Lunching with The Prince

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

The recent death  at 75 of Gennaro Castellano, former captain of  downtown Providence’s well known Capriccio restaurant, brought back cinematic memories of a few lunches I had there  with Vincent “Buddy” Cianci in his heyday as mayor and “Prince of Providence’’  in the ’90’s. The lunches were very long, and he wasn’t averse to drinking stuff stronger than water during them. Considering that Cianci allegedly had a good-sized city to run, he seemed in no hurry to get back to work even as we approached 3 p.m. Indeed, it was I who became increasingly anxious to get back to my job running The Providence Journal’s commentary pages, with its not very forgiving deadlines. 

Buddy would say as I kept looking at my watch: “Relax! Nice place, eh?”  

The waiters were very able, if obsequious, as if they feared the mayor, with his semi-mobster persona. They probably had good reason to. 

 Of course, being mayor of a good-sized city has always involved various degrees of show business. Consider besides Buddy, such flamboyant examples as New York Mayors Jimmy Walker and Fiorello LaGuardia (see the musical Fiorello!) and Boston Mayor James Michael Curley (read the novel The Last Hurrah).

There's a public-safety emergency in Providence

 Should you call 911?   Well, maybe.  

There is a crime in progress in Providence: Vincent Cianci is running for mayor, and, as of last week, he was winning.   So call 911?   Maybe not, if you live in Providence or you just happen to be passing through. That’s because the union representing the police officers who might be coming to help wants the Providence police force to be controlled by a twice-convicted criminal.  

 In fact, both the police and firefighters unions in Providence have endorsed Cianci in the three-way race for mayor of the capital city.   It sounds like another Rhode Island bad joke, but it’s not.   The men and women who enforce the law in Providence are recommending that a crook be the mayor of their city. The officers of the law want to be led by a lawbreaker. The man with the badge is backing the man who’s been in the can.   People with arrest powers want a twice-convicted felon calling the shots. They want a felon to appoint their chief; they’re hoping a crook will name a city solicitor and run the law department.

The cops’ Most Wanted Man is one with a record.   Cianci is not funny anymore; he’s leading in the polls.   Whom should you call instead of 911?  

 Call AAA.   Call the Institute for the Study and Practice of Nonviolence. Call the Democratic State Committee. Call your parish priest and the Rhode Island State Council of Churches, the bishop of Providence, the Rhode Island Board of Rabbis, the Providence Rotary, the Economic Policy Institute, the U.S. attorney, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service.

Call the AFL-CIO, the National Education Association, the American Federation of Teachers, the Service Employees International Union and the United Nurses and Allied Professionals.   Call the Rhode Island Boys and Girls Clubs, Trinity Repertory, Gamm Theatre, 2nd Story Theatre, the Unitarians, the Tea Party, the Rhode Island Community Food Bank, the Lions Club, the Kiwanis, the League of Women Voters, the Rhode Island League of Cities and Towns, the Republican Party, House of Hope, Crossroads, Channel 12, Leadership Rhode Island, the Young Democrats, the Greater Providence Chamber of Commerce, Rhode Island Public Radio and talk radio.   

Call Verizon, Cox and Sprint. Call Lifespan and Care New England and all of the hospitals. Call the Visiting Nurses, the Ironworkers, the Steelworkers and the Rhode Island Public Transit Authority. Call Gov. Lincoln Chafee, House Speaker Nicholas Mattiello and Senate President Teresa Paiva Weed. Call the Providence Bruins, The Providence Journal, the Rhode Island State Police. Call the Boy Scouts and the Girl Scouts.  

 Call the presidents of Brown University, Providence College, Moses Brown, the Wheeler School, Rhode Island College, Bryant, Roger Williams, Salve Regina, and Johnson and Wales universities and the University of Rhode Island. Call your neighbors. Call the next governor, Gina Raimondo or Allan Fung.  And don’t forget to call your mother.   

In fact, call the Fraternal Order of Police and the Firefighters Union, and tell them it’s not too late to go straight.   But do something. 

Whether you live in Providence or not, Rhode Island’s capital is too important for its residents, as well as for the rest of Rhode Island, to stay silent. It’s time to speak up. Tell everyone to stand up and to be counted, to raise a chorus that can be heard in every precinct and ward in the city of Providence, in every city and town hall in Rhode Island, that we do not want Vincent Cianci ever again to operate our capital city as a criminal enterprise.   

Should you call 911 in the event of an emergency?   Maybe. But if a Providence policeman or a Providence policewoman answers the call, tell him or her not to bring in the man their union wants as the next mayor.   Then call the Rhode Island Expenditure Council, Operation Clean Government and Common Cause.

And all of us, let’s call on our own common sense.   

Brian C. Jones is a book author, freelance writer and former Providence Journal reporter.

An early legal experience

  Former Providence Mayor Buddy ("Vincent'') Cianci has much legal experience that  can only strengthen his public service.

Champagne weather; politics and state wealth

  This has generally been a beautiful summer in New England -- not too hot, not too cool and soothing breezes most days.

Of course, as the mutual fund companies are compelled to note in their marketing, past performance should not be taken as assurance of future success.

It's tough to think of weather that could be nicer than nice weather in this corner of the world.

xxx

The story this week about Rhode Island's unemployment rate, at 7.7 percent, now the third highest in the country, got me thinking about how little  effect state tax  and other policies may have on prosperity. Or rather, in some places, they may have effects that surprise ideologues.

For instance, Georgia,  Mississippi and, somewhat less so, Nevada have long had regressive taxes  --  disproportionately hitting the poor. They tend to be light on environmental and other regulations and to give lots of public money to companies promising to locate or expand there.

Mississippi now has the highest jobless rate in the nation, at 8 percent. Georgia is second, at 7.8 percent. Rhode Island is in third place, tied with Michigan and Nevada.

Rhode Island's median household income is ranked at 17th in the nation, Georgia's at 33th,  Michigan's 34th (post collapse of car industry), Nevada's at 27th and Mississippi's at 50th.

The governors of all the states listed except Rhode Island are conservative Republicans.

After a half century of huzzahs for the alleged prosperity-fueling effects of Sun Belt tax and regulatory policies, the states there remain at the bottom of the household-income pile. The richest states are in the Middle Atlantic and Northeast -- as they have long been. And they have high taxes and lots of regulations. But some of these states have clearer, simpler, better written regulations than others. Clarity and predictability of regulations seem to be quite important in encouraging businesses to expand.

Rhode Island lags  in wealth rankings for its region. It does that because  of its absurd smallness (which skews its numbers), slowness in moving to new industrial models, dense  and badly written regulations exacerbated by an excessive number of jurisdictions (39 cities and towns!)  that discourage business creation and expansion and corruption, or,  probably more, the perception of corruption .

Corruption is doing well in other states, too, including Connecticut and Massachusetts. It has, however, always seemed to me, from decades of observation, that Rhode Island had a disproportionately high number of  particularly petty grifters. But of course, there's no way to prove that. That the "colorful'' Vincent Cianci is considered a serious candidate for mayor of Providence may also suggest either a suicidal or a bread-and-circuses mentality in too much of the state's electorate.

Anyway, if the eastern third of Connecticut were a state, its jobless  rate and household income would look a lot like Rhode Island's.

But that Rhode Island is a "liberal'' state per  se doesn't seem to be a problem.  Other "liberal''  states in the region --- e.g., Massachusetts and Maryland --- do very well indeed.

 --- Robert Whitcomb

Don Pesci: Cianci, Rowland, et al., and the politics of salvation

VERNON, Conn.

Buddy Cianci – the perhaps yet again Prince of Providence – is, to mix metaphors, the Pete Rose of Rhode Island politics.

We all know what Mr. Cianci did in office as mayor. When he was good, he was very good; when he was bad, he was very bad. A typical view of former jail bird and radio talk show host Cianci may be found, following an announcement by Mr. Cianci about running for mayor again, on LinkedIn.

The author of the piece is anxious not to be misunderstood: His post is not to be taken as an endorsement of Mr. Cianci’s political ambitions. But still…

“This is the man who took a near-literal sewer and transformed it into a center of art and culture. He stole the Providence Bruins from Maine and brought in regional hubs of tourism and commerce: WaterFire, the Providence Place Mall, and the Fleet Skating Center. Cianci would attend the opening of an envelope; he returned pride to a once great city. Buddy Cianci is Providence.” {Editor's note: Giving the endlessly  self-promotional Mr.  Cianci chief credit for all these things is misleading, as a perusal of history will show.}

Here in Connecticut, we have our own Ciancis, more pallid, to be sure, than The Prince of Providence, a very readable and entertaining unauthorized biography of Mr. Cianci by Mike Stanton, a former investigative reporter for The Providence Journal.

Former  Connecticut Gov.  John Rowland once again is chomping on a prosecution bullet. Like Mr. Cianci, Mr. Rowland spent some time cooling his heels in prison, having been pleaded guilty to a fraud charge involving the deprivation of honest services. Mr. Rowland’s plea followed an impeachment proceeding that was hampered by a federal investigation. But when Mr. Rowland was good, he was very good.

In Bridgeport, former State Sen.  Ernie Newton is once again running for the General Assembly, having spent some time in the slammer for bribery in office The FBI recently sent to prison a handful of uncooperative singing canaries, all of them associated with the failed U.S. congressional campaign of former Speaker of the Connecticut House Chris Donovan, who miraculously – and some would say unaccountably -- escaped the noose.

One begins to understand a) that power is a powerful aphrodisiac that, mainlined, may get you a stretch in jail, and b) there have in the past been brilliant second acts in politics. The much loved and notorious James Michael Curley of Boston administered the affairs of Boston from a prison cell.

Why not Newton, the self-proclaimed “Moses of his peeps?” Like Mr. Curley – who kept a campaign promise to “get the washerwomen of Boston off their knees” (by furnishing his faithful voters with long handled mops) – Mr. Newton had been unusually attentive to those in the past who had voted for him.

Mr. Newton’s latest legal scrape finds him facing five counts of illegal practices. Contributors to Mr. Newton’s recent campaign have told prosecutors that they filled out cards attesting that they paid contributions of $100 each to complete a &15,000 fundraising goal that would allow Mr. Newton to tap into public campaign funds when, in fact, they had not done so. To date, no one knows where the mysterious $500 came from.

Bridgeport’s underdogs – those “lynched,” justly or not, by the state of injustice – may well have found a champion in the imperturbable Mr. Newton. At one point during his most recent campaign, Mr. Newton pointed out to an astonished reporter that a good many voters in his old district were no strangers to prison. At the molten core of crime-infested inner cities, one finds an appalling spiritual vacancy: Marriages are non-existent; fathers have fled households; young men are in prison; others go to school in gangs. Mr. Newton himself went to prison for having done poorly what Mr. Curley did well. And now aggressive prosecutors want to deprive his constituents of their democratic rights because someone – no one knows who – paid five petitioners $100 each so that they might contribute their mite to see to it that their “Moses” should be reelected to office, from which he will be able to lead them from their Babylonian captivity to a promised land of milk and honey.

This is the politics of salvation.  One supposes that Mr. Curley and Mr. Barnum are spinning in their graves not because they are offended – but because they are jealous.

Don Pesci is a writer who lives in Vernon.

The interior life of Mr. Cianci

  I have always wondered about the interior life of people like former Providence Mayor Vincent Cianci  whose self identity seems to only consist of being  a  celebrity --  who become husks if they don't think that the public is watching and hearing them. They get publicity; therefore, they exist.

-- Robert Whitcomb