Related story: Video slots were the ruin of drug counselor John Cipolla

By Gerald M. Carbone
Journal Staff Writer

Writing the story about gambling addict John Cipolla reminded me that the connection between good reporting and good writing is strong.

Cipolla arrived for our first interview at the state prison with handwritten notes. He launched into a rehearsed spiel, occasionally peeking at his talking points, and he told me the longest, most boring story.

In the beginning I tried to derail him, to nudge him away from the notes into a conversation. But the man was determined. I could see there was no way to derail him, so I doodled on my notebook till he blew himself out. Then I scheduled another appointment.

Before I left I told him I needed specific scenes -- times, places, and situations -- that demonstrated to him that he really had a problem. I told him to think that over for our next interview.

He arrived for the second interview with a smaller list of talking points, which I let him blow through. Then I asked him to tell me about those specific scenes. And he gave me a couple: sitting in the Feinstein Imax theater in Providence watching Fantasia with his children, after he'd just been fired for stealing; trying to leave Lincoln Park racetrack with six "wraps" of $2,000 apiece in his pocket, but being lured back by the siren call of the video slot machines.

I made another appointment, and told him to think of some more specific scenes. At the next meeting he came up with one more, the scene where he tries to turn his car around as he heads towards the Foxwoods casino in Connecticut, but he just can't do it. So now I had three scenes that I could write with some authority.

I must say that I was suspicious of Cipolla, not because of what he said but because of things he did not say. Before I met him, I pulled his divorce and bankruptcy files, read most police reports that referenced him, and studied the forensic audit that the city commissioned to determine what he had stolen. Several times, I surprised him by showing that I knew more than he wanted to tell me, which helped open him up a bit.

Now, this was a man who lied to the people closest to him over a 10-year period. He was a habitual liar, which is part of his disease. I was asking him to recall clear scenes when he had spent 10 years muddying those very scenes. His memory seemed bad, which is no surprise. So I didn't trust it.

Before I wrote the opening scene, the one where he's watching Fantasia, I went to the microfilm to see the newspaper on the day that he was fired from his job as deputy director of the Mayor's Council on Alcohol and Drug Abuse in Providence.

Sure enough, Fantasia was playing at the Imax at 5 p.m., which fit his description of coming home from the movies only to discover that news of his firing had been on the 6 o'clock news while he was at the movies. So I felt I was on solid ground in writing that scene.

While I'm reporting a story, I'm constantly picturing how this information will fit as a block of text. I'm thinking: Can this be useful? If not, I try to move on to something else.

If the information could be useful, I think: what else do I need to know about this to make it work? Then I'll probe it, and as I'm writing down answers, I'm picturing what I would write, and what more I would need to know in order to write. So writing notes is itself a form of writing, the sketch for the composition to come.

Once I had completed my document searches (it was essential to do this before the interviews) and conducted my interviews, the writing of this one was easy.

This might not be an instructive ``How-I-Wrote'' for a person who has a day to get the job done, because s/he couldn't wait out the subject's pre-conceived blather then return for another day.

If I had had only one chance to interview Cipolla, I would have let him blow himself out, then gone to work on him. It would have been a long day, but I would've waited him out till I had a scene or two that I knew was true.