Corrente

PROVIDENCE — Frank E. Corrente, who infamously was caught on FBI videotapes taking bribes from a cooperating government witness in a corruption investigation, is coming back to City Hall.

Corrente, who was former Mayor Vincent A. Cianci Jr.’s top lieutenant, used to be a powerful tough-talking figure, able to dispense or withhold the favors of city government on a whim.

Brought down with the mayor in the Operation Plunder Dome probe of City Hall corruption, Corrente is now a 79-year-old supplicant from Cranston. Today he is scheduled to resume his fight in a City Hall conference room for his $70,576-a-year municipal pension, which was suspended when he was convicted in Operation Plunder Dome.

In a previously undisclosed move, the administration of Mayor David N. Cicilline also took away his city-paid medical and dental insurance. Corrente managed to continue the coverage for 1½ additional years — the maximum period allowed under the federal law called COBRA — by paying for it himself at the city’s group rate.

The Providence Retirement Board, which suspended the pension and is now considering whether to take it away altogether, hired Larry J. Ritchie, a law professor at the Roger Williams University School of Law, to hold a hearing in order to give Corrente an opportunity to say why he should be allowed to keep all or at least some of the pension.

It is also Ritchie’s job to present evidence of Corrente’s misdeeds in a report to the board and to recommend to the board what it should do with the pension.

A municipal ordinance requires an employee to give “honorable service” as a prerequisite to receiving a pension. The ordinance states that a pension or other benefit “shall be revoked or reduced” if the person at issue is convicted or pleads guilty or no contest “to any crime related to his or her public employment …”

Assistant City Solicitor Kenneth B. Chiavarini and Ritchie said they expect Corrente to attend the hearing, which is scheduled to begin at 1 p.m., in the company of his lawyer, John B. Harwood, former Rhode Island Speaker of the House.

Harwood is expected to make only a legal argument and not to present any witnesses, according to Chiavarini and Ritchie.

“Basically the facts are pretty much agreed on” and Corrente’s convictions are sufficient grounds in themselves to remove his pension, Ritchie said. “We aren’t retrying the case.”

Corrente was convicted in U.S. District Court in June 2002 of racketeering, racketeering conspiracy, two counts of conspiracy to extort and two counts of attempted extortion. Among the more damning pieces of evidence were two FBI surveillance videotapes of Corrente accepting two $1,000 bribes from businessman Antonio R. Freitas, who was working undercover for the FBI and carried a briefcase with a camera in it.

Doubting Thomases in the public were hard-pressed to explain away the visual evidence when a bootleg tape was broadcast by Channel 10 (WJAR). Originally sentenced to five years and three months’ imprisonment, Corrente had seven months trimmed from his sentence by the trial judge because of his poor health. He also benefited from time off for good behavior.

Corrente reported to prison at Fort Devens, in Massachusetts, in October 2002. He was released to home confinement in July 2006 and he ultimately was released from his sentence in November 2006, having served about four years and one month. He also paid a $75,000 fine.

Corrente recently unsuccessfully sued the Retirement Board, asking a Superior Court judge to order his pension and other benefits reinstated with a cash payment of the sums he has lost to date. Corrente said his previous lawyer had fought unsuccessfully for appropriate due process of law regarding his pension, including a hearing, but that the city had been recalcitrant.

“Fairness was sacrificed on the altar of politics …,” Harwood wrote on behalf of Corrente in a legal memorandum. The ordinance allows for reduction or revocation of a pension after a hearing, but not for suspension, and he is constitutionally entitled to receive his pension until the city justifies divestiture, he contended.

The suit presages perhaps the major argument that Corrente will make to the hearing officer. Corrente, who served two stints in city government and retired with a pension after each period, conceded in the suit that he is likely to lose that portion of the pension he earned during his second stint, as director of administration for Cianci. That was the period when he was snared in Operation Plunder Dome.

The city explicitly conceded in its reply to the lawsuit that there is no evidence that his first stint, in which he rose to the post of city controller, was anything but honorable. Nevertheless, the city has not ruled out revocation of the full pension.

In his suit, Corrente also raised the issue of his wife Thelma’s entitlement to his pension, as his spouse, and complained that the Retirement Board has ignored her interest.

The city Law Department argued in reply that the lawsuit was premature because the permanent disposition of the pension had not been determined and that Corrente has no contractual right to post-retirement medical and dental insurance, among other arguments.

“Corrente is a convicted felon who brazenly violated the public trust while supposedly ‘earning’ the very pension benefits that are at issue,” Senior Assistant City Solicitor Anthony F. Cottone and Chiavarini said in a legal memorandum.

Judge Allen Rubine, in a decision filed Dec. 5, agreed with the city that the case was not ripe for his intervention. If the Retirement Board wants to reduce or revoke the pension, he pointed out, the board must apply to the court for permission to implement its decision.

Unaffected by the board, Corrente draws another pension from the Laborers’ International Union of North America as the result of his municipal employment. He was a member of Local 1033 during all or part of his employment and both he and the city paid into a union pension fund in his behalf. The Laborers won’t divulge the amount of that pension.

gsmith@projo.com