The Prince of Providence

by Mike Stanton

  One moment on tape helped do Glancy in. In October 1998, when Freitas was working undercover, paying bribes to Pannone, Dennis Aiken decided to put her to the test. He had Freitas ask her to stop by his office to explain the tax savings he had achieved after paying twenty-four thousand dollars in bribes to Pannone. How much Glancy knew—or chose not to know—became evident as she and Pannone met with Freitas at JKL Engineering. When Freitas thanked them for their help on his taxes, Pannone replied, “And it ain’t stopped yet.” Glancy looked at Pannone, held up her hand, and said, “Stai zitto”—Italian for “shut up.”

  “I’m Irish,” she added, with a husky laugh. Then she repeated, “Stai zitto.”

  Nor did it help her when Glancy peered around at Freitas’s finished basement and advised him to lie about it to the city’s revaluation inspectors.

  “Is that honest services being performed in the basement of JKL?” asked prosecutor Richard W. Rose, in his closing argument. “She conducted a dishonest-services seminar, soup to nuts, A to Z: How to Cheat Providence Taxpayers.”

  Noting the nature of the conspiracy law, which requires only that someone participate in a corrupt scheme, Rose thundered that it didn’t matter whether Glancy “sold the city out for cash, out of misguided loyalty or for lunch.”

  Glancy never took the stand in her own defense. She had taken to drinking heavily since her indictment, and as she sat at the defense table, her whole body shook visibly, from nerves. During a recess one day, an elderly woman walked up to her on a downtown street, called her a criminal, and spat in her face. Glancy was “at the end of the line,” Bristow later said. She was physically incapable of testifying for hours.

  The trial lasted eight days, drawing national attention and an overflow crowd to the tiny courtroom. On March 16, 2000, the jury began deliberating. The next day was St. Patrick’s Day, an auspicious day for Glancy, who normally spent the holiday serving up green beer at Muldowney’s. Waiting outside the courtroom, she joked nervously that she would dance a jig on the steps of City Hall if she were acquitted. But a few hours later, the jury returned with guilty verdicts on all seven counts of extortion, conspiracy, and mail fraud. A devastated Glancy was sentenced to thirty-three months in federal prison.

  She didn’t last a month.

  Shortly after reporting to prison in Danbury, Connecticut, Glancy hurt her leg while working at her prison job—sweeping up goose droppings left by the hundreds of geese that would fly into the prison exercise yard every morning to eat the grass. Glancy’s lower leg began to swell. Within weeks she was flown to a prison hospital in Carswell, Texas—the nation’s only federal prison hospital for female inmates. But that facility couldn’t treat her, and Glancy wound up in a community hospital in Fort Worth, handcuffed to the rail of her hospital bed. Her years in City Hall had taught her that it would do no good to complain to the prison guards; “Bubba doesn’t explain,” she said.

  Glancy was diagnosed with terminal liver and kidney failure. The doctors gave her just weeks to live. Over the next twelve days, with Bristow, her lawyer, working around the clock, and backing from federal prosecutors and Rhode Island’s congressional delegation, Glancy won what may have been the speediest “compassionate release” in the history of the federal Bureau of Prisons.

  In October 2000 Rosemary Glancy returned home to Providence to die.

  She was checked in to a private room in Rhode Island Hospital under an assumed name, Maria Rodriguez. One afternoon she chatted amiably as she lay in her bed. An intravenous line carrying blood was hooked up to her arm. Her eyes flitted from the row of flower arrangements on the windowsill to the television show Law & Order, where two prosecutors talked about squeezing a woman to force her to cooperate.

  Glancy talked about her years as a city assessor, slogging through run-down houses and murky cellars, some of them flooded. She voiced regret for her trip into Tony Freitas’s basement. And she described the poisonous atmosphere in City Hall, where, for years, asbestos had crawled out of the pipes. She was bitter toward Cianci and the other big shots at City Hall, whom she held responsible for the corrupt system that she had gotten caught up in. “The greedy got richer and the poor people got screwed,” she said.

  Glancy lingered for another few months, prompting complaints from local radio talk-show callers that she had duped the system. A woman with an oxygen tank had been spotted dining at Mediterraneo; suspicious callers mistakenly thought it was Glancy.

  Rosemary Glancy died of liver failure on January 12, 2001. She was forty-eight.

  Hundreds of people attended her funeral at the Church of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, a once-Irish parish now dominated by Latinos in the city’s downtrodden West End. The mourners came from all walks of life—cops, judges, the poor. Father Daniel Trainor, widely known for his work among the city’s poor, criticized the “ambitious prosecutors” who had targeted Glancy. She was “a good person” who had been afraid to speak up, a woman who became ensnared in Providence’s “petty politics.”

  Cianci, in Washington on business, said that he otherwise would have attended Glancy’s funeral. He said that her life shouldn’t have been judged by the fact that she had “once or twice” gotten caught up in “some bad things.” He seemed uncomfortable when asked to comment on the fact that some people blamed him for Glancy’s tragic end.

  “Well, I can’t help the fact that she died,” he said. “I don’t think I caused that. I think the buck stops at my desk, but I wasn’t involved in any wrongdoing. . . . There’s no reason to indict me.”

  TWO DAYS AFTER Rosemary Glancy was laid to rest, Joe Pannone sat mournfully in the visitors’ room at the federal prison in Fort Devens, Massachusetts. The prison stood on a former military base—where Buddy Cianci had commanded the stockade as a young army officer—in a forlorn, wooded patch of north-central Massachusetts. On this raw afternoon, the prison was shrouded in fog.

  It wasn’t supposed to have ended this way for Uncle Joe.

  After he decided to cooperate, he started losing his friends. And after his taped statements about Cianci were played at Glancy’s trial, the mayor dismissed him and David Ead as “Goodfellas wannabes.”

  Now here he was, in prison, hanging around with the real goodfellas. He shuffled into the visitors’ room, a stooped, white-haired man with Coke-bottle glasses, George Burns in a green prison jumpsuit. Across the room, another elderly, bespectacled inmate waved to the ex-chairman of the Providence tax board.

  “That’s Jerry Angiulo,” said Pannone, referring to the former Boston Mafia boss. “He has a lot of power in here. He calls guards ‘fags’ and ‘fairies’ and gets away with it. If I said that, they’d put me in the hole.”

  Pannone had met Angiulo through another mobster imprisoned there, Anthony “the Saint” St. Laurent, a major Rhode Island bookmaker and loan shark. The Saint had tried to avoid prison by citing a chronic bowel condition that required up to forty enemas a day, which invited a new nickname—“Public Enema Number One.”

  When the Saint heard what Pannone was in for, he was impressed.

  “Hey, you made a lot of money, huh?” asked the Saint.

  “I wish I did,” replied Pannone.

  In the pill line one day, the Saint introduced Pannone to Angiulo as “Mr. Plunder Dome.” Angiulo’s eyes lit up.

  “Are you the mayor of Providence?” he asked.

  Pannone was seventy-eight years old and doing five years in prison—a possible life sentence at his age. Prosecutors had revoked his deal after a series of disastrous meetings in which he fumbled and contradicted himself, complained of headaches and stress, and lamented that his friends considered him a rat. During one session, Pannone told the FBI agents what was all too apparent—that he was a lousy “testifier.” Ultimately, the feds didn’t need Joe Pannone—he had said it all on tape. So following emergency triple-bypass heart surgery—covered by his city Blue Cross—Pannone was packed off to prison. He felt that the judge had made an example of hi
m.

  “When the judge looked at me, I thought he was looking at the mayor,” said Pannone.

  Now he was spending his golden years in a Darwinian world of murderers, drug dealers, and rapists, where inmates fought over what television show to watch and guards periodically tapped on the bars with rubber mallets to check for tampering. On foggy days like this, the inmates were not allowed outside. That was fine with Pannone, who couldn’t stand looking at the fences.

  “They’re making a hardened criminal out of me,” he said, laughing nervously. “I could be a boss in here if I wanted to. I’m already half a boss. I control these guys—a bag of rice, a bag of candy, a can of soda. They respect me.”

  The feds were never going to nail Buddy, Pannone predicted, because “Buddy’s very smart. They’re not going to get him, and I’ll tell you why. They got me and the others on tape. They don’t have tapes on the mayor.”

  EARLY IN 2001, the man who had launched Operation Plunder Dome, Tony Freitas, started following developments in the case from a state prison cell.

  The man who had set out to bring down the mayor had been defeated by his own volatile nature, exacerbated by the stress of his year undercover. His third wife, Nancy, had filed for divorce in November 1999, seven months after the City Hall investigation became public. They continued to work together at JKL Engineering, but the situation was tense. Nancy Freitas said that the strain of her husband’s role in Operation Plunder Dome had helped destroy their ten-year marriage.

  In December the FBI started an inquiry into possible witness intimidation of Freitas by the Providence Police Department, in its handling of two complaints against him. In one complaint, Freitas had lost his temper in the city building inspector’s office after believing that he was being hassled over a building permit. In the other, the owner of a nightclub near JKL Engineering accused Freitas of threatening him with a gun during an argument over a boundary dispute. Later the club owner, a Cianci supporter, admitted that he never saw a gun. But Cianci, who had watched a videotape of the incident from the club’s security camera, implied otherwise. The mayor gloated that Freitas “got himself on tape . . . doing bad things.”

  A few months later, during jury selection in the trial of Rosemary Glancy, Freitas was arrested for punching his wife in the face during an argument in the office. As he was booked at police headquarters, some cops fed up with City Hall corruption and meddling in police promotions shook his hand and embraced him. Freitas was fingerprinted and locked up, then handcuffed to a suspected murderer and driven to court by Patrolman Bruce Glancy, the brother of Rosemary, whom Freitas was about to testify against.

  “I need this like I need a hole in the head,” lamented Freitas.

  Freitas, who had been feted as a civic hero and lectured at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia, found his two previous marriages, which had also ended amid allegations of abuse, held up to public scrutiny. The head of the Rhode Island chapter of Common Cause, which had honored Freitas for his corruption-fighting efforts, said that his arrest showed that everyone is flawed. The award, explained a saddened H. Philip West, “doesn’t say that someone is a saint, only that they’ve made an extraordinary contribution to public life.”

  Freitas was arrested again in April 2000, for violating a no-contact order with his wife, and again in May, after she accused him of grabbing her and kissing her in the office. That arrest followed a call from the FBI’s Dennis Aiken to the Providence police, notifying them that Freitas had threatened to kill his wife, her friend, and himself. Freitas went to Butler Hospital to seek counseling. A psychological evaluation found him to be highly intelligent, “with a high energy level and a high level of emotional expressiveness,” a man under a great deal of stress from his role in Operation Plunder Dome and his divorce.

  Nancy Freitas was troubled that her husband’s enemies were “focusing on Tony and his temper, and not the criminals” at City Hall. She spoke of the risks that her husband had taken, and how she had lived through the unnerving experience with him. But she had given him plenty of chances, and “he just can’t seem to get a handle on his behavior . . . the stress was too much for him and he just went over the edge.”

  Freitas pleaded no contest to domestic assault and served ten days in prison and sixty days in home confinement. In December he was arrested again, this time charged with assaulting his girlfriend—a black belt in karate who, he claimed, had actually assaulted him because he wanted to break up. The arrest violated Freitas’s probation. On February 1, 2001, he began serving a four-month prison term.

  As Freitas sat in his prison cell, his paranoia grew. He saw conspiracies everywhere. He felt that he’d been set up. The attorney general, he believed, was too cozy politically with Cianci. The judge was a personal friend of the mayor’s. To Freitas, it showed that “the cockroaches” were out to get him. He read a book about the early European explorers in the New World, and the corruption of the merchants who enriched themselves at the expense of the people. When they were caught, he noted with satisfaction, they were hanged. Corruption in Rhode Island “has taken a big hit” as a result of Operation Plunder Dome, he said. “This is a lesson for future politicians.”

  Then, contemplating his circumstances, he added: “Never for a million years did I think I would be doing time in jail. I always looked at myself as the good guy.”

  BY EARLY 2001, Buddy Cianci was hearing footsteps.

  Six people had been convicted of corruption charges involving tax scams. A federal judge, in sentencing Pannone and Glancy in the summer of 2000, had lashed out at the mayor for presiding over the most corrupt administration in Rhode Island’s long and checkered history. Corruption, declared Judge Ronald R. Lagueux, “comes from the top.” City Hall was a place where “nothing gets done unless money changes hands.”

  Cianci criticized the judge’s remarks as unfounded and prejudicial. Privately, he grumbled that Lagueux was a former aide to John Chafee, out to settle an old score. The mayor enlisted Harvard lawyer Alan Dershowitz, who had clashed with Lagueux while representing Claus von Bulow, to attack the judge. And he pointed gleefully to the past arrest of Lagueux’s son, a Rhode Island state police detective, for stealing three submachine guns. (A grand jury later chose not to indict him.)

  Meanwhile, Cianci worried about Frank Corrente, who had retired abruptly in the summer of 1999, a few months after the FBI raid on City Hall. On the morning of the raid, two FBI agents had walked into Corrente’s office and shown him a photograph taken from the Freitas videotape, of him taking a bribe. Corrente had excused himself quickly and left City Hall, telling a reporter in the hallway that he was going to play golf. On June 29, 2000, Corrente was indicted with Pannone for taking bribes from Freitas. Cianci, the picture of confidence five days later as he rode a white police horse in the Bristol Fourth of July parade, wondered privately what Corrente would do. One night Cianci had dinner in Massachusetts to discuss strategy with his lawyer, Richard Egbert; his chief of staff, Art Coloian; and Coloian’s lawyer. The feeling was that Corrente would flip, because he couldn’t stand to go to prison at his age. The mayor and the others discussed ways to discredit Corrente by bringing up some of his shady dealings.

  Ironically, the feds had a contrary view. They thought it unlikely that Corrente would cut a deal. He was too old-school. Although family members urged him to cooperate, and one of his lawyers talked to prosecutors about a deal involving no jail time, Corrente refused to deal. He hired a new lawyer, C. Leonard O’Brien, a former Vietnam War–era protester who didn’t believe in cutting deals with prosecutors.

  O’Brien’s mistrust of the government increased early in 2001, when a local television reporter, Channel 10’s Jim Taricani, aired portions of a secret FBI videotape showing Corrente taking a thousand-dollar bribe from Tony Freitas in his City Hall office. O’Brien believed that the feds may have leaked the tape to put more pressure on Corrente. The U.S. attorney’s office responded that the tapes were in the possession of defense la
wyers and Plunder Dome defendants, any of whom might have leaked it, perhaps to discredit the government. The chief judge of the federal district court in Rhode Island, Ernest C. Torres, later appointed a special prosecutor to pursue the leak. Meanwhile, O’Brien hired his own private detective to investigate.

  Cianci kept in touch with Corrente, who in his retirement still liked to stop by City Hall to see people and check on his girlfriends. The objective, according to another top Cianci aide, was to “keep Frank close.”

  The feds were also putting pressure on Coloian. Coloian recalled walking down the street near City Hall during the spring of 2000 to meet some friends for dinner at Capriccio. Richard Rose, the lead Plunder Dome prosecutor, pulled up in his car and rolled down the window.

  “How come you’re not taking the limo?” Rose asked.

  “Why don’t you give me a ride?” replied Coloian.

  “I’ll give you a ride,” said Rose.

  Coloian climbed in and they bantered on the short ride to the restaurant, studiously avoiding the biggest subject between them—Operation Plunder Dome. As Coloian got out of the car, he quipped, “I’d invite you in for a drink, but that probably wouldn’t be a good idea under the circumstances.”

  Meanwhile, Cianci pushed ahead with the Renaissance. In his annual State of the City address to the City Council in March, the mayor sketched out his vision for the future, including his ambitious “New Cities” plan. The program included plans to transform the industrial South Providence waterfront into a mecca for cruise ships, condos, shops, and restaurants and cover Interstate 95 downtown to create forty new acres of land for development. Critics said that Cianci should finish fixing the old city before embarking on new ones, that his New Cities was nothing more than fanciful artist’s renderings—more sizzle than substance.