• The Providence Retirement Board decides to revoke his retirement benefits, but pay benefits to the estate of the late Rosemary Glancy.
BY MIKE STANTON
Journal Staff Writer
PROVIDENCE
-- The price of corruption was defined in various ways by the Providence Retirement Board yesterday. In a meeting replete with references to bank robbers, mercy and punishment, the board denied pension benefits in the case of one convicted public official, but granted them in another.
With scant public debate, the board emerged from a controversial secret session and voted, 5 to 4, to pay retirement benefits to the estate of the late Rosemary Glancy, the former deputy assessor convicted of assisting a City Hall bribery scheme to lower property taxes.
Then, by a 6-to-3 vote, the board voted to revoke the pension of former tax collector Anthony Annarino, who is serving a 30-month federal prison term for taking bribes to lower people's tax payments.
The board's decision, if ratified in Superior Court, means that Annarino would be denied his $3,500-a-month pension for life. In addition, the city would sue Annarino to recover some $20,000 in interest on his pension contributions that he has already collected, plus the $3,500 a month that he received for about a year, until the board cut him off in the fall of 2000.
For Glancy's heirs, the decision would mean that her contributions, plus interest accrued, would be paid out -- about $46,000 altogether. Because Glancy died last year, the question of whether to pay her monthly pension was moot.
Betty Jackson, the board's vice chairwoman and vice president of Local 1033 of the Laborers' International Union, which represents city employees, voted against revoking Annarino's pension.
"He deserves to get something for all his years of good service," said Jackson, in an interview afterward. "You can't punish a bank robber for crimes before you catch him. I don't have a crystal ball to say how much money he took."
The board's chairman, Local 1033 secretary-treasurer Pasquale D'Amico, sided with Jackson, arguing that Annarino's pension should be cut in half, not eliminated.
"I think it's too harsh," D'Amico said afterward. "I figure he should've gotten something."
Asked why the board voted against Annarino, but in favor of Glancy, D'Amico said, "She's dead."
The third board member to vote against revoking Annarino's pension, David Peters, representing the firefighters union, refused to comment.
A majority of the board felt sympathy toward Glancy, who was popular among her coworkers at City Hall and who died after she had gone to prison.
But board member Carla Dowben, a retired lawyer and the most vociferous critic of granting any retirement benefits to either Annarino or Glancy, argued that that was not the issue.
"This board should hold public employees to the highest possible standard," Dowben said. "We can act in an ethical manner that will bring honor to the city. I've been harmed as a taxpayer by Ms. Glancy's actions. I understand she was a kindhearted person, but that's not excuse enough for what she did."
After some parliamentary confusion and debate over the propriety of debating the pension matter in secret, the board went into executive session. City Councilman Kevin Jackson, a member of the board, left that portion of the meeting in protest.
During the private session, the board heard from its special counsel, Vincent F. Ragosta Jr. In a sharply worded report, released afterward, Ragosta recommended revoking both pensions for dishonorable service.
As high-ranking city tax officials, Annarino and Glancy "wielded considerable discretion" over Providence tax revenues.
Annarino, who pleaded guilty to taking bribes from businessman Antonio R. Freitas, who was working undercover for the FBI, also admitted reducing or waiving interest payments at least 20 times in his last two years in office, in return for $6,000 in bribes. Annarino's "devious connivances" may have cost the city tens of thousands of dollars, Ragosta wrote, and went far beyond the two isolated "lapses of judgment" that his lawyer argued.
Ragosta also criticized Glancy, who was convicted of conspiracy and extortion for her role in helping Freitas lower his property taxes in exchange for bribes to the tax board's chairman, Joseph Pannone, who is also in prison.
"Glancy's demeanor was undeniably friendly, compassionate, accommodating and, as many of her subordinates and coworkers have described, 'competent' and 'conscientious,' " Ragosta wrote. "But these personality traits cannot mitigate the severity of her actions nor her accommodation and acquiescense in sabotaging the soundness of the municipal taxation system."
Summing up, Ragosta concluded: "Annarino's behavior was hypocritical . . . Glancy was an enabler . . . Annarino and Glancy strayed from their most solemn obligations to the public."
Annarino worked 29 years for the city; Glancy, 26. But putting in one's time is not enough, Ragosta contended. Rather, "one must serve
each day
of that term honorably."
