He’s Still Their Buddy : Despite His Felony Conviction, Voters Sent Vincent Cianci Back to Providence City Hall

Frank, a caller on Mary Ann Sorrentino’s radio show, could barely contain his enthusiasm.

“I voted for you very proudly. It was probably the best vote I ever casted,” Frank told the city’s newly inaugurated mayor, Vincent A. (Buddy) Cianci Jr.

“I mean,” Frank said, “you did say you were sorry.”

Few words could have been more welcome to Cianci. In 1974, he was hailed as the first Italian-American mayor of this heavily ethnic capital city. Ten years later, Cianci was forced to resign after he pleaded no contest to charges that he assaulted a man he believed was having an affair with his estranged wife.

Cianci was accused of putting out a lighted cigarette in the eye of Raymond De Leo, a wealthy contractor, and pummeling him with an ashtray and a fireplace log. The March, 1983, incident took place in the mayor’s rented home and was witnessed by Cianci’s police chauffeur, his divorce lawyer, the Providence director of public works and a former state attorney general. Cianci drew a five-year suspended prison sentence and five years of probation. He completed the sentence without incident in April, 1989.

“Look, I’m no hero,” Cianci said of the event. “Mother Teresa’s not going to come and give me an award. I am what I am.”

And what he is, is one of the most colorful politicians to come out of a state that began as a haven for pirates and has been known since Colonial days as Rogues’ Island.

Driven from office--literally--in a black city limousine in April, 1984, Cianci was mobbed by supporters who cheered, “You’ll be back! You’ll be back!” Apparently confident that they were correct, Cianci grinned and flashed a victory sign.

Just after midnight on Jan. 7 of this year, Cianci proved them right when he took the oath of office as mayor in a private ceremony in his home. A public extravaganza later that day celebrated Cianci’s win by 317 votes in a three-way contest.

“I don’t know if I’d call it a mandate,” Cianci said after Sorrentino’s radio show. “But it was quite a victory.”

Nicholas Easton, president of the Providence City Council and a Cianci critic, had a slightly different view. He called Cianci’s reelection a situation to which “people who live in sane places have a little problem relating.”

Victoria Lederberg, a former Rhode Island state senator, said Cianci’s re-emergence as mayor “affirms my suspicion that the public really is interested in people who are more entertaining than careful and dull.” Lederberg is not alone in her opinion. Said Steven Brown, executive director of the Rhode Island chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union: “Rhode Island politics is everybody’s favorite spectator sport.”

The Providence Journal-Bulletin, Cianci’s longtime adversary, dubbed his victory, “The greatest political comeback in American urban politics,” Cianci said. He gave an impish smile. “They said that about li’l ol’ me.”

Cianci’s 1984 departure from office came in the midst of a major corruption probe of city officials. Cianci was never charged with corruption, but 30 members of his administration were indicted on charges that included extortion, larceny and conspiracy. Of those, 21 were convicted and 16 went to jail.

But Cianci remains unimpressed by those figures. “There were about 4,200 (city employees) who worked in Providence every day and only 15 or 16 were indicted,” he said. “That’s not a high percentage.”

Coupled with the corruption sweep at city hall, Cianci’s felony conviction and ignominious exit from office only added to a curious mix of pride and self-loathing among Rhode Islanders--and a perception outside the state that Rhode Island’s eccentricities are not always endearing or amusing.

In recent years the state was the setting for the trials of Claus von Bulow, the high-society figure who was eventually acquitted of attempting to murder his wife, Sunny, by injecting her with insulin.

A state Supreme Court justice, Joseph Bevilacqua, has been criticized in the media--and by other judges--for contacts with convicted felons tied to organized crime.

Providence, home of the notorious Patriarca crime family, is known as the organized crime capital of New England. Even Cianci admits the city is saddled with a growing reputation for violent crime.

And then came the banking crisis. Six days before Cianci was to take office, the state and city were once again thrust into the news when, on his first day in office, Gov. Bruce Sundlun declared 45 banks and credit unions insolvent and ordered them shut.

Joseph Mollicone, an investor who disappeared shortly before the state’s bank “holiday,” has been cited as a key figure in the crisis. The house Mollicone lived in was purchased from Cianci.

But Cianci insists that the sale was nothing more than a real estate transaction. “I sold the house through an agent,” he said. “Mollicone happened to buy it.” He shrugged. “It was a nice house.”

He barely knows Mollicone, Cianci said. Nevertheless, he decried the suggestion that Mollicone, who allegedly embezzled $13 million from his own S&L;, caused the Rhode Island bank collapse.

“He was Ft. Sumter,” Cianci said. “Ft. Sumter didn’t cause the Civil War.”

That kind of quick turn of phrase won Cianci a huge radio audience during his seven-year hiatus from the mayor’s office. His daily call-in radio show on WHJJ-AM was highly rated in the state, he said, and in addition he did weekly political commentaries on television. He sniffed when asked about his reported $100,000 radio salary. “More,” he said, and laughed. It was gravy, in any case, on top of Cianci’s profits from real estate investments.

Cianci, the son of a wealthy physician, said he has had a love affair with the city of his birth for as long as he can remember. Providence is “simpatico, a responsibility, your mistress, your wife, whatever you want to call it.”

He wears shoes with thick soles and dark custom-tailored suits that make him seem taller than his 5 feet, 7 inches. He travels in a cloud of after-shave. His toupee nearly matches his dark flecked-with-gray hair. Ten years ago Cianci lost 50 pounds but he has regained much of it so he continues to wage a battle of the bulge. When a photographer is in sight, Cianci, 49, removes his reading glasses.

Cianci said he finds humor in almost every situation in life, even his own conviction as a felon, “the humor there being, ‘Oh, what a revolting development this has been.’ ”

He called the cigarette-and-ashtray attack “an overreaction,” and “not half as bad as it was reported in the press.” The victim recovered from his injuries. He added, “You can maybe laugh at that statement, ‘overreaction,’ but that’s what it was. It was dumb. Stupid.

“I had one mistake that I paid the price for. Life goes on.”

Following the incident, Cianci was divorced from his wife Sheila. He lives with daughter Nicole, 17, in a 1902 brick carriage house near Brown University. Father and daughter share their home with a cat, Cyrus, and a cocker spaniel named Tucker.

Riding through Providence, Cianci rattled off factoids about the illustrious Brown family and about Samuel Slater, who helped establish Providence as a center for the manufacture of textiles. Just as briskly he allowed as how “when I was mayor last time,” he commissioned a book to be written about Providence history.

There is no modesty in Cianci’s tour. “There’s the new train station,” he said. “We built that.” He indicated the old train station. “We restored that.”

Pulling up to the restored First Baptist Church in America, a 1775 structure, he first warned his driver, “Hey, don’t hit a truck. The city can’t afford it,” then observed, “The steeple on this church was paid for by my administration.”

He pointed to the period light fixtures on the street. “When I was mayor last time we put all these lights in the historic area.”

Emerging from his limousine, Cianci was surrounded by admirers. “Hey Buddy, how’re ya?” “Hi Buddy,” “Yo, Buddy,” they called out. Cianci responded with handshakes, kisses and the ever-popular “How’s your mother?”

For lunch Cianci headed to his favorite restaurant, Toscano, in the heavily Italian Federal Hill district. He sat at “my table,” right in the front, so he could still wave at fans on the street and point to the bronze plaques he erected “when I was mayor last time” in memory of legendary pushcart peddlers.

Cianci began his meal with a vodka trimmed with six tiny cocktail onions. He downed the drink hastily, then reflected on his job. Returning as mayor after an unceremonious absence, Cianci said, “I just feel like I fell asleep and woke up” and was back in office again.

His public has proved forgiving, Cianci said. “Oh sure,” he said. “Well, I think people want to give someone a second chance.”

A former Republican who says he has a close friendship with George Bush, Cianci decided this time that political parties are “baloney,” and ran as an independent. His opponents never even raised the matter of his felony conviction, Cianci said. “I think everyone makes mistakes,” he said. “People know that.” And besides, he added, “At least I said I’m sorry.”

One reason he wanted to return to office, Cianci said, is that “I just thought I didn’t like the way I left. I wanted to go back and kind of clean things up. I wanted certainly to prove to myself and other people that I could go back.”

And he wanted vindication? “That too,” Cianci said.

Cianci’s seeming imperviousness to scandal and his determined perseverance make him “the consummate politician,” former Mayor Joe Paolino, a longtime Cianci rival, said. “He drinks and sleeps politics.”

The resurrected mayor cultivates a particular style “that is a big part of his success,” City Council President Easton said. “He likes to ride around in his fancy limousine,” with a police escort and a fawning coterie.

Working a street corner or attending a midday prayer service, Cianci emanates a sense of nonstop charm that appeals to many people, but repels others. “You either love him or you hate him,” former U.S. Atty. Lincoln Almond said.

Cianci’s skills as a performer date back to his early years. Lederberg, the former state senator, said she could remember hearing Cianci when he was not yet 10 years old, but already appearing as a singer on a radio program called “Celia Moreau’s Kiddies Revue.”

Back in his City Hall office, “the one they kicked me out of,” Cianci worked to the strains of an oldies radio station that was playing “Just One Kiss.” He said he is a “gentler, more mature” mayor this time around.

Confidant that he can solve the problems of Providence, he said, “I have the testicular fortitude to do what has to be done,” he said.

Cianci settled into his big chair in his large, high-ceilinged office. The election of a convicted felon to the office of mayor says nothing negative about him or about Providence, Cianci said. On the contrary, it’s a ‘fresh start” for him and for his city.

“This is like a second coming,” he said. Content with his metaphor, Cianci returned to the afternoon’s work.