by Mike Stanton
After the speech the mayor’s chief of policy, William Collins, stood in the hallway outside the council chambers. A former Providence Journal reporter, Collins had covered downtown development in the 1970s and written a story in 1980 about the mayor’s “War Room” and abuse of power. A few years later Collins, who had a degree in urban planning, went to work for Cianci, and he returned to City Hall with him in 1991. A wonkish, bespectacled man, Collins spoke of a calmer, more mature Cianci, a mayor with extraordinary vision and the ability to wield power effectively to push Providence forward.
In drafting the State of the City speech, Collins and Cianci had held long, reflective discussions about the future. They talked about capitalizing on Providence’s proximity to Boston, and its cheaper cost of living and quality of life, to attract new businesses. They spoke of the city’s central location, between medical-research centers Boston and New Haven, home to Yale University, as an incentive to create a biotechnology-research park affiliated with Brown University’s medical school and the city’s hospitals. Providence was a traditionally working-class city struggling to remake itself as a magnet for higher-paying jobs and college graduates. The Renaissance was a fragile work in progress; it required “constant replenishment,” said Collins. “Otherwise, the lights will go out.”
“We’ve got to keep hitting home runs,” said Collins. “The mayor is the best person to do that. I don’t know if I could tell the feds doing Plunder Dome this, but he’s too important to the future of Providence. He’s an enormously valuable asset.”
The mayor that Collins knew, beckoning from the spires of his New Cities, would never involve himself with the likes of David Ead or Joseph Pannone. They were, said Collins, “toads in the basement.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Buddy’s Inferno
Davio’s, the bar in the Biltmore Hotel, drew an eclectic nighttime crowd—tourists, conventioneers, gays, traveling salesmen, and Brown University professors.
In the spring of 2001 Buddy Cianci could be found many a night drinking alone there. A few years before, when the playwright Arthur Miller was in town to receive an award, Cianci had read the scene from Death of a Salesman where Willy Loman describes meeting the mayor of Providence in the lobby of his hotel. Now Cianci seemed to be playing the role of the salesman, reminiscing about the days he “knocked ’em cold in Providence,” as another cigarette burned down and he waited for the curtain to fall.
The previous fall, Cianci had sold his beloved carriage house on Power Street and moved into the Presidential Suite at the Biltmore. If the mayor’s life had become a lounge act, then Davio’s was, he joked, his living room. The cynics said that Cianci was liquidating his assets before the feds swooped in. The mayor insisted that he had simply grown tired of rattling around in a big, empty house, all alone. Besides, he quipped, living at the Biltmore meant never having to buy another roll of toilet paper.
One of the people who got to know Buddy after dark was Laurel Casey, a cabaret singer who performed Friday nights at Davio’s. A tall, angular woman in her late forties, Casey usually wore a slinky black evening dress and matching gloves. Casey did her irreverent best to re-create the avant-garde café society of 1920s Berlin. She was just as likely to flash her breasts, dance on the bar, or insult her patrons—anything to shake them out of their middle-class sensibilities. She patterned her act on the cabaret performers of Weimar Germany, who had skewered the Nazis on their rise to power. One of Casey’s favorite targets was the WASP elite, and Cianci loved it.
Casey viewed the mayor as a kindred spirit. Like her, he was a showman, always onstage, uncomfortable when the spotlight was turned off. “When we’re alone, it’s like we disappear, because no one’s watching,” she explained. Behind Cianci’s sad basset-hound eyes, Casey saw a vulnerable boy who wanted to be loved, who needed to feel important.
She had moved to Providence in 2000 from Newport because Cianci supported artists, understood them because he was one. But that didn’t stop Casey from satirizing the Providence Renaissance as skin-deep, or telling her audience that she lived between a Vietnamese restaurant and a crack house on the South Side. The mayor would shout back, “One step at a time, Laurel.”
Late one night Cianci came in with some friends and Casey started lampooning them as a bunch of no-neck thugs. The mayor egged her on, urging her to “do that thing that got you fired” from a previous gig, meaning flashing her breasts. Laughing, Cianci guaranteed her that his companions would all throw twenty-dollar bills if she did. Instead, Casey mooned them; the mayor seemed shocked, taken aback. But that’s what true cabaret was about, she believed—a slap in the face of convention.
On other nights, Casey would coax Cianci to join her. Reluctantly, encouraged by the applause of the audience—some tourists from Omaha, perhaps, or men in town for a turf-management convention—the mayor would get up and tell a few jokes or sing a song, like an old vaudevillian. On those nights, it seemed, Cianci managed to forget the growing shadow of Plunder Dome. It was as if he’d been transported back to his childhood, when he sang and tap-danced in Celia Moreau’s Kiddie Revue.
One night Cianci and Casey performed a duet of one of the mayor’s favorite songs, “It Had to Be You.” Cianci also liked “Mountain Greenery,” “The Man That Got Away,” and “Big Spender,” with its opening line, “The minute you walked in the joint.” These were songs that spoke to the Providence of his youth and his imagination—a brassy, romantic world of film-noir light and shadows. There was a poetry to his sitting in the Biltmore, a former Jazz Age hotel where a teenage Raymond Patriarca had been a bellboy and where Cianci had announced his first candidacy for mayor, back in 1974.
When Casey complained about her stagnating singing career and mused about moving to Los Angeles, the mayor encouraged her to stay.
“Being a cult figure in Providence, Rhode Island, is no small thing, Laurel.”
Less than a hundred yards away from the Biltmore, on the eighth floor of the Fleet office tower facing Kennedy Plaza, the lights burned after hours in the offices of the United States attorney, Margaret E. Curran. For months a team of federal prosecutors under Curran—her top deputy, Craig Moore; Richard Rose, the lead Plunder Dome prosecutor; and Terrence Donnelly, another prosecutor who had joined the case—had been writing and rewriting the draft of a racketeering indictment against the mayor.
For the past two years, since the conclusion of Tony Freitas’s undercover work, a federal grand jury had sifted through hundreds of boxes of evidence and heard from more than 150 witnesses. Dennis Aiken likened the investigation to turning over rocks and seeing what would crawl out. The grand jury had issued nearly three hundred subpoenas and scrutinized virtually every corner of city government—from the mayor’s office to the police department and the School Department to obscure city boards and agencies to the city’s loan program for some of the Renaissance’s glitzy restaurants. The acclaimed Trinity Repertory Company had even received a subpoena for records, as investigators explored whether city tow-truck operators had laundered payoffs through donations to the theater that Cianci had done so much to support. But it had been slow going in a city where the culture of corruption was deeply ingrained. Curran joked that there were only two degrees of separation in Providence; as a result, she said, “Nobody gave information above a whisper.”
The Freitas tapes had changed the equation, but the tapes alone didn’t give them the mayor. Early on, when Pannone started describing City Hall payoffs, Moore had warned people in the office that he didn’t want to hear the “R word.” They were still a long way from building a racketeering case against Cianci; he wasn’t on the tapes. The feds viewed the mayor as a smart, experienced criminal who had insulated himself so well that nobody could point to any specific crime that he had committed. His subordinates could carry out his wishes with just a wink and a nod, even as Cianci personally spurned advances by people he didn’t trust, like the undercover FBI agent Marco in 1995.
But the more Pa
nnone told Freitas about how the money went through Corrente to Cianci, the more convinced the feds became that they had the makings of a racketeering case. By early 2001 the investigators believed that they had uncovered a pattern of corruption that the RICO statute was designed to address, with Cianci as the Mafia-like boss. But a seasoned prosecutor knew that there were two universes: what may have actually happened, and what could be proven in court.
Putting an indictment together was laborious. The prosecutors had to make hard choices about what to put in and what to leave out. There were heated discussions over evidence and witnesses, over who might be willing to cooperate and who wouldn’t. The draft indictment also went to the Justice Department in Washington, which must approve all RICO cases. Early in 2001 Moore, Rose, and Donnelly closeted themselves in a conference room for a week and went through the lengthy indictment, line by line. It was reminiscent of an old law-school exercise of drafting an “elements sheet,” with the elements of each crime written across the top of the page and the evidence filled in underneath.
They emerged with a lengthy document that accused Cianci of being the Tony Soprano of City Hall—of running a criminal enterprise out of the mayor’s office that, during the 1990s, had extorted more than two million dollars in kickbacks for jobs, contracts, and favors. The draft indictment accused Cianci of conspiring with Frank Corrente to extort $1.2 million from Edward Voccola for the School Department registration center, and another $250,000 in campaign contributions from tow-truck operators to maintain their lucrative place on the police department tow list. The mayor was also accused of conspiring to take three bribes arranged by David Ead—$10,000 for the vacant lots that Freitas had wanted to purchase from the city; $10,000 from the estate of Fernando Ronci to resolve a half-million-dollar tax debt; and $5,000 from a city job-seeker, Christopher Ise. Last, the indictment accused the mayor of extorting an honorary lifetime membership from the University Club, and of witness tampering for urging Steven Antonson to lie to investigators about how the mayor had ordered the club’s building variances blocked.
The indictment also charged Corrente, Voccola, Pannone, and Richard Autiello, the leader of the tow-truck operators, with being participants in Cianci’s criminal enterprise. Corrente and Pannone were accused of taking payoffs from Freitas. Voccola was accused of bribery and money laundering. Autiello, Corrente’s good friend and a leading Cianci supporter who had the contract to service city police cars, was charged with taking $5,000 to help a woman’s son get onto the Providence police force, despite a criminal record. The mayor’s chief of staff, Art Coloian, was charged with serving as bagman for the Ise bribe, but not with racketeering, which required at least two underlying criminal charges.
In March, not long after Cianci gave his State of the City address, federal prosecutors invited him to address another forum—the Plunder Dome grand jury. They warned he didn’t have much time; indictments were coming soon. Cianci was tempted, confident that he could explain away the feds’ suspicions and outsmart his pursuers. But his lawyer would never allow it. Cianci turned down the invitation.
The federal cloud overshadowed a Cianci fund-raiser at the Biltmore that month, which was sparsely attended compared with previous bashes. Some of the people who came admitted quietly that they were there to hedge their bets. “Say he doesn’t go down,” explained Providence police sergeant Bob Bennett, the head of internal affairs, as he munched on hors d’oeuvres. “I’d like to think that he’d remember the people who were here tonight.”
Sharky Almagno, the former Silver Lake councilman who had been with Cianci from the beginning and was the city’s inspector of weights and measures, said that he’d be “stunned—stunned” if the mayor were convicted of anything. “An indictment doesn’t mean anything. I’ve got that kind of faith in the man.” He dismissed the videotape of Corrente taking money from Freitas. “Talk about entrapment.”
Lawyer Walter Stone, a cochair of the fund-raiser, gave a speech in which he said that he supported Cianci because he had a 60 percent approval rating, because nobody was running against him, and because the corruption probe had been going on for two and a half years with no resolution in sight. “I find it most offensive,” said Stone. “Either indict his ass, try him and convict him, or leave him alone.” The crowd cheered.
On Monday, April 2, the grand jury assembled in the John O. Pastore Building, across Kennedy Plaza from City Hall. Channel 12’s Jack White, a veteran newspaper and television reporter, had been staking out the courthouse since Friday, told by his sources that the mayor’s indictment was imminent. On Monday morning White arrived with a large satellite truck and another satellite truck from his sister station in Boston. As the day wore on, all Cianci had to do was glance out his office window to see the growing media contingent. The chief judge for the federal district of Rhode Island, Ernest C. Torres, also noticed the photographers outside and fretted that there had been a leak in the grand jury. Torres, who ran a tight courthouse, groused that he seemed to be the last person in Providence to know of the coming indictment.
Later that day the grand jury voted to indict Cianci and his alleged coconspirators. The indictment remained sealed, to give the FBI time to arrest Voccola, who was considered a flight risk because of his extensive criminal record.
Bustling about the courthouse, Richard Rose smiled enigmatically at the reporters who had gathered in the clerk’s office. He deflected their questions with quips and an enthusiastic scouting report on Duke University’s basketball team, which was playing for the national championship that night. An avid basketball fan and former player in his youth (when he was twelve years old he once hit a lucky hook shot over Providence College All-American Marvin Barnes while fooling around in Alumni Hall), Rose regarded the federal courthouse as his home court. “I got game,” he liked to say, the brash talk of the streets of South Providence, where he had grown up poor, black, and fatherless.
Rose, only the second black federal prosecutor in Rhode Island history, had journeyed far for his court date with Cianci. The last time he had sought an encounter with the mayor was back in the spring of 1975, Cianci’s first year in office. Rose was a sixteen-year-old sophomore at Central High School, a truant who spent a lot of time hanging around downtown, then a wasteland dominated by X-rated movie theaters. When the Paris Cinema, where Rose liked to watch kung-fu movies and blaxploitation flicks like Superfly, also switched to X-rated films, Rose complained to any public official who would listen. He and a classmate collected more than fifteen hundred signatures on a petition. When Rose saw that the mayor was appearing on a television broadcast from Burnside Park, outside the federal courthouse, he went downtown and tried to speak to Cianci but was turned away. “The mayor is trying to get people into the city,” Rose told a reporter. “These movies aren’t helping.”
That same spring Rose’s social-studies teacher lectured him about the fact that he was the smartest kid in class but never came to school. Rose had already spent five years in a Catholic orphanage in rural Smithfield; his mother, who collected welfare and worked odd jobs while struggling to raise five children alone, put him in the orphanage when he was eleven because she couldn’t control him and wanted to keep him away from the drugs and street crime decimating South Providence. Now, back in the city, Rose was adrift again. His teacher pressed him: What was he going to do with his life? Rose said that he wanted to be a lawyer. The teacher told him to go down to the courthouse and write a report about what he saw. Rose went to the Providence County Courthouse on Benefit Street and walked into a courtroom where the lawyers were picking a jury in Rhode Island’s first death-penalty case in more than a century, since an Irish immigrant had been hanged for the 1843 murder of a textile baron that he probably didn’t commit.
The judge was curious about the skinny black kid and let Rose sit with the press through the trial. The defendant, a state-prison escapee, had shot a Bristol fish peddler outside a Providence housing project. Rose was riveted by the spectacle
of the trial, the theatrics of the lawyers—“the whole Perry Mason thing.” He thought to himself, “I can definitely do that.”
The following year, after his seventeenth birthday, Rose passed the high school equivalency exam, dropped out of Central, and joined the marines. The discipline was jarring—life as a private, he said, was “one of the worst existences in the world”—but it helped turn his life around. He spent five years in the marines, then graduated from the Community College of Rhode Island, Rhode Island College, and Northeastern University Law School in Boston. He joined one of Boston’s hottest law firms, Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo, telling a partner in his job interview, “Mintz, Levin is like me—we’re both young and cocky.” As the firm’s only Rhode Island lawyer, Rose wound up working directly with the firm’s chairman, R. Robert Popeo, a former federal prosecutor and nationally known criminal-defense lawyer. First the City of Pawtucket hired Popeo to conduct a forensic audit following a federal corruption probe that sent the mayor, Brian Sarault, to prison for shaking down contractors. Later Rose joined the defense team in one of the biggest corruption cases in Rhode Island history, against former governor Edward D. DiPrete.
DiPrete, who had been governor in the mid- to late 1980s, and his son, Dennis, faced state charges in the mid-1990s that they had run the Rhode Island State House as a racketeering enterprise. The ex-governor was accused of extorting contractors, including a ten-thousand-dollar payoff that he inadvertently threw away at a fast-food restaurant after eating a roast-beef sandwich; when he discovered his mistake, the governor drove back to the restaurant and retrieved the cash from the trash can in the parking lot. Popeo represented Dennis DiPrete, while another top-rated Boston defense lawyer, Richard Egbert—Cianci’s future lawyer—represented the former governor. Popeo taught Rose to be prepared, to know his case inside out. Walking into the state police financial-crimes unit and surveying the hundreds of boxes of evidence, Popeo told Rose: “Our defense is in there somewhere. I just don’t know where right now.” Rose spent about a year plowing through those boxes. His efforts helped lay the groundwork for Popeo and Egbert to show that state prosecutors had concealed critical evidence favorable to the DiPretes, then attempted to cover it up. The former governor eventually pleaded guilty to eighteen felony corruption charges, but because of the prosecutorial bungling, he landed a good deal, doing only a year in prison. By then Rose, who was pushing forty and eager for trial experience, had moved on to the U.S. attorney’s office in Providence.