THE DERDERIANS AND their lawyers had good reason to be wary of local officials. Corruption in Rhode Island, especially its legal system and government, was legendary. At a time when many Americans increasingly harbored doubts about the workings of their institutions, Rhode Island was well ahead of the nation in providing reasons for distrusting authorities.
Geographically it’s the nation’s smallest state, just thirty-seven by forty-eight miles in size, but actually has the longest official name: Rhode Island and the Providence Plantations. When some thought the slavery-era word “plantation” was racially insensitive, an amendment to shorten the state’s name to just “Rhode Island” was put on the ballot. It failed miserably by a four to one margin. Defiance has been part of the state’s essence from its beginnings, earning it the nickname Rogues’ Island during the era of the pilgrims.
Rhode Island was founded in 1636 by Roger Williams after he was convicted of heresy and sedition and banished by the Massachusetts Bay Colony, the Puritan settlement in Boston, for spreading dangerous ideas, such as the separation of church and state and freedom of religion. Having learned the languages of the Native Americans, upon his arrival Williams greeted members of the Narragansett Indian tribe in their own tongue, saying, “What cheer, netop (friend).” Tribes granted Williams land at the top of Narragansett Bay, an idyllic perch of stunning natural beauty, and he founded a settlement called Providence, “having a sense of God’s merciful providence unto me in my distress.” Williams established the First Baptist Church there, but unlike most of the colonies at that time, his settlement made no religious demands on its inhabitants, did not force natives to convert to Christianity, and welcomed people of all faiths, including Jews as early as 1658. The first synagogue in America was built in Newport, and remains open.
Williams’s ideology for his colony was “a lively experiment,” and from its earliest days Rhode Island was ahead of others in spurning authority and conventions. In 1652, more than two hundred years before the Civil War, it was the first of the thirteen colonies to pass an abolition law against African slavery. Rhode Islanders were among the first to rebel against the crown when they set fire to the British naval vessel Gaspee in 1772, sixteen months before the Boston Tea Party. Two months ahead of the Fourth of July and the Declaration of Independence, Rhode Island was the first colony to renounce its allegiance to King George, and in 1790 was the last to ratify the Constitution and become part of the United States—and that only happened by a narrow vote after the founding fathers agreed to create the Bill of Rights. The Industrial Revolution started in America in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, when Samuel Slater built a water-powered cotton-spinning mill in 1793, basing his plans on a mill he’d apprenticed at in England. Slater had absconded with the most sophisticated technological knowledge of the day, and helped launch a fledgling nation into becoming an economic powerhouse, one not subservient to Europe. The British called him “Slater the Traitor.”
Brash, rebellious thinking like this would serve the state well for decades, making it a leader in manufacturing, commerce, and finance. By the late 1800s and into the turn of the century Providence was one of the richest cities in America, and Newport became a favorite playground of the nation’s high society, with mansions for the wealthiest families of the era, including the Vanderbilts, Astors, and Morgans. The culmination of this age of opulence and success was construction of the Rhode Island State House, completed in 1904, composed of 327,000 cubic feet of white Georgian marble with the third-largest self-supporting marble dome in the world, after St. Peter’s Basilica and the Taj Mahal, and atop it stands a symbol meant to capture the spirit of the state, sculptor George Brewster’s eleven-foot-tall gilded statue of “The Independent Man.”
Starting in the late 1800s a wave of immigrants arrived, primarily from Italy and Ireland, attracted by innumerable jobs at local factories and mills, and by the 1920s and 1930s they began to assert their own political will, altering the fabric of Rhode Island. Roger Williams’s Protestant outpost became the state with the highest per capita percentage of Roman Catholics in the nation, with the church wielding considerable influence. Organized crime gained a foothold with the Patriarca family reportedly controlling the entire New England mob from its headquarters on Providence’s Atwells Avenue, the city’s Little Italy neighborhood. Historians have debated whether the Mafia was the cause of widespread corruption that enveloped the state, or if organized crime simply took advantage of the situation, but from the 1940s onward the state’s rebel-with-a-cause spirit was replaced by pay-to-play.
To a large extent, Rhode Islanders accepted this change. In working-class neighborhoods it was a badge of honor to figure out how to manipulate the system to one’s advantage, epitomized by the phrases “one hand washes the other” and “I know a guy.” No-show government jobs were de rigueur, and getting paid “under the table” in cash, to avoid payroll taxes, was widely accepted. If you didn’t know someone on the inside, whether in government or business, you wouldn’t get the best deal, and it took little effort to find those connections since the state’s population had stagnated at around one million for decades, and everyone seemed to know everyone else, or at least could find someone who did. This familiarity made for a close-knit community, with only one or two degrees of separation between many people. As a result, Rhode Islanders tend to be remarkably comfortable engaging strangers, figuring they’re probably already connected in some way.
In this atmosphere it was not surprising that the populace shrugged when their leaders acted less than honorably, and corruption flourished at nearly every level of state and local government. Residents had low expectations for their authorities, and their politicians lived up to those expectations. In 1983 the Wall Street Journal described Providence as “a smudge on the road from New York to Cape Cod.”
It would often take outsiders, like the news media or federal prosecutors, to weed out the worst corruption, with some of the most egregious cases beginning to surface in the 1980s. In 1986, Chief Justice of the Rhode Island Supreme Court Joseph A. Bevilacqua resigned during impeachment proceedings over his alleged ties to organized crime. The next chief justice, Thomas Fay, was convicted of illegally directing lucrative court contracts to his own real estate firm. Governor Edward DiPrete pleaded guilty and went to prison for accepting $250,000 in bribes during his tenure from 1985 to 1991. At one point DiPrete allegedly bungled a handoff and mistakenly threw away a bag of cash and ended up dumpster diving at a Walt’s Roast Beef to retrieve it. Pawtucket mayor Brian J. Sarault was arrested in City Hall in 1991 and later pleaded guilty to racketeering. Officials from the cities of Central Falls and North Providence, plus the speaker of the Rhode Island House of Representatives, all pleaded guilty in bribery and extortion cases.
Corruption was so widespread that it impacted the lives of ordinary citizens. The economy stagnated in this atmosphere of graft, leading to one of the highest unemployment rates in the nation. The state’s banking system collapsed when the president of a credit and loan embezzled his customers’ money, and it was discovered that the statewide insurance system created to protect deposits at dozens of local financial institutions was not properly funded, causing a banking crisis not seen since the Great Depression. Accounts were frozen and banks were surrounded by state police and closed to prevent runs, and more than three hundred thousand people were cut off from their savings for up to a year.
Despite episodes like these, Rhode Island voters defiantly continued to return politicians of dubious character to office again and again.
No single politician personified Rhode Island’s embrace of corruption more than Vincent A. “Buddy” Cianci, a mob-busting state prosecutor who became mayor of Providence. Cianci was a master at whip-smart one-liners who was engaging and entertaining, but also suffered deep character flaws that would overshadow his achievements and further stain the state’s reputation. He envisioned Providence as an unpolished gem and catalyzed a renaissance that led to an economic and cultural rebirth, but Cianci was forced to resign and received a suspended sentence in 1984 after pleading nolo contendere to assaulting his estranged wife’s alleged boyfriend with a lit cigarette, ashtray, and fireplace log, and then urinating on the man.
Cianci would later deny the details of this incident and claim that he merely threatened the man. “No one urinated on anyone,” he told the New York Times, but he turned his infamy into a popular career in talk radio and as a local television news commentator. After his sentence expired he was eligible to run for mayor again and was reelected in 1991, only to be convicted of racketeering corruption in 2002 and sentenced to five years in federal prison. When released he went back into radio and television and ran again for mayor as an independent in 2014, then seventy-three years old, but lost in a three-way race after the Republican Party candidate essentially quit the contest and asked his supporters to vote for the Democratic Party candidate to prevent Cianci from prevailing.
The disgrace Cianci brought to Providence, and the state as a whole, mattered little to many locals. While in other jurisdictions he would be stripped of his pension for a corruption conviction, in Providence he was honored with an official portrait at City Hall in 2015. Sensing the irony, Cianci joked at the unveiling ceremony, “This is not the first time I’ve been framed.” When he died of colon cancer in 2016, Cianci was hailed as a hero. Flags were lowered to half-staff statewide, his body was on display in repose in City Hall for two days while thousands lined up to pay their respects, and a black carriage drawn by two white horses led a funeral cortège across the city in a snowstorm. Cianci was a rogue, to be sure, but that also made him the quintessential Rhode Islander.
Despite all of the state’s travails, or perhaps because of them, Rhode Island’s official motto is one simple word: Hope.