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4.8.2001 00:16
M. Charles Bakst
Back to darkness: indicted mayor, crippled ethics panel
The Wednesday Journal front page was stunning.
One headline reported, "Almond calls upon Cianci to resign."
Another said, "Ethics panel fires its director."
We are back in the darkness.
It is obvious that Mayor Buddy Cianci has no shame.
Do the people of Providence, and Rhode Island, have any pride?
Are they offended enough and determined enough to join Governor Almond and Sen. Lincoln Chafee in demanding that Cianci resign?
Are they at least sophisticated enough to grasp a basic truth? However much success Cianci has had -- however much downtown shines, however entertaining his schticks, his sauce and his jokes -- a 97-page, 30-count federal indictment of him and others for racketeering, conspiracy, extortion, mail fraud and witness tampering is not humorous or cute.
His achievements and strengths are considerable. But I am mesmerized by an historical quote I found after chatting with lawyer/scholar Patrick T. Conley, once a close Cianci associate, who sees him as a mixture of talents and flaws.
Said John Randolph (1773-1833) of Edward Livingston:
"He is a man of splendid abilities, but utterly corrupt. He shines and stinks like rotten mackerel by moonlight."
Cianci denies any wrongdoing.
The Ethics Commission's beheading of executive director Martin Healey comes across as a panel of political puppets punishing a man who was too zealous about ferreting out state and local corruption.
The commission's operations, marked by dissension and bungling, have brought it to paralysis and derision. Near the end of last Tuesday's meeting, chairman Mel Zurier declared that the burden now was on members to "step up to the plate and participate in getting this organization running again."
He added, "I don't mean only finding bodies to fill places and so forth, but I mean trying to regain a measure of respect for what is a very important institution in the state. I think a lot of people, for whatever reasons, feel let down."
I repeat: That is not an outside critic speaking. It's the commission's own chairman.
Beyond the Cianci scandal and the ethics panel's internal problems, another matter looms: The commission still has before it a complaint against House Speaker John Harwood for practicing law before state administrative agencies.
It has been years since I have felt such alarm about ethics in Rhode Island.
As for Cianci, Providence residents can blame themselves. I thought it odd in 1990 that they chose to return him as mayor. After all, his first City Hall tenure, marred by corruption and fiscal chaos, came to an abrupt end after a 1984 assault conviction. ("I've had better Tuesdays," he said when indicted in that case. "I've had better Mondays," he said when indicted last week. Isn't this material wearing thin?)
In 1991, then-U.S. Attorney Almond, surveying the local scene, said everyone wants to see criminals get their lives back in order, "but is there no one else in the city of Providence who could be mayor except a convicted felon?"
Last week, in demanding Cianci's resignation, Governor Almond was at his best, playing the role of the tall man in the white hat. Almond noted Cianci legally is entitled to a presumption of innocence, but he scoffed at the mayor's hallucinatory assertion that he can leave his legal case in the hands of lawyer Richard Egbert and not be distracted.
"He's the client," Almond told me. "Egbert's only the lawyer.
He's
on trial, not Egbert."
As U.S. attorney, Almond nailed several Cianci staffers in a bribery/kickback scheme but the mayor eluded his net. You might think the governor now is simply perpetuating a decades-old vendetta. Well, Almond said at a press conference, there have been decades of corruption.
Cianci long has enjoyed lofty job approval ratings. Obviously, many people love the city's glitzy face and have believed, or hoped, Cianci was not caught up in the federal Operation Plunder Dome investigation. Now people will have to think anew. They need to focus and not be fooled by Cianci's wisecracks and endless efforts to spin and make himself synonymous with whatever success the city has experienced.
For example, last Tuesday, I mentioned to the mayor his situation, the firing of Healey, and the complaint against Harwood, and I said some Rhode Islanders might think, "It's the same old story."
Cianci responded:
"I don't think we're falling backwards. I think we're going forward. We've had an increase in population. We've had great support on doing a lot of great initiatives here in the city of Providence. We're one of the five top cities in America to live in, according to
Money
magazine. We keep moving on with our bond programs where we're going to be doing things in neighorhoods. Our public safety building is going up...We're building the botanical garden. I mean, people are interested in progress. They're interested, like you are, in having a vibrant economy and a good place to go have dinner, to see a play, to live in a neighborhood that's safe, clean, that has some dignity to it, good schools. Those are all the things we work on every day around here."
Perhaps so. But according to the federal indictment, he and his co-defendants also worked with some frequency over the years extorting cash and campaign contributions for leases, contracts, jobs, promotions and other benefits.
I asked the mayor how he thinks people feel about the national publicity his indictment has brought. For example, I noted that it was being discussed on the Don Imus radio program. "Imus was very favorable, I heard," Cianci said.
But just the idea that the case is being discussed on national radio --
"Well, what can I tell you? I don't spend my time listening to national radio. I was on it, though, the other day -- NPR in Washington."
I said, "We don't need this kind of publicity."
Cianci said, "I know. Well, you know, the point is, I don't need to be indicted either for something I didn't do."
I will be interested to see in coming days if there is a crescendo of calls for his resignation, to see, for example, if key Democratic state legislators, Latino leaders, business and labor bigwigs, and clergy join in.
But I imagine the mayor will hang tight until closer to a trial's dawn, and that's when he'd pack it in. By then, it would no longer be a political matter, or spin control: It would be a matter of assessing what could be a bleak legal landscape. Clever patter doesn't carry much weight in a federal courtroom.
Meanwhile, we need to do heavy thinking about the pathetic Ethics Commission. Healey claimed the stated reasons for his firing, such as a strident essay about him in the Journal by Supreme Court Chief Justice Frank Williams, were a "pretext" and that the real story was that he did his job too well.
The firing came on a 3-to-2 tally with four commissioners not participating in the vote. Chairman Zurier, who had disqualified himself, later refused comment, and vice chairman Richard Kirby would say nothing beyond what he said at the meeting.
It was obvious that the commissioners who wanted to fire Healey were not interested in such small details as, um, facts. For example, they did not bring Williams in to question him about discrepancies between his version and Healey's version about their conversations, which related to a Massachusetts lawyer who was recruited here to investigate complaints against some commissioners.
Unlike former lottery director John Hawkins, the last person I'd seen fired in public, Healey had the class Tuesday to say he won't bring a legal challenge to his dismissal.
But he did have some interesting thoughts. When I asked about the array of events -- his firing, the indictment of Cianci, and the complaint against Harwood -- he said:
"It is the sort of thing that a lot of other states would be very disappointed about. I get the impression that the powers that be in Rhode Island, rather than being embarassed about the situation, either accept it as normal or in some respects revel in it. And what I said a week ago to people is: 'Pay attention.' If apathy remains the order of the day, then there'll be something else added to this list in short order."
Former Ethics Commission chairman Richard Morsilli told me, "Marty has always done a good job. He's a man of high integrity. I question who they want. Is there someone that they want in the job?"
Phil West of Common Cause wondered if any talented prospect would want to be commission director now. "Who will come in from California or Massachusetts or anywhere else to serve in this position?"
Bob Arruda of Operation Clean Government had this message for the governor and legislative leaders: "Look closely as to what's happening here at the Ethics Commission. There are good people out there that are willing to serve. We have to stop putting political hacks on this commission who seem to have no other motive but to undermine this commission."
Almond told me he agrees with Zurier that the commission needs to regain respect. The governor said, "The commission is going to have to take the lead...It's their commission."
Almond added, "Let's get a director in there who can work with people and with the commission."
The governor said the commission set-up is very odd. "We put it out there hanging. No one likes to go to the Ethics Commission and tell them what to do because it's supposedly independent, so it sort of hangs out there, and I'm not sure that's a good idea. It's not functioning."
It
is
bizarre to have a commission constitutionally mandated to write its own laws and yet dependent for financing -- and quality of appointments -- on people -- the governor, legislators -- it is supposed to monitor and who can't always be counted on to want strong ethics enforcement.
I asked Almond what he'd like to do about the commission's status. "I really haven't given much thought to that particular issue," he said.
He should, and so should the legislature, and so should you.
M. Charles Bakst, The Journal's political columnist, can be reached by
e
-mail at mbakst@projo.com
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