Dennis Aiken, in his office overlooking the State House last week, left a desk job in Washington in 1994 so he could return to Rhode Island and its “target-rich environment.”

The Providence Journal / Mary Murphy

PROVIDENCE — Dennis Aiken is walking out that door, leaving his corner office with the panoramic views of the State House and the courthouse, turning in his badge and his gun. He is taking 34 years of memories of chasing bank robbers, kidnappers, mobsters, dirty cops, crooked politicians and assorted other bad guys.

He’s really leaving this time, not like four years ago, when he almost retired from the FBI and took another job only to get pulled back in by a newspaper story about a certain state senator and a certain health insurer. He is the quintessential G-man, 6-foot-2, spit and polish, a laconic “just the facts” approach delivered in that Mississippi Delta drawl. The accent once helped him win the confidence of a wary witness who trusted him because he wasn’t from Rhode Island. That was the beginning of the end for a certain mayor who went from untouchable to federal prison.

Buttoning his suit jacket for a photo, Aiken gestures to a picture on the wall of J. Edgar Hoover, and tells a story about an agent in New York who got busted to Butte when the legendary FBI director saw his picture in the paper, sans jacket, after shooting a bank robber.

This Friday, the man who brought down Buddy Cianci and has overseen the State House corruption probe, Operation Dollar Bill, is retiring. He is 55 and still loves what he does, but he’s facing mandatory retirement in two years. So next week Aiken will start a new job, as manager of investigations and security for Pratt & Whitney, a global aerospace company and government defense contractor based in East Hartford, Conn.

He won’t be leaving Rhode Island entirely, though. Aiken will commute from his home in Cumberland and observe from the sidelines as Operation Dollar Bill unfolds, with all its promise of indictments and trials and greased palms turning sweaty under the big marble dome that he has watched from his window for the past few years.

One of the FBI’s foremost experts on public corruption, Aiken walked away from a cushy desk job in Washington 13 years ago to return to the streets of Providence, where he had been assigned in the late 1970s. Rhode Island, he discovered, was “a target-rich environment.” Besides, he had married a Rhode Island woman and grown to appreciate the one degree of separation at work here; his father-in-law is a retired court administrator who had sworn in Cianci as a lawyer in 1967.

Last week, Aiken was back in Washington, where acting U.S. Attorney General Peter Keisler and FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III presented him with an award for excellence in law enforcement.

The citation calls Aiken a leader in the fight against political corruption for three decades, notes his tenure as chief of the FBI’s Public Corruption Unit, and singles out his direction of Operation Plunder Dome, which led to the conviction of Cianci and eight others.

“Mr. Aiken has continued to investigate and weed out corruption,” the citation continues. “He is presently overseeing a multi-agency task force investigating corruption in the Rhode Island General Assembly … The investigation continues into other legislators and corporate executives.”

Rhode Island, Aiken says of his adoptive home, is “a place with character, filled with characters.”

HIS STORY BEGINS in Clarksdale, Miss., 75 miles south of Memphis.

Aiken grew up there in a town where whites lived on one side of the railroad tracks and blacks on the other. He could have sold farm equipment, like his father. Or been a musician; he played trumpet in a rock bank, The Avengers, covering Motown songs. Or become an accountant, his major at the University of Mississippi. But fate dictated another course.

As in much of the South in the 1960s, racial tensions rumbled through Clarksdale. Aiken, whose father used to sneak across the tracks at night to visit black friends, couldn’t understand the divisions. One Sunday when he was a teenager, he sat in his Southern Baptist church. The parishioners were tense. A rumor was going around that the blacks were going to try to integrate the church. Then a tall, strapping parishioner who worked for the FBI strode in.

“There’ll be no trouble today,” Aiken remembers his mother saying. “The FBI is here.”

The moment left an impression. Aiken became a G-man. Years later, when he was assigned to work with a congressional committee on the impeachment of Alcee Hastings, a black federal judge in Florida who was taking payoffs, the committee’s counsel was John Doar, the former assistant U.S. attorney general for civil rights under John F. Kennedy and the man who had walked a black student, James Meredith, into the segregated University of Mississippi when Aiken was a student there.

In 1973, at the age of 21, Aiken was hired by the FBI in Washington as a GS2 clerk, at a salary of $5,432. His first case was Watergate, compiling a database of witness interviews. He passed the agent’s exam when he was 23 and went to Houston, where he worked on the bank-robbery and fugitive squad.

But doing interviews would prove to be Aiken’s forte, and public corruption his arena. In Houston, he bagged his first corrupt public official, the assistant police chief. Aiken wore a wire into prison to tape an informant discussing a $25,000 bribe to fix a case.

“I could always get people to talk,” says Aiken. “Guys in the office used to bet me, and I’d always do it.”

In 1976, he received one of his first commendations, for his “excellent performance” in the investigation of white-collar crime.

“As a result of the penetrative, persuasive and skillful fashion in which you conducted in-depth interviews, you were able to secure several admissions of guilt and thereby bring about successful conclusions in these complex undertakings,” wrote FBI Director Clarence M. Kelley.

After three years, Aiken was transferred to Rhode Island. He’d never been that far north and thought he was being sent to Long Island until his boss pulled out a map of the United States and pointed to Providence.

But he soon felt at home, dogging corruption. He persuaded a furniture salesman to tell him how he had allegedly paid a bribe to get the contract to redecorate House Speaker Edward Manning’s office. One morning Aiken showed up at the speaker’s house with a search warrant and cut a swatch of shag carpet from Manning’s bedroom, to compare with the carpet in his State House office. Manning was indicted, but the case ended with two hung juries. Years later, Aiken bought a house near Manning’s.

Aiken also began receiving tips about payoffs for city contracts in Providence, and constructing a profile of the dynamic young mayor, Buddy Cianci. Some of that work would lead to the corruption cases against several people from Cianci’s first administration, but by then Aiken was gone, promoted in 1981 to run the FBI’s office in West Palm Beach, Fla.

Leafing through a scrapbook, Aiken pauses at a black-and-white photograph of a wounded man lying on a gurney. His name is Forrest Silva Tucker, one of Whitey Bulger’s henchmen, a San Quentin escapee who had been robbing banks and jewelry stores with a machine gun until Aiken and other agents caught up with him in a parking garage.

“I shot Forrest down in Florida,” says Aiken.

He flips another page, and there’s a newspaper picture of Aiken, with a modish 1980s haircut, arresting Boone Darden, the chief of police in Riviera Beach, Fla. The chief had stumbled across a bar that the FBI had opened to sting New York mobsters and started shaking down the undercover agents for $3,000 a week to protect their illegal gambling operation.

“I called him out of professional courtesy to tell him he was indicted and could turn himself in,” recalls Aiken. “And he took off. We found him three days later.”

Then there are the moments that sear into memory — like recovering a kidnapped 4-year-old boy from the trunk of a car.

The boy, a doctor’s son, had been kidnapped by a disgruntled patient. For three days there was no word, no leads. A lot of people were ready to give up, fearing the boy was dead. Then the kidnapper called and demanded a ransom.

“We made the money drop at a golf course, at midnight. We had 30 agents and officers out there, but it was so pitch black that an agent and the bad guy literally ran into each other. There was a fight, and the agent’s gun went off.”

The kidnapper was shot. Before blacking out, he told the agent that the boy was in the trunk of a car. But not where the car was. After a frantic search, they found the car and rescued the boy, who was unharmed.

“That’s the kind of case that you never forget,” says Aiken, who has four children.

AIKEN ROSE through the ranks, and he wrote The FBI Field Guide to Public Corruption. Among the cases he directed from his desk in Washington was an undercover operation that stung corrupt state legislators in California. Agents posed as corrupt lobbyists and bribed lawmakers to pass a meaningless bill. But then, with the governor about to sign the bill, the FBI feared embarrassment. So Aiken instructed his undercover agents to go back to the crooked legislators and say they’d changed their mind; for another $60,000, the bill was killed.

But Aiken missed the action, and in 1994 he returned to Providence. That first day, his wife, Cheryl, dropped him off for work in front of City Hall, just another businessman with a briefcase. Before long, he was back on Buddy’s trail. When the FBI moved its office to a building overlooking City Hall, the mayor’s aides joked that it was so that the FBI could watch.

Aiken was a tenacious investigator, but he also knew he needed an opening. He found it with a suspicious city lease and a spurned businessman, Tony Freitas, who had lost out on the bid. Freitas agreed to work undercover, partly because he was fed up with corruption but also because he trusted Aiken. The agent’s Mississippi accent showed that he wasn’t from around here. He didn’t have some hidden connection that would betray the investigation.

Aiken spent a year directing Freitas under cover, secretly taping corrupt encounters with Cianci’s people, then showed up at the mayor’s door the morning that the case went public, with agents raiding City Hall and seizing records.

Few thought that the feds, who had tried for years, would ever nail Buddy. And it wasn’t easy. Shortly after Cianci’s indictment, Aiken blew his cool after the mayor went on the Don Imus national radio show and said that Aiken had once admitted obtaining money under false pretenses. In fact, Aiken had been censured in 1982 as part of an internal FBI investigation for lying about signing an internal document on behalf of another employee. Aiken called it a stupid and embarrassing mistake, but noted he was promoted a week later.

But on his way to work that morning, after listening to Cianci attack him on the radio, Aiken confronted an aide to the mayor on the sidewalk outside City Hall and told him to deliver a message to “your [expletive] mayor” — to stop lying about him on the radio, or else Aiken might sue.

“Yeah, shouldn’t have done that,” says Aiken, thumbing through his scrapbook and coming across a reference to the episode. Asked about Cianci’s return from prison and homecoming to talk radio, Aiken smiles and says, “Is he back?” Then he dismisses the ex-mayor with a two-word epitaph: “He’s history.”

And so, almost, was Aiken after Plunder Dome.

“After Plunder Dome, well, that took a lot out of a lot of people,” says Aiken. “I thought I was ready to do something different. I had an offer on the table. Then I saw this article on John Celona in The Providence Journal.”

The Dec. 4, 2003 story, by State House reporter Katherine Gregg, raised ethical questions about Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island’s financial support of a cable-television show cohosted by Sen. John A. Celona, D-North Providence. Celona chaired a committee that handled health-care legislation. The story revealed that Blue Cross’ vice president for government affairs, former Sen. Thomas Lynch, had told Blue Cross staffers that Celona wanted to make a pitch for funding, and that Blue Cross went ahead over the objections of staffers who saw no need to support the show.

Subsequent Journal stories revealed that Celona had a $1,000-a-month consulting deal with the CVS drugstore chain, raised questions about another consulting job that he had with Roger Williams Medical Center and revealed the financial ties of another lawmaker, Senate President William V. Irons, to Blue Cross and CVS.

Operation Dollar Bill was born. And Aiken was reborn. He now had a new and bigger dome that he believed was being plundered — the Rhode Island State House.

Aiken said that he had been hearing about “a small group of people in the General Assembly” who might be corrupt. But he wasn’t going to stumble blindly into a case without an opening. Now, here it was, he says — “a stupid cable TV show.” He took that first Journal article to Assistant U.S. Attorney Gerard B. Sullivan and said, “ ‘Hey, Jerry, you want to take a look at this? It may be the opportunity for us to get into that pocket in the legislature.’ He was all for it.

“The rest is history.”

FOUR YEARS LATER, Celona is in prison and cooperating with the FBI, two former Roger Williams executives convicted, two CVS executives indicted. Last week, another lawmaker, former House Majority Leader Gerard Martineau, admitted selling his office for $900,000 in contracts to sell paper and plastic bags to CVS and Blue Cross. The current Senate President, Joseph A. Montalbano, and Senate Finance Chairman, Stephen D. Alves, are also under investigation, as well as several other politicians and corporations.

The investigation, Aiken is quick to say, is not “The Dennis Aiken Show.” He praises the task force of local and out-of-town FBI agents, Rhode Island State Police detectives and agents from the IRS and the U.S. Department of Labor. Agents and prosecutors don’t always see eye to eye, but Aiken commends the support of U.S. Attorney Robert Clark Corrente, who has devoted significant prosecutorial resources. The task force has taken over much of one floor of the U.S. Attorney’s office.

As the case has unfolded and mushroomed, Aiken has always been conscious of the clock’s ticking. In another year and a half, when he turns 57, he would have faced mandatory retirement. Over the past few years, he said, he passed up other job prospects because he felt his departure might have “had a negative effect” on the corruption investigation. But now the time is right.

“I’m confident that the investigation will continue full force,” he says. “A lot of the investigations are done, some cases are close to fruition and others have work remaining to be done. And I’m confident that there will be new cases.”

Aiken speaks of the “intelligence base” that the task force has developed over the last three years.

“To conduct an investigation like this, you need to know the legal route that a law is supposed to take to be passed. Then there’s the political route. Then there’s the corrupt route. You have to understand all three.”

If the case has seemed to drag on to the public, Aiken says, that’s because there’s so much to investigate.

“If one investigation slows down, it’s because something else as good or better has speeded up,” says Aiken. “It’s time-management and prioritizing. We’re getting good at finding the head of the snake. We don’t want to utilize valuable resources to address a [lower] level of corruption that won’t address the bigger problem.”

Unlike Plunder Dome, which was “a tape case,” Operation Dollar Bill has been “much more difficult.” None of the purported corruption was caught on tape for a jury to see. But with the prevalence of computers and e-mail, corporate records and financial-disclosure requirements for public officials, a historical trail can be developed.

In a fraud case, Aiken notes, some of those documents don’t fit, or “tend to be false — the creation of the false document is part of the deception.” Celona filed misleading financial disclosures. Martineau billed Blue Cross for 10 million bags but delivered only 2 million, his plea agreement says.

Beyond the documents, it’s all about getting someone to tell you what happened.

“People have a desire to tell you the truth,” says Aiken. “You just have to find the common ground. I try to be up front with people and not try to trick them. Though they may be adversaries in the beginning, I look at them as potential witnesses later on, and try to treat them with respect.”

Some defense lawyers will tell you a different story, of the black-and-white G-Man who can bully and intimidate. Aiken smiles.

“Sometimes, you’ve gotta be tough,” he says. “I’ve been lied to a couple of times.”

But the world can be a gray place. A businessman who pays a bribe, or a politician who goes along to get along, may be doing so because they risk losing their livelihood or their ability to accomplish anything if they buck the system. Aiken understands their dilemma, but only up to a point. Politicians who look the other way are guilty of “willful blindness,” he says. And those who pay bribes have a choice.

“It takes two to participate in a criminal act,” says Aiken. “If a politician demands something of value, it’s extortion. The company is a victim. But if a victim chooses to pay, they become a participant — they have corrupted the system just as much as the person who received the bribe. I understand why some decide to pay — it’s just not the right decision.”

Some people will be happy to see Aiken go. He understands this. Told that others may be nervous, given that his departure may signal that much of his work is done, Aiken says, “They should be.”

While corrupt public officials ride high today, they should worry about tomorrow.

“It’s all great until it goes bad,” he says. “When it goes bad, it’s really bad.

“What drives me is that people in this country have fought wars and lost many lives, on our soil and on foreign soil, for the right to honest representation,” says Aiken. “If you are one of those elected representatives, you need to remember that. It’s so egregious when that representative sells that and doesn’t even realize what they’re selling — and for how little they give it up for.”

As he prepares to walk out of his office for the last time on Friday, Aiken says he has no regrets. The cases will always be there, but next week he’ll be gone.

“If I could do this job forever, I probably would,” he says. “But I’ve had a great career.”

mstanton@projo.com