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4.4.2001 00:10
Imprisoned at
ACI, Freitas sees justice in indictments
BY DAVID HERZOG
Journal Staff Writer
CRANSTON — Tony Freitas thought it was all a joke
Monday night when he walked back into his room in the Adult Correctional Institutions'
Minimum Security Unit and another inmate told him that Providence Mayor Vincent
A. Cianci Jr. had been charged with corruption.
Freitas sat down on a box of books a few feet from the television in his room
and watched the news, listening to a reporter announce Cianci's name and list
five others charged by the federal grand jury whose investigation began after
Freitas went undercover for the FBI three years ago.
After that, Freitas said yesterday during an interview at the ACI, reality sank
in. He punched his hands up into the air and yelled: "All right!"
Nearly two years ago, when he disclosed that his secret work for the FBI had launched
Operation Plunder Dome, Freitas wore the aura of a civic hero.
Yesterday, he was another inmate in a khaki uniform and tan leather work boots,
in the middle of a four-month stretch for violating his domestic-violence probation
sentence.
"Never for a million years did I think I would be doing time in jail," Freitas
said yesterday inside a Minimum Security Unit conference room. "I always looked
at myself as the good guy."
Freitas's undercover work helped the U.S. Attorney's office in Providence get
six convictions so far in the corruption probe.
On Monday, the grand jury handed up its biggest indictment yet, alleging that
Cianci and four others in and out of City Hall ran a criminal enterprise to enrich
Cianci and his campaign fund. The grand jury also charged Artin H. Coloian, Cianci's
chief of staff, with participating in a bribery conspiracy.
As he watched the news for hours last night, Freitas said, "I kept thinking: This
is justice."
BACK IN 1997, Antonio R. Freitas was a businessman with some property that
he wanted to lease to the Providence School Department. Freitas's JKL Engineering,
an air-conditioning business on Westminster Street, was doing well. Freitas had
some neighboring properties that he wanted to rehabilitate for potential tenants.
Freitas fumed as his proposals to the School Department went nowhere and his neighbor
in the city's West End, a felon named Edward Voccola, kept getting the School
Department's business. The grand jury charged Voccola on Monday with racketeering.
In 1998, when the School Department was under mounting political pressure to move
the new student-registration center out of Voccola's former auto-body garage at
400 West Fountain St., it rejected a lower-cost bid from Freitas.
School officials said Freitas's building was unsuitable, and a city board authorized
the department to stay in Voccola's property.
The paperwork from Freitas's spurned bid was scattered on the floor of his office
when an FBI agent came to visit.
Special Agent W. Dennis Aiken wanted to know whether Freitas had ever paid bribes
to Joseph Pannone, the chairman of the Providence tax board. Freitas said that
he had not bribed Pannone, who also was charged with racketeering Monday. Pannone,
in 1999, pleaded guilty to earlier corruption charges.
The conversation between Aiken and Freitas turned to Voccola.
Freitas told Aiken that he was so fed up with corruption at City Hall that he
would do whatever it took to fight it.
"It was his way of saying, 'I can do something about cleaning up this mess,' "
said Gerry Roy, a friend through the West Broadway Neighborhood Association.
In April 1998, Freitas was ready to go; the FBI had installed hidden microphones
and video cameras in his basement office.
Early on, Freitas said he and Aiken, a veteran of public-corruption cases, trusted
each other. Freitas also liked hearing Aiken's Mississippi drawl. "It told me
he was a guy who didn't have local connections."
In the tapes played during last year's trial of former Deputy Tax Assessor Rosemary
Glancy, Freitas played to the hilt his part as the businessman willing to pay
in return for tax breaks.
Obviously relishing his role as Pannone's partner in crime, Freitas joked with
him, thanking "Uncle Joe" for teaching him how to get things done at City Hall,
counted out bribe money and nonchalantly took telephone calls from Aiken, who
directed Freitas about what to do next.
A jury later convicted Glancy on corruption charges. She died Jan. 12 after winning
a rare compassionate release from the Federal Bureau of Prisons.
Though Freitas turned much of the day-to-day operations of JKL over to Nancy Freitas,
then his wife, working with the FBI took its toll, Freitas and his friends said.
Roy said Freitas was used to putting 75 hours a week into running the business.
Freitas said he came out of the undercover sessions "mentally exhausted." He and
Aiken worked whenever the case demanded, including nights and weekends.
"It was a difficult year," said Robert P. Arruda, chairman of Operation Clean
Government, a civic reform group. "I had a lot of concerns about Tony being found
out at the time."
Freitas had been a board member of the group.
Arruda said he told Freitas he was putting his life on the line. "Tony felt he
couldn't be hurt."
The stress only grew after Freitas disclosed his undercover role, Arruda said.
A few times, the government flew Freitas to the FBI Academy in Quantico, Va.,
to tell agents how important it is to build trust between cooperating witnesses
and themselves.
Arruda and Roy said that the pressure from the year undercover contributed to
the Freitases' divorce. "Both of them were on edge," Roy said.
THEN FREITAS'S personal life crumbled, in full public view.
As lawyers picked a jury to hear the government's case against Glancy last year,
the Providence police arrested Freitas for allegedly striking Nancy in the face
and knocking her to the ground.
He pleaded innocent to misdemeanor domestic assault and a magistrate released
him, with an order to have no contact with Nancy.
The police arrested him again in April, for allegedly violating the no-contact
order by going to Nancy's home.
In May, the Providence police arrested Freitas a third time. They said he grabbed
Nancy's buttocks and kissed her during a fight.
Freitas pleaded no contest to assault and received a 10-day sentence, followed
by 60 days of home confinement and 21 months of probation.
Freitas stayed out of trouble until just before last Christmas, when the East
Providence police charged him with assaulting a woman. Freitas allegedly punched
a former girlfriend, Lori Ribiero, 37, in the face at her home, the police said.
In late January, Freitas admitted the arrest violated the terms of his probation
and prosecutors dropped the new charge. As part of a plea agreement, Freitas agreed
to return to the ACI on a four-year term, with the chance of work release.
Freitas said that his criminal problems have not eroded his undercover work for
the FBI.
Public opinion, though, is another matter.
"I think early on, before the domestic-violence problems, he was viewed as a hero
by the vast majority of people," Arruda said. "Since then, a fallen hero. And
possibly just a reckless man."
FREITAS, 52 and a grandfather, said he is adjusting to life in prison.
If he had to do the undercover work again, Freitas said he would. "I'm not sorry
I did it."
True to what his friends say is his hard-working nature, Freitas has found work
behind bars.
Four or five times a day, he said that he cleans the bathrooms in the unit. On
the weekends, he said he has been stripping the floors.
He did the same kind of work when he was a teenager fresh from the Azores, going
to Central High School.
Though he built JKL into a million-dollar business, Freitas said that he's not
above manual labor.
"I'm not a prima donna," he said.
At the ACI, he's been writing about his life and experience working for the FBI
and jotting down notes for a new computer program that he wants to develop with
his company, JKL Software.
Like many other inmates in Minimum, he boils water in a hot pot that's in his
room and makes instant soup and hot chocolate.
Freitas has been reading Living, Loving and Learning by Leo Buscalia and
a history book about the American people and the European expeditions to the New
World.
"I felt it was very interesting back then, because there was corruption," he said.
The merchants got rich at the expense of the people, he said. But when the corrupt
merchants got caught, they were executed by hanging.
And back then, he said, the honest politicians spoke out against corruption.
"I feel that the corruption in Rhode Island has taken a big hit," Freitas said.
"This is a lesson for future politicians."
Digital extra:
Read the full report on Monday's indictment and see previous Journal coverage
of Operation Plunder Dome at:
http://projo.com/extra/plunder/
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