The Buddy System

Cianci may be in good shape—he insists that doctors have given him a clean bill of health, despite his battling colon cancer—but he looks a little frailer than the last time he ran for mayor, back in 1998. Gone is Cianci’s famous toupee, the “squirrel.” (He was forced to lose it when he went to prison, a traumatic experience—losing the toupee, that is—though he recently told the New York Times that he “enjoys life without the squirrel.”) Instead, he now frequently sports eyeglasses; squint, and he almost looks distinguished. The epicurean ex-officeholder is now considerably skinnier than the last time around, as well. (That’s not to say Cianci’s taking care of his health, exactly—he maintains his decades-long Marlboro habit.) He is, he says, “a little older, a little wiser, a little more mellow.”

“Mellow” is not a word one would traditionally associate with Vincent “Buddy” Cianci. Wildly ambitious from a young age, the Cranston, Rhode Island, native began his career as a prosecutor before being elected mayor of Providence in 1974, at just 33 years old. More transactional than ideological, Cianci ran as a Republican because it made the most electoral sense. His brand was “anti-corruption” and clean government—he defeated the barfly incumbent, Democrat Joseph Doorley, and when he was still a prosecutor, Cianci even went after Raymond Patriarca, the don of the New England mafia. At the time, Providence’s politics were positively Middle Eastern, dominated by ethnic conflict. Cianci was the candidate of the Italians; Doorley, the Irish.

After winning election, Cianci looked like he was destined for bigger things than mere mayor of a then-declining New England city. A rare Republican mayor, Cianci addressed the 1976 GOP convention and was even tipped as a possible vice president. Indeed, it was an open secret that he coveted one day becoming the first Italian-American president. All the while, he threw himself into his job, embracing the historic preservation of Providence’s fabulous stock of architecture and trying, with mixed results, to lure development downtown. He also cultivated something of a cult of personality, showing up at parades, weddings, Little League games, business launches, and concerts. As the old joke goes, Cianci is the kind of politician who would have attended the opening of an envelope. While he lost a 1980 bid for Rhode Island governor, Providence voters rewarded his attention by reelecting him in 1978 and 1982, that last time as an independent. 

But Cianci’s frenetic energy has always had a disturbing dark side. In 1966, while a law student at Marquette University in Milwaukee, he was accused of raping a woman at gunpoint. Then there was the infamous incident in 1983, in which the then-mayor assaulted a man he suspected of having an affair with his wife. While a Providence policeman held the victim captive, Cianci burned him with a lit cigarette, attacked him with a fireplace log, and chucked an ashtray at him. For that charming conduct, Cianci was given a five-year suspended prison sentence and forced to resign his office, which he regained in 1990, running under the slogan “He Never Stopped Caring About Providence.” Pulitzer Prize-winner Mike Stanton’s exhaustive biography, The Prince of Providence, describes numerous instances of minor violence, tantrums, and petty tyranny. There was the time, for example, when a restaurant Cianci favored was too crowded to let him in, and he was turned away at the door. A little later, the Providence fire marshal shut the place down for overcrowding, and its entertainment license was revoked.

Cianci fell again—harder, this time—in 2002, after a multiyear FBI investigation of corruption in Providence city government brought down nine people, including the mayor himself. The linchpin of the case was a video recording of a top Cianci aide taking a $1,000 bribe. Though he was acquitted of the majority of the charges he faced, Cianci was found guilty of running a criminal enterprise from City Hall. Not only was he forced to resign again, but he was sent to federal prison for four and a half years.

In retrospect, it seems touchingly naïve to have thought that Cianci’s imprisonment would have been the last that Providence would hear from him, that he’d simply slink away in disgrace. When he was released from prison in 2007, Cianci returned to Providence almost immediately and wasted no time in seizing the spotlight again. Within a few months of his release, he was hosting a daily radio show. (This was the same tack he took after his first conviction.) He also began appearing on local TV as a political analyst and released a memoir, Politics and Pasta. And even when he was in jail, Cianci’s most ardent opponents couldn’t avoid his visage in the grocery store aisles: He continued to market his “Mayor’s Own Marinara Sauce,” which features a smiling shot of Cianci on the label. Like a bizarro Newman’s Own, -Cianci’s marinara sauce is ostensibly a charitable endeavor, but as the Associated Press revealed earlier this spring, “in recent years, no money from the sauce’s sales has been donated to Cianci’s charity scholarship fund.” That hasn’t spurred Cianci to remove the message Benefiting Providence School Children from the sauce’s label, however. Cianci’s comeback culminated this summer with his announcement that he would make a run at the mayor’s office, again as an independent.

This run, Cianci has some bona fide successes to point to: When he was mayor, particularly in his second go-around, Providence underwent so much positive change that many took to calling it “America’s renaissance city.” (Opinions differ, of course, on how much credit Cianci can legitimately claim.) A modern-day Xerxes, Cianci literally moved water for his most famous project—he oversaw the rerouting of three rivers downtown and the opening of the beautiful Waterplace Park. Today, that project is looked to worldwide as a model of urban redevelopment. Hotels, a skating rink, and a shiny new shopping mall also opened under his watch. (Though as Stanton’s book shows, it’s not exactly a healthy business climate when entrepreneurs can have their businesses messed with if they fall out of favor with an ill-tempered mayor.) And he can make a reasonable case that he stanched the city’s decline: The population stabilized and even began to grow when he was mayor, from 160,000 in 1990 to more than 180,000 today.

Cianci talks a solid game on a lot of issues, too. “Raising taxes is not an option,” he tells me. “Our taxes are too high. The property tax is high. The commercial property tax is the fourth-highest in the country; up until last year it was the highest. Dropping to fourth-highest isn’t exactly something to write home about.” He also makes a good case for consolidating and privatizing various services, slicing the unwieldy administrative staff of Providence Public Schools, putting more cops on the beat, and filling potholes. Okay, so it’s not the stuff of the White House—but it sure beats Fort Dix Correctional Facility.

And he’s still the charismatic and witty pol he was 30 years ago. When his press secretary comes into his office to relay an invitation to appear on a radio show, Cianci shoots back, “You could open a window and yell out the window and have more listeners than [that program].” (The quintessential glad-hander, he went on the show anyway.)

But, of course, there’s Cianci’s disquieting criminal past. His strategy is both to minimize the gravity of his convictions and to characterize anybody concerned about his rap sheet as dwelling on “ancient history.” 

“I was found guilty of one charge,” he stresses. “I’ve always proclaimed my innocence .  .  . frankly, I’m not shy about it. It’s the truth: I did go to jail. Having said that, I paid the price.” Referring to journalists who raise the issue, he says, “I thought they were in the news business, not the History Channel.” (That’s a variation of an old line; in 1990, he said those concerned about the assault conviction should go to “The Rhode Island Historical Society.”) “The law says I can run. I paid the price, and I can run. If you don’t like that, change the law,” he continues. When asked at a press conference how the people of Providence can trust him given that he’s already been convicted of racketeering, he doesn’t have much of an answer, saying only that he’ll appoint good people.

Cianci almost lucked out with a Democratic opponent who has his own alleged ethical lapses, albeit on a different scale than Cianci’s. Providence City Council president Michael Solomon, who is under investigation for failing to disclose that a real estate partnership he’s involved in received an economic development loan from the city, nearly won the Democratic primary. Instead, Cianci is facing his electoral nightmare, in the form of one Jorge Elorza. In a city with as much corruption as Providence, it’s helpful not to have a history as an elected official. Elorza is a housing judge, and he comes from a genuinely inspiring background: The son of Guatemalan immigrants, Elorza grew up in poverty and was a troubled teenager who dabbled in petty crimes like shoplifting. But he later attended the Community College of Rhode Island before working his way to the University of Rhode Island and eventually Harvard Law School. Elorza will also have an ethnic advantage; Providence is rapidly on the way to becoming a majority-Hispanic city. (The current mayor, Angel Taveras, is of Dominican descent.) Cianci, for his part, says that his campaign is spending a lot on Spanish-language television and radio ads.

Cianci charges to me that “the progressive types” (presumably Elorza) want to keep hiking taxes, despite his opponent’s insistence that he wants to do no such thing. It’s also mordantly amusing to hear him use “progressive” as an epithet—not 20 minutes before, I had witnessed Cianci, when talking to a Democratic voter, call himself the “original progressive,” citing his earlier administration’s pro-gay policies. But then last week, Cianci was playing the conservative culture warrior; his campaign initiated a telephone push poll, which, as local TV station WPRI reported, asked voters to “press 1 if they agree with Cianci that teaching about the existence or nonexistence of God ‘does not belong in schools,’ or press 2 if they agree with Elorza that it would be acceptable ‘to teach in schools that there is no God.’ ” (Elorza wrote a 2010 law review article exploring the issue.)

Trying to be everything to everyone carries more than a hint of desperation. Is Cianci worried he’s on the path to defeat? He says no. “One thing I don’t need is name recognition,” he quips, before saying that “this race is winnable.” In contrast to the old days of ethnic-based allegiances, today, he says, “It’s a sociological war. Elites against the not-so-elites.” Cianci makes it clear he’s the candidate of the not-so-elites.

But that points to one of Cianci’s biggest problems: While it is by no means a rich city, Providence just isn’t as “blue collah” as it used to be. People with Ph.D.s now live on the West End, where, when I was growing up on the East Side of Providence in the 1990s, people with bachelor’s degrees didn’t dare to tread. Downtown, which in my day made Allentown look cosmopolitan, is now downright hip. A sagging old parking garage now houses a gaggle of trendy restaurants on its ground floor, including a wood-fired pizza place and a Tokyo-style ramen joint where lines can stretch out the door. The Sportsman’s Inn, a notorious “gentlemen’s club” across from the Providence Journal building, has recently re-opened as a boutique hotel housing an upmarket coffee bar. (Note: The online reviews of the Sportsman’s Inn live on, and they merit a chuckle.) Cianci’s core supporters come from a fading Providence; at a barbecue fundraiser of his I attended, Sinatra played over the loudspeakers and the largely Italian-American crowd threw back wine in paper cups. But almost all of the attendees were older than 60.

In a way, the myriad changes in Providence are a testament to the renaissance that Buddy Cianci at least helped spur. But, unfortunately for Buddy, highly educated Bobos who live in nice places don’t tend to vote for twice-convicted felons.

Ethan Epstein is an assistant editor at The Weekly Standard.