The many faces of Buddy

The Journal’s jihad

By Artin Coloian

THE PROVIDENCE JOURNAL’S Mike Stanton will soon be making the rounds at book signings and media interviews to hype his new book, The Prince of Providence. Announced with much fanfare last fall, this book — and perhaps a Robert De Niro-Michael Corrente movie to follow — has been the talk of the town. Offered the opportunity to review an advance copy, I came away disappointed, but not surprised.

In the acknowledgement section of his book, Mr. Stanton thanked me for my help, adding that I was more intent on finding out what he knew than telling him everything I knew. I can say with utmost certainty that he offered little then and even less in this book.

The Prince of Providence is a story woven directly from the pages of the Providence Journal. It reads like a chronology of Journal stories. If a high school student turned in a paper like The Prince, he would undoubtedly be brought to the principal’s office for submitting someone else’s work. It is very possible that Mike Stanton cut and pasted his way, putting his book together in the Journal archives, using news accounts directly from an array of reporters’ stories of the mayor’s public and private life. He thanks many of his Journal colleagues for their stories. I wonder if he will be sharing his advance with them. He owes them that much.

Caught in the trap of his own newspaper’s determined drive to bring down the mayor, Stanton showed balance and fairness the door when his publisher showed him the money. His book became a conclusion in search of a story — a study in Journal justice. Ignore and discredit the 28 not guilty counts and the dubious single count for the government, or should I say, the $20 million in taxpayer money spent to get the mayor. The Prince attempts to build a case that Buddy was really guilty of anything and everything that the Journal has printed about him over the past 33 years. Stanton takes all the "charges" thrown at the mayor since he took office and uses a host of discredited and disaffected individuals, who were all too eager to say what the author wanted to hear and "prove" to Providence’s voters that the Journal was right all along. How did Stanton do it? He searched for anyone who would attest to every piece of gossip, innuendo, and negative anecdote previously published, and tied it up in a nice, neat package.

I had more than a taste of the Providence Journal’s style of justice as I faced a litany of unidentified sources offering scathing accounts of my case in banner headlines across the front pages of the newspaper. Thankfully, my day in court resulted in a full exoneration from all charges leveled against me. My acquittal was a footnote in news accounts and the "sources" that gave the Journal its opening to "convict" me before my trial drifted into thin air.

The Journal bosses wanted a 400-page character assassination of the mayor, regardless of the bad characters they had to use to tell their story. After all, it is Mike Stanton’s hands that would get dirty, not the Hope Club types from the fourth floor on Fountain Street.

Buddy Cianci is many things to many people. A brilliant urban planner to some, a tough guy to others, a resilient personality, a smart politician, a controversial individual on some occasions, and often a warm and caring person. He is truly one of Rhode Island’s most memorable people and one of its most influential political figures. His fiercest adversaries respected his grit, his intelligence, and his determination to take on any and all challenges put before him.

Mayor Cianci never hid from the electorate or the media. Whatever battles he fought, he did so at the head of the line. I saw firsthand that leadership and courage as he carried out his responsibilities as mayor. I had the privilege of spending hours with him over the years. I marveled at his ability to bring people together, to jumpstart a huge economic development project, or settle a neighborhood dispute. He was always willing to put himself and his office in the forefront if it solved a problem or raised the hope of progress. He was willing to take the hits that came his way to fight the fights to improve the city.

To quote Teddy Roosevelt, "The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again, who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions and spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at best, knows the triumph of his achievement; and who, at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold, timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat."

This quote represents the essence of our former mayor. Providence is a better place as a result of Mayor Cianci’s tenure in office. He was also the driving force for the progress that Providence has enjoyed over the past 30 years. Regardless of the barrels of ink in Journal warehouses, they will never be able to print over that fact.

Artin Coloian, Cianci’s former chief of staff, is a lawyer in private practice.

Countrymen and their discontents

By Christina Bevilacqua

AS ARMY BRATS, my brothers and I grew up on the move, and while climates, landscapes, and accents differed from state to state, one thing stayed the same: no matter where we lived, no one could pronounce or spell our last name. In vain we’d dissect it letter by letter (" ‘B’ as in ‘Boy’; ‘E’ as in ‘Edward’; ‘V’ as in ‘Victor’ . . . "), then listen resignedly to its mangling: "Berleagreia? Bezelacava? Benliacola? Vezveleque? What kind of name is that?"

Until we moved to Providence, that is, where "Bevilacqua" takes up nearly a column in the white pages, where everyone can say and spell it, and where the only question it elicits is, "Are you related to The Judge?"

I’m not, but I might as well be. Although my first-generation father grew up enduring ethnic slurs, his peripatetic American children had so little sense of being Italian that our move to Providence as teenagers was our first introduction to the stereotype we were supposed to represent. But by the time I left for college a year later, I was all too aware of what people would think when they heard my surname and learned where my family lived — that I’d have mob ties, dozens of cousins, and gold earrings shaped like kissing dolphins. I took to qualifying by adding, "My parents just moved there — I’m not from there." Coming back as an adult, I bemusedly resigned myself to having been provided a ready-made, if imaginary, Providence heritage. As a gypsy child, I’d always wanted to be from somewhere — now everyone thought I was, which was almost the same thing — and it occasionally came in handy.

Some years ago, when I crashed into the car in front of me in full view of six on-duty police officers — my license was expired and my proof of insurance was at home — the officer in charge remarked upon neither transgression. Instead, he asked solicitously after my welfare, calling me, "Miss Bevilacqua," at every chance, and gave me the police report to see if I wanted to make any changes (I declined), and then let me go without citation, offering sympathetically, "These things happen, Miss Bevilacqua." He finally ended our interview by asking conspiratorially, "So, Miss Bevilacqua . . . are you related to The Family?" I answered without hesitation, "Yes."

That story is a veritable "This Is Providence" primer, perfectly encapsulating the loopiness, small town vainglory, capricious sense of consequence, and vague menace that combine to make life here particular. If it’s funny, and for years it seemed to me that it was, it’s because the you-gotta-know-a-guy elements are so familiar to anyone who’s ever lived here. I arrived in Providence the year of Buddy’s first inauguration, leaving and returning a half-dozen times over the next 25 years, and I dined out on stories of his high jinx and effrontery whenever I found myself away.

Then, after years of treating Providence as an occasional stop, I gave into my love for its idiosyncratic charm, and moved back for good in 1997. By 2002, I was a registered voter who had stopped laughing. Plunder Dome revelations were followed with equal measures of disgust and mortification for the mayor, the citizenry, and myself. Was it worse if Buddy knew, or if he didn’t? Was I really surprised that City Hall was still charging me taxes and late fees from 1995-99 on a car I’d sold in 1993? That when I was rear-ended while driving, the tow operators arrived and asked for graft? That drug dealers were out night and day on my Mount Pleasant street, and when I’d call the police during particularly loud brawls, the dispatcher would ask in bored tones, "Does anyone have a weapon?", and then only occasionally send a car? And who was to blame when my landlord, after investing thousands of dollars in the apartment downstairs and being unable to rent it due to the blatant dealing and vandalism on our street, finally gave up after months of calling our elected officials and the beleaguered police, and sold the house in which he’d planned to retire?

Mike Stanton’s book filled in details I’d never known, reminded me of stories I’d forgotten, and often made me laugh, however uneasily, at the wild ride that was Buddy’s reign. But maybe because it has come out so soon after his banishment, it mostly brought back the queasy, angry despair I felt a year ago, when this independent and enduring city seemed irrevocably broken. It’s true that only a rogues’ gallery from City Hall was brought to trial, but by last summer, I felt like we were all unindicted co-conspirators in the decades of crimes against Providence.

Christina Bevilacqua is a contributor to the Phoenix.

A matter of choice

By Brian C. Jones

BUDDY CIANCI always had choices.

Some of them were amusing, like the daily decisions he made about what hair to wear.

As described in Mike Stanton’s The Prince of Providence, when Mayor Vincent A. Cianci Jr. awoke each morning in his adopted home at the Biltmore Hotel, across from Providence City Hall, he faced an array of Styrofoam heads on his bathroom counter. A different hairpiece rested on each one.

One toupee sported longer hair for the times when the real hair on the sides of Cianci’s head grew longer. Another was dubbed "the tousled piece," which featured "swirly" hair for outdoor events like crime scenes and fires. And a silvery gray toupee suggested the "more distinguished, statesmanlike" look that Cianci favored during his trial and final months in office.

Thus, stepping out the door every day, Cianci could be any of a number of characters.

He could be the astonishingly nimble and funny Buddy, with an ear for one-liners, like the one he pulled out of thin air while debating two rivals during his 1990 comeback election. Frederick Lippitt and Andrew Annaldo accused each other of dipping into special pension deals, prompting Cianci to crack, "I’m getting caught in the crossfire here between the Little Dipper and the Big Dipper."

But Cianci could also be mean and crude, Stanton writes, such as when he berated Alan Hassenfeld, chairman of Hasbro, one of the world’s largest toy companies and a leading Rhode Island philanthropist and government reformer. "Let’s get one thing straight," Cianci intoned. "You make fucking toys. I run a city. I have a police department, a fire department. You make fucking toys. And the only reason you do that is because your father left you the company, because you’re a member of the Lucky Sperm Club."

Early in his political career, Cianci might have run for the US Senate, but he backed away from running against former governor John H. Chafee in 1976, uncharacteristically outmaneuvered in pre-campaign jockeying. Indeed, Cianci aspired for bigger things, trying to get noticed by national Republicans as a long shot vice presidential choice, angling for an ambassadorship and running unsuccessfully for governor in 1980.

As adept as Cianci was at the gritty mechanics of local politics, Stanton writes that he sometimes recoiled at the close-up nature of being a mayor, telling a confidant: "Governors aren’t like this. They can keep people at arm’s length. Here the people lean over your desk and you can smell their armpits."

What would have become of Cianci — the city, the state, the country — had he moved into more rarified areas of public life? Undoubtedly, this man, who could see the possibilities of turning Providence’s polluted rivers into architectural assets and promoting artistic creations like Barnaby Evans’s WaterFire displays as valuable attractions, could have brought vision and inspiration to bigger arenas.

But corruption is hardly a local matter. Another one-time mayor, Edward DiPrete, moved from Cranston City Hall to the State House, and was later convicted of orchestrating a racketeering operation not dissimilar to the massive enrichment schemes that occurred during Cianci’s two administrations. DiPrete hardly shrank from the Dumpster-diving aspects of state government, famously returning to retrieve the lost loot after allegedly tossing a $10,000 payoff into a trashcan at a fast food restaurant.

If Cianci had made different choices when he came to the forks of his political life, it’s not clear that things would have turned out better for him or the different public responsibilities he would have overseen.

After all, Cianci’s biggest choice was the one he faced during the political comeback that followed the end of his first tenure in office. That first administration resulted in convictions of 22 people, although not Cianci, who was forced out instead for assaulting a man he believed was involved with his wife — a brutal episode chillingly described by Stanton.

As he’d promised, Cianci could have run a clean and visionary second administration. But the jury that weighed evidence of the federal Plunder Dome probe concluded he’d done it all over again, turning the city that "he never stopped caring" about into a racketeering enterprise.

Perhaps Cianci’s choices were not as clear-cut as they seemed.

Despite the array of hairpieces that allowed him to change his appearance at will, Cianci remained bald underneath. And for all his charisma and political savvy, maybe there never really was a good side to Buddy Cianci.

Brian C. Jones is a frequent contributor to the Phoenix.