Word: cianci
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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What has yet to be seen is whether the charges will stick to the mayor, who has pleaded not guilty. Federal law does not require prosecutors to show that any money went directly to Cianci, but they must prove his underlings took it on his behalf with his knowledge. "I don't know if they got anything on him yet," says Mary Tassone, 66, a retiree from the artificial-flower business who says she has attended every day of the trial. "Except maybe the University Club...
That would be the allegation that in return for building permits, Cianci extorted a free lifetime membership from a fancy downtown club that hadn't deigned to reply to his application in the mid-1970s. The mayor confirms that when club officials went to him for help, one wearing a Cianci bumper sticker on his back, Buddy uttered what has become the signature line of the trial: "The toe you stepped on yesterday may be connected to the ass you have to kiss today." But he scoffs at the extortion charge. "You think it would take me 25 years...
...under a gag order that prevents him from discussing the case. Yet Cianci, paraphrasing the local media's assessment, says his lawyer, Richard Egbert of Boston, "ripped through the main witness against me"--David Ead, who pleaded guilty in February 2000 to extortion and claims to have arranged $25,000 in bribes for Buddy--"like a chainsaw going through a piece of wood." That's why Cianci can't understand the strategy employed by another high-profile politician defendant, Ohio Congressman James Traficant, convicted in April of bribery, racketeering and fraud. "He's the guy who represented himself," Cianci says...
Sometime this summer, Cianci's legal fortunes will be put in the hands of the jury. If he survives, his political fate will be up to the voters in November, which is why he rarely misses a chance to remind people what Providence was like pre-Buddy. At a reception, he beckons me to a plate-glass window on the 17th floor of the Biltmore Hotel, where he happens to live. "I love this view," he says, gesturing with a glass of '98 Louis Bernard Chateauneuf du Pape. "That was a brownfield," he says of the picturesque street being plied...
...first day in office in 1975, Cianci got a call saying monkeys from the dilapidated zoo had escaped onto I-95; in March 1999 the Roger Williams Park Zoo was named one of the nation's best by Travel & Leisure Family magazine. That's in part because Cianci mastered the art of federal grantsmanship and leveraged municipal bonds. "The biggest trick," he confides, "is to use other people's money...