The Prince of Providence

by Mike Stanton

  In a masterful performance, seemingly ad-libbed but meticulously planned, Egbert attempted to deconstruct Joseph Pannone. Distilling several hundred hours of tape, Egbert spent part of one day and most of the next painting him as a boastful liar who had exaggerated his ties to Cianci and other powerful politicians. Reading from transcripts of tapes that the government had not played, Egbert highlighted particularly absurd moments. He had the judge and jury laughing as he recounted Pannone’s description of visiting a woman whose brother had died in the house. “So I closed his eyes, right? I said, ‘See Joan, your brother’s dead. Why don’t you give him to my friend at Pontarelli’s [funeral home].’ ” The sister, looking for her brother’s will, went to a cedar chest where, according to Pannone, “he had four hundred thousand dollars in that fucking chest.” Then Egbert, trying to show how easily confused Pannone was, pointed to another conversation in which he said, “The mayor had a cedar chest full of fucking money.”

  Egbert zeroed in on Pannone’s allegation that a former Rhode Island governor, Philip Noel, had used his influence with Cianci to secure a substantial tax break for an upscale East Side retirement home. The FBI had, in fact, investigated the matter, but nobody had been charged. Pannone also said that Cianci and Noel “go out screwing together.” Later, Egbert would call Noel to the stand to deny it, in effect putting an ex-governor’s word up against the conniving Pannone’s. Egbert questioned Pannone’s claim that he had clout with judges and with an influential North End state senator, Dominick Ruggerio. (Egbert failed to mention the incident that had made Ruggerio part of Rhode Island political folklore—shoplifting condoms from a CVS drugstore by stuffing them in his sock, which earned him the nickname “Rubbers.”)

  Egbert also delved into the curious case of a coin-laundry owner named John J. Izzo, a family friend of Pannone’s who liked prostitutes. In June 1998 Izzo was arrested for soliciting an undercover policewoman. Izzo, who was married, had been arrested once before for solicitation. He turned to Pannone, who later told Freitas that he had passed along a bribe to Corrente to fix the case. Izzo pleaded no contest and his case was filed for a year, which meant it would be erased from his record if he stayed out of trouble. It was not an unusual disposition, prompting Egbert to question the alleged fix.

  The prosecution countered that what had actually happened was murkier, demonstrating that in spite of his braggadocio, Pannone wasn’t as clueless as Egbert would have the jury believe. Izzo had given a thousand dollars in cash to Pannone, who had taken Izzo to Corrente’s office and then gone in alone while Izzo waited outside. Fatefully, Freitas had also come to see Corrente that day and found himself in the reception area with Pannone and Izzo. His hidden recorder captured Corrente’s coming out and chastising Izzo and Pannone for not going to court with a lawyer whom Corrente had arranged to represent Izzo at a hearing that day. Corrente told them that the lawyer had just gone over to court with Art Coloian. Later, with Freitas still there, Coloian came in and said that the case had been postponed and that Corrente would call and find out the new date. Izzo went to court the following month and pleaded no contest. Egbert would later call the judge and the undercover policewoman to testify that nobody approached them to fix the case. Corrente’s role in the case, and the fate of Izzo’s thousand bucks, remained a mystery.

  On Monday morning, June 3, six weeks after the trial began, Freitas stepped down from the witness stand. Shortly after that, the government rested. The defendants moved immediately for judgments of acquittal, arguing that the government hadn’t proven its racketeering case. Although such motions are routine, Torres questioned the prosecution closely on whether the evidence spelled RICO.

  A prosecution brief presented the government’s view of City Hall: “Cianci was the head of a criminal business, in effect, the CEO. Corrente was his vice-president, responsible for overseeing daily operations. The other defendants were responsible for various aspects of that business. Pannone was responsible for taxes, along with David Ead. Autiello was responsible for the towers. Those defendants also handled ‘walk-in customers’—like Ise and Maggiacomo. And Voccola was responsible for ensuring a steady flow of cash, obtaining city funds on a corrupt lease, laundering those funds into cash, and making sure the cash made its way back to the CEO—through the vice president.” In court, Terrence Donnelly summed it up: “If a leader sets up a scheme and then has other people carry it out, he’s on the hook, whether it’s John Gotti or Vincent Cianci.”

  But where, the defense lawyers asked, was the proof that Cianci had organized any scheme? There was no evidence linking the mayor to the Voccola lease or the alleged extortion of tow-truck operators. There was no proof that Cianci, Corrente, Autiello, and Voccola had an agreement to run a criminal enterprise—no tapes or testimony of meetings or conversations. There was, at best, the three bribes alleged by David Ead—“sporadic unconnected episodes”—and the University Club charges, which also didn’t fit into any pattern of criminal activity. As for Pannone’s statements, the defense urged the judge to look at the corruption that Pannone knew about firsthand, most of it involving the tax board. The government was trying to inflate “a cesspool of corruption” into a “Great Swamp.”

  The defense was fighting an uphill battle. Cianci and his codefendants were attacking the very essence of RICO, which reversed the legal notion that someone cannot be convicted for a crime he didn’t commit by being held responsible for the crimes of his coconspirators. Enacted by Congress in 1970 to combat organized crime, at a time when Cianci was a mob prosecutor, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act was considered the atomic bomb in a prosecutor’s arsenal. RICO grew out of the Kefauver hearings into the Mafia in the fifties and the McClellan hearings in the sixties, in which Joseph Valachi exposed the inner workings of the mob and identified Raymond Patriarca as one of the nation’s top bosses. The hearings had revealed the mob’s infiltration of legitimate businesses and how Mafia bosses had made themselves virtually untouchable by insulating themselves from the crimes committed by their underlings. A new approach was needed, one that targeted the entire organization.

  RICO was drafted by G. Robert Blakey, a former mob prosecutor for U.S. attorney general Robert Kennedy and later special counsel to McClellan’s U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Criminal Laws and Procedures. As a prosecutor, Blakey had read the FBI reports on the illegal bugging of Patriarca’s Federal Hill office. But while RICO was designed to nail mobsters like Patriarca, McClellan directed Blakey to draft it more broadly. Hearings had also shown that the Mafia could not survive without corrupting public officials. The law targeted “any person” who engaged in racketeering activity, not, Blakey later joked, “any person whose name ends in a vowel.” Still, many believed that the acronym RICO was inspired by Edward G. Robinson’s gangster Caesar Enrico Bandello, in the movie Little Caesar, who said as he lay dying, “Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Rico?” Blakey, a gangster-movie buff, pointed to a less remembered character from the film, Big Boy, the shadowy upper-world figure behind the rackets who is not brought to justice. The RICO statute, wrote Blakey, “was designed to change the ending of the movie. Racketeers—like Rico—should not be shot by the police. They are entitled to due process. Big Boys—racketeers as much as their underworld counterparts—should not be above the law.”

  Cianci and his defenders sought to portray the government’s use of RICO against a mayor as an abuse of power. RICO was a “runaway train,” they complained. Egbert criticized it as the “kitchen-sink” approach—“just throw all kinds of disparate, unconnected allegations against the wall and see what sticks.” But while RICO had faced a number of court challenges over the years, the U.S. Supreme Court had affirmed its application beyond organized crime. Prosecutors had successfully used RICO against street gangs, neo-Nazis, corporate executives, Wall Street inside traders, and corrupt politicians who employed a moblike hierarchy. The Justice Department brought more RICO cases against corrupt public officials than it d
id against mobsters; public-corruption cases were the largest single category of RICO cases. Said Blakey, “We learned by studying organized crime, but RICO transcended that to attack corrupt systems, including political ones. Mayors, governors, police chiefs, senators, congressmen—all have been convicted where the political entity is the enterprise.” Former Boston Mafia underboss Gennaro Angiulo offered his own sobering analysis of the RICO law that would eventually land him in prison with Joseph Pannone. In a conversation bugged by the FBI, Angiulo complained, “Under RICO, no matter who . . . we are, if we’re together, they’ll get every . . . one of us.”

  Blakey, now a law professor at Notre Dame, said that he had received a call after Cianci’s indictment from someone in the mayor’s defense camp, asking if he saw any grounds for challenging how the indictment had been drawn. He said that he couldn’t find any. Blakey, whose knowledge of Rhode Island dated back to Raymond Patriarca’s heyday, had also represented an out-of-state contractor drawn into a federal corruption probe in neighboring Johnston in the mid-nineties. The case, laced as it was with the state’s incestuous politics, reinforced Blakey’s belief that “Rhode Island is more corrupt than Vietnam.”

  The day after the arguments over judgments of acquittal, Judge Torres refused to dismiss the racketeering charges against Buddy Cianci, Frank Corrente, and Richard Autiello. But he threw out the charges against Edward Voccola, ruling that while there was evidence that he had paid bribes and laundered money, the government had not proven that Voccola was part of a racketeering enterprise. If anything, Torres said, Voccola was at cross-purposes, since he was the one allegedly paying the bribes. (Because of the statute of limitations, the feds had been unable to charge Voccola separately with paying bribes or with money laundering.)

  After hugging Cianci and his other codefendants in the defendants’ room, Voccola walked out of the courthouse a free man. “We’re going to miss you,” Cianci said to Voccola’s lawyer. Voccola celebrated by making up a story for the Journal’s Tracy Breton about a fictitious victory party at his house for ninety people, featuring lobster and roast beef. (Later, when friends complained that they hadn’t been invited, Voccola had a real party.)

  Torres also threw out some of the lesser charges against the mayor. He dismissed charges accusing him of direct involvement in the extortion of the tow-truck operators but said that the mayor could still be held accountable, under RICO, of approving the shakedown. (By the time the case reached the jury, the judge would also throw out the RICO charge against Cianci regarding the Voccola lease.) Torres also tossed the witness-tampering charges regarding Steven Antonson because of Richard Rose’s failure to clarify Antonson’s confusing testimony during Egbert’s cross-examination.

  Trial analyst Daniel I. Small, a former federal prosecutor in Boston who had defended former Louisiana governor Edwin Edwards on corruption charges, called the judge’s ruling an embarrassment for the government and an important victory for the defense. “But you can win battles and still lose the war,” he said.

  It didn’t take the defense long to present its case—a handful of minor witnesses. A hearing expert testified about Frank Corrente’s impaired hearing, part of a defense argument that he hadn’t grasped everything that Freitas had said in his heavy Portuguese accent. Reporters covering the trial joked that it was the “hear no evil” defense.

  The judge shot down Egbert’s attempt to play the 1995 FBI tape in which Cianci told “Marco,” the undercover agent posing as a businessman trying to do business with the city, that he would castrate anyone who tried to shake him down. Before he ruled, Torres warned Egbert that playing the tape—and introducing evidence that the mayor was above bribes—would open the door for the government to introduce evidence of corruption in Cianci’s first administration.

  The prosecution had a list of familiar faces from Buddy’s past all teed up, from Ronnie Glantz to Ruth Bandlow, the woman who had accused him of raping her at gunpoint when he was a law student at Marquette. Egbert asked the judge if that door would also be opened if the mayor took the stand. That depends, Torres replied, on what Cianci would testify to.

  Up until the trial’s last few weeks, Cianci held out the possibility of taking the stand. He felt that he could explain things away and show the jury how far removed he had been from the Joe Pannones and the David Eads. The risk, said one adviser, was that Cianci might not shut up, and say something damaging. But because he was so quick and intelligent and confident that he could pull it off, the prosecutors thought that there was a chance.

  Richard Rose prepped for a possible cross-examination. If Cianci testified, he would have to be perfect. The prosecutors thought that Cianci would have trouble reconciling certain things. For instance, the mayor claimed to be unaware of the small details of what went on at City Hall—and yet he followed things so closely that he spotted the University Club on the agenda of the obscure Building Board of Review and involved himself in the hiring of a low-level city worker, Christopher Ise, and in the sale of two city-owned vacant lots to Tony Freitas.

  Ultimately, the mayor chose not to testify. Aside from the risks, another factor was a belief that he was ahead—that Egbert had sown reasonable doubt in the minds of the jurors with his attacks on the credibility of Ead and Pannone.

  Instead, the defense rested with another face from the mayor’s past—Eddie Xavier, the old political warhorse and former councilman from Fox Point. In the early days, Xavier had been one of Cianci’s sworn enemies. He had been one of the Democratic leaders in 1978, during the famous Wednesday Night Massacre, when Ronnie Glantz called him so dumb that he probably thought a caucus was a dead moose.

  Like many old adversaries, Xavier had made his peace with Cianci. He ran the city’s Office of Emergency Management.

  In the middle of the afternoon, Xavier trudged into the courthouse in work clothes, his plaid shirt partially soaked from a sudden rainstorm that had swept Kennedy Plaza. After taking the stand, he pointed out that he had taken half a vacation day to appear on Cianci’s behalf.

  His testimony was brief. As a member of the Friends of Cianci campaign committee, Xavier said that he had never seen Pannone at meetings to distribute fund-raising tickets.

  After a few minutes, Xavier stepped down from the stand, and Torres joked, “Enjoy the rest of your vacation.”

  RENAISSANCE CITY—OR a City for Sale?

  In their closing arguments, Richard Rose and Richard Egbert painted contrasting views of Buddy Cianci and Providence.

  “The evidence shows that the price of admission was often five thousand dollars,” said Rose. “Want a job? Five thousand. Want to be on the tow list? Five thousand. Want to grease the chairman of the tax board? Five thousand. It was a city for sale, where anything could be had for a price.”

  (Rose need not have looked any further than the packed spectator benches for proof—a former state legislator and his girlfriend had paid two people waiting in line five hundred dollars for their courtroom seats.)

  Richard Egbert took a more reflective tone, telling the jury about a stroll that he had taken around downtown Providence that dawn, as he contemplated his closing. “I walked around, looking at some of the things—the Westin Hotel, the Providence Place Mall, the Convention Center, the rivers moved. . . . I realized that this, in fact, is a Renaissance City.” The mayor, said Egbert, “was the leader, the backbone, the visionary.”

  Rose reminded the jurors that people like David Ead and Joseph Pannone were Cianci’s men. “It’s not like a coach who gets a team and inherits the players,” he said. “He picked ’em and he reappointed ’em. Why? Because they were stand-up guys.” And if David Ead was making it up about meeting with Cianci on bribes, Rose asked, then why didn’t he just keep it simple and say he’d delivered the money directly to the mayor, instead of to Corrente and Coloian?

  Egbert asked the jurors to imagine a trial in simpler times, in a colonial village where everyone knew everyone else. “So when Joe Pannone walked into the
courtroom in that village in 1650, . . . people could say, ‘Oh, there goes Joe Pannone the Liar, who would sell you the Brooklyn Bridge.’ And when David Ead walked in, they could say, ‘There goes David Ead. He’s the one who lives around the corner and stole from this store and that store and didn’t pay his taxes and gambled at Foxwoods night and day and was there on Christmas.’ ”

  That same day, a new Brown University poll found that over half the voters in Rhode Island thought Cianci was guilty, but 67 percent felt he showed strong leadership. The pollster, political scientist Darrell West, attributed the dichotomy to “the Houdini quality of Buddy Cianci. People see him as someone who is able to escape from impossible situations.” Across the river behind the courthouse, three RISD sculpture students raised a fourteen-foot-high inflatable Buddy constructed from thirty yards of silicone-coated nylon and inflated with a leaf blower. Cianci was popular among RISD students; every year at graduation he would waive the penalties on overdue parking tickets for those who had paid the original fines. “I could do more, but this year I can’t,” he had quipped the previous year, alluding to his indictment. The balloon Buddy, the product of a final class project to create a public monument or memorial, looked out across Providence, a sash across his chest proclaiming, “Serving the city since 1974.”

  Would the jury burst the mayor’s balloon, or set him free? The jurors had gotten the case after three hours of mind-numbing instructions from the judge on the intricacies of racketeering and conspiracy and “extortion under color of official right.”

  “You just earned credit for a year in law school,” Cianci quipped to reporters in the hallway. On a more somber note, he grumbled: “If you gave the jurors an exam right now, they’d probably score about thirty. And these people have my life in their hands.”

  The week ended with no verdict. The jury had been out for three days. That Saturday night the mayor served as grand marshal for the Rhode Island Festival of Pride parade, celebrating the gay community.