'Somebody's gonna leave town'

BY MIKE STANTON
Journal Staff Writer
The Providence Journal
12/15/2002

THE FBI AGENT, THE FELON AND MR. FREON

W. Dennis Aiken knew corruption.

As a 21-year-old FBI clerk in 1974, his first assignment had been Watergate. His task had been to create a computerized database of witness interviews in the investigation of President Richard M. Nixon.

As a field agent, Aiken had worked on undercover operations targeting mobsters, dirty cops and corrupt public officials.

Later, he became chief of the FBI's Public Corruption Unit. In Washington, D.C., he oversaw some of the bureau's most sensitive cases, from an ethics probe of President Ronald W. Reagan's attorney general, Edwin Meese III, to an investigation of dirty tricks in the 1992 presidential election of Bill Clinton.

Aiken literally wrote the book: the FBI Field Guide to Public Corruption. Aiken also knew Buddy Cianci.

In the late 1970s, as a junior agent posted in Providence, Aiken had helped start some of the earliest investigations of Cianci's scandal-plagued first reign.

A tall, rangy southerner from Clarksdale, Miss. -- birthplace of Muddy Waters and home of the blues -- Aiken stood out at City Hall. When he entered the building, some city workers would warn one another to beware of the redneck FBI agent.

Cianci was aggravated by Aiken's visits to City Hall. The mayor would ask why he was there. Aiken would reply in his easy drawl that he was conducting surveillance, trying to "root out corruption."

In 1981, Aiken was transferred to Florida.

In 1984, Cianci was forced from office by his conviction for felony assault.

In 1991, Cianci returned to City Hall.

Three years later, in 1994, Aiken came back to Providence.

A tenacious investigator, Aiken had grown bored with his desk job in Washington. When the FBI announced a plan to put 300 senior agents back in the field, Aiken jumped at the chance.

He asked to be sent to Rhode Island, his wife's home state. He was 42 years old, with two young children, and he had moved eight times in his FBI career. Aiken was ready to put down roots.

As an investigator, Aiken knew that Providence was "a target-rich environment." He asked his supervisor not to assign him any cases; he would find his own.

Scratching beneath the glitzy surface of the Renaissance, Aiken quickly discovered that not much had changed. The old, familiar names kept coming up.

One day, about a year after his return, Aiken walked into the Capital Grille and saw Cianci, who was walking out.

"How ya doin', mayor," said Aiken.

The mayor was speechless, Aiken recalls. "He looked like he'd seen a ghost."

EDWARD E. VOCCOLA knew insurance fraud.

A longtime Providence auto-body shop owner, Voccola knew how to strip a stolen car down to its chassis, how to fake an insurance claim, how to stage a phony accident.

Insurance adjusters dreaded going to his body shop in a rundown block of the city's West Broadway neighborhood, a labyrinth of pockmarked streets, strip clubs, chop shops and rat-infested warehouses. Once, Voccola and his brother John beat up an insurance investigator from Connecticut, as Eddie shouted: "This is Rhode Island. I'll blow up your car and kill you."

In the spring of 1995, Voccola was indicted with his brother, Robert, and his manager, Roger Cavaca, for staging car accidents. Authorities also alleged that Voccola had tried to persuade a witness to lie to the grand jury. A federal prosecutor called it a strange coincidence that another witness had received an animal tongue and black roses, as well as the phone number for a funeral home on her pager.

The case caught Dennis Aiken's eye. Since 1991, the Providence School Department had leased Voccola's former body shop at 400 West Fountain St. as a registration center for new students.

The lease had generated controversy. The city's impoverished school system paid more than $1 million for a building that was drafty and dreary, with concrete floors and inaccessible bathrooms.

Critics pointed out that the city could have bought a better building for a fraction of the inflated rent it was paying. A reform-minded School Committee member tried to get out of the lease when it came up for renewal in 1994. But she was told not to buck City Hall.

Dennis Aiken smelled a bribe.

Voccola and Cavaca pleaded guilty to insurance fraud and were sentenced to prison. The city not only kept sending Voccola his rent checks, but also cut new deals to rent or buy additional property.

Then, instead of reporting to prison, Cavaca fled. Authorities alleged that Voccola was paying off Cavaca to go on the lam, so that he wouldn't talk to the feds.

>Early in 1997, the authorities finally caught up with Cavaca, who had tried through his son to negotiate a surrender, in North Carolina. Facing an additional five years in prison, Cavaca started talking to Aiken about Voccola and City Hall -- specifically, the mayor's top aide, Frank E. Corrente.

According to court proceedings, Cavaca said that Voccola had confided he was paying bribes for the lease to Corrente, Cianci's "errand boy." Before the lease was signed in 1991, Cavaca said, he was told by Voccola that it was "a done deal" after Voccola and Corrente had met at the Blue Grotto restaurant.

Cavaca also described to Aiken how Voccola had laundered money, allegedly to come up with cash for payoffs to City Hall.

Later in 1997, a grand jury was convened to investigate Corrente and the Voccola lease. School officials were called to testify.

Cavaca, in his debriefing, mentioned two other men he had seen at Voccola's garage: Antonio R. Freitas and Joseph A. Pannone.

Dennis Aiken decided to follow up.

TONY FREITAS knew how things worked in Providence.

He had come to Rhode Island as a teenager from the Azores and had gone on to live the American Dream. He built a successful heating and air-conditioning business, JKL Engineering, named for the initials of his three children. And he went about restoring his patch of rundown Providence, in the West Broadway neighborhood just down the street from Eddie Voccola's garage.

One day in 1994, Freitas stopped by Voccola's body shop to check on a truck repair. He met a small, white-haired man with thick glasses, who said he recognized Freitas's high-pitched, accented voice from a local radio show that Freitas hosted.

The man introduced himself as Joe Pannone.

Pannone was the chairman of the city's Board of Tax Assessment Review. A retired restaurant operator from Eagle Park, Pannone kept busy with local politics -- he sold fundraising tickets for Buddy Cianci -- and the tax board, which was appointed by the mayor.

When Freitas mentioned that he was headed down to City Hall to straighten out a mix-up on his taxes, Pannone offered to help. Soon, Pannone sent the tax assessor to Freitas's office to clear up the problem.

Later, Pannone stopped by Freitas's office and said that he was about to take his annual trip to Florida. Freitas failed to pick up on the hint that he should give Pannone some spending money as a thank-you.

>Freitas had never been good at playing the game. When he was a young businessman in the 1970s, two Providence building inspectors tried to shake him down for a bribe. At first, Freitas had no idea what they were talking about. Later, after it dawned on him, he chased the inspectors down the street with a two-by-four.

Freitas was a short, manic man, a hard-driving boss with a quick smile and a hot temper. When Dennis Aiken came to see him in January 1998, the day before Freitas's 49th birthday, Freitas was furious with the Providence School Department. Officials had lied to him about a bid that he had put in to lease office space to the city, and given the contract instead to a higher bidder: Eddie Voccola.

Aiken asked about Cavaca's allegations that Freitas may have bribed Pannone. Freitas said that he hadn't. As the FBI agent and the businessman talked, they realized they shared a desire to clean out the corrupt officials at City Hall. "The cockroaches," Freitas called them.

They talked about a bold idea.

Aiken realized he had a rare find. Freitas was not cooperating to avoid prison or prosecution, which would make him more credible on the witness stand. And as a businessman rooted in the community, Freitas could seek help from City Hall without arousing suspicions.

In 1995, the FBI had sent an undercover agent named "Marco" to pose as an outside businessman trying to do business in Providence. In a secretly recorded conversation at Capriccio, Cianci jokingly introduced "Marco" to someone as an FBI agent. Cianci also told Marco that if any city official tried to shake him down, the mayor would personally "cut off his [expletive]."

Aiken promised Freitas that the FBI would do its best to protect him.

To shield his identity, Freitas would need a code name. They picked one based on a chemical coolant in the air-conditioning systems he installed -- Mr. Freon.

The investigation also needed a name.

On April 29, 1998, Operation Plunder Dome began, with a phone call from Tony Freitas to Joe Pannone.

NEVER TALK ON THE PHONE

JOE PANNONE knew how to get things done.

He knew how to fix your taxes and grease the right palms. He knew about cash in envelopes. He knew Frank Corrente, the mayor's right-hand man. And he had known Buddy Cianci since the mayor was a boy, playing at Joe's sister's house in the Laurel Hill Avenue area of Cranston.

Unwittingly, Pannone became the FBI's cynical guide into the netherworld of City Hall.

Pannone told Freitas one day that Cianci had counseled him in the art of bribery: "Never talk on the phone, never get a check, but get cash when you're one-on-one."

Greedy, crude and foul-mouthed, Pannone was eager to show Freitas the ropes. He impressed upon him the importance of buying campaign tickets for Cianci, and of being seen at fundraisers by the mayor and his top people.

"There are no free lunches," he said. "It's the money that counts, Tony."

Or, explaining how the deputy assessor helped him lower people's taxes: "She bends, you know what I mean? I just show some green and she's all right."

Pannone introduced Freitas to other city officials: Rosemary Glancy, the deputy assessor; David C. Ead, vice chairman of the tax board; Anthony E. Annarino Jr., the tax collector.

And Pannone introduced Freitas to Frank Corrente. Eventually, Freitas began dealing directly with Corrente, and bribing him in his City Hall office. The payoffs were captured by a camera hidden in Freitas's briefcase.

Pannone called Freitas "Tony Frazier." Freitas called Pannone "Uncle Joe."

"Joe, you're the best teacher I know," Freitas said.

The FBI transformed an office in the basement of JKL Engineering into a miniature television studio. Dennis Aiken would monitor the conversations at JKL Engineering from a nearby utility closet.

Sometimes Aiken called Freitas on his cell phone and suggested he ask a certain question. One day, he asked Freitas to see if he could get Pannone to tell him where he hid his money. Within minutes, Pannone revealed that he kept his cash in a nightstand next to his bed, under the picture of a saint.

There was always concern that, sooner or later, Freitas's cover would be blown. One day, there was a close call.

Pannone was in Freitas's office. Aiken was in the utility closet, listening on a set of headphones.

Two meter readers from Narragansett Electric showed up.

When the meter readers, one a trainee, opened the closet door, Aiken put his finger to his lips. They left quietly, and Freitas got Pannone out of there.

Aiken hurried outside and tracked down the meter readers. He flashed his badge and told them that Freitas was helping the FBI catch a dangerous drug dealer. The women promised to keep quiet.

PROVIDENCE WAS a small town, full of coincidences.

In the summer of 1998, as Freitas continued to work undercover for the FBI, he installed a heating and air-conditioning system in a historic East Side mansion. He finished the job in August, got it approved by the city's building inspector and went on vacation.

When he returned and checked on the job, Freitas noticed that someone had tried to peel the "approved" stickers off the duct work. He asked the construction manager what was up.

"There are some problems with City Hall," the manager told him.

The mansion was home to the University Club.

That summer, Cianci had ordered the club's building permits blocked, according to later court testimony. He was angry because the club had denied him membership in the 1970s.

Freitas heard part of the story from Rosemary Glancy, the deputy tax assessor. She told him that Cianci had also ordered a city appraiser to give the club a hard look.

"The mayor's on their ass," Glancy said. ". . . He must have got a bad dinner over there."

That fall the club gave the mayor an honorary lifetime membership, and the problems with the permits went away.

ON THE WRONG SIDE OF THE LAW

AND THEN THERE was David C. Ead.

Through Pannone, Freitas had gotten to know the vice chairman of the tax board. Where Pannone was a buffoon, Ead was menacing and guarded.

Ead, an ex-cop, ran a vending-machine business, Doris Vending, in a ramshackle warehouse amidst the faded triple-deckers of Manton Avenue. The only way in was through a thick steel door, bearing a sign warning that trespassers would be shot. There were bars on the windows. Ead called it his fortress.

When Freitas went out to meet with people like Ead, Dennis Aiken wasn't down the hall, as he was at JKL Engineering, if something went wrong. Freitas was not trained to handle dangerous situations. He worried about walking into a setup. Whenever he finished an outside meeting, Freitas was supposed to call Aiken and give him the signal that everything was OK: "Hallelujah."

>One day, Freitas went to Ead's musty office to discuss a money-laundering scheme in which Freitas would pretend to buy soda machines from Ead to generate cash for bribes. Suddenly, Ead glanced suspiciously at Freitas's briefcase -- and right at the concealed camera.

Freitas grabbed the briefcase, opened it, and pulled out some paperwork to show Ead.

By early 1999, Freitas had gathered enough evidence to obtain indictments of Corrente, Pannone, Ead and others involved in kickbacks for tax favors. He had also provided the FBI with a myriad of leads.

But Aiken wasn't ready to move. He felt confident that they were pushing closer to the top.

Freitas was dealing with Corrente on landing a big city lease, and offering to pay $25,000 a year in kickbacks.

And Freitas was working on another deal with Ead, to buy some vacant lots from the city -- a deal that the feds hoped would lead directly to the mayor.

Ead, who lacked the authority to approve the sale of vacant lots, was going to extremes to help Freitas buy the lots. He pressured city redevelopment officials. He met with the mayor, and reported back to Freitas that Cianci had agreed to the deal in return for a $10,000 payoff, Ead later testified.

But time ran out.

On March 9, 1999, Ead received an anonymous phone call from a woman who warned that Freitas was working for the FBI.

Four days later, Ead visited Freitas and promised to return a $1,200 kickback that Freitas had given him. He said that there was no "big guy" involved in the vacant-lot deal.

"I was just testing you out," Ead said. "I wanted to see if this got around. There's no ten grand to give to nobody."

Freitas and Aiken were unaware of the phone call to Ead, but it was obvious that he was on to them. They decided to shut down the undercover phase of Operation Plunder Dome.

Aiken prepared a 94-page affidavit, in support of a search warrant to seize records from city agencies and from Pannone and Ead. On April 27, a federal magistrate judge signed the search warrant.

Early the next morning, 50 FBI agents, including reinforcements from Boston, gathered in Providence, and awaited Dennis Aiken's orders.

The next move was Ead's.

DAVID EAD knew the long arm of the law.

Once upon a time, before he launched his vending business and got involved in City Hall politics and crime, Ead had been a Providence patrolman. He had a fistful of commendations: for apprehending a ring of burglars, arresting a suspect for assault with a dangerous weapon, rescuing an elderly woman from a burning building and catching a car thief before the owner even knew his car had been stolen.

Ead had grown up on Federal Hill, the son of an Italian mother and a Palestinian father who had emigrated from the West Bank. He had been a big, bruising cop, 6 feet 1 inch and 225 pounds -- his looks alone could strike fear into a suspect, a former partner recalls.

On the morning of Wednesday, April 28, 1999, Ead's old police instincts warned him of trouble when he pulled up to Doris Vending and saw the white car parked in front. Two men sat in the car, waiting. There was no front license plate, so Ead circled around the block to come up from behind and check the plate. But the white car followed him.

Ead parked and the white car parked. The two men got out.

"What are you doing -- trying to escape?" asked one, in a southern drawl.

The man introduced himself as Dennis Aiken, of the FBI.

The two agents slid into the back seat of Ead's Cadillac. Aiken told Ead that they had him and Joe Pannone taking money from Tony Freitas.

Ead denied it. Aiken showed him a photograph of Ead with Freitas, inside his Doris Vending office.

"How'd you get that picture?" Ead asked. "My office is like a bank."

Aiken laughed.

Ead and the FBI agents went inside Doris Vending. Aiken told him that the FBI knew about the $10,000 that Ead was supposed to deliver to Cianci for the vacant lots. Aiken said that he wanted Ead to cooperate, and bring the $10,000 to the mayor. Aiken said that he had the money in his briefcase.

"I can't do that," Ead protested, according to later court proceedings. "I can probably do that to Frank Corrente or Art Coloian, but not the mayor."

Ead didn't want to admit what he would later testify to: that he couldn't bring the money to Cianci because he had already warned him Freitas might be working with the FBI.

Aiken told Ead that if he didn't cooperate, he would go to prison.

They went back and forth for about 30 minutes. At one point, Ead was handcuffed, then asked that the cuffs be removed. Ead seemed confused; he knew he was in serious trouble, but wasn't convinced that the FBI really had him.

Aiken said that he had 50 agents ready to move. If Ead agreed to work with them, the agents would be called off.

Ead would not cooperate, and the handcuffs went back on. Aiken left to arrest Joe Pannone.

Shortly after City Hall opened for business, agents with subpoenas swarmed through the offices of the tax assessor and tax collector, seizing records.

Two agents visited Frank Corrente, and showed him a picture of Tony Freitas giving him an envelope in his city office; Corrente hurried from City Hall shortly after they left.

Still more agents descended on agencies elsewhere in the city: the School Department, the planning office, the building inspector.

Later that morning, the chairman and vice chairman of the Providence Board of Tax Assessment Review found themselves in a jail cell in the basement of the federal Post Office in Kennedy Plaza.

Two young drug suspects were also in the cell. One of them sat on the toilet behind a partition in the corner.

Ead looked sullen, and didn't say much. Pannone chattered nervously, telling Ead: "They got me. They got me."

Ead told Pannone how Aiken had asked him to bring $10,000 to the mayor.

"I told him to screw," Ead said.

"I'm glad you told him that," Pannone replied. "The mayor's a good guy. He doesn't deserve that."

POMP AND CIRCUMSTANTIAL EVIDENCE<

And so, now, one fine June morning in 2002, Buddy Cianci finds himself sitting on the courthouse steps, waiting for a jury to decide his fate.

Three years have passed since the FBI's raid on City Hall shattered the tranquility of Cianci's Renaissance -- three years of subpoenas, indictments, convictions and headlines stirring memories of the corruption that engulfed his first reign.

Amid the pomp of the Splendor of Florence exhibition of Italian artisans and treasures in 1999, Cianci celebrated his tenure as the longest-serving mayor in Providence history.

Since then, Operation Plunder Dome defendants had fallen like dominoes.

Two lawyers pleaded guilty to corruption charges involving bribes for tax breaks.

Pannone pleaded guilty to 14 felony charges and went to prison, at the age of 77.>

Ead pleaded guilty to arranging bribes with an unnamed high-ranking city executive, whom he later identified as Cianci.

Tax collector Anthony Annarino pleaded guilty to accepting cash bribes in exchange for waiving interest on property-tax payments and went to prison.

Deputy assessor Rosemary Glancy was tried and convicted of aiding Pannone's illicit tax schemes. Sent to prison, she was soon released after suffering terminal liver failure. She died a few months later, at the age of 48.

In the summer of 2000, Cianci's former top aide and campaign treasurer, Frank Corrente, was indicted on nine counts of attempted extortion, conspiracy and mail fraud. Unlike most of those charged before him, Corrente did not plead guilty or agree to cooperate.

That fall, Cianci sold his beloved carriage house on Power Street and took up residence in the Presidential Suite of the Providence Biltmore, where he had announced his first candidacy for mayor, in 1974.

Then, on April 2, 2001, the hammer came down.

Vincent A. Cianci Jr. was indicted in a 30-count racketeering case, along with Corrente, Pannone, Voccola and tow-truck operator Richard E. Autiello.

The mayor's chief of staff, Artin H. Coloian, was also indicted on separate charges that he accepted a $5,000 bribe on Cianci's behalf from Ead, for a city job. (Coloian would later be acquitted at trial.)

Now, in June 2002, following nearly eight weeks of testimony, the case is in the hands of the jury. The jurors are in their seventh day of deliberations as Cianci waits on the courthouse steps.

Standing nearby is Richard M. Egbert, Cianci's lawyer and one of the top criminal-defense lawyers in New England. Although Egbert is from Boston, Providence has been like a second home through the years. He defended a murder case involving Frank L. "Bobo" Marrapese, the mobster whom Cianci had once prosecuted. Egbert also handled high-profile corruption cases involving former Cianci aides Ronald Glantz and Joseph DiSanto, former North Providence Mayor Salvatore Mancini and ex-Rhode Island Governor Edward D. DiPrete.

EGBERT IS A relentless lawyer who works off his nervous energy by taking dawn walks through Providence; during the lunch recess, he encourages Cianci to walk with him around downtown, where passersby cheer the mayor. To Egbert, a defense lawyer is democracy's safeguard against overreaching police officers and prosecutors. He loves the movie My Cousin Vinny.

There is nothing Egbert enjoys more in the courtroom than going after a government witness who is testifying to avoid prison. Court watchers are still talking about Egbert's withering cross-examination of the government's lead-off witness, David Ead, which set the tone for Cianci's aggressive defense.

"How long have you known Vincenzo?" asked Egbert, mocking the familiar nickname that Ead had professed to using with Cianci.

Or, referring to $500 that Ead had described giving Cianci, Egbert said, "That's about five minutes at the blackjack table for you."

Now, they wait.

At the opposite end of the broad steps, the lead prosecutor in the case, Assistant U.S. Attorney Richard W. Rose, talks about basketball, one of his passions outside the courtroom.

The corruption at City Hall resonates with Rose. His indignation was evident during his fiery closing argument, as he pointed at Cianci and kept repeating, "Renaissance City, or a city for sale?"

Rose had grown up fatherless in South Providence, on mean streets that offered little opportunity for kids who were poor and without connections. A high-school dropout who spent part of his childhood in an orphanage, Rose had joined the Marines, put himself through law school and become only the second African-American federal prosecutor in Rhode Island history.

Shortly after Dennis Aiken began working undercover with Tony Freitas, the FBI agent had picked Rose as the prosecutor he wanted to work with on Operation Plunder Dome.

Aiken had seen Rose in action. Aiken thought that he was smart, and that he had guts. Rose was also ambitious; he had sought the U.S. Attorney's job, a political plum traditionally chosen by the senior Rhode Island senator of the party that rules the White House. Rose had flair in the courtroom. Some defense lawyers considered him arrogant, but they didn't question his intelligence or preparation.

When Aiken first pitched Plunder Dome, Rose had some concerns. Taking on Buddy Cianci in Providence would not be easy. The stakes would be high. This was a case that could help chart a city's destiny, and one that could make or break a career. As Aiken put it: "Somebody's gonna leave town."

Rose watched the tapes of Freitas and Pannone, and saw the potential of the case. After that, says Aiken, the prosecutor's attitude was, "Let's go. Let's play."

Now, they wait.

INSIDE THE courthouse, shielded behind a wooden door guarded by a federal marshal, the jury is wrestling with the mayor's fate.

Deliberations have been long and tense. Jurors have clashed over the credibility of David Ead, over the University Club, over what the mayor did and didn't know. They have gone around and around and around on racketeering and conspiracy and "extortion under color of official right."

One day, after two jurors got into a heated argument, one read his horoscope from a tabloid aloud to the others: "You will be explosive in your temper." The jurors burst into laughter, momentarily easing the tension.

There had been days, during the long and, at times, tedious testimony, that the jurors had longed to escape. They joked about hiding from the marshal in the two bathrooms off the deliberation room. Since they weren't supposed to discuss the testimony, they made small talk. When they grew punchy, some imitated Egbert hitching up his pants or Rose pulling up his socks as he sat at the prosecution table.

Before they finally got the case, the jurors sat in the courtroom and listened to Chief U.S. District Judge Ernest C. Torres instruct them on the law for several hours. Torres explained things as simply as he could, but it was still a mind-numbing recitation.

"You just earned credit for a year in law school," Cianci quipped to reporters in the hallway.

On a more somber note, Cianci grumbled: "If you gave the jurors an exam right now, they'd probably score about 30. And these people have my life in their hands."

The jury was a cross-section of Rhode Island. It included two teachers, two social workers, a cab driver, a store manager, a retired police officer, a laborer, a physical therapist and a worker at the Rhode Island Central Landfill

When the deliberations began on Wednesday, June 12, according to one juror who requested anonymity, the jury agreed to set aside the first two counts -- racketeering conspiracy and racketeering -- until the end. Those were the biggest and most complicated charges. Then, the jury began working through the remaining counts, disposing of the easiest ones -- where Frank Corrente was on tape, taking bribes from Freitas -- first.

(Before the case reached the jury, the judge had thrown out the charges against Voccola. While Torres said there was evidence that Voccola had paid bribes for the school lease, the statute of limitations had expired. Torres ruled that the government had failed to charge Voccola with a second, unrelated crime, as required for a racketeering charge.)

After that, they tackled the charges that Cianci agreed to bribes with Ead -- $10,000 for a half-million dollar property-tax settlement; $5,000 for a city job; and $10,000, which was never paid, from Freitas to purchase vacant lots from the city.

They went back and forth. A majority of the jury mistrusted Ead; they viewed him as a compulsive gambler who would do anything to get money. Egbert's cross-examination -- when he cited Foxwoods records showing that Ead had visited the casino 250 days in one year, including Christmas Day -- had made an impression. The jurors were also troubled that there were no other witnesses to Ead's alleged conversations with Cianci about bribes.

Other jurors argued that Ead couldn't be wrong about everything. The government had presented other witnesses who described how Cianci had supported Ead's efforts to secure someone a city job and to help Freitas obtain the vacant lots.

"Maybe Ead was right," says the juror. "But a lot of us felt that the standard of proof fell just short. We were being asked to convict Buddy Cianci solely on the word of David Ead."

After several days of debate, the jurors agreed to acquit Cianci on the Ead charges.

The jury moved on to the charges that Corrente and Autiello had extorted campaign contributions from city tow-truck operators, and eventually voted to convict. The jury also agreed to find Autiello guilty of extorting a $5,000 payoff from the mother of a Providence police recruit.

Then there was the University Club. Those were the hardest charges to resolve -- that the mayor had extorted an honorary lifetime membership from the private club, which had rejected him years earlier, by threatening to shut it down.

The initial vote on the University Club charge was 6 to 6, according to the juror. At first, some felt that Cianci was guilty of extortion. Others reasoned that it was grayer, that club leaders had offered a membership to the mayor not necessarily out of fear -- an essential element of extortion -- but to make a friend.

After considerable debate, the jury took another vote. This time, it was 9 to 3 in favor of acquittal on the University Club.

Stuck, the jurors turned to the two counts they had been dreading -- the so-called RICO counts -- given how hard it had been to resolve the simpler charges.

THE RACKETEER Influenced and Corrupt Organizations law was enacted in 1970, to combat organized crime.

The author, G. Robert Blakey, had been a federal mob prosecutor under U.S. Atty. Gen. Robert F. Kennedy in the early 1960s, when the FBI bugged Raymond Patriarca's vending office on Federal Hill. Some believed that the name RICO was inspired by Edward G. Robinson's gangster in the movie Little Caesar, who said as he lay dying at the end, "Mother of God, is this the end of Rico?"

described as an "atomic bomb" against organized crime -- allowed prosecutors to go after mob bosses whose underlings committed crimes. In recent years, defense lawyers have argued that RICO has gone too far.

Cianci's lawyers had argued, unsuccessfully, that Judge Torres should throw out the RICO counts, because there was not a proven pattern of corruption linked to the mayor, no common purpose of the alleged criminal enterprise and an improperly defined conspiracy linking corrupt officials with legitimate offices in city government.

Instead, they contended, the evidence would only support charges of individual crimes by lower-level players.

The first four pages of the jury's 10-page verdict form was devoted to the two RICO counts.

To convict Cianci of racketeering, the jury would have to find the mayor guilty of at least two individual crimes, or predicate acts. But since the jurors had not found Cianci guilty of any specific crime, they also acquitted him of racketeering.

That left Count I: RICO conspiracy.

In his instructions, Judge Torres had explained that a defendant could be convicted of racketeering conspiracy if he was knowingly a part of the plan. He did not have to be found guilty of committing any of the actual crimes or even be aware of all of the details of the criminal enterprise.

"Each member of the conspiracy may perform separate and distinct acts and at different times," Torres said. "Some may perform major roles; some minor roles."

The evidence of a conspiracy did not have to be direct -- it could be shown through circumstantial evidence.>

>The debate was not as hard-fought as some of the earlier counts, the juror says. Of the nine days of deliberation, only the last few were spent considering the RICO counts.

It came down to the jury's belief about what Cianci knew.

Although the evidence had not been sufficient, in their eyes, to link the mayor beyond a reasonable doubt to either Corrente or Ead or Pannone, the accumulation of their corrupt acts, and their association with the mayor, was damning.

The juror found it hard to believe that all this could have gone on without Cianci's knowledge. As another juror put it during the deliberations, "This guy knows how many rolls of toilet paper there are in City Hall."

Another decisive piece of evidence, according to the juror, sprang from another matter that the jury was still stuck on -- the University Club.

Although they could not agree on the extortion count regarding the club, the jury was bothered by a tape-recording that had been played during the trial, of a telephone conversation between Cianci and a city building board member, Steven Antonson.

To the juror, it sounded as if Cianci was telling Antonson to lie to investigators. Previous testimony had shown that the mayor had ordered Antonson and other city officials to oppose the club's building variances. But on the tape, Cianci tells Antonson, who is about to go before the grand jury, "I never spoke to you before that meeting . . . I never [expletive] talked to you once."

Ironically, during the trial, Judge Torres had thrown out a witness-tampering charge against Cianci, for telling Antonson to lie about the University Club. Torres had ruled that Egbert had confused Antonson during cross-examination, and that Rose's failure to ask Antonson a few more questions to clarify things had hopelessly muddled the charge.

But the jury was still free to consider the evidence for the remaining charge. As the jurors closed in on a verdict, the juror says, they kept coming back to the Antonson tape.

Cianci, the juror says, "was very, very unbelievable."

On its ninth day of deliberations, on Monday, June 24, the jury convicted Vincent A. Cianci Jr. of racketeering conspiracy.

Cianci was dumbfounded.>

Outside, in Kennedy Plaza, several hundred people gathered as word of the verdict spread across the city. They stood in eerie silence as the mayor walked, blinking, out of the courthouse, into the bright sunshine.

The reign of Buddy Cianci was over.>

>In the days and months ahead, as Cianci prepared to leave office, he pondered his legacy and steeled himself for prison. He ticked off all the charges that he had beaten, and puzzled over the one that he hadn't.

>"What was I convicted of?" Cianci asked plaintively, to anyone who would listen.

Then, he answered his own question.

"I was convicted of being the mayor."

mstanton@projo.com