Talented Providence mayor who was doomed by crime and corruption

THE PRINCE OF PROVIDENCE: THE LIFE AND TIMES OF BUDDY CIANCI, AMERICA’S MOST NOTORIOUS MAYOR, SOME WISEGUYS, AND THE FEDS

By Mike Stanton

Random House, $25.95, 442 pages, illus.

REVIEWED BY LYN NOFZIGER

If Buddy Cianci hadn’t been a crook he might have won kudos and other accolades as one of America’s outstanding mayors.

If he hadn’t run perhaps the most corrupt big city political machine east of Chicago he might have wound up as a governor or a U.S. senator. As a matter of fact, in his dreams his ambitions took him higher than that, but his principles or rather, his lack of them, got in his way. As it was, therefore, the man they called the Prince of Providence never went to the senate or the state house and never was considered for vice president; he went to the pokey instead.

In “The Prince of Providence,” Mike Stanton tells the story of Vincent A. “Buddy” Cianci Jr.,warts and all.To some he was the flamboyant and visionary mayor of Providence, R.I., to others he was a corrupt elected official who betrayed the public trust. And perhaps he was both.

Unfortunately the warts on Cianci’s record in the end outweighed the good almost everyone admits he did and they were plentiful enough and serious enough to send him eventually from the mayor’s office to the federal prison at Fort Dix, N.J., where he currently resides.

In reading Mr. Stanton’s detailed expose of Cianci’s two lengthy tenures as mayor of Providence one can’t help but conclude that he is a genuine Jekyll and Hyde figure, morphing easily from the good guy to the bad guy and back again. Not surprisingly, a federal judge reached the same conclusion and sentMr. Hyde off to the slammer with a five years and four months sentence for criminal conspiracy. Unfortunately for Cianci, Dr. Jekyll had to go along with him.

“There are,” Federal Judge Ernest Torres said at the sentencing, “two very different Buddy Ciancis.” One, he said, was one of the most talented politicians Rhode Island has ever seen. The other “was mayor of an administration that was corrupt at all levels.” It was, he added, a criminal enterprise that Cianci used to line his own pockets.

Mr. Stanton, who has won a number of awards, including a Pulitizer Prize, leaves little about Cianci and his record to the imagination. As an investigative reporter at Rhode Island’s biggest newspaper, the Providence Journal, for l8 years he was blessed with a ringside seat as much of Cianci’s checkered career unfolded.

Mr. Stanton knows Cianci personally, as well as many of those who were involved one way or another in his career, including the crooks who were part of his organization and Dennis Aiken, the Federal Bureau of Investigation agent who brought him down. In thanking those who helped him with the book, Mr. Stanton notes in an aside that Cianci tried to block its publication. It is easy, in reading it, to understand why.

To me the most damning indictment of Cianci is not that he is a crook after the manner of too many of America’s big city political bosses, but that underneath a jovial exterior he has a mean and cruel streak. He is a bully who has not been above using whatever instrument or authority he has had handy to hurt people or have his way with them. For example, as Mr. Stanton relates it, there is little doubt that while Cianci was a 25-year-old law school student at Marquette University in Milwaukee, Wis., he committed one of those unforgivable crimes; he lured a young woman to his house and raped her at gunpoint. Though he denied the woman’s charge, he failed three lie detector tests and later paid the woman $3,000. Still, in those pre-DNA days, there appears not to have been enough evidence to indict or try him or, on the other hand, to clear him. The charges eventually were dropped, although the woman never retracted her charges.

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