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POLITICS

A Providence civics lesson

BY MIKE STANTON

From the archives: The Providence Journal originally published this story Dec. 9, 2002.

They called it Doorley's Dream.

Rising from the marshy soil near the Great Salt Cove of Colonial times, on the site of an old jewelry factory, the Providence Civic Center was hailed as the salvation of a dying city.

PART 1: 'A survivor in a wicked world'

PART 2: A Providence civics lesson

PART 3: The only game in town

PART 4: A heap of trouble

PART 5: Nightmare on Power Street

PART 6: Zorba the mayor

PART 7: 'Somebody's gonna leave town'

Joseph A. Doorley Jr., the mayor of Providence, had built the Civic Center after statewide voters refused to pay for it. It was the early 1970s, desperate times for Providence. Since the suburban boom that followed World War II, the capital city's population had plummeted from 248,000 to 179,000. The federal urban-renewal funds from Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society had dried up. The big downtown department stores were closing, one by one. A Chamber of Commerce leader said that you could fire a rifle down Westminster Street at dusk and not hit anyone. Even a downtown Bible studies storefront had shut down, because there were no souls left to save.

The cynics said that Providence was beyond salvation. They predicted that Doorley's Dream would become Doorley's Icebox.

The building opened on Friday night, Nov. 3, 1972, with a Providence Reds hockey game. The proud city fathers invited President Richard M. Nixon, who was scheduled to make a campaign stop at the state airport in Warwick, to drop the ceremonial first puck.

Not surprisingly, the Republican president declined to venture into a Democratic stronghold that hadn't elected a Republican mayor since the Great Depression. Standing on the steps of Air Force One, bathed in spotlights, Nixon urged Rhode Islanders to elect Herbert DeSimone as governor and John Chafee as U.S. senator the following Tuesday. The marching bands drowned out a small group of hecklers who chanted about Watergate -- which was still just a third-rate burglary.

Among the crowd of 10,000 cheering Nixon supporters was Buddy Cianci, who had emerged as a key campaign adviser to DeSimone. DeSimone was considering making Cianci his chief of staff if he became governor.

But when DeSimone lost to Philip Noel, Cianci started to think more seriously about his own political future. He had toyed previously with the idea of running for mayor of Cranston, or some other office in that Republican-dominated city.

Meanwhile, in Providence, Cianci sensed the winds of discontent blowing through the mighty Democratic Party.

EARLY IN 1973, a few weeks after Doorley presided over the Civic Center's grand opening, a rock music promoter named Robert "Skip" Chernov walked into Cianci's life. Doorley's Dream was about to become Cianci's Opportunity.

With long, black curly hair falling to his shoulders and red velvet sports coats, Chernov bore a striking resemblance to Tiny Tim. He did drugs, drove a Bentley and cultivated a flamboyant hippie image that was the antithesis of the Irish-Catholic, shot-and-beer Doorley.

Chernov and Doorley had clashed before over rock 'n' roll. A few years earlier, a riot followed a Sly & The Family Stone concert that Chernov had promoted at the old Rhode Island Auditorium. Doorley, whose tastes ran to Frank Sinatra, responded by banning rock concerts in Providence.

When the Civic Center opened, however, Doorley needed rock 'n' roll -- and Chernov wanted a piece of the action. But Chernov had little success getting in the door with the Civic Center's executive director, Harold Copeland.

In February 1973, Chernov and Copeland were discussing a possible Grateful Dead concert. Chernov would later testify at a trial that Copeland wanted an extra thousand dollars, "under the table."

Chernov was angered at being shaken down, and panicked that Doorley might be trying to set him up. He bought a tape recorder and taped a phone call in which Copeland again asked for a bribe.

Chernov took the tape to the Rhode Island attorney general, Richard Israel. Israel asked Chernov if he thought Copeland might be kidding. Chernov said he didn't know, but he agreed to work undercover and try to deliver the bribe to Copeland.

Israel introduced Chernov to a husky young prosecutor who would likely handle the case -- Buddy Cianci.

The investigation was assigned to Rhode Island State Police Detective Vincent Vespia Jr., who had been a classmate of Chernov's at Hope High School. Vespia and Cianci were good friends, and had worked a number of cases together.

In the following weeks, Chernov talked to Copeland again, and booked a Pink Floyd concert for March 19. On the night of the show, Chernov walked into the Civic Center carrying a state-police briefcase wired with a tape recorder and transmitter.

Vespia waited outside in a van. He had a warrant to search Copeland and his office.

As he walked inside, carrying 10 marked hundred-dollar bills in his pocket, Chernov whistled a few notes to test the transmitter. He had been warned not to offer the money unless Copeland asked for it. Pink Floyd performed its new hit single, "Money," featuring the ca-ching of cash registers.

Chernov thought that Copeland seemed uneasy as they settled the box-office receipts. Copeland never asked for the money. Outside in the van, Vespia cursed.

Shortly thereafter, Chernov and his partner, Bruce Goldstein, attended another meeting with Attorney General Israel. According to Goldstein, the attorney general was on the fence about whether to proceed, since Copeland hadn't taken the money.

But Cianci spoke up forcefully in favor of pursuing the case, according to Goldstein. Israel said the authorities would monitor the situation.

That spring, with the Watergate scandal mushrooming, Mayor Doorley remarked that the Republicans' apparent attempt to bug the Democratic National Committee offices was no shock to him.

"Everybody assumes that the politicians are spies and cheats and liars," said Doorley, who confessed that he liked to "snoop" to find out what his political rivals were up to.

"I suspect that very little of my activities are not bugged," he added.

What Doorley didn't say publicly was that he had recently heard that Chernov had Copeland on tape, asking for money. The mayor had passed the rumor on to Copeland, according to Copeland's subsequent court testimony.

Copeland went to Chernov, who dismissed the rumor as "absurd."

"There's always somebody trying to get somebody in this town," Chernov told him.

TWO MONTHS after the Pink Floyd concert, in May of 1973, Joe Doorley spoke at a very different kind of gathering at the Civic Center, one rife with intrigue that would have implications for the political fortunes of Buddy Cianci.

Three thousand city workers, ward-heelers and other Democratic Party luminaries and soldiers -- from the governor on down to sewer workers -- turned out to pay tribute to a man known simply as Mr. Democrat, Lawrence P. McGarry, a lean, twinkling Irishman with a mischievous smile and a Machiavellian mind.

McGarry was the Democratic city chairman of Providence, the last of the old-time political bosses. He ran the city's Public Works Department, the hub of a patronage empire that turned out the votes on Election Day. A product of the "Fighting 10th" Ward, on the city's South Side, McGarry had come up through the ranks, beginning as a teenage errand boy for the party bosses who hung out at Gallagher's plumbing shop.

An advancing case of multiple sclerosis made it increasingly difficult for him to get around without the aid of a cane or a wheelchair. But McGarry, an avid horse-racing fan with his own box at Lincoln Downs, still possessed an agile political mind.

McGarry believed in unquestioned loyalty to the Democratic machine. He once warned that if the unendorsed candidate won in a certain ward, "not another leaf will be picked up in the neighborhood." But he was also a benevolent boss, a devout Catholic who attended St. Pius V Church in Elmhurst, and a sucker for a hard-luck story.

"The political machine is just ordinary people," he said. "I never saw anything dishonest take place in a back room."

In the back room, McGarry was king -- and, as the crowd gathered in the Civic Center attested, Rhode Island's preeminent political king-maker. McGarry had come to power in 1964, when he led a party revolt against the entrenched leadership of Mayor Walter H. Reynolds and Reynolds's political mentor, ex-mayor and governor Dennis Roberts. McGarry had backed Joe Doorley, a spunky young councilman and lawyer educated at Notre Dame and Boston College.

But despite the smiles on their faces that May evening, McGarry and Doorley were in the process of a painful political divorce.

McGarry believed that Doorley had broken faith with the machine -- that the mayor had lost interest in the job, grown aloof and arrogant. Some said Doorley had reneged on his promise to run for higher office and open up the mayor's job for another McGarry protege.

There had been a time when Doorley, the son of a Providence firefighter, seemed destined for the State House, or Washington, D.C. During the turbulent 1960s, when politicians were struggling to address the ills of America's cities, he stood on the ramparts of President Johnson's Great Society.

Under Doorley, Providence was one of the first cities in the nation to join in the federal Model Cities program and to integrate its schools. Doorley sent his children to a magnet school in South Providence with black children. He pushed for fair-housing laws and antipoverty programs, and obtained federal funding for the country's first urban-renewal demolition project and the second code-enforcement program.

Doorley began traveling in national Democratic circles. He was a regular visitor to the Texas ranch of National Committee chairman Robert S. Strauss and ran for national chairman himself, in 1970. He chaired the credentials committee in 1968, the year of the party's riotous national convention in Chicago, where Mayor Richard Daley's cops beat antiwar protesters. Daley, who sent his son, Richard, the current mayor of Chicago, to Providence College, praised Doorley's well-oiled Providence machine.

Meanwhile, McGarry felt that Doorley was neglecting the machine. He and the mayor clashed over patronage. Doorley's top policy aide, John Cicilline, says that McGarry was too old-school to appreciate Doorley's efforts to experiment with new programs and draw minorities into the political process, rather than "taking care of our own." The labor unions derisively called Doorley "No Dough Joe."

In June 1973, the month after Doorley praised McGarry at the Civic Center, McGarry's Democratic City Committee refused to endorse Doorley's bid for reelection in 1974. The divorce had become public.

IN THE FALL of 1973, prosecutor Buddy Cianci presented the case of Harold Copeland to a state grand jury. On Oct. 10, Copeland was indicted for soliciting a bribe.

Copeland's lawyer branded the indictment as "politically motivated." An upset Doorley said that he hoped the charges would not "cast a shadow" over the Civic Center's opening-year success.

But the shadow grew. Auditors and investigators with subpoenas moved into the Civic Center. Questions were raised about missing tickets to a Frank Sinatra concert. Cianci took charge of the investigation of Doorley's Dream.

By then, Cianci was actively considering running for mayor. A few months later, early in 1974, Cianci and a close friend and political adviser went to lunch at the Old Canteen on Federal Hill. Doorley, who sat at a table with several men, waved Cianci over.

Doorley introduced Cianci as the man who wanted to take his job. The tone was sarcastic.

"Mayor, you never know," Cianci replied calmly. "There's always that possibility." When he made his decision, Cianci promised, Doorley would be the first to know.

As Cianci walked away, he turned to his friend and said, "Let's do it . . . let's run."

In March, Cianci resigned from the attorney general's office. In April, he formally announced his candidacy for mayor at a rally at the Biltmore. He called himself the anticorruption candidate.

Nobody took the Republican challenger seriously. Through the spring and summer, all political eyes were focused on a nasty primary battle pitting Doorley against three Democratic challengers. The leading challenger was Francis Brown, the city's public safety commissioner and McGarry's anointed candidate.

Doorley fired Brown and McGarry -- and threatened to fire other city workers who betrayed him.

"They are either for me or against me," Doorley declared. "The time has come for these people to face reality."

As the Sept. 10 primary approached, Cianci, through intermediaries, reached out to McGarry. If McGarry's man lost, Cianci wanted the support of Mr. Democrat.

Doorley won the primary, beating Brown by about 2,000 votes. As Doorley celebrated at a Civic Center rally on primary night, vendors sold black armbands that said, "R.I.P. Larry & Tony," referring to Larry McGarry and his ally, 4th Ward boss Tony Bucci.

MEANWHILE, a group of Franny Brown supporters, who had gathered for a victory celebration at the Rosario Club in Silver Lake, turned their lonely eyes to Cianci. They invited Cianci to come down and talk.

Cianci advisers urged him not to go. Nobody knew what kind of reception Cianci would receive in a neighborhood where "Republican" was a dirty word. Older residents still remembered how the last Republican mayor, "Honest John" Collins, had purged the city payroll of loyal Democrats during the Great Depression.

Cianci decided to go.

He had deep roots in Silver Lake, and he was an Italian-American in a city that had never had an Italian-American mayor. Although Italian-Americans had become the city's largest single ethnic group, they had been subsumed in the Irish-Democratic machine, an alliance forged during the Great Depression by Dennis Roberts and Democratic Party boss Frank Rao, who, incidentally, had been a distant cousin of Cianci's mother's family, the Capobiancos. Cianci could also claim ties to Eagle Park, where the Capobiancos came from; the North End, where his parents had been married, at St. Ann Church; and Federal Hill, where the first Ciancis had settled before moving to the Silver Lake area.

At the Rosario Club, Cianci received a rousing reception. That was the beginning of "Democrats for Cianci." The Democratic rebellion against Doorley would take shape in clandestine meetings and quiet conversations.

One night, shortly after the primary, three of Larry McGarry's men waited in the shadows at a corner in downtown Providence. One, Joseph Florio, wore a comical disguise -- a trench coat and Groucho Marx-style fake eyeglasses, nose and mustache.

The other two men were Ron Glantz, who had resigned as Doorley's assistant city solicitor, and Lloyd Griffin, an up-and-coming black political figure from the South Side who had worked for Doorley.

A van pulled up to the corner.

The three men climbed in. Inside the van were Cianci and his campaign manager, Mickey Farina. As Farina drove the van through the streets of the darkened city, the men discussed strategy. Cianci offered his reassurances that he would protect the jobs of McGarry's people if he became mayor.

As a sign of respect, Cianci subsequently called McGarry and offered his word directly, according to a Cianci campaign adviser.

About three weeks later, Glantz publicly announced the formation of Democrats for Cianci. The group provided Cianci with 150 workers as well as lists of 31,000 anti-Doorley Democrats, compiled during the primary for Franny Brown. Armed with the lists, Cianci set up a phone bank on the third floor of his East Side house, on Blackstone Boulevard.

During the campaign, Doorley lashed out at McGarry for working secretly on Cianci's behalf. One of the mayor's spies had seen Cianci at the Old Canteen with Glantz and Tony Bucci, a Democratic powerbroker in the city's prominent 4th Ward.

"Buddy can have the remnants of the McGarry-Bucci machine," Doorley said. "I warn him, however, to remember what they tried to do to me during the last few years . . . If Buddy can trust them, he can have them."

THE ANTI-CORRUPTION CANDIDATE

IN THIS YEAR of Watergate -- Richard Nixon had resigned the presidency in disgrace on Aug. 9, 1974 -- Cianci hammered at the anticorruption theme. He promised to release his income-tax statements and run a more open government.

"The Providence River is like the Democratic machine that has been running this city -- namely, it stinks," he said.

The anticorruption candidate received some more ammunition a month before Election Day, when Harold Copeland, the Civic Center director, was convicted of soliciting a $1,000 bribe from Skip Chernov, the concert promoter.

Doorley fired back that he still believed in Copeland's innocence. He called the case political. Doorley accused Cianci of abusing his power as a prosecutor to go after Copeland, in the hopes of nailing Doorley.

"He offered Harold Copeland immunity if he would just tell him what Doorley did," Doorley said. "There are four or five people who will attest to the fact that [Cianci] was walking around offering immunity."

Cianci denied offering Copeland immunity, but allowed that he had talked to him about testifying. About what, he wouldn't say. Although Cianci had left the attorney general's office seven months ago, he said the investigation of Doorley "is still going on."

"It was not a political investigation in any sense of the word," said Cianci.

THE CAMPAIGN was heating up. As Election Day approached, Cianci was everywhere, smiling and schmoozing -- at factories, church feasts, supermarkets, senior centers, coffee hours, testimonial dinners.

"Hello, may I shake your hand? I'm Buddy Cianci, and I'm running for mayor," he said over and over as he crisscrossed Providence from dawn to midnight.

Not everyone would accept the handshake.

When he tried to address the longshoremen, they shouted him out of the hall and slammed the doors. With beer bottles banging off the walls, Cianci pushed the doors open and marched right back in. He won their grudging respect, if not their support.

Every day, it seemed as if Cianci was introducing a new program. He sketched out his visions to revive downtown, restore the blighted neighborhoods, rebuild the waterfront, create green spaces, build housing, create jobs, improve the schools.

Doorley, who had disappeared to Florida immediately after the primary, ran a more passive campaign. The Doorley archives at Providence College contain a letter from one nervous supporter who urged the mayor to pay more attention to the city's elderly housing projects. He warned that Cianci, who was throwing campaign parties for senior citizens, was making "tremendous inroads."

Lloyd Griffin, who had taken the clandestine van ride with Cianci after the primary, also helped Cianci line up votes from the elderly. Griffin persuaded hundreds of seniors to sign mail ballots by promising them a free day trip to Atlantic City. When the day came, the seniors were told that the buses had been canceled because of a labor dispute. In fact, no trip had ever been booked.

The week before the election, Doorley tried to derail Cianci with a last-minute surprise. Addressing a big Democratic Party dinner at Rhodes-on-the-Pawtuxet, Doorley waved what he said was an affidavit from an insurance adjuster. The affidavit accused Cianci of paying a cash kickback to falsify records in an automobile accident.

"This is the man who attacks my integrity and my character," thundered Doorley.

Cianci watched Doorley on the 11 o'clock news -- with disbelief. Cianci paced furiously about his living room. Herbert DeSimone, the former attorney general and a campaign adviser, urged Cianci to calm down; Doorley's attack was a sign of desperation. (A grand jury concluded, after the election, that there was no evidence of any wrongdoing by Cianci.)

Late on the Saturday night before the election, Cianci walked into the East Side Diner after a long day of campaigning. He was greeted by the spontaneous applause of 150 people who rose to their feet and cheered.

Election Day dawned gray and drizzly in Providence, with a promise of thunderstorms. Turnout across the city was heavy. Cianci made one last, long, mad dash to the finish line. That night, five minutes before the polls closed, not having eaten anything for hours, he stopped by a supermarket to grab a sandwich and wound up shaking hands with shoppers.

Later, Cianci plopped down on the couch in his mother's house, on Laurel Hill Avenue, where he had grown up, and watched the returns on television with his campaign manager, Mickey Farina. The two men drank a toast.

Cianci won big on the East Side, giving him the early lead, then held on with strong showings in the ethnic Democratic wards. Doorley knew he was in trouble when he barely won his home 5th Ward. Cianci took Silver Lake and two wards on the South Side, where Lloyd Griffin helped turn out a strong black vote for Cianci.

Cianci captured City Hall by 709 votes.

Doorley's police chief, Walter McQueeney, arrived at the Laurel Hill house to drive Cianci to his campaign headquarters.

The chief called Cianci "mayor."

The celebration was already in full swing when Cianci arrived downtown at the Holiday Inn, next to Doorley's Dream -- the Providence Civic Center.

In the chaos of the balloon-draped ballroom, jammed with hundreds of sweating, stomping, singing and chanting people, there was a sense of history being made. After an unbroken chain of Yankee and Irish-American mayors dating back to 1832, Cianci would be Providence's first Italian-American mayor.

Thirty minutes before midnight, Cianci made his entrance. The ballroom erupted. Cianci looked crisp and fresh in a brown pin-striped suit. A dozen policemen formed a flying wedge through the mob of people who wanted to shake his hand and slap his back.

"It was people fed up with the machine who got him in," said one supporter. "Buddy is the new look in politics. He's the opposite of Watergate."

Later, at a smaller gathering of campaign insiders upstairs, Cianci wrapped Tony Bucci in a bear hug.

The next afternoon, a car drove up to the mayor-elect's house on Blackstone Boulevard. A thin, lanky man, unable to walk, was carried by two men into the house. They set him down in a chair. Flourishing a long cigar and a twinkling smile, Larry McGarry finally came face to face with Buddy Cianci.

"Mayor," said McGarry, with a long, theatrical pause, "we'd like your support."

Later, the press got wind of the meeting between the once and future powers of Providence.

"I'm a Democrat. I was born a Democrat and I will die a Democrat," McGarry explained. "But I was also born in Providence, and I have lived all my life in Providence. I will in no way be a stumbling block or try to hurt Mr. Cianci if he is trying to do something good for the city."

In the aftermath of Cianci's victory, The Providence Journal asked, "How will he cope with this complex city, with its decaying neighborhoods, fading retail center, poverty and unemployment, street crime, shabby schools, disinterested students, racial tensions, unequal tax assessments and rising government costs?"

Responded Cianci, "It's a little frightening."

PART 1: 'A survivor in a wicked world'

PART 2: A Providence civics lesson

PART 3: The only game in town

PART 4: A heap of trouble

PART 5: Nightmare on Power Street

PART 6: Zorba the mayor

PART 7: 'Somebody's gonna leave town'