Death came to Buddy Cianci a year too soon, for surely he would have recognized a political soulmate in our president-elect. Cianci, who died of colon cancer last January at the age of 74, was the original avatar of our new politics, a creature composed mostly of bluff and bluster, a master of the media who mesmerized both press and public throughout his record 21 years as mayor of Providence, Rhode Island.
Along the way, neither press nor public ever seemed able to look away, nor to hold anything against him for very long. They weren’t turned off when Providence’s straight-arrow police chief put a bullet in his head, after Cianci pressured him to lie under oath. Nor did they much mind that 22 public officials were convicted of corruption during Cianci’s first regime, or that he received two felony convictions, or that a young woman accused him of raping her at gunpoint when he was still in law school. They couldn’t even give up their Buddy when it came out that he had accused a local contractor of sleeping with his ex-wife, and tortured him with a lit cigarette and a fire log for three hours—in front of a sitting judge and a Providence police officer.
That mad little escapade spelled the end of Cianci’s first nine-and-a-half years as mayor, in 1984. But he would be back. Hired as a drive-time host less than a year after his resignation—and just as talk radio was taking over the airwaves—he was a natural and eventually made it to television, where he hosted shows with names such as Buddy TV and The World According to Buddy. His fans loved him for his baggy suits and his risibly awful toupee, which he named “the squirrel,” for the jars of his “Mayor’s Own Marinara Sauce” that he sold from the trunk of his car and for his outrageous “politically incorrect” japes.
“Be careful,” Cianci liked to say. “The toe you stepped on yesterday may be connected to the ass you have to kiss today.”
The media ate it up. The best and the brightest of American journalism flocked to his campaigns and his corruption trials—and emerged thoroughly charmed. They quoted his revisions of his squalid and often frighteningly violent personal life, or let him whitewash it altogether. They tended to paint him as a sort of latter-day Fiorello La Guardia, a squat, feisty ball of perpetual motion and tribune of the people, careening from one ribbon-cutting to another.
Even after Cianci’s death, Matt Taibbi eulogized affectionately in Rolling Stone, “There was a lot of darkness in Cianci’s past, from the mountainous history of bribes to some very serious ugly allegations about his relationships with women. But as personalities go, he was one of a kind.” Talking Point Memo’s Josh Marshall tweeted that Cianci was “Crooked, yes. But genuinely great major [sic] of a special city.” Even Mike Stanton, whose best-selling exposé, The Prince of Providence, spelled out chapter and verse how Cianci turned Providence into an open-air bazaar of political corruption, characterized him in the end as both “good and bad,” a mayor who at least “brought a lot of excitement and regeneration to the city.”
Worst of all, the press tended to cement the idea that Cianci, corrupt as he was, had really transformed Providence into the “Renaissance City”—that this was just the sort of egg-breaking that effective city leaders engaged in, one way or another. Philip Gourevitch noted in a 2002 New Yorker profile that in Cianci’s Providence, “Sixteen million dollars were simply unaccounted for from the previous year’s [1983] budget”—but credited Cianci with making Providence a beautiful, thriving “destination city” that “now boasts one of the fastest-growing (and most diverse) urban populations in New England.” Like many other visiting journalists through the years, Gourevitch kvelled over Providence’s transformation from the rotting industrial town he remembered during a visit 30 years earlier, praising its beautifully restored buildings, new arts culture and gay scene; its spectacular waterfront parks by canals “created by excavating three long-buried rivers and rerouting them to wind—complete with bobbing gondolas—through the heart of the city.” Was Cianci, Gourevitch asked in a remembrance this year, really any more corrupt than Mike Bloomberg, or Rahm Emmanuel?
In fact, the legend of Cianci, the fatally flawed hero of Providence, was largely a lie from the get-go. Vincent Albert Cianci, Jr., wasn’t even born in the city, but the comfortable suburb of Cranston, and he attended a prestigious local prep school starting at age 9. He actually spent much of his political career plotting how to escape Providence, mostly to Washington as a senator or even vice-president. (A crushing loss in his one run for governor, in 1980, put an end to those pipedreams.)
His own lying, and his personality, were pathological, right down to the label on his marinara sauce, “Benefiting Providence’s Children” (what proceeds there were benefited Buddy). After narrowly avoiding prosecution for his alleged law-school rape charges—Buddy flunked three lie-detector tests, and paid his accuser $3,000 after she nearly died from an overdose of sleeping pills—he returned to Providence and made his bones as a prosecutor by sending up the local mob boss, in a case in which he caught out a priest lying on the stand.
Elected Providence’s first Republican mayor in a generation, in 1974 and at age 33, Cianci did indeed inherit a moribund, postindustrial city, known mostly for its mob hits and freight yards, and barely propped up by federal money for urban development. Providences’ downtown streets were empty and its buildings rotting away, local unemployment was 18 percent, and its zoo was so badly maintained that monkeys were escaping onto the highways. Much of its human population had done the same, shrinking from more than a quarter-million residents in the 1940s to just over 179,000.
Cianci brought a lot of energy to the job and attracted some downtown development money. Elected originally by a margin of 709 votes, he spent much of his time wriggling about desperately to stay in power, exploiting fissures in the Democratic machine and finally changing his party affiliation to “Independent” to win his third term, in a three-way race in 1982. His operatives pulled scams such as promising seniors a free bus trip to the casinos of Atlantic City in exchange for signing absentee ballots—then telling the elderly voters that a labor dispute had canceled the trip.
In another stunt to impress the public, Cianci ended a garbage strike by sending cops armed with shotguns around in trash trucks driven by scabs, then privatized the city’s garbage service—for which his minions collected a $200,000 kickback. (Disposing of the city’s garbage trucks netted an additional $15,000 kickback.) Corruption seems to have become more open and ubiquitous than ever during his administration. A police driver of the mayor recalled seeing rubber-banded stacks of cash spread out across the desk of Cianci’s legal adviser—just outside Cianci’s own office. The mayor’s frenetic drives around the city were routinely highlighted by individuals wordlessly dropping blocks of cash, wrapped in aluminum foil, onto the front seat of his official car. Cianci stored these cash “contributions,” as much as $500,000 at a time, according to his legal adviser, in a safe at his mother’s home. And Cianci himself lived in luxury, in a huge carriage house built by an old political boss.
“Good government only gets you good government,” Cianci liked to say. Corrupt government didn’t get you much, either, at least for those who were not receiving foil bricks stuffed with bills. By the time his little torture episode forced Cianci out of office in 1984, Providence was teetering on bankruptcy, forced to keep raising its taxes and its population still hemorrhaging, down to 156,000 souls.
What Cianci learned from his first three terms in office, though, was the same thing that so many American mayors were learning about the same time, in their own, rotting post-industrial cities: Government isn’t the solution. People are the problem. Who needs all those old industrial workers and their families, anyway? More than anything, Cianci found that Providence attracted the praise of the national media for the superficial changes he had made: all those riverfront promenades and gondolas and the city’s “WaterFire” summer festival; the beautifully restored historic buildings that had been refurbished originally as a sop to blue-haired Republican donors from the city’s wealthy old Yankee neighborhoods.
Once Cianci was back in power in 1991—this time elected by all of 317 votes, in another three-way race—Providence’s face-lift really took hold. The city would change its old nickname from “the Beehive of Industry” to “Creative Capitol,” with the usual emphasis on “knowledge industries,” particularly in health and the arts. It stressed tourism as an industry. It was voted one of the 10 best places to live in the country for seniors by Money magazine. Cianci appointed a mayoral liaison to the gay community, and Providence was named one of the 10 best cities to live in for lesbians by Girlfriends magazine. Buddy restored the zoo.
Cianci was more popular than ever, reelected in a walk in 1994, then running unopposed to win a sixth term in 1998. Providence—like most of America—was doing well. Crime was down, and the notorious local Mafia had been largely wiped out by the same federal racketeering and corruption statutes that eventually would take down Cianci himself. If it took a little corruption (or a lot) to get this done, our free press repeatedly told the people of Providence, well, maybe that’s the way it has always been, and always will be. Buddy was a throwback in a drab political age. He was a national celebrity in a small place, named the man Rhode Island women would most like to date in 1996, even at age 55.
“People are willing to compromise principle a little for prosperity,” a local lawyer told Gourevitch in 2002. “People in Providence are willing to put up with shenanigans because they’re doing well.”
Cianci was brought down ultimately only by “Operation Plunder Dome,” a sweeping FBI investigation that put still more of his hires in jail and brought 30 indictments against Cianci. Ultimately, he was convicted on only one, a racketeering conspiracy charge, which he lamented was like being convicted “just for being captain of the ship.”
Indeed. But even that wasn’t the end of Buddy. After five years in prison, he was back, minus the toupee and 50 pounds lost after his first bout with cancer, wearing a light covering of pancake makeup as he made his rounds of the city again in 2014. He grabbed a remarkable 44 percent of the vote in another three-way race and fell just short of a seventh term in office.
What was his legacy?
Today, the population of Providence is almost exactly what it was when Cianci first became mayor—179,213 in the 1970 census and 179,207 according to the 2015 figures. Unemployment is no longer 18 percent, but the city’s per capita income is only about three-quarters of that of Rhode Island as a whole. Its poverty rate is nearly 30 percent, which is one of the higher rates among any city in the United States. And more than four in every 10 of its residents younger than age 18 live beneath the poverty line.
In other words, outside of all the pretty lights on the water, and the nice historic buildings, and the cool bars downtown, there is a Providence—like cities all over this country—that is struggling as much as it was when Cianci first took office 42 years ago. But hey, it only took untold millions—maybe billions—in stolen public monies and putting up with a violent, vengeful, lying demagogue to get back to where it began. At least the monkeys are safe.