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4.15.2001 00:12
Plunder Dome prosecutor's life shaped by childhood trials
 Friends and colleagues say Richard W. Rose, who grew up poor in South Providence, has never forgotten his roots.
BY MIKE STANTON
Journal Staff Writer
Richard W. Rose traveled a hard road to his position as lead prosecutor in United States of America vs. Vincent A. Cianci Jr.
He grew up fatherless in South Providence, spent five years in an orphanage and later dropped out of Central High School to join the Marines.
After he turned his life around and became a successful lawyer, Rose remained involved in his old neighborhood, stressing the importance of "doing God's work."
Friends and colleagues say that Rose's work in Operation Plunder Dome is an extension of that social commitment.
During the past few years, as the City Hall corruption probe piled up convictions and indictments, Rose earned high marks for leading the investigation. When he walked out of the federal courthouse in Providence after Cianci's arraignment, spectators cheered Rose like a conquering hero.
But last week, after the three-year investigation culminated in a 30-count, 97-page indictment of Cianci and five others, Rose publicly acknowledged a misstep.
On the day of Cianci's indictment, a private investigator working for a defense lawyer asked a friend of Rose's if the prosecutor had ever shown him the FBI's secret Plunder Dome videotapes. That prompted Rose to write a letter to the judge, disclosing that he had shown part of one tape to his sister and two close friends at home last summer.
The disclosure unleashed a firestorm that has put the government on the defensive and Rose under the microscope. The following morning, Cianci attacked the prosecutor on the national
Imus In The Morning
radio show.
"Blockbuster must have been closed," cracked Cianci, who jokigly wondered if Rose had also made popcorn and served cocktails to accompany the "sneak previews."
Legal experts say that the miscue is unlikely to derail the government's case, or result in Rose's removal, though he could face personal sanctions.
But in the short run, at least, Rose's mistake provided Cianci with a major distraction from the charges against him, while giving the mayor's lawyer ammunition to attack the government's case.
"It was a dumb mistake," says Rose's former boss, Rhode Island Atty. Gen. Sheldon Whitehouse. "But it's important to note that it was just that. It wasn't the type of conduct intended to, or that has had the effect, of taking advantage of a criminal defendant."
In 1995, when Whitehouse was the U.S. Attorney in Providence, he hired Rose as only the second black federal prosecutor in Rhode Island history. The first, Alton W. Wiley, who went on to become a state judge, had been hired 30 years earlier.
Rose, 42, is divorced and the father of a 9-year-old girl, Kelsey. Last year, she watched her father's closing argument in the Plunder Dome trial of former Providence Deputy Tax Assessor Rosemary Glancy.
Rose is outgoing and social, friends say, but a workaholic who has been absorbed by Operation Plunder Dome.
"He's a very bright, energetic man who gives the impression that he doesn't just want the title and the status, he really wants to do the right thing," says Whitehouse.
Clifford Montiero, president of the Providence chapter of the NAACP, praises Rose, who also served on the Rhode Island Ethics Commission in the mid-1990s, as a friend and adviser with "a commitment to self-improvement and a commitment to the community."
"Richard has been an inspirational leader for young minority students, with his message that 'You can be somebody,' " says Montiero.
Last June, at the NAACP's annual Freedom Fund dinner, Rose was presented with the Joseph G. LeCount award for outstanding contributions to the community. He often speaks to youth groups and community groups about justice, equality and working hard to realize one's dream.
The gregarious Rose is an avid basketball fan who, for years, was a fixture at the North Providence Summer League. Rose has taken an interest in helping young men find their way after basketball, including former Providence College player Abdul Abdullah, who grew up in South Providence.
In 1991, after a friend and prominent Providence community activist, Joseph R. Vanni Jr., died, Rose organized a tribute in which friends sang folksongs and planted a sweet gum tree in Roger Williams Park.
Rose expressed his admiration for Vanni in a letter published in The Providence Journal: "To those who abused or mistreated the public trust, he was ruthless and unforgiving . . . He fought for what he believed was right, never quit, and when he was down and almost out, he got up and fought again."
A few years ago, Rose told a group of Providence high-school dropouts, "When you are motivated, no one can stop you."
RICHARD ROSE
grew up on Public Street, one of five children raised by his mother, Linda Rose, who worked some of the time as a home health aide and also collected welfare.
When Rose was 11, his mother placed him in the Catholic-run St. Aloysius Home in Smithfield.
"She felt that without a father's influence, I was going to pick up the values of the street and go astray," said Rose, in a 1995 interview. (Rose declined to be interviewed for this story.)
Typical of his upbeat personality, Rose said that he never viewed St. Aloysius as an orphanage.
"I likened it more to an exclusive boarding school. At least, that was my mental image of it. It was a wonderful stately brick building in a country setting, with its own private school. I felt it a privilege to be there.
"I have no doubt that St. Aloysius offered me opportunities I wouldn't have had if I had stayed at home. Certainly, I would not have gone to as many Red Sox games if I had stayed on Public Street."
While living at St. Aloysius, Rose attended La Salle Academy for his freshman year, then returned home to Providence at the age of 15. He enrolled at Central High School, but did poorly. He cut classes and failed every subject except one, about law enforcement.
"I spent most of my time getting chased by the assistant principal," he told a group of City Year youths in 1996.
Rose said that he wanted his independence. So, in a two-week period, he quit high school, passed his high-school equivalency exam, and enlisted in the Marines.
"One of the worst existences in the world is being a private in the Marine Corps," Rose told the City Year students. "And there's a correlation to that in life. You don't want to be a private. You don't want to be at the bottom of the ladder."
During his five years in the service, Rose began attending junior college at night. After the Marines, he earned degrees from the Community College of Rhode Island and Rhode Island College.
"One of the happiest days in my life was when I graduated from CCRI, and my mother was there," said Rose.
Rose went on to the Northeastern University School of Law, in Boston.
A law school classmate and friend, Annie Talbot, says that Rose stood out in law school because "he could talk well on his feet; he had the makings of a good courtroom lawyer."
"The reason I went to law school is because being a doctor or lawyer are sort of the epitome of success, and I love to talk," Rose said in a 1998 interview with The Journal. "So I knew that being a lawyer was a way that I could go talk and do something that I felt a sense of pride in."
AFTER LAW SCHOOL,
Rose joined one of the biggest law firms in Boston: Mintz, Levin, Cohn, Ferris, Glovsky and Popeo.
The firm's chairman, R. Robert Popeo, is a former federal prosecutor and a nationally renowned criminal-defense lawyer.
After a few years, Rose found himself working with Popeo and another top-rated New England defense lawyer, Richard M. Egbert, in the defense of former Gov. Edward D. DiPrete and his son, Dennis L. DiPrete.
The DiPretes were charged with running a criminal enterprise out of the State House, involving kickbacks for state contracts. Popeo's firm represented Dennis DiPrete. Egbert, who is now Rose's adversary as Mayor Cianci's lawyer in Operation Plunder Dome, represented Edward DiPrete.
For about a year, before he left the firm to become a federal prosecutor, Rose did a lot of the grunt work on the case. Dennis DiPrete recalls Rose plowing through thousands of pages of grand-jury transcripts and hundreds of boxes of evidence.
"He was an extremely valuable part of the defense team," says DiPrete, who remains friendly with Rose. "We were disappointed when he left."
Rose's efforts helped lay the groundwork for a defense counterattack. Egbert and Popeo would uncover evidence of flagrant prosecutorial misconduct by the office of then-Atty. Gen. Jeffrey B. Pine.
The misconduct included withholding critical evidence, then attempting to cover that up, and resulted in a judge throwing the case out. The charges were subsequently reinstated. But critics say the damage was done. Edward DiPrete pleaded guilty to 18 felonies, but served what observers considered a lenient sentence -- one year in prison. Pine agreed to drop all but one minor charge against Dennis DiPrete.
The DiPrete case provided a lesson in how prosecutors should not behave -- a lesson, colleagues say, that was not lost on Rose.
Whitehouse said that Rose's lapse in judgment -- showing the Plunder Dome tapes to friends -- is not in the category of "the really wicked things that some prosecutors do to make things unfair to a defendant."
Says Dennis DiPrete: "I think this is more an aberration than his normal practice. Knowing Richard, he's sorrier than anyone."
IN 1995,
Rose was sworn in as an assistant United States Attorney in Providence.
He filled his office with mementos that fixed his personal history in the broader history of his race. A yellowed document detailing the settlement of a lawsuit with the payment of a male slave. The front page of an abolitionist newspaper. An autographed photograph of Muhammad Ali.
And he spoke out passionately about the struggle for racial equality. At an NAACP dinner in 1997, he noted the lack of any black state prosecutors or statewide officeholders.
"I believe there are only three places in Rhode Island where our participation is greater than our percentage of the population," he said. "The state prison, and the PC and URI basketball teams."
Rose also talked about being a black federal prosecutor.
"When you find yourself representing the United States of America in a criminal proceeding, you do some soul searching," he said in 1998. "There's always this tension between can I do more for my community from this side of the table or from the other side of the table?"
Rose described prosecuting a black, 73-year-old crack dealer who was sentenced to 15 years in prison. Rose said that his sister, who came to watch, was struck by the fact that the man, in a lot of ways, could have been their father -- not that he was a drug dealer, but just the way he looked and talked.
Later, Rose went by where the drug deals had occurred, a street in South Providence that he had known as a boy.
"This [tension] had been churning in me, so I rode by it, and on the porch were two little girls my daughter's age," said Rose. "I don't know if those kids are going to make it, because of all the forces at work against them. But I do know that, that night at least, there was nobody on the first floor of their tenement selling crack out the door."
ROSE BEGAN
began by prosecuting drug cases and gun cases, like most young prosecutors, and worked his way up to more complicated cases, including white-collar crime.
He had flair in the courtroom, said Whitehouse, and was more dramatic than most prosecutors, well prepared with a knack for zeroing in on the pertinent fact or the telling detail that will stick in a juror's mind.
In one case, Rose seized on the fact that the defendant had hidden some contraband in his child's room, in a box of cookies known as Grizzly Grahams. Whitehouse later adopted the term when reviewing cases, asking prosecutors, "What are your Grizzly Grahams?"
Rose was ambitious. In 1998, when Whitehouse resigned to run for attorney general, Rose applied for the U.S. Attorney's post, though he had little seniority.
"He told me that he didn't expect to get it, but he wanted to let them know he was interested," says Whitehouse. "He said, 'It may help me in the future.' "
Not all lawyers were impressed with Rose's style. Some found him brash and overly theatrical. He annoyed some defense lawyers at the outset of a major drug trial by telling them, "You're in my house now." Later in that trial, he and defense lawyer Stephen R. Famiglietti got into a heated argument in which Rose kept jabbing his finger in Famiglietti's face. The two lawyers made peace afterward.
During Rosemary Glancy's trial last year, Glancy's lawyer, Kevin J. Bristow, told jurors that he wasn't going to "bounce around" the courtroom as Rose had during his closing argument.
But Rose's presentation, and the evidence, was effective. Although Glancy was not on tape herself taking bribes, she was convicted on all counts against her.
The moral outrage -- "the highly developed sense of right and wrong" that friend Annie Talbot says drives Rose -- was evident in Glancy's trial.
Rose paced the courtroom during his closing argument, modulating his voice between a whisper and a shout, pointing at Glancy as he repeated the refrain: "innocent dupe or corrupt public official?"
He talked of how honest, hard-working Providence taxpayers had been wronged.
"She conducted a dishonest-services seminar, soup to nuts, A to Z: How to Cheat Providence Taxpayers," Rose thundered.
ON ONE OCCASION
last summer, Rose recently acknowledged to a federal judge, he showed portions of a secret FBI surveillance tape in Operation Plunder Dome to his sister and two close friends, Casby Harrison III and Harrison's wife, Mary Sylvia Harrison.
Casby Harrison told The Journal that he and his wife had been out to dinner and stopped by Rose's house afterward. Rose was spending another night working at home, and was watching one of the tapes that had been made by the FBI's undercover witness, businessman Antonio R. Freitas.
"He was working, and we interrupted him, and the tape was cued up [in the VCR]," Harrison said. "Richard might have even had the remote in his hand."
What followed, Harrison said, was a moment of weakness, not malice. For about 10 minutes, they watched tape of Freitas interacting with Cianci's then-top aide, Frank E. Corrente, who is under indictment for taking bribes from Freitas for city favors.
Then, two weeks ago -- around the same time that Cianci's indictment was being announced -- Harrison was confronted by a private investigator hired by Corrente's lawyer. The investigator asked if Harrison had seen any of the Plunder Dome tapes.
Harrison didn't answer. He told Rose, who in turn alerted his superiors. Last Monday, one week after the indictment, Rose wrote what friends say must have been a difficult letter, disclosing his actions to the judge in the case.
"That's got to hurt," says Whitehouse.
Still, legal observers say, if Rose has been totally forthcoming, and no further damaging information emerges regarding improper handling of the tapes, his actions should not jeopardize the case. Cianci's lawyers will be digging, seeking to exploit any mistakes.
"He was responsible enough to admit what he did and he's willing to face the consequences," says Cliff Montiero of the NAACP. "I don't care who you are, everybody can make a mistake. That's why pencils have erasers. Richard didn't duck it or deny it -- not The Kid."
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