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Buddy cianci7/14/2023 Joe DiSanto rushed over and helped DeLeo fend off the blow.Įventually, a former attorney general and mutual friend of the two convinced the mayor to to let DeLeo leave. DeLeo flinched, and the glowing embers singed the corner of his eye.Ĭianci grabbed a fireplace log and raised it over DeLeo’s head like a club. He spit on him.Ĭianci tried to snuff out his lit cigarette in DeLeo’s left eye. He would later describe feeling as if he were the mayor’s prisoner.Ĭianci’s rage mounted. Based on their silence, and Cianci’s earlier threats, DeLeo dared not fight back or try to leave. The police officer and the other men in the room said nothing. Cianci said that he had several hundred policemen behind him and that DeLeo would not be safe on the streets of Providence.Ĭianci continued to assault DeLeo throughout the night, dousing him with liquor and burning him: He said that DeLeo would be found dead in the river. If DeLeo didn’t sign, Cianci warned, “You’re not gonna leave here tonight, and you’re gonna end up with a bullet in your head.”ĭeLeo, who was married, told Cianci that he had nothing to confess and denied any affair.Ĭianci punctuated his words with slaps and punches. If DeLeo did not sign the papers, Cianci threatened to leverage the power of the city in order to end DeLeo’s life:Ĭianci told DeLeo that the judge had some papers for him to sign a confession that he had been sleeping with Sheila and an agreement that DeLeo would pay Cianci $500,000. DeLeo looked at Cianci in disbelief.Ĭianci then produced a written confession that DeLeo had slept with Cianci’s wife and an agreement that DeLeo would pay Cianci $500,000. He said that all the men in the room would swear that DeLeo had thrown the first punch. Out of the corner of his eye, DeLeo noticed Officer Hassett, who had positioned himself on the other side of his chair, move his hand to the holster on his hip whether it was in a threatening manner or to protect the gun, he couldn’t say.Ĭianci kept smacking DeLeo about the head and daring him to hit back. “You strike me back, you’re gonna get a bullet in your head.” “You’ve been screwing around with my wife,” Cianci said. From a 2013 story published in the Providence Journal, written by journalist Mike Stanton, who would go onto write a book about the mayor: Instead DeLeo was immediately frisked by a uniformed cop and placed in a chair in front of a fireplace, surrounded by the city’s director of Public Works and a former judge who was also Cianci’s divorce lawyer. That incident took place in 1983, when Cianci called Raymond DeLeo over to his house for what DeLeo, a contractor, thought was a routine meeting. His first stint as mayor of Providence ran from 1975 through 1984, when he resigned after being charged with beating a longtime acquaintance who he believed was romantically involved with his estranged wife. The second Buddy Cianci, Judge Torres said, ‘’presided over an administration that is rife with corruption at all levels’’ and ‘’engaged in an egregious breach of public trust by engaging to operate the city that Buddy Cianci was supposed to serve as a criminal enterprise to line his own pockets.’’īut Cianci wasn’t simply corrupt he was also a monster. ‘’The first is a skilled and charismatic political figure, probably one of the most talented politicians Rhode Island has ever seen, someone with wit, who thinks quickly on his feet and can enthrall an audience.’’ ‘’There appear to be two very different Buddy Ciancis that came across,’’ the judge said. Torres of United States District Court said just before sentencing Mr. ‘I’m struck between the parallels between this case and the classic story of Dr. In her write-up of his 2002 conviction, New York Times reporter Pam Belluck described Cianci as “the enduring and unshakably charismatic mayor of Providence,” and during Cianci’s sentencing the judge described him fondly: But genuinely great major of special city Mayor Vincent 'Buddy' Cianci Dies At 74 - Josh Marshall January 28, 2016 This morning, Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall called Cianci “crooked” but “genuinely great.” The popular verdict on Cianci today seems to be that he was a lovable, if not exactly moral, character whose contributions to Providence were ultimately revolutionary as long you overlooked the nefarious wise guy stuff. Cianci is being celebrated as a wily, colorful, old-school politician, but his actual record shows that he was a brutal and disgusting gangster, who used the police force as muscle while he abused and terrorized his victims. mayor and two-time convicted felon, died today at the age of 74, just two years after mounting an unsuccessful campaign to return to the office he vacated upon being sent to prison on racketeering charges in 2002. Vincent “Buddy” Cianci, the two-time Providence, R.I.
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