A lack of providence
Mayor misdeeds tarnish a city
By REID J. EPSTEIN repstein@journalsentinel.com, Journal Sentinel
Sunday, August 10, 2003
The Prince of Providence: The True Story of Buddy Cianci, America's Most Notorious Mayor, Some Wiseguys, and the Feds. By Mike Stanton. Random House. 384 pages. $24.95.
Buddy Cianci was a man in full, and his Providence was a place where he was king. Like Tom Wolfe's protagonist, he believed his own hype, but unlike Charlie Croker, Cianci was real, elected mayor of Rhode Island's capital six times before finally being sent to prison in 2002 on a federal racketeering conviction.
The Cianci portrayed in Mike Stanton's "The Prince of Providence" was the most popular man in town, dancing at a pulsating nightclub one moment and dining with a group of elderly Italian women the next. He was powerful, popular and omnipresent, once saying that he would attend "the opening of an envelope."
He was also crooked, running Providence like a personal fiefdom. In a never dull and at times comical portrayal of Cianci (two of his henchmen were nicknamed Buckles and Blackjack), Stanton describes a municipal dictatorship where people had to go through the mayor or his people. A job with the city planning department: $5,000. A remodeling license for the exclusive University Club: A free lifetime membership for Cianci. A property tax break: $500 per year.
Stanton's tale is not just a biography of a crooked mayor, but rather one of an entire city reeling in corruption and patronage.
Cianci's chicanery makes the triumvirate of indicted aldermen at Milwaukee's City Hall look positively minor league.
While he didn't exactly buy votes, anyone with a municipal job was expected to meet quotas for selling tickets to his political fund- raisers. In weeks before tough elections, he would have the roads repaved in strategically important neighborhoods. And he once ordered a city electrician -- who taped the phone call -- to lie to the FBI during its investigation, which was named Operation Plunder Dome after the metaphorically crumbling city hall roof.
The political Buddy Cianci was a survivor, serving as Providence's mayor longer than anyone ever had before. He beat back political foes, prosecutors and The Providence Journal which, spurred on by Milwaukee attorney Alan Eisenberg, Cianci's classmate at Marquette Law School, investigated a story that Cianci had raped a woman in the Milwaukee area suburb of River Hills in 1966. (Cianci was never charged, though he paid the woman $3,000 to settle the case.) Cianci's lawyers pressured the paper's editors to kill the story, Stanton writes, which they ultimately did.
Stanton, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter at The Providence Journal, paints a vivid picture of a city trying to boost its image by investing in its downtown, enticing young professionals and engaging in massive civic projects like moving the downtown river to form a park in the city's harbor. Like Wolfe's "A Man in Full," it is exhaustive in its detail, which at times bogs down the narrative for one not versed in local geography and lore.
"The Prince of Providence" is a textbook example of how machine politics worked in America. When the FBI finally put Cianci on trial, city employees compelled to testify chose their words carefully, just in case he was acquitted and sought revenge.
Even after his conviction, Cianci maintained that he was guilty only "of being the mayor."
That Cianci was, but had he not spent the prior decades cultivating an environment of corruption, the man Providence crowds serenaded with chants of "Buh-Dee" would still be the mayor, and not just another inmate at the Fort Dix federal penitentiary.
Reid J. Epstein is a Journal Sentinel reporter.
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