He always seemed happy—at least to my 9-year-old self. At my Little League games, he had his photo taken with each team. At the grand opening of a bakery owned by my friend’s mom, he showed up at the last minute to personally cut the ribbon. He’d tuck into plates of pasta on Federal Hill, the historically Italian section of my hometown of Providence, Rhode Island. Vincent Cianci—you probably know him as “Buddy”—who died late last month, appeared to relish his job as mayor of “America’s greatest city” (at least that’s how Providence was described in his campaign literature).
From 1975 to 1984, and again from 1991 to 2002, Cianci held the title long enough to be crowned “The Prince of Providence” by the biographer Mike Stanton. (He tried to regain the mayoralty in 2014, but lost resoundingly.) Or perhaps he just enjoyed the attention more than anything. After all, this was a man who slapped a photo of his smiling visage on jars of the “Mayor’s Own Marinara” sauce, his ostensibly charitable foray into the culinary arts. (Total donated to the sauce’s namesake scholarship fund between 2009 and 2012: $0.)
It only occurred to me later in life how haunted the mayor must have been. In 1976, while a Republican (he later became an independent), Cianci gave a ballyhooed address to the GOP convention. There was serious talk of him being the first Italian American on a presidential ticket. He could have been a contender. But by the time I knew him, his career had long since peaked: He was the mayor of a fairly insignificant American city, population less than 200,000. Sure, Cianci still made regular appearances on Imus in the Morning, and his antics ensured a steady stream of national news coverage, but that was as good as it was going to get.
That was all his fault. In 1983, Cianci viciously assaulted a man he suspected of being his wife’s lover (there were lit cigarettes and a fireplace log involved). That felony conviction prompted his first fall from office. His second tenure as mayor ended in self-inflicted disgrace as well. Chronically unable to control his malevolent impulses, he ran a criminal enterprise out of City Hall: A federal RICO conviction sent him to prison for five years.
That stint in the slammer, even if it was a country club, took its toll on the man. The Buddy of my childhood was fat, loud, gregarious, and possessed of a full head of hair. (Okay, it was a wig.) When I last saw him in 2014, as he was mounting his failed bid at a comeback, Cianci was slight, bald, and frail. And his efforts at self-improvement were seemingly unsuccessful. Before he was sent up, Cianci vowed to use the time in captivity to learn Spanish and quit smoking. So I asked him how his Spanish was. His only response was to laugh. A pack of Marlboros was lying in front of him on his desk. Cianci cussed a blue streak in our final interview and demanded I turn off my recorder so he could say some, er, impolitic things. When he lost that race—a defeat that some said would kill him—he returned to hosting both a radio and a television show.
For a few years now, people who have never lived in Providence have been telling me that my hometown is “cool.” I still can’t get used to this. (Be patient, beleaguered citizens of Allentown: It could eventually happen to you.) Cianci deserves credit for this: By helping to preserve Providence’s historic stock of architecture and planning a beautiful riverfront park downtown, among other things, he helped turn a dying city around. During his second tenure, people began referring to Providence, not implausibly, as a “renaissance city.”
But it’s been sad to watch the twice-convicted felon get the Kim Il-sung treatment in the days after his death. Cianci lay in repose in Providence’s splendid Second Empire City Hall (though there is no truth to the rumor, which I am hereby starting, that he’ll receive the Full Lenin and be forever on display, embalmed). In fact, Cianci’s body rested right in front of the very office . . . that he sold. Rhode Island’s governor, meanwhile, pointedly said that the state house would not lower its flags in his memory, only to reverse course when angry friends of Buddy objected.
Cianci’s campaign slogan in 1990, as he ran following the assault conviction, was “He Never Stopped Caring About Providence.” If that’s true, it’s perverse: Like an abusive husband, he mistreated what he supposedly cared about most. But perhaps it’s churlish to dwell on that now. Buddy Cianci was, after all, the man who sought to “Make Providence Great Again.”
