But it was a year of new beginnings for Catholics, downtown Providence and a 12-year-old named Sara

01:00 AM EST on Sunday, January 1, 2006

BY SCOTT MacKAY
Journal Staff Writer

He was a quiet man, thoughtful and gentle. If you met him, your first impression would be that he was a social worker or a teacher, not a gun-toting city police detective.

But James "Jimmy" Allen was indeed a detective, 27 years on the Providence police force, whose killing on April 17 at police headquarters shocked and saddened Rhode Island.

A stabbing suspect named Esteban Carpio got his hands on Detective Allen's gun, shot him twice in the police station, then jumped out a window and ran until he was captured downtown by other officers, according to the police.

Allen was a devoted father and parishioner of St. Thomas Church in the Fruit Hill neighborhood. His funeral drew thousands of law-enforcement officers from around the country and led to much soul-searching and grieving among Providence officers and city political figures.

If 2005 had a defining image nationally, it was as the year Hurricane Katrina flooded the Gulf Coast and devastated New Orleans, America's capital of jazz and jambalaya.

Evacuees fled across the country. More than 200 came to Rhode Island in September and were put up at an abandoned Navy housing center in Middletown. In addition, 125 college students from the Big Easy landed at campuses in Rhode Island -- mostly at Brown University and the University of Rhode Island.

The horror of the U.S. military intervention in Iraq reverberated back to the state on June 23, the day Marine Lance Cpl. Holly Charette of Cranston was killed in a suicide bomb attack in Fallujah. A New York Times investigation later concluded that Charette and two female Marine colleagues were sent into a volatile part of Iraq with substandard armor and were not provided with adequate security.

If 2005 was a year limned by tragedy, in Rhode Island there was levity, even high hilarity. It was a time one didn't have to be a devotee of The Sopranos or Federal Hill on Friday night to learn what a "comatta" is.

And right-wing television commentator Bill O'Reilly -- discovering that people between 18 and 21 years old are interested in partying -- broadcast scenes from a Brown party that featured, surprise of surprises, suggestive dancing and drinking.

A smiling 12-year-old Middletown girl, Sara Powell, raised the spirits of the state in early December when she celebrated in good health the first anniversary of her heart transplant.

Sadness suffused Rhode Island's Roman Catholics in April, when Pope John Paul II died. Locally, there was a changing of the guard at the Catholic Diocese of Providence, as Bishop Robert Mulvee retired and was replaced by Thomas Tobin, a Youngstown, Ohio, bishop.

Providence College, the state's premier Catholic institution of higher learning, got a new president as the Rev. Brian Shanley, a Warwick native, succeeded the Rev. Philip Smith, who retired.

The groups of cigarette and cigar smokers you see huddled outside of restaurants and taverns became ubiquitous this past year as the General Assembly's legislation to ban smoking in restaurants and bars took effect in March.

ONE RHODE ISLAND axiom that endures is that you could return to the state after a decade -- or even two -- and join any conversation about politics without having missed much.

At the State House, the names change, the issues don't. The Assembly is overwhelmingly Democratic, and the governor's office is held by a Republican -- as has been the case for all but four years since 1985.

The General Assembly still convenes in January but waits until the final two weeks in June or July to do the important work. This chaotic rush to adjournment is decried by the usual reform and good government groups, yet never varies; in 1907, a first-term state rep from Providence's East Side became outraged by what he saw at the end-of-session flurry. His name was Theodore Francis Green, a fusty Brown professor. In the 1930s, he would become the governor who united organized labor and the state's warring ethnic working-class groups into the modern Democratic Party.

If Green walked the corridors of McKim, Mead and White's majestic State House today, he would recognize much about how our laws are made.

Organized labor is still in the Democratic camp, but its sway is at a 50-year nadir. The biggest reason is that union membership has dropped -- especially in the private sector -- as Rhode Island's manufacturing economy has moved to cheap labor havens in the U.S. South and the Third World.

After two ineffectual years at a State House run by Democrats, Republican Governor Carcieri came into his own in 2005, winning major battles against Democrats and union leaders, especially by forcing lawmakers to approve a plan to reduce pension benefits for state employees, who are heavily unionized.

The governor also defeated Democratic leaders on legislation that would have allowed state-subsidized childcare workers the benefits of union collective bargaining. Carcieri vetoed the bill, and Democrats couldn't muster the votes for an override.

ANOTHER PERENNIAL issue that resonated in 2005 on Smith Hill was gambling and the Narragansett Indian tribe's proposal, in partnership with Harrah's, to build a casino in West Warwick.

Democrats tried to put the issue to voters, asking the state Supreme Court for an advisory opinion on legislation that would have called for a referendum. The court sided with Carcieri, again frustrating the tribe's effort to get an up-or-down vote from Rhode Islanders on the casino.

Ironically, Carcieri, who campaigned against state-sponsored gambling and railed against the casino, has presided over the largest expansion of gambling in Rhode Island history.

Since Carcieri became governor, the state's two legal gambling venues in Lincoln and Newport have been allowed to add 4,400 video slot machines, a form of gambling so addictive that professionals who treat problem gamblers compare it to crack cocaine.

At the same time, state government has become hooked on gambling to finance services, such as education and health care for the poor. State-sanctioned gambling, which includes the $312 million from the state lottery and the slots, is now the third-largest source of money to support state services, after the state income and sales taxes.

Democratic lawmakers also clashed with Carcieri on raising the minimum wage, another traditional priority of organized labor. Carcieri vetoed a bill that would have increased it. The governor also vetoed a proposal to allow the medical use of marijuana. Both of those issues will be back in 2006.

AS ALWAYS, there were several head-scratching, only-in-Rhode-Island moments in politics in 2005, but one stood out in all its florid foolishness.

That was the Sunday in November when casino lobbyist Guy Dufault, a veteran Democratic operative, said on a TV infomercial that he had the names of Carcieri's "comattas" -- Italian slang for mistresses.

The comment got onto the air inadvertently, and Carcieri's camp went into aggressive campaign mode against Dufault. Flanked by his wife, Suzanne Carcieri, who had undergone successful heart-bypass surgery in 2005, Carcieri lashed out at Dufault for "gutter politics" in questioning his fidelity, as the television cameras rolled.

Dufault apologized. Carcieri said the apology didn't go far enough and hammered Dufault harder.

"This was a very stupid mistake," said a chastened Dufault, who lost a passel of clients over the comment.

There was one misstep in 2005 that Carcieri acknowledged.

He paid a civil penalty of $750 to settle state Ethics Commission charges that he violated ethics codes when he accepted free tickets from Fleet Bank to watch a New England Patriots game in the bank's luxury box at Gillette Stadium in Foxboro.

THERE WAS the inevitable reminder that greed and sleaze are embedded in some relationships between business and government here. Former state Sen. John Celona, a North Providence Democrat, pleaded guilty to influence peddling. Federal prosecutors say he received more than $300,000 in money and gifts from three businesses -- Blue Cross & Blue Shield of Rhode Island, the Woonsocket-based CVS Pharmacy chain and the Roger Williams Medical Center. He is scheduled to be sentenced in May.

Robert Urciuoli, president of Roger Williams, is a target of a federal criminal investigation related to Celona's influence peddling at the State House. Urciuoli was placed on paid leave by the hospital. Top CVS executives are under investigation, too.

It took two federal trials, but Lincoln Park race track and two former executives were convicted of wire fraud and conspiracy charges in connection with a scheme to bribe former House Speaker John Harwood, D-Pawtucket, who was not charged with any wrongdoing.

CRIMINAL CASES springing from the 2003 Station nightclub fire, which killed 100 and injured 200 more, moved ahead, with trials expected this year. Jeffrey and Michael Derderian, owners of the West Warwick club and defendants in the criminal cases, filed for bankruptcy, asserting their debts totaled more than $100 million.

Providence lawyer Joseph Bevilacqua, a flamboyant criminal defense attorney, was sentenced to prison for giving Channel 10 reporter Jim Taricani a videotape of former Providence City Hall administration director Frank Corrente taking a bribe.

Even former Providence Mayor Vincent A. "Buddy" Cianci Jr. -- still ensconced in a federal prison cell in New Jersey -- made news in 2005. Cianci appeared by way of a videoconference in June from prison to ask U.S. District Court Judge Ernest Torres for a sentence reduction.

Speaking contritely -- without his trademark toupee -- Cianci apologized to Providence citizens for the "embarrassment and scars" his corruption had brought to the city. Torres refused to change Cianci's five-year-and-four-month sentence. Later, the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear Cianci's appeal of his rackeeteering conspiracy conviction.

ONE OF CIANCI'S legacies, the rebirth of once hollowed-out downtown Providence, continued in 2005. The Procaccianti Group of Cranston purchased The Westin Providence and announced plans for three other large downtown developments. New condominium and retail projects sprouted in Providence. And the city sold the Dunkin' Donuts Center to the state, which has pledged to renovate it and market it alongside the Rhode Island Convention Center next door.

In electoral politics, 2005 was also the year the parade started forming for the 2006 elections -- which promise a lively campaign cycle. The marquee race is the contest for the U.S. Senate seat held by Lincoln Chafee, a moderate Republican. His father, John Chafee, was the only other Republican to have represented Rhode Island in the Senate since the 1930s.

Chafee is being challenged for the Republican nomination by Stephen Laffey, the energetic and conservative mayor of Cranston who is rarely at a loss for words; for a time he had his own radio talk show.

On the Democratic side, Sheldon Whitehouse, the former U.S. Attorney and state attorney general, is squaring off against Secretary of State Matthew Brown for the Democratic Senate nomination. Whitehouse seems to have the early advantage with support from his party's establishment and many elected officials, including U.S. Representatives Patrick J. Kennedy and James Langevin, both of whom -- particularly Langevin -- considered running for Senate but opted to run for reelection to safe congressional seats.

Carcieri will probably be challenged by Democratic Lt. Gov. Charles Fogarty, a well-liked figure who enters the race as an underdog; he has yet to show that he can raise enough money or lead a campaign strong enough to topple the incumbent.

Republicans say they will once again try to elect more legislators to break the Democratic State House lock. Carcieri led such an an effort in 2004 that largely failed.

Democratic U.S. Sen. Jack Reed last year saw his status in his party in Washington heighten as colleagues came to rely on him as a spokesman on military policy, especially to counter President Bush's rosy view of the war in Iraq. Reed, 56, is no longer Rhode Island's most eligible bachelor; he married Julia Hart, an Iowa native and U.S. Senate staffer, in a traditional Roman Catholic ceremony at the Catholic chapel at his alma mater, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point.

A CUP O' KINDNESS was tipped last night for Rhode Islanders who died in 2005. As is the case every year, the state lost citizens who helped make our corner of Southeastern New England distinctive. Among them: Frederick Lippitt, 88, lawyer, philanthropist and Providence political leader; Jack White, 63, a Pulitzer-Prize winning journalist who in the 1970s caught President Richard Nixon cheating on his taxes and later became one of the state's most respected television reporters; Stephen Hamblett, 71, the former publisher of The Journal and a moving force in the redevelopment of downtown Providence; Ann Hill, 77, longtime director of the St. Martin de Porres Center and a tireless advocate for the elderly and minorities; and Roosevelt "Bells" Benton, 58, a force in Providence's minority community and a former chairman of the city's School Board.

RHODE ISLAND'S college sports teams had mixed success in 2005. Brown's football team won the Ivy League title. The basketball team at Bryant College, an institution whose students are more familiar with getting an MBA than playing in the NBA, went all the way to the NCAA Division II basketball national finals before losing to Virginia Union.

State sports fans love college basketball, but the main objects of their affections, hoop teams at Providence College and the University of Rhode Island, both had mediocre seasons.

New England Patriots fans were once again treated to the Super Bowl championship. The Pats, once the neglected orphans of the New England sports scene, are now almost as beloved as the Red Sox, who lost in the first round of the American League baseball playoffs.

Yet, 2005 will always be heralded by New England sports devotees for what happened on April 11, the day the banner celebrating baseball's world championship was raised in center field at Fenway Park for the first time since Woodrow Wilson's second administration in 1919.

The Red Sox held a glorious pageant before the Fenway opener against the hated New York Yankees to mark the Sox 2004 World Series victory. There were few dry eyes when Bill Russell, Bobby Orr and Tedy Bruschi emerged from left field to throw out the ceremonial first ball.

As predictable as the tides in Narragansett Bay, another baseball season begins in eight weeks when the Sox start spring training in Florida.

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