PROVIDENCE –– John Celona, Rhode Island senator and paid consultant for an affiliate of Roger Williams Medical Center, was eager to please.

After he was hired, he bombarded Roger Williams executives Robert Urciuoli and Frances Driscoll with notes, faxes and e-mails about anything that might be of interest –– health fairs, softball games, his cable TV show and, most critically in the view of prosecutors, anything that moved at the State House that could affect the hospital.

In one e-mail to Urciuoli near the end of 2000, Celona closed by writing, “As an aside, with the new session of the General Assembly set to open in January, do you have any suggestions for legislation?”

In another communiqué to Urciuoli, in 2001, Celona advised the then-Roger Williams president of proposed changes to key legislation affecting hospital insurance reimbursements, concluding, “I will try to contact you to make sure that this is in the best interest of RWMC.”

And in a third, in 2000, Celona passed along a letter from the Rhode Island AFL-CIO, objecting to a proposed merger between two rival hospital companies, and asked Driscoll, a hospital vice president, “Would there be any objection for my opposing such?”

Those were among several communications introduced by the prosecution yesterday as the second corruption trial of Urciuoli and Driscoll, the two former Roger Williams executives, closed its first week. The pair is accused of corruptly hiring Celona for political favors, which a jury convicted them of two years ago only to have an appeals court send it back for a new trial based on the judge’s flawed jury instructions.

Celona, who has pleaded guilty to selling his office, testified at the first Roger Williams trial that he did the defendants’ bidding at the State House. But with prosecutors deciding not to call him this time, after his credibility was called into question, the government is instead invoking Celona’s written words.

But those words cut both ways, in the view of the defense. Lawyers for Urciuoli and Driscoll pointed to references in some of Celona’s missives to his efforts to promote the hospital and its affiliated nursing home and assisted-living center –– the real reason that Celona was hired, they maintain. Under Rhode Island ethics law, part-time legislators can participate in certain legislation that affects their employer. And the hospital obtained an advisory opinion from the Rhode Island Ethics Commission allowing Celona to participate in general health-care legislation, while his consulting agreement called for him, beyond promoting the assisted-living center, to track legislation.

Sheila Capobianco, Urciuoli’s longtime executive assistant, was yesterday’s lone witness. Most of her testimony was a tedious chess match, as defense lawyers objected frequently to the relevance of many of the documents that Assistant U.S. Attorney Dulce Donovan sought to introduce, triggering numerous sidebar conferences with Chief U.S. District Judge Mary M. Lisi.

Several times, Lisi refused to allow various, unspecified documents to be introduced –– a sharp contrast to the last trial, but one shaped in large part by the appeals court ruling in January that sent the Roger Williams case back to trial.

Yesterday’s testimony was also dry because Capobianco merely processed the paperwork that went back and forth; she didn’t have any substantive involvement in the underlying issues, many of which weren’t elaborated on during her testimony.

Some of the documents chronicled Celona’s efforts to run down minutes of legislative hearings regarding health care.

“I personally went to the State House today and researched the availability of the minutes . . . as directed,” he wrote Driscoll in 1999.

One substantive note from Capobianco came when she testified that she overheard Celona offer to help Urciuoli arrange a meeting with the leaders of Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island to discuss disputed insurance reimbursements.

Among the corrupt acts with which Urciuoli is charged is using Celona, then a powerful Senate committee chairman, to pressure leaders of Blue Cross and United Health to meet with Urciuoli regarding millions of dollars in disputed reimbursements. The defense counters that Celona played no part in the negotiations or resolution of those disputes.

Capobianco testified that Urciuoli and Celona were emerging from a meeting in the hospital president’s office when she heard “Senator Celona mention to Mr. Urciuoli, ‘If you need any help pulling the parties together. . .’ ”

Shortly after that, she testified, Urciuoli asked her to arrange a meeting with Blue Cross president Ron Battista and Celona at Celona’s State House office. At the time, Capobianco said, Battista had not been returning Urciuoli’s phone calls to discuss the disputed reimbursements, which defense lawyers have said threatened Roger Williams’ survival.

Other documents released yesterday mentioned other encounters involving Celona and Blue Cross, including a 2002 meeting at the Capital Grille with Urciuoli, Celona and two Blue Cross executives, one of them former state Sen. Thomas Lynch.

Urciuoli and Celona also attended the Rhode Island Police Chiefs golf tournament in 2003 and a Boston Red Sox game at Fenway Park. And they joined two other senators, former Senate President William Irons and current Senate leader Joseph Montalbano, for the Bobby Orr Golf Tournament.

Those events were listed in an exhibit introduced yesterday headlined “Senator John Celona, Meetings and Golf,” which Capobianco said she prepared at Urciuoli’s direction after the investigation of Celona’s consulting deals began.

It wasn’t clear from yesterday’s testimony what the purpose of the document was. Under cross-examination from Michael Connolly, Urciuoli’s lawyer, Capobianco said that Urciuoli never sought to conceal or destroy that document or any of the others in Celona’s voluminous correspondence.

Instead, she testified, she filed them in a Celona file, where they became part of the hospital’s permanent records.

Testimony is expected to continue Monday with the government calling Thomas Slowey, the hospital’s former chief financial officer.

mstanton@projo.com