The Prince of Providence: The Rise and Fall of Buddy Cianci, America's Most Notorious Mayor (Paperback)

Chapter One

Buddy Cianci sat in the wooden pew of the courtroom, doubting a priest.

Courtroom No. 5 in the Providence County Courthouse was crowded on this spring morning in 1972, like Easter mass at St. Bartholomew's in Silver Lake, where Cianci gone as a boy. Cianci, a thirty-one-year-old Rhode Island prosecutor, sat shoulder to shoulder with Bobby Stevenson, a beefy Irish detective who had played CYO ball for St. Michael's in South Providence.

The two men watched as a ruddy, white-haired priest made his way to the front of the room, past a larger-than-normal contingent of armed sheriffs and curious spectators. He walked past a tableful of exhibits-an army carbine, two sawed-off shotguns, pistols, revolvers, and Halloween masks of John F. Kennedy and Richard M. Nixon. The priest paused to embrace the man at the defense table, Mafia boss Raymond L. S. Patriarca.

Then Father Raymond Moriarty took the witness stand, raised his right hand, and swore to tell the truth.

Patriarca, the feared ruler of the New England rackets, the man known in the underworld as "the Mayor of Providence," was on trial for murder. Moriarty, his childhood friend, who had entered the priesthood around the time that Patriarca was arrested for rolling dice on a Sunday, had come from his parish in Maryland to testify as the Mafia chief's alibi.

Four years earlier, on the Saturday after Easter, two masked gunmen had burst into a meat market in Silver Lake and gunned down a bookmaker and his bodyguard as they did their weekly grocery shopping. Rudolph Marfeo, the bookie, fell near the front door, a drawn .38 in his hand, his left side blown apart. Anthony Melei, the bodyguard, died next to the ice cream freezer, his face shot away by Double OO buckshot. The shopkeeper and his wife dived behind the deli counter as the killers retreated. Their getaway car roared up a steep hill beside the market, through the streets of Buddy Cianci's childhood, and sped across Laurel Hill Avenue, a few blocks north of his house. Soon, curious neighborhood boys pressed their face to the plate-glass window to see the bloody corpses as the wail of sirens signaled yet another mob hit in Providence.

The government's star witness, Boston armored-car robber Red Kelley, had testified that he planned the murders for Patriarca. He described a meeting outside a Providence restaurant two weeks before the murders, on Palm Sunday, when Patriarca snarled, "I want him dead," meaning Marfeo. The hit had been planned for the day before Easter. But it was postponed after the son of one of the gunmen found a pistol stashed in a toy chest and accidentally shot and killed his playmate on Good Friday afternoon.

Father Moriarty contradicted Red Kelley's story.

Speaking in a soft, confessional voice, the priest told the jury that he had been with Patriarca that Palm Sunday. He had gone with the mob boss to the Gate of Heaven Cemetery in East Providence, where the two men had prayed over the grave of Patriarca's wife. Afterward, they had returned to Patriarca's house on the East Side of Providence, and Father Moriarty had spent the night.

Patriarca wept during Father Moriarty's testimony and hugged him again when he stepped off the witness stand.

In the back of the courtroom, Cianci turned to Stevenson and shook his head. The priests Cianci had known as a boy at St. Bart's had listened to his confessions and taught him the Ten Commandments: Thou shalt not steal. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not bear false witness.... This priest's story sounded too good to be true, Cianci said. Stevenson wondered aloud what kind of a priest would be away from his parish on Palm Sunday.

Cianci and Stevenson feared that Father Moriarty had destroyed the state's case in heavily Catholic Rhode Island, and that Patriarca would soon be free to resume running the rackets. During a recess, Cianci went downstairs to the Rhode Island attorney general's office and spoke to his bosses about his doubts.

"This doesn't sound right,"

Cianci told them. Cianci, who had been assisting the lead prosecutor in the trial, offered to check out the priest's alibi. His superiors agreed. But there wasn't much time. Closing arguments were scheduled for the next day. Then the case would go to the jury.

* * *

LONG BEFORE PROVIDENCE was Buddy Cianci's town, it belonged to Raymond Loreda Salvatore Patriarca.

Patriarca was the last of the old-time gangsters. He came of age during Prohibition, hijacking shipments of bootleg liquor, and over the next five decades became one of the richest and most powerful mob bosses in America. From the back room of his Coin-O-Matic vending office on Federal Hill, in the heart of Providence's Little Italy, Patriarca ran a multimillion-dollar criminal empire built on illegal gambling, loan sharking, truck hijackings, and labor racketeering. An illegal FBI bug ordered by J. Edgar Hoover in the early 1960s picked up the constant squeak of Patriarca's desk drawer as he dropped in envelopes that the wiseguys brought in tribute. They also gave him cigars, whiskey, a fur coat, a diamond ring, a gallon of spaghetti sauce-anything they could think of to keep those baleful eyes from looking on them with disfavor. One day a shoplifter stopped in to show Patriarca a London Fog raincoat that he had stolen from a downtown department store; Patriarca tried it on, found that it fit perfectly, and told the man, "Now go boost another one for yourself."

"No matter what went on in New England, Raymond got a piece of the action," recalled Patriarca underboss Vinny Teresa.

Patriarca bragged that he owned Connecticut, vowed to declare martial law to end an Irish-Italian gang war in Massachusetts, and arbitrated disputes among the Five Families in New York. He owned part of the Dunes Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, had dealings with Jimmy Hoffa and Meyer Lansky, and was a silent partner in a Massachusetts horse track with Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin. Law enforcement lore had it that Sinatra got the engagement ring he gave Mia Farrow from Patriarca, who procured it from a wiseguy who had stolen it from Damon Runyon's widow on Cape Cod. Patriarca had once entertained an offer from some wealthy Cuban businessmen to assassinate Fidel Castro, using the same hitman who had gunned down Rudy Marfeo and Anthony Melei. Facing the prospect of prison, Patriarca received an offer of asylum from his casino partner in Haiti, the notorious dictator "Papa Doc" Duvalier. Patriarca turned him down, confident that he could beat the rap.

If someone got out of line, Patriarca would bite down hard on his cigar, his craggy face would turn white, and he'd spit out the command to "put him in the hospital," or worse. When a Bible manufacturer reported that someone was stealing Bibles from a business that Patriarca had a piece of, the mob boss warned that if he was lying, "he would wind up in the hospital with his legs broken."

But Patriarca understood that running a successful business required more than muscle and the threat of violence. Corrupting government officials was also necessary. He owned judges, politicians, and cops, whom he paid to protect his illegal gambling operations. "If you have not got the law today," he told an associate, "you can't stay in the gaming business." He advised his men to stay away from politicians, unless absolutely necessary-then "go see them with the money."

The FBI bug captured Patriarca discussing political endorsements like a ward boss. In 1964 he and an unidentified politician discussed who they were supporting in the mayor's race. Another time, a man running for lieutenant governor stopped by Coin-O-Matic, seeking Patriarca's backing, and received a lecture for being so careless as to visit in person. When Patriarca's son had trouble changing a course at the University of Rhode Island, Patriarca called the governor to straighten things out.

Patriarca's rise coincided with Providence's decline.

Born on St. Patrick's Day 1908 in Worcester, Massachusetts, Patriarca moved to Providence when he was about four years old. His father ran a liquor business on Federal Hill, a neighborhood west of downtown that teemed with Italian immigrants, among them a carpenter from Roccamonfina, Pietro Cianci, Buddy's grandfather.

The crowded tenements of Patriarca's childhood were a place of ferment as the rural Italians struggled to adapt to an urban environment dominated by Yankee factory owners and Irish cops. Even the Catholic Church was run by Irish bishops and upper-caste Northern Italian priests, who tried to ban the southerners' peasant superstitions and boisterous religious feast days. In 1920 a phalanx of Providence police officers held back one hundred Italian women trying to forcibly evict a priest from the Church of the Holy Ghost on Federal Hill. Said one early Italian leader, "We came here with high ideas, and were kicked around like dogs." Their mistreatment fueled a suspicion of authority carried over from the old country, where the people had a saying: "If you want to be rich, become a thief, a policeman, or a priest."

In choosing his career path, Patriarca could have followed many of the immigrants into one of Providence's booming factories. Thanks to immigrant labor, Providence was one of the richest cities in America in the early 1900s. It was the hub of the nation's most industrialized state, an early-day Silicon Valley of cutting-edge technology. The city boasted its "Five Industrial Wonders of the World"-the largest precision-tool factory (Brown & Sharpe), the largest file factory (Nicholson File), the largest steam-engine factory (Corliss), the largest silverware factory (Gorham), and the largest screw factory (American Screw)-plus the country's biggest textile manufacturer, Fruit of the Loom. Local factories turned out windlasses for U.S. Navy ships and the U.S. Army cannons that massacred the Sioux at Wounded Knee. Local innovators developed the first fire-sprinkler system for office buildings, a machine that made horseshoes, and a "burglarproof" safe.

Most of that wealth remained locked in the vaults of the wealthy East Siders. Although the immigrants outnumbered them, the Yankee ruling class controlled the government through a corrupt political machine that bought rural Republican votes while denying the vote to landless urban dwellers. The system was run by Boss Brayton, the half-blind Republican party chief and Providence's federal postmaster, who once secured a thirty-seven-thousand-dollar personal loan with postage stamps. Brayton's machine produced the most powerful politician in America at the turn of the century, U.S. Senator Nelson Aldrich, a descendant of Roger Williams who began his career as a grocery clerk and started his political career on the Providence City Council. Dubbed "the General Manager of the United States," Aldrich fought Teddy Roosevelt's trust-busting efforts, permitted trust lobbyists to set up shop in his Senate office, and married off his daughter to John D. Rockefeller's son in his opulent waterfront mansion on Narragansett Bay in Warwick-the house that sugar built. Curious about the political system that had produced Aldrich, the muckraker Lincoln Steffens visited Rhode Island for McClure's magazine in 1904 and found it to be one of the most corrupt in the nation. Vote-buying was rampant; the going rate for a man's vote was two to five dollars for an ordinary election and fifteen to thirty-five for a hotly contested race. "An honest voter," said one Brayton lieutenant, "is one who stays bought." The growing immigrant populace watched and waited.

"What has the immigrant really learned in America?" asked one Italian activist. "Justice here encourages lawlessness and corrupts the sons of honest peasants."

A. J. Liebling, the New Yorker magazine writer who worked as a reporter for The Providence Journal-Bulletin during Prohibition, recalled a waterfront lined with flophouses, tattoo parlors, and Portuguese ship chandlers' stores, where smugglers ran scotch right up Narragansett Bay. "The best liquor was to be had of a bootlegger who had a flat in a frame building behind the State House," wrote Liebling. "He felt a responsibility for the quality of the legislation that got passed under its influence."

Patriarca dropped out of school after eighth grade. He shined shoes and worked as a bellhop at the new Biltmore Hotel, an opulent Jazz Age hotel that had a rooftop chicken coop to provide guests with fresh eggs for breakfast. Patriarca worked there for two years, opening doors for the powerful businessmen and politicians who would walk across the street from City Hall. Then, in 1925, when he was seventeen, his father died. Later Patriarca would say, "I lost my father, and I guess I drifted a little."

Prohibition, another curse visited upon the immigrant population by the Yankee temperance movement, provided savvy and ruthless young men like Patriarca a quick path to the riches that America had promised. Patriarca drifted first into rum-running, then double-crossed his associates and hijacked the liquor shipments he had been paid to guard. After Prohibition, Patriarca gambled, robbed payrolls, and trafficked in white slavery, as prostitution was known.

In 1930, while a third of Providence's workers were losing their jobs to the Great Depression, Patriarca organized an Easter Sunday prison break for two criminal cohorts from the Rhode Island state prison; it failed, after a shoot-out in which two guards died. In 1933, when seventy-seven thousand workers marched through downtown Providence in support of President Roosevelt's National Recovery Act, the Providence police designated Patriarca a "public enemy," meaning that he could be picked up on sight after dark. In 1938, Patriarca's scandalous early parole by the governor of Massachusetts after a burglary conviction led to the impeachment of a state official who had been a contemporary of James Michael Curley.

Patriarca ran with Butsey Morelli's gang. Back in 1920, Morelli's gunmen had pulled off the Braintree, Massachusetts, shoe-factory payroll heist that was later pinned on Sacco and Vanzetti, the famous martyrs to anti-Italian prejudice. A guard was killed in the holdup, and Sacco and Vanzetti, two Socialists, were railroaded and executed. As Butsey later confided to another Patriarca associate: "These two suckers took it on the chin for us. That shows you how much justice there really is."

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from The Prince of Providenceby Mike Stanton Copyright © 2003 by Mike Stanton . Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---