CITYWATCH Mum’s the word on Brotherhood BY BETH SCHWARTZAPFEL

It wasn’t the usual crowd seated at the lunch counter at Olneyville’s New York System. One guy had a coiled wire tucked behind his ear like a CIA agent. Another had a chunky walkie-talkie clipped to his belt. And the parking lot, instead of cars, was filled with giant spotlights and folding chairs, and a stern-looking police officer keeping watch over it all. "Hey," yelled one woman out the window of a passing car, "what are you filming?" But since her luck was not so hot, all she got was a little tantalizing, yet frustratingly unhelpful bit of information. "A pilot," came the answer, "for Showtime."

Others, too, were wondering about all the tractor-trailers recently parked along Westminster Street on the West Side. What was up with the fluorescent yellow signs with black, Sharpied arrows and block letters reading "Crew"? And the suddenly full parking lot of the Cranston Street Armory, which usually sits empty like a hulking ghost?

I started by asking a driver of one of the abovementioned tractor-trailers. That was the day I spotted them, pointing their giant spotlights at the mint-hued Green Bar, a small dive overlooking Route 10 on Westminster Street. "It’s a Showtime pilot," said the driver, "about the Irish mob."

Jim Saccoccio, a New York System employee who was there during the filming, has another theory. "It’s about Whitey Bulger," he says, referring to the much-sought, on-the-lam South Boston mobster whose legit brother, William Bulger, enjoyed a long reign as the president of the Massachusetts State Senate. He also says they told him not to talk to the press. He did mention, though, "They love Rhode Island — better than Boston."

According to Showtime spokeswoman Faye Katz, the crew is here to shoot a prototype of Brotherhood, a potential series for the cable network. It centers around two brothers, one who may or may not be currently involved in the Mafia, and one who is a senator. If the pilot survives its infancy and becomes a full-fledged series, it will continue to be shot in Providence. Beyond that, says Katz, she can’t elaborate.

Word leaked out in other press and Web reports, though, that the cable drama stars Jason Clarke (colonialist, racist, and family-wrecker Constable Riggs in 2002’s Rabbit-Proof Fence) as the senator; Jason Isaacs (the evil Lucius Malfoy in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets) as the sketchy brother; and Annabeth Gish (most recently President Bartlet’s daughter, Liz, on The West Wing) as Clarke’s wife. Elizabeth Stephens, one of the executive producers, lived in Providence and graduated from Brown in 1986.

Providence’s role as the one-time base of the New England mob has surfaced in television and on celluloid before, most notably on HBO’s wildly successful The Sopranos. Two of the show’s executive producers, Mitchell Burgess and Robin Green, are native Rhode Islanders (Green graduated from Brown in 1967), and the show’s blind mobster/hit man Lou DiMaggio and his creepy crew hail from the Ocean State. Federal Hill also figured as the backdrop for the 1995 movie of the same name by director Michael Corrente, who will be helming the forthcoming cinematic version of ProJo reporter Mike Stanton’s The Prince of Providence: The True Story of Buddy Cianci, America’s Most Notorious Mayor, Some Wiseguys, and The Feds.

In 2000, however, bemoaning The Sopranos’ representation of Italian-Americans as mobsters, then-mayor Cianci refused to allow HBO to distribute jars of his marinara sauce at a Providence screening of the show. To do so, he was quoted as saying at the time, "would be to compromise the pride I have for my heritage, my ethnic background."

Indications are that Mayor David N. Cicilline, another notable Rhode Island Italian-American, does not have similar qualms about what the Brotherhood might suggest about our fair city. Cliff Wood, the director of the city’s Department of Art, Culture, and Tourism, says that the show is "a great opportunity for us."