Buddy Cianci, former two-time mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, has died at 74. Twice a mayor and twice a felon, he built a life on second chances, and came to be known as a legend and a bit of a folk hero in Rhode Island and across New England. Peter Kadzis, Senior Online Editor and host of the Scrum Podcast, knew Buddy Cianci for years as a drinking buddy and as the subject of the political stories Kadzis edited in his former life at the Providence Journal and the Providence Phoenix. Kadzis joined Jim Braude and Margery Eagan to celebrate and examine the life of the late Cianci.
JIM: Thanks for being here.
PETER: Great to be here, under sad circumstances.
MARGERY: He was a larger-than-life character. Give us a couple of stories, Peter Kadzis.
PETER: Listen, love him or loathe him, if you lived in Rhode Island, you had an opinion about him. One that comes to mind… I had lunch with him the afternoon before he was sentenced. Stephen Mindich, the owner and publisher of the now-defunct [Providence] Phoenix had lunch with Buddy, and he was very cool, calm and collected, almost like a figure out of Goodfellas.
MARGERY: He wasn’t afraid of going to federal prison?
PETER: Eh, he… no, he wasn’t afraid. He predicted, within a couple of months, exactly what his sentence was going to be. That was very Steve McQueen-esque, if you will, but then, later that night, I’m walking by the Biltmore Hotel, and who is he having a drink with in the bar, but the judge who sentenced him?
MARGERY: You’re kidding.
PETER: No! That, in a nutshell, is Buddy. Smart enough to figure out how much time he’s going to go to jail—
JIM: Did that appear in the Phoenix?
PETER: It probably did, at some point.
MARGERY: Isn’t that against the rules? The defendant having a drink with the judge?
PETER: No, this was over. It was after he was sentenced, it was all over.
MARGERY: He did four years, right? He was in there for four years, which is not a small amount of time.
JIM: How did you know him? How did this relationship start?
PETER: I was a young reporter, kid reporter at the Providence Journal. He was a young mayor, a few years older than I was, maybe about ten. He was recently divorced, I was aggressively single, and I used to run into him around town. Not just me, there were a couple of other reporters from the [Providence] Journal. The Journal was very anti-Buddy, and Buddy was extremely anti-Providence Journal, so it was sort of like taking a walk on the wild side for both Buddy and me and my buddies to hang around with him. I didn’t cover him, I had nothing to do with Buddy coverage—I was way too low on the totem pole to be covering him.
MARGERY: Was he the first Italian mayor?
PETER: Oddly enough, he might have been. Buddy was elected because the Jewish voters and the Italian voters were united in one thing, that was their dislike… they were against the Irish. Here is a true story, and it might offend some people, but I think they’ll catch the spirit. A very good friend of mine, Bruce Mallucci, was Buddy’s right-hand political man for many years. Buddy and Bruce were having dinner on a Saturday night, and Bruce would say, ‘well, what should we do now, Mr Mayor?’ and [Buddy] said, ‘let’s go to the symphony!’ And Bruce hadn’t been working for Cianci very long and he said, ‘why am I going to go to the symphony?’ and [Buddy] says, ‘to meet the Jews.’
JIM: Peter, did you happen to hear my one… I never had an encounter with Cianci, but my one almost-encounter? My boss at NECN had a great idea—Cianci was in between, and I don’t know if he had started doing his radio show on WPRO down there, but said, Jim, would you have any interest, if I could lure him, in co-hosting a show on NECN with Buddy Cianci? I said, are you kidding me? That would be a huge draw, it would be great, I would love it. So nothing happens for a short period of time, my boss comes back to me and says, ‘it’s still not definite, I think I can pull it off,’ It turns out, ultimately, he couldn’t, — ‘but I just want to make sure you’re okay—there are two conditions. There are two things Cianci said could not be talked about, everything else is fair game.’ Can you guess what the two things were?
PETER: This was after his conviction?
JIM: I believe… right, in-between when he was doing radio, yeah.
PETER: Why he didn’t wear a toupee?
JIM: Well, he hadn’t stopped wearing a toupee, you couldn’t mention the toupee, you’re one for one, what the other one?
PETER: The conviction, I guess.
JIM: You could not mention that he put a cigarette out in the eye of the person who was allegedly having an affair with his… this DeLeo character.
MARGERY: They were separated at the time, so I guess he didn’t want her to date, separated or not.
PETER: One of the best political profiles I ever read was in the Wall Street Journal, and the Journal scooped everyone that Buddy was going to make a comeback—not the most recent one, his first comeback—and it began, “even by Rhode Island standards, Buddy Cianci is….” but in the course of it, they talked about the assault charge, and it went on to observe that most Rhode Islanders thought that Cianci had shown remarkable restraint.
JIM: Some people have said to me, through the years, when I’ve had a Buddy Cianci discussion, —and believe me, I’m not comparing him to Whitey Bulger, but this is the point some have made— that those of us who don’t know him, those of us who didn’t live in Providence, romanticize him too much because of his huge personality and his character. That beyond the felonies he committed, that there was a darker side to Buddy Cianci than the folk hero one that many of us have talked about. Is that a fair criticism, or not?
PETER: I think that’s a fair observation. Buddy had a darker side, just as a suspect Donald Trump has a darker side. Just as all really intelligent narcissists….
JIM: Meaning how, how did it manifest itself?
PETER: Believe it or not, he had it under control most of the time. His big problem was, he thought he was smarter than everyone else. And you know what? 90 percent of the time he was. But the sort of political corruption he practiced was very Mediterranean. What I mean by that is—he didn’t so much, as Kevin White was suspected of getting huge kickbacks from developers… what he did is, the people around him, if you sold enough tickets or raised enough money for his political campaigns, he would look the other way while you pillaged the city coffers. That’s why, when he was convicted… and by the way, I talked to him about this one time, I said Buddy, you’re going to get caught, what are you doing? ...he was charged with like 13 things, and he was only convicted of the top… what that was is, the jury decided that he specifically wasn’t guilty of all the many things he was specifically charged with, but he was guilty of knowing that they all took place.
To hear Peter Kadzis in full on Boston Public Radio, click on the audio link above.
