Bob Ceprano says that when he became Providence tax collector seven years ago, he created the office’s first written policies and improved the city’s tax collection rate.

>

The Providence Journal / Kris Craig

PROVIDENCE –– Seven years ago, Bob Ceprano moved into the second-floor tax collector’s office in Providence City Hall, past the polished brass cashier’s cages and behind the heavy oak door with the frosted glass window.

He decorated his shelves with two dozen baseball caps collected in a three-decade career in the military and law enforcement: U.S. Treasury, FBI, Secret Service, U.S. Army in Vietnam, Rhode Island Army National Guard.

Then he rolled up his sleeves and embarked on a new field of combat — collecting the taxes of the people of Providence.

A recent predecessor in the tax collector’s office was known to play Solitaire on his computer between helping people with their taxes — at times for cash stuffed surreptitiously in envelopes. His reign ended with a trip to federal prison, where he was joined by other corrupt city tax officials snared in Operation Plunder Dome. The tax-collection process was perceived as a roulette wheel of favoritism and backroom deals.

Ceprano said that his law-enforcement background and no-nonsense approach enabled him to clean up the tax office and increase collections. When he was hired, he said, the attitude was, “There’s a new sheriff in town.”

His boss, then-Finance Director Alex Prignano, says that they targeted the top 100 delinquent taxpayers. They called them downtown for meetings, arranged payment plans, stayed on them. If a tavern owner was behind on his taxes, they held up his liquor license. If a landlord was a deadbeat, his tenants received notices that the city would start collecting their rent.

“I don’t waive penalties and interest,” Ceprano declared at the time. “There aren’t any deals in this office. I didn’t come in after 28 years in the IRS to make a deal.”

That, says Ceprano, may have proved his undoing. Last week, Mayor David N. Cicilline fired Ceprano, saying that it was time for new leadership after an outside audit found errors in judgment in the acceptance and handling of a bum check for $75,000 to settle a tax delinquency, and recommended changes to increase office efficiency.

The fact that the mayor’s brother wrote the check, and the mayor’s top aides intervened to prevent Ceprano from cashing the check, has thrust Ceprano into the glare of a new tax scandal at City Hall.

Was Ceprano an out-of-touch manager — his office “a serious blind spot” in Cicilline’s efforts to reform City Hall, as the mayor put it last week, a “single individual [who] exercised extraordinary personal discretion with almost nothing in the way of real professional guidelines, policies or procedures”?

Or was he the fall guy, the man who refused to bend when the mayor and his people requested tax favors for the mayor’s friends and campaign contributors?

Ceprano’s boss, Finance Director Bruce T. Miller, disputes that, saying that his decision to remove Ceprano was based on management and efficiency issues, and Ceprano’s refusal to cooperate with efforts to improve the operations of the office.

“I liked the fact that Bob took pride in his work and wanted to do the right thing,” said Miller. “I never took exception with that aspect of Bob. The root issue was performance.”

ROBERT P. CEPRANO sat at a conference table in his lawyer Artin H. Coloian’s office Thursday, his brow furrowed as he discussed his ignominious ouster from City Hall.

Last September, two days after his employees had surprised him with a cake for his 63rd birthday, Ceprano was placed on leave by the mayor and escorted from the building — “like some kind of criminal,” he says. The move came three days after The Providence Journal first reported that the mayor’s brother, lawyer John Cicilline, had given the city a bad check for $75,000 in 2006 on behalf of a delinquent taxpayer, and that the taxes remained unpaid.

“This has been extremely difficult,” he says. “All my life I’ve been a very productive member of society. I’ve been in public service all my life and I believe I’ve served the City of Providence very well. I don’t like being made a scapegoat.”

Ceprano bristles at the mayor’s comments that the tax collector’s office lacked necessary procedures and safeguards. Prignano, his former boss, says that Ceprano produced the office’s first written standards.

“We created the first written policies and procedures in that office,” said Ceprano. “My approach was that everybody had to play by the same rules.”

Ceprano, a Providence native, brought a long pedigree in law enforcement and the military to City Hall.

A retired Army lieutenant colonel, Ceprano served on active duty from 1968 to 1971, earning a Bronze Star in Vietnam, and then served with the Army Reserve and National Guard from 1971 to 1996. After leaving active service, he worked from 1972 to 1998 as a special agent for the IRS in Providence, serving as the lead agent in investigations of narcotics trafficking, organized crime and political corruption.

After his retirement from the IRS, Ceprano went to work as an investigator for the Rhode Island Ethics Commission. Through another investigator, he met Coloian, then chief of staff to Mayor Vincent A. Cianci Jr., who was the target of a federal City Hall corruption probe known as Operation Plunder Dome. Upon Coloian’s recommendation, Prignano hired Ceprano as an assistant collector in September 2000; a year later, he was promoted to tax collector.

Ceprano and Prignano said that they increased collections, including the amount of interest the city took in, and reduced the number of properties put up for tax sale from 4,000 a year to 1,300. They also credited a new citywide computer system that Ceprano helped install in the collector’s office with helping to detect employee theft.

John Simmons, Cicilline’s director of administration from 2003 to early last year, said that Prignano and Ceprano “enhanced” the city’s tax collection efforts. While there was some discussion within the administration about whether to ease up on enforcing interest payments, Simmons said, “At the end of the day, nothing changed, because we had a policy and the taxes should be paid.”

IN THE SPRING OF 2006, John Cicilline walked through Bob Ceprano’s door. The mayor’s brother represented a property owner, Felix Nelson Garcia, who was delinquent on taxes connected to his hardware and auto-parts business at 577 Cranston St. As a result, the city had placed a lien on the property.

Normally, Ceprano wouldn’t remove a lien until the taxes were paid. But Cicilline proposed an unusual compromise — he would give the city his own check, for $75,000, as collateral until Garcia borrowed the money.

The city lawyer hired to collect the debt agreed. Prignano said that he had no problem with the arrangement, because Cicilline was a lawyer in good standing.

But weeks and months passed, the taxes remained unpaid and Cicilline remained elusive. Ceprano, who learned from the city’s lawyer that Cicilline didn’t have sufficient money in his account, enlisted the mayor’s then-chief of staff, Chris Bizzacco, and another aide, Rita Murphy. Both tried without success to collect the money. A few times, Ceprano and the lawyer, Scott Hammer, wanted to cash the check, to force Cicilline’s hand, but Bizzacco passed the word through Murphy that they should hold the check.

By early 2007, however, the chase pretty much ended. Ceprano said that he believed the matter had been taken out of his hands by the mayor’s aides.

John Cicilline, meanwhile, was indicted and subsequently pleaded guilty to federal charges in Boston of shaking down two drug-dealer clients for $150,000. Garcia successfully refinanced the property in May 2007, borrowing $484,000, but never paid his tax delinquency, which is now more than $130,000.

IN OCTOBER 2007, Miller was hired as finance director, becoming Ceprano’s boss.

In March, Ceprano refused to waive a $12,450 interest penalty that had been assessed on an office building managed by Arthur Robbins, a friend of the mayor’s and an owner of the Providence Marriott.

Robbins appealed to Cicilline, arguing that his quarterly tax payment from the previous fall had inadvertently been sent to the electric company. Shortly thereafter, Ceprano said, Miller came to Ceprano’s office and said that the mayor wanted him to make the change. Ceprano said that he told Miller that unless Robbins paid his taxes in full — $237,000 — “it’s not going to happen.”

When Miller persisted, Ceprano said that he responded, “It’s on your authority, not mine.”

Miller “was absolutely annoyed,” said Ceprano. “It wasn’t a pleasant conversation.”

In an interview yesterday, Miller said that he was more confused than annoyed. Miller told the outside auditors that he merely wanted Ceprano to handle the matter “consistently.”

Cicilline acknowledged that Robbins called him, but defended his right to advocate for a taxpayer victimized by “an honest mistake.” Ceprano told The Journal that he wasn’t so sympathetic, since Robbins had waited from the fall until March to raise the issue.

Shortly thereafter, Ceprano said, Miller grew angry with him for mentioning to some members of the City Council his desire to get financing to hire more people in the tax office.

Miller said he was receptive to Ceprano’s request, but that when he repeatedly asked Ceprano to provide a cost-benefit analysis to justify the new positions, the tax collector failed to do so — “then he went outside process.”

Last summer, Miller and Ceprano clashed again, this time over the property of two delinquent taxpayers that the administration wanted Ceprano to remove from the August tax sale.

In one instance, city planning director Thomas Deller said that the mayor agreed that property belonging to Edward Marandola, owner of Victory Plating, be removed from the tax sale because a developer was interested in building an office park there. Ceprano says that he didn’t want to stand in the way of economic progress, but warned in an e-mail to several city officials that they use “extreme care” given the taxpayer’s poor payment history and $27,000 delinquency.

That drew a rebuke from Miller, who e-mailed Ceprano: “I was surprised to see this e-mail. In the future please make sure you discuss with me prior to making a unilateral decision.”

The property was removed from the tax sale, but the development has yet to go through. The delinquency is now more than $40,000.

“I was just warning them to be careful, but Bruce took exception to that,” said Ceprano. “At that point he would have probably taken exception if I’d recited the Lord’s Prayer.”

Miller counters that he interpreted Ceprano’s e-mail as a challenge to a decision already made.

Then, just before the tax sale, Miller and other mayoral aides asked Ceprano to remove three properties belonging to developer David Corsetti, a friend of the mayor’s, saying that Corsetti had an agreement to sell one of the properties that would enable him to repay a $95,000 tax debt.

When Ceprano demanded to see a purchase and sales agreement, he said, Miller called him a “hard ass.” Ceprano replied: “I’m not being a hard ass. That’s my job. That’s what I’m supposed to do.”

Miller says that he never called Ceprano a “hard ass,” that Corsetti ultimately provided the required information and the taxes were paid.

Ceprano and Miller also disagree about events leading to Ceprano’s dismissal.

Miller said that he had grown frustrated with Ceprano’s refusal to cooperate in his efforts to review office operations and develop a plan to correct them. Last summer, Miller outlined some options for Ceprano: he could cooperate and remain as tax collector, he could take another city job, perhaps in the Police Department given his law-enforcement background; resign; or be fired.

In a follow-up conversation Sept. 12, says Miller, Ceprano agreed to retire, but didn’t want it to appear that he was being forced out. Miller agreed to give him up to six months to resign, and offered to let Ceprano serve on the selection committee to choose his replacement. On Sept. 15, Miller e-mailed Ceprano that he owed him his letter of resignation.

Ceprano contends that Miller initially suggested that, since Ceprano was in his 60s, he consider retiring and enjoying his family. When Ceprano said that he wanted to stay, he said, Miller then pushed him to leave. Miller adamantly denies ever mentioning Ceprano’s age.

Then, on Sept. 19, The Providence Journal broke the news of the $75,000 check — the same day that John Cicilline was sentenced to 18 months in prison in the shakedown case. Ceprano’s subsequent suspension put his job status in limbo — until his firing last week.

“The table was well set [for Ceprano’s dismissal] way before any of this happened,” said Miller, emphasizing that it was performance, not politics, that made up his mind.

Counters Ceprano: “I don’t want anyone to walk into my office and say they’re a friend of the mayor. If you want to walk into my office and get your taxes mitigated, tell me the facts and the circumstances. Being a friend of the mayor is not a criteria.”

mstanton@projo.com