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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
In the fall of 1978, I stood on the shoulder of I-95 North in southern Connecticut, facing the traffic and holding out a sheet of cardboard on which I'd written the word "Providence." The sign worked; it took me three rides to get there--all of them cars with Rhode Island plates. The first was an aging purple Cadillac, piloted by what looked like a pirate: long stringy red hair tied in a bandanna, long stringy red beard, mirror shades, black leather vest (no shirt, just more red hair), and leather pants. He drove fast and ignored me, cursing at his eight-track tape deck, which was on the fritz. He kept stabbing a large screwdriver into it. "Providence?" he said suddenly. "What for? You from there?" No, I said, just visiting. "I'm from there," he said. "Armpit of New England." He flexed his arm in the shape of Cape Cod to illustrate the point, then rammed his screwdriver back into the dashboard and announced, "Motherfucker's busted, I'm dropping you off." My next ride was a Pontiac with a fading "Ford for President" bumper sticker and a lady driver, a schoolteacher from Newport in pearls and a Fair Isle sweater, who said she never stopped for hitchers but she'd had a notion: If you were my kid, I'd want someone just like me to pick you up. We listened to Mozart, and when we crossed the state line she said, "Welcome to Rogue's Island," and giggled. She left me at her exit ramp, and an Econoline van stopped, and the back door opened, and I climbed into a dark space where four very stoned people and a stoned-looking dog were sprawled on a couple of futons. The driver was apparently in no better shape than the passengers, because the van crawled along the interstate at a frighteningly slow speed. The people in back were from Woonsocket or Pawtucket. I can't remember, and I'm not sure they could, either. We'd been talking for some time when one of them said, "Who are you?" Another said, "He's the hitchhiker," and the first one said, "The same hitchhiker?" The third one said, "Ask him." Then someone said, "What state are we in?" and another said, "Confusion," just as I said, "Rhode Island," and the four of them laughed about that, repeating it over and over--Rhode Island, Confusion, Confusion, Rhode Island--until the van finally stopped, and we pushed the door open, and there was downtown Providence.
It looked like a railroad yard. In fact, it was a railroad yard. A broad delta of converging tracks sliced right through the city center and under the back door of the state capitol--a luminous palace of white marble crowned by an immense dome that looked like nothing so much as an extravagant tombstone against the surrounding desolation. Even by the hard-bitten standards of the rest of the Northeast in those days of oil crisis and post-industrial decline, Providence was notorious, its mills and factories shuttered, its docks and shipyards following suit, its city center lifeless, with once proud mercantile buildings standing dark and empty. The citizenry was in rout: Providence had one of the most rapidly dwindling populations in America. I spent a night there with a friend, then took a train home. "One way or round trip?" the Amtrak ticket man said, and when I told him, "One way," he said, "Smart bastard."
This summer, I returned to Providence to sit in on the racketeering trial of the mayor: United States of America v. Vincent A. Cianci, Jr. a/k/a "Buddy." The "a/k/a" had a prosecutorial sneer to it, as if Buddy were not the name by which Cianci is universally known but, rather, an underworld alias. Cianci has been mayor on and off now for a total of twenty-one years. He is among the longest-serving mayors in the country today, a political maverick and a relentless booster of his city and himself, and in the course of his tenure he has presided over the most celebrated resuscitation of an American city in our time. When he first took office, in 1975, Providence was in the depths of a seemingly terminal downward slide. Today, the city center I saw on my first visit is almost unrecognizably transformed. The rail yards are gone, replaced in part by a vast, upscale shopping mall, in part by several new hotels, and, most strikingly, by the elegant Waterplace Park, an area of greens and stone promenades and canals that was created by excavating three long-buried rivers and rerouting them to wind--complete with bobbing gondolas--through the heart of the city. Spurred by the success of these huge projects in the last ten years of Cianci's mayoralty, Providence has reversed demographic direction and now boasts one of the fastest-growing (and most diverse) urban populations in New England. Property values have risen. Crime rates have fallen. The city's theatres and restaurants are ranked among the best in the Northeast. Its zoo, from which monkeys were escaping onto the freeways on Cianci's first night in office, is considered of the highest order nationally. So are its parks, its support for visual artists, and its preservation of historic architecture. Touted by City Hall as the Renaissance City, it has become a thriving "destination city" for conventioneers and tourists (a two-billion-dollar-a-year industry). Since 1997, Providence has been ranked among the ten best places to live in America by Money (which also rated it one of the ten best for retirement), the Utne Reader, and the lesbian monthly Girlfriends.
During the same five-year period, Providence was also the scene of a multi-tentacled F.B.I. investigation of municipal corruption, code-named Operation Plunder Dome, which led to criminal charges being brought against nearly a dozen Cianci appointees and their associates and, ultimately, against Cianci himself. The F.B.I. went public with Plunder Dome on April 28, 1999, raiding five city agencies, arresting a pair of elderly tax assessors, and announcing that it had undercover audio- and videotapes that would incriminate many more city officials. That afternoon, Cianci held a news conference, where he plucked his lapels and proclaimed his innocence with a Monica Lewinsky joke: "You're not going to find any stains on this jacket." Two years later, when the United States Attorney's office in Rhode Island issued a thirty-count indictment charging him and a handful of co-defendants with running a criminal enterprise out of City Hall whose aim was "enriching, promoting, and protecting" their power and assets, he said, "Still no stains."
The indictment accused Cianci of taking kickbacks from the landlord of a building leased by the School Department; of selling a city job for five thousand dollars; of attempting to extort ten thousand dollars from a man who wanted to buy city land; of shaking down tow-truck operators for a quarter-million dollars in campaign contributions; of pocketing ten thousand dollars from the estate of a buckle manufacturer in exchange for a four-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar tax break; of bullying an elite private club into giving him a free lifetime membership by withholding city building permits; and of tampering with a witness. Two of the charges fell under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations act, or RICO. One of the RICO charges was for conspiracy, and the remaining twenty-nine charges described a variety of particular criminal acts allegedly committed in the service of the conspiracy. Cianci held up the ninety-seven-page document and told reporters, "Ninety-seven times zero equals zero." He said that he was enraged but unafraid, characterized the charges as "nothing but lies . . . based on self-serving statements of criminals seeking to save their own skin," and vowed to defend his innocence till his dying day: "I will go all the way to the Supreme Court, The Hague, wherever they want to go." In the meantime, he said, "Let me do my job. Let me be the mayor. And I'll see everyone in court."
Cianci had been in trouble before. In 1983, a grand jury indicted him on six counts, including kidnapping and assault with a dangerous weapon, following an evening he spent torturing a man who was dating his ex-wife. With the help of a policeman, Cianci, whose divorce had gone through the week before, held the man captive for three hours, in the course of which he poured liquor on him, hurled an ashtray at him, swung at him with a fireplace log, burned his eyelid with a lit cigarette, demanded five hundred thousand dollars, and threatened to put a bullet in his head. "I saw a crazed man," the victim told the police. "I saw a lunatic, you know, simply stated." Cianci allowed that there had been a dispute, but denied that it was violent. "I was hoping to go through an amicable divorce, and complications resulted in an altercation," he told the Washington Post, adding, "I am a human being. I sweat. I feel. I cry. I laugh. I get angry. I am still going to run my city." He held on for a year, awaiting trial and fighting...
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