For anybody who has lived in New England anytime during the last twenty-five years, the name Buddy Cianci is likely familiar. For those who spent time in Rhode Island during that period, however, Cianci was more than familiar: he was inescapable. Whether you saw him on the campaign trail, ran into him at a sporting event, heard him hosting a radio talk show, or bought a jar of his marinara sauce at a local supermarket, you just couldn’t live in Rhode Island and not somehow be affected by Vincent A. “Buddy” Cianci, mayor of the state capitol city of Providence.
Living in West Warwick, Rhode Island for many years myself, I can still recall the mayor very clearly. I worked with the brother of one of his police drivers, heard him speak at a dedication in downtown Providence, called into his radio talk show, and saw his sauce being made in a factory in West Warwick. One night during the summer of 2001, after a few beers at Trinity Brewhouse in Providence, I was walking past the Biltmore Hotel, where Cianci lived at the time. I looked through the first-floor window into Davio’s, the Biltmore’s first floor lounge, only to see the mayor himself sitting at the bar, nursing a drink with a sad and melancholy look on his face.
Make no mistake: Buddy Cianci was an extremely complex character. Love him or hate him, the man has led a fascinating career, and his story, told by Pulitzer-Prize winning author Mike Stanton in The Prince of Providence, is proof that the truth really can be stranger than fiction.
In his book, Stanton, a regular reporter for the Providence Journal Bulletin, tells Cianci’s roller-coaster story from his humble beginnings as a prosecutor to his imprisonment for racketeering. Buddy began his career, ironically, trying to prosecute organized crime figures, including famed New England mob boss Raymond Patriarca. But Buddy always wanted more. Since childhood, he had aspirations to public office, telling his friends he would someday be President of the United States.
Realistically, though, Cianci needed to start with something a little less grandiose, and so he ran for and was elected mayor of Providence in 1974. Cianci truly loved the city, and he was a penultimate politician who once cracked that he would attend “the opening of an envelope”. Buddy had a darker side, however, and often used the Police department for his own ends.
That dark side first emerged in the early eighties. After legally separating from his first wife, Cianci became enraged when she had an affair with another man. Luring the offender to his home, Cianci used his city police driver to detain the man. For several hours, the mayor insulted, assaulted, and intimidated the man, brutally punching him and burning him with a cigarette butt. Later, Cianci pleaded guilty to assault charges, ending his term as mayor.
Like the proverbial cat, however, Buddy seemed to have more than a few lives left. He was still immensely popular, and even got his own talk show on a local AM radio station. Eventually he was re-elected as mayor, despite the fact that he was a convicted felon. It seemed, however, that Buddy hadn’t learned the error of his ways, and throughout the nineties Cianci continued to view Providence as his personal fiefdom. Stanton shows the reader an incredibly corrupt administration where public jobs were always for sale and where kickbacks were an accepted part of doing business. As before, the mayor used the police to intimidate political enemies. This time, however, someone was watching: the FBI, and in 2002 Cianci was convicted and sent to prison.
But Stanton also shows another side of Cianci: the mayor who revived a dying city, bringing in new business, overseeing the revitalization of the downtown area, encouraging diversity, overseeing construction of a new Convention Center. Indeed, it is this dichotomy of character that existed in Buddy Cianci that makes his tale so intriguing.
Stanton’s book is brilliant. His research is meticulous, his sources innumerable, his prose entertaining and enlightening. He is extremely thorough in his background examination of pertinent events, whether they are the history of the mob in Rhode Island or a brief biography on an important figure in Cianci’s story.
You don’t have to be a Rhode Islander to enjoy this book. Anyone interested in the behind the scenes machinations of local government will be enthralled by The Prince of Providence. Published in 2003, the book is already rumored to become a motion picture. But don’t wait for the film. Stanton’s book is one of those rare works that plays out so well in the mind’s eye of the reader that it is much better read than seen.
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