’s allegedly prejudicial remarks. Pannone, testifying in court, denied telling the jurors anything; Manocchio lost his bid for a new trial.
On April 28, 1999, Pannone was back in court, this time as a defendant. That afternoon, marshals finally released him and Ead from their basement holding cell and led them into a federal courtroom in handcuffs for their arraignment.
The judge explained to Pannone the terms of his fifty-thousand-dollar bail—that he would forfeit the money if he violated his bail conditions. Pannone, playing the tough guy, interrupted the judge, joking that if he met his bail conditions, “you’ll give me fifty thousand.”
Outside the courthouse, Pannone tried to hold his blue jacket in front of his face to block the news photographers—but he held it at the wrong angle. Pannone, fiercely proud and old-school, was embarrassed by his arrest and all the publicity. It brought shame on his family—his wife and their two grown children, who lived in a two-family house next door to his neatly tended white ranch house.
After he was indicted with Ead and Rosemary Glancy, the deputy tax assessor, on charges of fixing people’s taxes, Pannone refused to cut a deal with the feds. He vowed to “take the heat” for his confederates. He wouldn’t be a rat. Then his lawyer started showing him the Freitas videotapes and explained the facts of life: at the age of seventy-six, Pannone was looking at a likely death sentence in federal prison. He also saw that his confederates were on tape, and reasoned that he couldn’t protect them.
Around Thanksgiving he had a chat with his family. John Scungio, the lawyer who had paid off Pannone in one crooked tax deal, had recently agreed to cooperate—the first Plunder Dome defendant to plead guilty. Pannone’s family urged him to come forward. The Sunday after Thanksgiving, David Ead stopped by Pannone’s house, trying to keep him in the fold. Ead showed him a police report in which the owner of a Providence nightclub had accused Tony Freitas of threatening him with a gun. The FBI’s star witness wasn’t so clean after all, Ead argued. He told Pannone not to worry—the feds were going to have to drop the charges.
But it was too late. Pannone asked Ead to go away. He had decided to plead guilty.
DAVID EAD KNEW what it was like to be on the right side of the law.
In the 1960s, before he started his vending business and got involved in City Hall politics and crimes, Ead had been a Providence patrolman, and a good one. He had a fistful of commendations to prove it: for apprehending a ring of burglars, arresting a suspect for assault with a dangerous weapon, rescuing an elderly woman from a burning building, and catching a car thief before the owner even knew his car had been stolen.
His looks alone could strike fear into a suspect. He was six foot one and 225 pounds, a boxer in the police academy who was not afraid to mix it up. On patrol in Federal Hill one day, Ead decided to settle an old score with a bookie who had whacked him across the face with a pool cue when he was a boy. Ead slammed the man against a brick wall a few times, then dragged him down to police headquarters and flushed his head in the toilet. “What goes around comes around, you boob,” he said.
Ead was a throwback to the Providence of gangsters and hustlers and bare-knuckles politicians. He grew up on Federal Hill, the son of an Italian mother and a Palestinian father who had emigrated from the West Bank and ran a small market on the Hill. As a boy, Ead looked out his bedroom window one night and saw two gunmen fleeing through the alley after a mob hit; one ditched his weapon in a trash can. Ead kept his mouth shut. As a teenager in the 1950s, Ead sold the Providence Evening Bulletin for a nickel in the bars along Atwells Avenue and downtown—Doorley’s Pub, the hoodlum joints, the raucous sailor bars. Providence was a brawling, wide-open town. Ead met the great Rocky Marciano in Manny Almeida’s Tap, and got the champ’s autograph. He saw the actor Gregory Peck step out of a big Lincoln for a screening of his new movie, Moby Dick, at the Majestic Theater. He lost his virginity in a bar one New Year’s Eve, when a barmaid pulled him into the back room.
As a young police officer, Ead was assigned to a new tactical squad whose job was to patrol Providence’s high-crime areas in unmarked cars, gathering intelligence on burglars, thieves, and assorted thugs. On the side, he put coin-operated gumball machines in variety stores and gas stations. With an elderly mother and a young family to support, Ead left the force after four years to pursue the vending business full-time.
He thrived in the cutthroat competition, building Doris Vending up to six hundred soda, juice, and snack machines in Rhode Island, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. He was a sharp businessman, sometimes accused of chiseling his customers out of their commissions—including the Association for the Blind, which was supposed to share in the profits from his machines in state government offices. In 1994, when a state banking crisis put his business in jeopardy, the city bailed him out with a seventy-five-thousand-dollar low-interest loan.
“The money is the god,” he told Tony Freitas.
He liked to play the part of a high roller. After leaving the force, he would go around to Willie Marfeo’s crap game. Later, he became a big blackjack player at the Foxwoods Casino. Ead had friends on both sides of the law. When Frank Sinatra performed at the Providence Civic Center in the 1970s, a wise
guy pal got Ead’s mother a front-row seat. At a later Sinatra concert, Ead’s friend the Providence police chief let him in the back door of the Civic Center, as Buddy Cianci was presenting the Chairman of the Board with an honorary Providence fire chief’s helmet. When the Chairman of the Board died in 1998, shortly after Freitas began working undercover for the FBI, Ead mourned along with most of Providence, the city where Sinatra, a friend to Raymond Patriarca, had once said: “I always like being in Providence. I have a lot of friends here.” Cianci ordered the flag above City Hall flown at half-mast. “He may be gone,” said the mayor, “but I don’t think he’ll ever really leave.”
Ead was also a political operator, which is how he met Cianci.
In the early 1980s, when Cianci was warring with city Democratic boss Tony Bucci, Ead, the party vice chairman, was one of the Democrats who fought Bucci, whom he called “a shakedown artist.” At one raucous City Committee meeting, Ead threatened to punch out Bucci’s brother-in-law, who kept shoving him. Ead recalled Cianci’s courting his support, showing up at a party Ead threw at the Shriners hall in Cranston, and presenting Ead’s seventy-five-year-old mother with a key to the city.
In 1990, when Cianci launched his political comeback, Ead said that he received a desperate phone call from an aide reporting that the campaign was “getting light—light of funds.” Ead and his cousin drove in his Cadillac Brougham to the Civic Center and met Cianci, who slid into the backseat and accepted five hundred dollars in cash from Ead. Later in the campaign, Ead said he also donated at least twelve hundred dollars’ worth of soda and refreshments to Cianci’s campaign headquarters.
After Cianci won, Ead began attending the mayor’s fund-raisers and selling campaign tickets. He also started lobbying Cianci to put him on the city payroll, so he could qualify for a pension and Blue Cross insurance. The mayor did appoint him to the tax board in 1993, which gave him free Blue Cross, but it was a nonpaying job. Ead kept angling for something better but saw the plums going to other people.
Ead complained to his new friend tax assessor Tom Rossi that Frank Corrente didn’t seem to like him. Rossi said that Ead needed to contribute more—and that Corrente and Cianci preferred cash. Following Rossi’s advice, Ead said that he put five hundred dollars cash in an envelope and gave it to Corrente. Shortly thereafter, Ead was watching the Columbus Day parade on Federal Hill when Cianci, marching down Atwells Avenue, veered over and thanked him.
Ead began searching for other ways to ingratiate himself with the mayor. During a visit to the dentist, another opportunity presented itself. The dental hygienist was married to a young man, Christopher Ise, whose aunt used to live next door to Ead. The wife said that Ise had graduated from college with a degree in urban planning and historic preservation but that he was having trouble finding a job in his field. He was working at a Borders bookstore in Cranston.
Ead offered to help and eventually, according to his story, met with the mayor and reported that Ise would be willing to make a five-thousand-dollar “contribution” to Cianci’s campaign. (The legal annual limit was one thousand dollars.) Ead brought Ise around to Cianci’s office for an interview, warning him not to say anything in front of the mayor about the money. During the interview, Cianci called a city planning official and told him to hire Ise immediately.
A month or so later, after Ise had started work, Ead called him up and said it was time to fork over the five thousand.
Ise, an artsy-looking young man with a shaved head and black, horn-rimmed glasses, debated what to do. Although he had grown up in Providence, he had purposely not looked for work there, searching instead in cities like Boston and New York. Now Ise was being asked to kick back for a job in the city he had hoped to escape. It didn’t seem right, Ise reflected, but he needed the job. And it beat working at Borders. Ise’s friends told him not to worry; that’s how things worked in Providence.
Ise rounded up the money, borrowing some from his sister. He told her that it was for a career-development program. He gave the five thousand to Ead; after that, he didn’t want to know what happened to it. Ise didn’t know whether the money went to Cianci or whether Ead kept it and Cianci had hired him as a political favor to Ead.
Ead would later give the following account of what he did with the money: After Ise gave him the five thousand dollars, Ead called Cianci to report that the “situation” with Mr. Ise was “all set.” Cianci told him to come down. Ead walked into the mayor’s office feeling uneasy. He pointed to his pocket, where the money was hidden, and told Cianci, “I got it over here.” The mayor told him not to be nervous, and sent him to give it to Art Coloian.
Ead had known Coloian for years. A friend of Ead’s daughter, Coloian had started coming around Doris Vending, and the two had become friendly. Ead had a picture of himself with Coloian on his office wall and a copy of Coloian’s acceptance letter to law school.
Ead said that he took the money to Coloian, who put it in his drawer; before leaving he asked Coloian to make sure that the kid didn’t get laid off. Ead fretted about the city’s screwing Ise because, he said, two of Ise’s relatives were old-time bookmakers on Federal Hill.
The following year, in 1998, Ead worked another crooked deal in which he described going directly to the mayor. This was the alleged ten-thousand-dollar payoff that had cropped up on the Freitas tapes—the one in which the city had resolved a delinquent five-hundred-thousand-dollar tax debt on the estate of the late buckle manufacturer Fernando Ronci.
The lawyer for the Ronci estate was Angelo “Jerry” Mosca, Jr., a longtime State House insider and lobbyist. Ead knew Mosca, who had represented Doris Vending in a dispute with the state over unpaid sales taxes.
Ead went to Cianci and helped arrange a settlement that was actually reasonable. In return for a hundred-thousand-dollar payment from the Ronci estate, the city would waive the remaining four hundred thousand in back taxes, which had accumulated over the past three decades because of a mistaken assessment. According to Ead, he also told the mayor that his approval would be appreciated—to the tune of a ten-thousand-dollar “campaign contribution.” Those were “nice words,” Ead later explained. “You can’t expect to walk into the mayor’s office, with the American flag on one side and the Rhode Island flag on the other, and say, ‘Here’s the bribe.’ ”
After the settlement had been arranged, Ead said, he received a phone call from Frank Corrente, who said the mayor had told him that Ead had something to deliver. Ead reported that it would be coming soon. “Well, you know the mayor,” Ead recalled Corrente saying. “He’s on my back. Do your best.”
In a scene reminiscent of Tony Freitas’s dealings with Corrente, Ead described taking the ten thousand in cash from Mosca to Corrente, who opened a big envelope and put his hands to his lips to be quiet. As Ead dropped the money in the envelope, he said he joked that they should have also taken twenty-five thousand for the mayor from the hundred-thousand-dollar settlement.
Not long after that, Ead and Cianci were at a fund-raiser for the mayor at Blake’s Tavern, hosted by Rosemary Glancy on behalf of her brother, who was seeking a police promotion. On his way out, according to Ead, Cianci shook his hand and said, “I heard what you told Frank,” and laughed.
Ead wasn’t laughing in the summer of 1999.
Following his arrest, he had made yet another effort to land a City Hall job—this time for his wife. Ead was willing to keep his mouth shut and take the hit, but he wanted to make sure that his wife was provided for if he went to prison. Ead sent someone to see Coloian. But Coloian rejected his request; he didn’t even want to hear Ead’s name.
That summer, Ead would meet with his lawyer, James E. O’Neil, to watch the Freitas tapes. O’Neil, a former federal prosecutor and Rhode Island attorney general who had investigated corruption in Cianci’s first administration, saw it as his job to “educate” Ead about the evidence and the conspiracy law under which he’d been indicted.
Ead, embarrassed by his newfound notoriety,
tried to lie low. He kept going to the 8:30 Sunday mass at St. Augustine’s in Mount Pleasant, but he stopped taking communion. One day as he was leaving church, he saw Frank Corrente “walk in like Moses,” going to communion, shaking hands with judges and politicians, telling them that he’d be all right. Ead hung near the back of the church. Did he go to confession? “Nah, the priest is a friend of the mayor’s.”
Ead, still in denial, tried to divine his future by going to psychics.
He consulted first with an Italian woman named Maryann, a retired state worker whom his wife had seen do readings at a park in Providence. Embarrassed that people might think he was crazy, he talked to her on the telephone. Afterward, he’d send her twenty bucks for a half-hour reading. The psychic gave Ead her read on Plunder Dome.
“Jim O’Neil’s a good man, but he can only take you so far down the road,” Ead recalled Maryann telling him. “You’re going to have to cooperate.” She did not see Ead going to prison and predicted a bumpy ride for Cianci: “It looks like he’s going, then it looks like he’s not, then it looks like he is.”
Not satisfied, Ead sought a second opinion.
He went to a young, dark-haired Iranian woman who worked out of her house in a working-class Italian neighborhood in Cranston. The woman looked at the furrows on Ead’s massive brow, studied his hands, then rolled her eyes back in her head until her pupils disappeared and only the whites showed. In Ead’s vernacular, she advised: “You’re in big trouble. Your name will be shit for a long time. I don’t see jail for you, but I see some hectic times.”
Ead didn’t go back to the Iranian woman. He was too freaked out by the eyeball thing. Plus, she charged thirty bucks.
Ultimately, it was Jerry Mosca who would determine Ead’s fortunes.