Buddy for Life

Buddy Cianci used to be the mayor of Providence until a scandal forced him from office and nearly into jail. Then he became mayor again. Which brings us to the latest developments. By DAN BARRY

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Buddy Cianci. Photograph by Michael Edwards.

s the rain beats down on Providence at dusk, its mayor stands at the threshold of his private entrance to City Hall and repeatedly mimics someone popping an umbrella. A city police officer, sitting not 10 feet away behind the wheel of the mayor's sedan, obediently steps into the downpour and gets drenched while rooting without success through the clutter in the mayoral trunk.

His face clouded with annoyance, the mayor vanishes into the building for a moment and then reappears, this time with a real umbrella that springs open like a black flower. He crosses the rain-slick street to the Biltmore Hotel bar, which caters more to out-of-towners seeking fleeting friendship than to locals looking to unwind. But the mayor moved into the hotel a couple of months ago, and now this lounge of strangers has become an extension of his living room.

The reasons that Mayor Vincent A. Cianci Jr. is living in a hotel are no clearer than anything else in Providence these days. You might as well ask why his administration is being investigated for corruption -- again -- just as his city is being touted by Money magazine as the best place to live in the Northeast. Or why he is called Buddy when so many nights he can be seen drinking alone.

Whatever the question, Buddy Cianci has the answer.

Dan Barry, a reporter for The Times, formerly covered politics for The Providence Journal.

"Hi, Mayor," the bartender says. "What's it tonight?"

"B and B," Cianci says, reaching for his pack of Merits. He takes a sip of his brandy, turns on his barstool and says to me, almost as a taunt, "When you're ready, I'm ready."

Once again it is time to discuss the subject that both enthralls and pains him: himself. In three decades of public life, Cianci has been psychoanalyzed so many times -- by reporters, by voters, by those who dwell in the radio-talk-show nation within Rhode Island -- that he has lost the ability to be unguarded. Defense mechanisms seem rusted in place. And so he seeks to disarm his questioners through filibuster, wit and the feint of an invitation into the exculpatory wonders of his confidence. ("Shut that thing off," he says of my tape recorder at one point, then whispers that a critic of his is connected to the mob.)

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Buddy Cianci is 59, short but imposing, with broad shoulders on a compact body. He has stained teeth that could use some work and hound-dog eyes that have had some work. He wears a convincing toupee that is an accepted part of the public package, a gold ring bearing the Cianci family crest and a pin on his gray suit that says he is the mayor of Providence.

This is like having the Pope wear a nametag around the Vatican. Cianci has been the mayor of Providence since 1975, except for a six-year timeout for a 1984 felony assault conviction. The interregnum, which came in the midst of the first federal investigation into his City Hall, allows people to distinguish between Cianci administrations with the terms Buddy I and Buddy II. He has served longer than any other big-city mayor in the country, and he is the most defiant, if not the very last, of an old-school political breed: cheerleader, bully and lounge singer, all rolled into a fist of a man.

Cianci is chauffeured about this city of 160,000 by a jackbooted police officer in a black Lincoln Town Car with a license-plate number of 1. An independent who ran unopposed in 1998, he oversees a political machine that dominates a Democratic town. He keeps everyone, from the Brahmins on College Hill to the grunts in public works, off-balance with his good Buddy, bad Buddy routine.

Even critics applaud Cianci for the postcard-pretty transformation of downtown Providence, which a few years ago was a hacking cough of a place. But other sorts of stories about Buddy are gleefully swapped around town: how he called someone at the Performing Arts Center a "faggot" for daring to tell him to put out a cigarette; how he gave the Nazi salute while shouting "Heil Hitler" to a state legislator at the Capital Grille; how he uses the city apparatus to enforce Buddy's law. One public official nervously told me that Cianci had him under police surveillance for a while; another critic said a Cianci lackey sent a message by casually mentioning the make of the critic's new car and the town to which he had just moved.

Cianci denies these stories in a way that intimates they might be true, but so what? His approval ratings hover in the 60's and 70's, and the city has never looked better. It's just the anti-Buddy faction at work again, he implies: The Providence Journal, the Justice Department, the wrongheaded reformers who just don't get why a lot of people love him.

They love him because he never stops calling Providence the greatest city in the world. Because he relishes being the honorary coach of the Nads, the Rhode Island School of Design's ice-challenged hockey team. ("Go Nads," Cianci says. "Heh-heh.") Because he knows how to use his personal embarrassments to endearing advantage. The night before, he attended the annual meeting of an AIDS-awareness organization whose members are precisely the kind of people who once did not get Buddy. But he talks the talk now, charming them with his faux self-deprecation.

"I used to be mayor," he told the group. "Then I stopped being the mayor. And then I became mayor again."

He was rewarded with knowing, only-in-Providence laughter. But that was last night. Now, sitting at the bar, he drags on another cigarette and tries to relax. His sedan is just outside, waiting to whisk him to yet another function, some celebration at a music store on Weybosset Street. But he cannot unwind, not completely. He knows that on the eighth floor of a building across the street, federal investigators are working to build a corruption case against him. Again.

Buddy, Act I: Cianci's first inauguration, 1975. Photograph from the Providence Journal.

So far, six people have been convicted of municipal-corruption charges; Cianci's close adviser and former director of administration has also been charged with taking bribes, and two top police officials are chatting with investigators about Police Department shenanigans. By last summer, the breadth of the real and rumored corruption was enough to prompt Judge Ronald R. Lagueux to intone from the bench: "Clearly, there is a feeling in city government in Providence that corruption is tolerated. In this mayor's two administrations, there has been more corruption in the City of Providence than in the history of this state."

With eyes squinting in the plume of his own smoke, Cianci mulls yet another question about the federal investigation. "Does it cause aggravation? Sure," he says. "Do I take it seriously? Yes. Am I concerned about the image of the city? Yes. Do I try to combat that every day? Yes. Do I envelop myself in the consumption of what's going to happen tomorrow? No.

"I'm not trying to be bravado. I'm not trying to be any of that. I know what I am."

To appreciate the aching beauty of the current investigation into his City Hall, you must first understand Buddy Cianci's breathtaking past. He is a political Lazarus whose capacity to heed the lessons of death seems forever in question.

In the early 1970's, Cianci -- the son of a local proctologist -- worked as a prosecutor; he took a chauffeured car every day while his boss drove himself to the office. He had a Caesar-style haircut, a stiletto-sharp mind and enough confidence to run for mayor in 1974 as a Republican in a city of squabbling but powerful Democrats. He won, becoming the city's first Italian-American mayor and a trophy for a national party seeking relevance in Northeastern cities. But the Providence he inherited was a case study in urban decay, a set piece for the antics of the Patriarca crime family, a place that tourists visited only when they had lost their way to Cape Cod. Animals from the city zoo were wandering onto Interstate 95, for God's sake.

In the end, shoring up the monkey house proved to be the least of the young mayor's worries. By 1981, the United States Attorney's office was pursuing allegations of kickbacks for city contracts; nearly two dozen people were eventually convicted, from low-level hacks nicknamed Buckles and Cha Cha to the city's top lawyer and the Democratic city chairman. Although federal investigators failed to bag the man they had identified as the primary target, Cianci eased their regrets by taking himself down.

In the spring of 1983, on one of the strangest evenings in Rhode Island history -- which is saying something -- Cianci summoned a local contractor to his home. The contractor, who Cianci suspected was having an affair with his estranged wife, later told prosecutors that with a city police officer in attendance, the mayor of Providence assaulted him and tried to extort $500,000 from him. The tools used in the assault are so well known they might as well be embossed on the city seal: an ashtray, a fireplace log and a lighted cigarette.

"I saw a crazed man," the contractor told police. "I saw a lunatic, you know, simply stated."

Some of the facts and most of the truth have never been revealed. Cianci kept it that way by pleading no contest to two assault charges and receiving a five-year suspended sentence that forced him to resign. His supporters now cite the incident as a reflection of his honor, his passion. His critics, though, suspect more insidious forces were at play, and to this day they swap rumors that make the stipulated facts seem like frat-house hazing.

"I paid my price" is all that Cianci will say today. "I did the wrong thing and I pleaded."

Perhaps another man, in another city, would have slunk from the public stage, hung a law-office shingle somewhere in Maine, evaporated. Not Cianci, and not in Providence. He became a radio-talk-show host, which gave him a coveted forum and allowed him to charm the edges off his image as a reprobate. One afternoon in June 1990, a year after the end of his suspended sentence and 17 minutes before the deadline for entering that year's mayoral race, Cianci informed his afternoon drive-time listeners, "I am back."

Within the hour he was walking into the domed 19th-century City Hall and wisecracking his way up the main interior staircase -- just like the old days. City employees leaned over railings to witness the moment that many had been praying for; some wept. Stopping for a moment in the well-appointed City Council chambers, Cianci noticed a water stain on the ceiling. "Got to get that fixed," he said.

Running as an independent in a three-way race, Cianci won by only 317 votes, but it was all he needed; Darrell West, a political scientist at Brown University, calls it the "comeback of the century." Cianci immediately threw himself into selling the city in a manner -- trading barbs with Imus on the radio, pitching jars of his own marinara sauce for a scholarship fund -- that seemed to belie his old-style political customs.

"Before, when I was first mayor, mayors around America in those days were more social workers," Cianci explains. "Now mayors have become more risk takers; they have become more entrepreneurial. So I've changed quite a bit."

Joseph R. Paolino Jr., who served as the city's mayor between Buddy I and Buddy II and for many years was among Cianci's favorite foils, says he has to give the man his due: Cianci truly deserves some credit for the city core's revival. "His enthusiasm and diligence have made a lot of things happen," Paolino says. "They look at downtown, they see the man in office as mayor, and they say one and one is two."

By the spring of 1999, the city's school system was about the worst in the state, its municipal-employee pension system was promising a future financial crisis and most of its neighborhoods -- with glorious names like Wanskuck and Olneyville -- had yet to benefit from downtown's resurgence. But Providence had become the success story of New England, a place that commuters no longer fled at dusk, a place so hot that NBC based a feel-good drama there. And Cianci had become the city's mischievous mascot. He might be a rogue, people joked, but he's our rogue.

Then one morning last April the F.B.I. returned to City Hall. As city workers muttered about the inconvenience, federal agents flashing search warrants converged on several city offices. By day's end, two tax officials had been charged in a bribery scheme, the existence of incriminating tapes had become known -- and Buddy Cianci had seen the ghost of his first administration.

'I lost a family to this job, I lost a girlfriend to this job. I lost a -- you know. I guess I had this work ethic and this thing about always working. And it's too late to change now. I'm not going to change. I go about my business.'

A year earlier, a fed-up businessman named Antonio Freitas approached the F.B.I. after the city rejected his low bid to lease office space. He spent the next several months posing as someone who had finally gotten the message, all the while recording more than 100 conversations with city officials. The recordings, shared at subsequent court hearings, include the instructive banter one might expect from people divvying up small pools of ill-gotten cash. Know that nothing comes from nothing; that it is the money that counts; that "no, no, no" means "yes, yes, yes."

Cianci tried to laugh off the investigation that the Department of Justice had christened Operation Plunder Dome. He dubbed it Wonder Dome while chatting with Imus one morning; on another occasion, he joked that there was no telltale stain on his jacket. And when prosecutors played a tape of a city official bragging that the mayor had once tutored him in pocketing bribes, Cianci snapped: "What the hell does he think? That I'm running a seminar? Stealing 101?"

But rumors of his impending indictment began to take their toll on the born-again Buddy. So did the never-ending series of articles in The Providence Journal: "Officer Who Raised Funds for Cianci Is Promoted"; "Tapes at Trial Link Cianci to Tax-Break Bribe Scheme"; "Probe Focuses on Cash in Cianci Campaign"; "F.B.I. Investigates Felon's Leases to City School Department"; "Convicted Tax Official Tells F.B.I. He Arranged Bribes With Cianci."

ome say that cianci would never be so stupid as to blow a second chance over a few C-notes in an envelope, and that the blood lust in the air only works to his benefit. "He has been around so long and hit the bottom so many times," Paolino says, "that when he comes back from being knocked down it's part of what we are -- it's part of what we celebrate."

But the bad Buddy sometimes gets the better of the good Buddy. Instead of commending Freitas for his good-citizen efforts, Cianci gleefully seized on a police report that Freitas had threatened a neighbor in a parking lot. The report was quickly determined to be unfounded, underscoring the sense that Cianci is off his game. He adamantly denies that he ever uses foul language, then proceeds to demonstrate a fluency in profanity. He briefly feigns never having heard of a notorious ex-felon who enjoys a lucrative city lease, then tells me that the lease dates back to a prior administration, which is not true. It is as though the mayor of the future is trapped in his own past, and can't quite wriggle free -- no matter what Money magazine says about the city's renaissance, no matter how many awards the Roger Williams Zoo receives.

Every move Cianci makes is seen through the prism of Operation Plunder Dome. A few months ago, he sold his East Side home -- the setting for the log-ashtray-cigarette episode -- and moved into a "presidential suite" at the Biltmore. He says the house was too big; he says the market was just right; he says he might move to a different neighborhood every six months for the sake of city morale. ("What do I need? Two suits, a pair of shoes, a toothbrush, that's all I need. A hairpiece?") But the more he explains himself, the more he feeds the suspicion that he was liquidating an asset in anticipation of indictment. In Providence, as Paolino says, one and one makes two.

A weary Cianci takes a sip from his B and B in the smoky lounge that is part of his new home. "Crisis and challenges get my blood boiling," he says. "I might have made mistakes in who I appointed and that stuff, but that's not criminal. The question is: Did I do anything intentionally wrong? And the answer to that is no. That's why I can go on."

One evening, while sitting behind his oversize desk at City Hall, he interrupts our interview. "You want a beer?" Moments later, a secretary emerges from a side room with a glass of beer in one hand, a glass of vodka in the other, while Cianci pulls a dish of roasted peanuts from among the mayoral knickknacks on his desk and puts it between us. Suddenly, the setting could just as easily be his living room or the bar in the Biltmore.

"Yeah, I'm lonely," he says, staring at a large-screen television in the corner, popping nuts into his mouth. "I lost a family to this job, I lost a girlfriend to this job. I lost a -- you know. I guess I had this work ethic and this thing about always working. And it's too late to change now. I'm not going to change. I go about my business."

And so the mayor of Providence is chauffeured about his 18-square-mile domain in a black sedan whose trunk contains a portable lectern bearing the city seal. Some of the city has changed in the 25 years since he first took office; much of it has not. He emerges to appear at bar mitzvahs and graduations, ribbon cuttings and wakes, then returns to his car's back seat, where a fax machine and television keep him abreast of city affairs and federal investigations.

Sometimes the mayor stops to dress down dawdling police officers; sometimes he swings through Roger Williams Park to make sure that all the doors are locked. Sometimes he directs his driver to take him to the award-winning zoo so that he can watch the elephants be fed late at night. But often, when darkness comes to Providence, you can find the mayor in the Biltmore, or maybe at Mediterraneo on Federal Hill, hunched at the bar, as though waiting for a tap on the shoulder.

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December 31, 2000