PROVIDENCE -- Whether the mayor's conviction stands -- and whether he will ever serve any time in prison or be removed from office -- are far from certain.
The judge presiding over the case of Mayor Vincent A. Cianci Jr. still has to decide whether there was sufficient evidence on which to convict the mayor and his codefendants of racketeering crimes.
The mayor last night vowed to appeal his conviction. So even if U.S. District Judge Ernest C. Torres refuses to set aside the jury's verdict, the case will continue for months at the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston.
The verdicts rendered in the mayor's case seemed strange and hard to understand to many who had watched seven weeks of testimony. Jurors acquitted Cianci of all of the substantive crimes he was accused of -- which stemmed from allegations that he had accepted bribes in return for city favors -- but convicted him of plotting with others as part of a criminal enterprise to commit offenses including extortion, mail fraud, bribery, money laundering and witness tampering.
Cianci was accused of being the leader of the broad-based enterprise whose members engaged in a pattern of criminal activity over an eight-year period, from 1991 through 1999.
The jurors found that Cianci, his former top aide, Frank E. Corrente, and Providence tow-operator and auto-body shop owner Richard E. Autiello, were guilty of RICO conspiracy.
"This has been a case full of irony from the beginning, and it ends with the ultimate irony -- an across-the-board repudiation of the government's case, but they won," said Daniel I. Small, a former federal prosecutor in Boston who defended former Louisiana Gov. Edwin Edwards on corruption charges.
The government presented no evidence showing that Cianci, Corrente and Autiello met together to plan crimes they would commit to enrich themselves.
But in his instructions to jurors, Torres said that to convict a defendant of conspiracy, they merely had to find that there existed "a mutual understanding or agreement" to commit an illegal act. "An informal or unspoken agreement is sufficient" to prove a conspiracy existed, he said, and a conspiracy can be proven by circumstantial evidence as well as direct evidence.
IN AN UNUSUAL move, Torres told the jurors after the verdicts that, while they had done "a truly outstanding job," the case was not over yet because he now had to determnine whether "there is a sufficient legal basis" for the convictions they had returned on the RICO and RICO-conspiracy counts. [All three defendants were convicted of racketeering conspiracy; Corrente, who was described by prosecutors as the mayor's "middleman," was also convicted of racketeering.]
The federal Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute "is a very complex law," the judge told the jurors, and certain aspects of the law are "somewhat unclear." To determine whether those convictions should stand, Torres said he would have to do further research.
"Whether the law does or does not allow a conviction under the circumstances is a very big if," he told them.
"Whatever I decide," he told the jury, "will be subject to further review by the Court of Appeals." That court could entertain an appeal by the government if Torres vacates the jury's convictions on the racketeering counts, or an appeal by the defendants, if Torres allows the convictions to stand.
IN RENDERING their verdicts, jurors apparently were convinced of Corrente's guilt on several counts, based on tape recordings made by Antonio R. Freitas. Freitas posed as a corrupt businessman and taped more than 180 conversations with city officials, including Corrente and former tax officials Joseph A. Pannone and David C. Ead.
But they apparently did not believe the testimony of two key government witnesses -- Ead, the former vice-chairman of the city's Board of Tax Assessment Review, and Roger Cavaca, a convicted felon and onetime fugitive from justice.
Ead -- who has pleaded guilty to extortion charges and agreed to testify for the government in hopes of getting a lighter sentence -- testified that he arranged to get Cianci $25,000 in bribes for putting together three deals. Among them were: a $5,000 bribe from Christopher J. Ise for a $9-an-hour temporary job in the city's Planning Department; a $10,000 bribe to settle a $500,000 city tax debt owed by the estate of Fernando Ronci; and a $10,000 bribe for Freitas to buy two city-owned lots for $1,000 each.
Cavaca, a former employee of Edward E. Voccola, provided testimony suggesting that after Voccola got a $1.2-million lease with the city's School Deparment, Corrente picked up an envelope filled with $7,500 in cash from Voccola. Cavaca said he saw Voccola put the cash in an envelope, write "Frank C." on the outside and put the envelope in a safe. Later, Corrente came by and met privately with Voccola, Cavaca said, and when he looked in the safe after Corrente departed, the envelope was gone.
The jurors also apparently had a problem believing that Pannone -- who is serving a five-year prison term on corruption charges -- was telling the truth when he asserted on tape that he was delivering money that Freitas had given him to Corrente. Using government money, Freitas gave Pannone $300 on one occasion, and $800 another time, in return for Corrente's help in trying to get him a School Department lease.
SMALL, THE former federal prosecutor, said that based on the evidence the government presented against Corrente, he was not surprised by the jury's verdicts against the mayor's former director of administration. Corrente was caught on tape taking two $1,000 bribes from Freitas in his City Hall office.
But Small called the jury's guilty verdict against Cianci "very strange and troubling."
He predicted, however, that it would be "an uphill battle" for the mayor to get the conviction overturned.
Trial judges and appellate courts are reluctant, he said, to disturb a jury's verdict unless there is clear evidence that it misunderstood the judge's legal instructions -- or unless the trial judge admitted evidence which an appellate court later rules inadmissible.
"A jury's verdict can be inconsistent and not necessarily logical," but courts don't like "to go inside a jury's head," he said.
Small called the verdict "a sweeping victory for the mayor except on the broadest and vaguest count, RICO conspiracy. And it's difficult to figure out what evidence the jury was relying on" to convict him of that offense.
Sometimes, said Small, defendants are accused of racketeering-conspiracy and acquitted of underlying offenses and the verdicts are easy to understand because the government has introduced "independent evidence of a conspiracy -- meetings, defendants talking together" and evidence that the leader of the alleged enterprise "sent out foot soldiers to do its bidding."
But the government's Operation Plunder Dome case, asserted Small, is one in which "the government relied on an unrelated group of events to put together a conspiracy allegation.
"It's hard to fathom what the conspiracy is that they found and how they found it," he said.
"Conspiracy requires a meeting of the minds, and there was no such evidence presented by the government here that the mayor engaged in such conduct."
Small predicted that the mayor's defense team will try to fashion an appeal based on legal grounds and evidentiary grounds. It may argue something like, "Does the jury's verdict reflect a lack of understanding of the judge's instructions, or did Judge Torres err in the way he instructed the jury?"
AFTER EXCUSING the jurors, Torres told the lawyers that he needed some guidance from them on whether the racketeering conspiracy and racketeering convictions should stand. He asked each side to submit legal briefs for him to consider in preparation for a hearing July 3.
"The law seems quite unclear on what constitutes an 'enterprise' within the meaning of RICO," he told them, and "there's a question whether this all added up to conducting the affairs of an enterprise through a pattern of racketeering."
The judge said he wanted the lawyers to specifically address the following questions:
Did the government prove the broad-based criminal enterprise it described in the indictment -- one that was led by Cianci and Corrente and which permeated the entire city government -- or only a "narrower" enterprise that included only the defendants and Pannone.
And if it was a narrower one, "is that sufficient to support conviction on the RICO counts?"
"It's a very complicated question," Torres said.
