NOTE – This article was originally published in the July 24th, 1978 issue of NewTimes magazine. As Buddy Cianci runs for office again in 2014, I thought it was important to share this with the people of Providence. It's an "old story", but one that not many people know about, and one that isn't talked about much in the media. I transcribed the original article by hand, word for word, and updated the layout for 2014. You can download a PDF of a scan of the original article by clicking here. You can also see images of the scans hosted on imgur.
-Tom Weyman, October 28th, 2014
It was 8 a.m., a cold wet April morning in Providence, Rhode Island, which is about as gray and as dreary as the world ever gets. But inside the ballroom of the Marriott Inn, the world was all sunshine and laughter. a Dixieland band beat out Bourbon Street melodies, while hundreds of the city’s elite feasted on free Danish and coffee in Styrofoam cups.
Vincent A. “Buddy” Cianci Jr., the 36-year-old mayor of Providence, had scheduled a breakfast party to announce his plans for the future; nearly 400 friends and relatives and Republican Party faithfuls had shown up. They side-stepped icy puddles as they crossed the parking lot, crowded into a plush lobby and milled down a long hallway toward the sound of the music.
A corps of attractive young women handed out “Cianci ‘78” buttons at the door. Plastic bags filled with pastel balloons dangled from the ceiling.
When the mayor finally arrived, Tony Polito’s Dixieland band broke into a chorus of “My Buddy.” Tall troopers cleared a path through the crowd. Cianci, a short, plump man with cherubic features, is a strange mixture of Peter Lorre and Brother Dominic. He smiled as he made his way across the room.
Taking his place at the podium beneath a huge, fuzzy photo of himself, the mayor indulged the applause for a few minutes, then began to speak: “It’s certainly a great pleasure, obviously, to be here this morning with so many people – so many Republicans, and so many Democrats, and so many Independents who truly are interested in their city.”
Leaning into the microphone, Cianci began to read a seven-page statement, and dryly recited the highlights of his first term as mayor. His voice was strong but uninflected, and he rushed along like a priest performing the last mass of a very long day. He detailed his accomplishments, noted that he had been urged to run for higher office, reaffirmed his commitment to Providence…
The litany went on and on. Cianci’s mouth grew dry; sweat began to glisten on his upper lip. It was a ritual of endurance rather than of inspiration. Reporters followed his text without much interest, but as he neared the big moment, the television crews instinctively switched on their cameras.
“In the hope that record merits re-election,” Cianci’s voice rose dramatically, “I announce my candidacy for mayor of the city of Providence.”
Someone in the audience “Hi-yo’d” an Ed McMahon yell, triggering whistles and applause; balloons billowed down from the ceiling, and the band burst into “Happy days are here again…” Cianci stepped back from the podium and savored the scene: the color, the noise, the power. His wife and their three-year-old daughter came to his side; Providence’s first family waved at the transported crowd.
“…The skies above are clear again… Let us sing a song of cheer again…”
When the applause and Dixieland subsided, Cianci returned to the microphone. “The press has asked… that questions be asked. I’d be very happy to answer any…”
There was at least one question that would not have been pleasant to answer – one that the reporters present that morning did not ask: whether or not Vincent Cianci, Jr., had once been accused of raping a woman at gunpoint.
In 1974, Buddy Cianci became the first Republican to be elected mayor of Providence in 35 years. Before his term, Republicans had occupied Providence City Hall for a grand total of six years and 10 months since the turn of the century. His margin of victory was narrow – 709 votes out of a total of more than 50,000 – but in a city as intrinsically Democratic as Providence, and in a state as fundamentally Democratic as Rhode Island, any Republican victory suggests divine intervention. Even now, nearly four years after his elections, political observers note that there is no viable Republican organization in the city: there is only Cianci.
He was born and raised in Providence, and his background gave him a head start on a political career: He was affluent, Italian and Roman Catholic in a city where, politically, you could hardly do better. He attended Fairfield University, earned a master’s degree in political science at Villanova and, in 1966, graduated from law school at Marquette University: the following year he was admitted to the Rhode Island Bar. Cianci spent three years in the Army, and after being discharged, joined the staff of the state attorney general: in 1973, he became deputy attorney general.
Cianci’s political debut could not have been more perfectly timed. In 1974, the city’s Democratic Party was splintered by a bitter primary, and one dissident faction threw its support to Cianci. It was all he needed. Running against a 10-year incumbent on an anticorruption platform, he squeaked into office.
Two years later, Cianci was seconding Gerald Ford’s nomination at the Republican National Convention – an enviable task for a 34-year-old neophyte.
Since his election he has earned mostly favorable reviews. One city hall reporter noted that “he’s a very talented politician… in many ways a very bright politician… City government in Providence is much more open now – records are easily accessible. And he’s made some progress in revitalizing downtown.”
But there have been some problems. “The city’s financial posture… has deteriorated steadily since he took office,” the same reporter noted. In January, his beleaguered police chief, Robert Ricci, a 29-year veteran, committed suicide. And in February, the city’s snowplows faced the Blizzard Of ‘78 and failed.
Cianci weathered the crises well. Everyone knew he was running for higher office – either the Senate or the governor’s mansion. When Cianci held a fundraiser last winter, former President Ford not only put in an appearance, but urged that Cianci run for governor. These days, Republicans who win are cultivated as carefully as rare orchids.
When Cianci announced that he would seek another term as mayor because he could not “in good conscience” leave the job undone, the skeptics put forth more plausible explanations. Cianci felt his popularity had suffered from the storm and the suicide; he was not yet strong enough to challenge the state Democratic Party; he intended to wait until 1980, when he could run for governor while serving as mayor.
And there were those who entertained a fourth possibility: “The other reason was the unpublished reason – the story of the [alleged] rape,” the reporter said. “If he stays in Providence, he’s probably safe. If he goes to the state or federal level, then obviously it’s going to come out.”
Voters might forgive a snowstorm, might even overlook the fact that he was not a Democrat; but, if they ever found out, it is unlikely they would forget that Buddy Cianci had indeed once been accused of raping a woman at gunpoint.
One of his classmates at Marquette Law School was Alan D. Eisenberg, the son of a Milwaukee attorney. Eisenberg is now one of the best known – some would say notorious – trial lawyers in Wisconsin. A short, dark tempest of a man, he combines the moral outrage of William Kunstler, the flamboyance of F. Lee Bailey, and the jive class of a street tough. He has made a reputation by defending controversial clients and attacking institutions. After he and his father launched a particularly vigorous attack against a county judge who then committed suicide, both were suspended from the Wisconsin bar for a year for “unprofessional conduct” that violated “the oath of respect to the court.” In his office is a bulletin board papered with current news clippings: one wall features a poster announcing “The Fight Of the Century – Muhammad Ali vs. Alan D. Eisenberg.”
Three days after Cianci announced his candidacy for reelection, Eisenberg sat in the coffee shop of the Marc Plaza Hotel in downtown Milwaukee. He devoured Cianci and a club sandwich simultaneously. “I began law school in January of ‘63 and he began the following fall,” Eisenberg said.
“In the beginning, I was quite close to him. I knew that his father was a wealthy doctor… that he had a substantial income that he was living off of – a trust fund. First thing he did when he got into town was he bought himself a new Buick Riviera – paid cash for it – and he got an [East Side] apartment.”
“He was a new guy in town: he didn’t know anybody… so I introduced him. I was very active socially myself – knew a lot of ladies – and I fixed him up with a few. And… eight to ten months later, I started getting my face slapped for having introduced them to him. He was very aggressive. He came on strong – very strong. I fixed him up with one girl who was a judge’s secretary, and she gave me a harsh reprimand.”
Eisenberg’s friendship with Cianci withered. Then, on March 5, 1966, Eisenberg saw a story in the Milwaukee Sentinel: “A 20 year old telephone operator and a 25 year old law school senior she has accused of raping her at gunpoint, have agreed to take lie detector tests next week, Asst. Dist. Atty. Gerald Boyle said Friday. Boyle said the woman alleged that she had been drugged and raped by the student… in a River Hills home…”
“That was my class,” Eisenberg explained, “and there were only 100 – maybe 70 – guys left. I went to school that day or the next morning… and somebody said, ‘Hey, that was Cianci.’ Then I talked to him and he said, ‘Yeah – it’s a shakedown,’ that he was having Danny Weiss [a local attorney] handle it.”
The 20-year-old telephone operator, Gayle Redick,* (names followed by asterisks are fictitious) had been living away from home for about a year and was renting a room at a studio club (a women’s residence) in Milwaukee. Within hours of the alleged attack, she had told her parents and a friend who reported the incident to the police.
Years later, Redick was still able to describe the evening of March 2, 1966, in painfully vivid detail.
“I was 20… working full-time as an operator for… [the] answering service… working an evening shift…
“I was walking home from work. It was a spring night – it was nice out, and the bus wasn’t coming… It wasn’t that far… I was walking home from work, yes, and he was following me. He had… some big black car… I think it was a Riviera. He kept pulling up at the curb, and I kept walking. I thought it was just somebody trying to pick me up – you know how guys used to do that years ago.
“Finally, he parked the car and he got out. He walked up to me, and he asked if I was Gayle Redick. He said he knew Carey,* who worked with me, and he said she had mentioned my name to him. He knew [where] I worked… he knew everything about me… And he was wondering if I wanted to work for him part-time. He asked if I wanted to type… something to do with subscription forms – it was for the school, I know… He told me he was going to school – he was a student at Marquette Law…” (In her original, handwritten statement to police, Redick said that Cianci had first called her, offering part-time employment, and then picked her up after work; more recently, she has denied that account, explaining that it was written while she was still in a state of shock – she says that her first contact with Cianci occurred when he approached her on the street.)
“There was something very odd – the look in his eyes… I don’t know. I kept saying, ‘There’s something different about him,’ but yet he was very smooth, very good mannered, well dressed; the type of person that would impress anyone – like a businessman – and I figured he was a well-educated person. Maybe that’s why I trusted him…
“He said he was going to take me to his office to show me what I would do…
“I wasn’t going to go, I remember. I told him I had to change my clothes, I went back to the studio club, and I wasn’t going to go. And he parked out front of the studio club, and I kept thinking I needed the money… I changed my clothes – I put on a dress; and he sat out there for half an hour or so.. I needed the money, it was a part-time job, and I figured if he knew Carey I could trust him. So I took a chance… And finally I went. I told him I was willing to do typing…
“We were on the expressway, and I asked him where he was taking me – it seemed so far. And he just said, ‘We’ll be there in a minute. It’s not that far… My office is over there.’ I told him, I said, ‘This isn’t an office.’ He said his office was in his house, and through the front door there was an office there – like a study or den…
“I wasn’t worried though, because he hadn’t really made any advances to me or done anything. You know, it seemed all business. Then he offered me a drink… I think it was a rum and Coke – that was what I drank at the time. After I drank that drink, I felt funny – everything was all hazy. I felt like I was drugged. I don’t know how it feels to be drugged, but that’s the way it felt.
“Then he started coming toward me, and trying to kiss me and trying to make out with me. And I told him I didn’t even know him. He just kept talking, and I can’t remember too much more… He pulled me into the bedroom – it was all in such a haze… It was more or less like I was here, and I was there. I was out, and I wasn’t. Everything was far away and spinning – it didn’t seem like it was really happening…
“I told him that I’d go to the police, and he said that I’d make a fool out of myself… that he would get away with it because he knew every nook and cranny – he was going to law school. He laughed and said that he’d get away with it. He said he could do anything he wanted…
“I started fighting him off. I started screaming – I remember screaming. Then he got the gun. The gun was in a nightstand by the bed, tucked in a drawer. He put it by my head and told me if I screamed one more time he’d blow my brains out. He said, ‘Look out the window – there’s a ravine there, I could throw your body down there, and no one would ever find you.’
“It was a terrible experience – that’s all I can say… Finally, I couldn’t fight him off any longer… and he raped me…
“When he went to the bathroom, I called a cab. I was going to call the police, but I thought if a police car drove up, he would kill me. All I could think about was to get out of there, to get to some place safe… and sleep – that’s all I could think of. I was in a state of shock…
“When the doorbell rang, he got all excited, and he said, ‘Who’s that?’ And I ran – I pushed him aside and I ran, and I opened the door. The cab driver had come to the door. He acted very cool in front of the cab driver. He says, ‘We had a wonderful time, and I’ll call you… We’ll go out to dinner sometime.’ I remember that very plain.”
Shortly after arriving at the studio club, Redick passed out. When she awoke, she told a friend what had happened. The police were notified and she was escorted to the station by her housemother. Redick was examined by a physician, spoke to the River Hills police, filed a written complaint and was grilled by authorities for more than 14 hours. On the morning of March 4, she was asked to identify Cianci, who denied her accusations.
“We were in the judge’s chamber at the time. When they first brought him in, he said, ‘Hi there! Didn’t we have a great time last night?’ He acted so cool, calm and collected… And they asked him if he knew me, and he said, ‘Yes, I met her last night, and we had such a good time I wanted to take her out to dinner.’ And I just completely… I don’t know… I just flipped out. Can you imagine – my parents were there in the judge’s chambers, and he walks in like that? My dad almost went after him.”
Redick was so distraught that, the following day, she took an overdose of sleeping pills, and was admitted to a hospital for observation.
“I didn’t want to kill myself, but I was under such strain and nervous pressure. No one seemed to believe me… until after the lie detector tests. I even felt guilty, because I did go with that man – a person that’s raped always feels a little bit guilty… But I think anyone would have trusted him – the way he can smooth talk, and put on a front…”
Police reported that they found the alleged crime scene exactly as Redick had described it. The glasses, the gun, the soiled linens were tagged as evidence by the State Crime Laboratory. Their reports noted:
“The German 7.65 m/m (.32 A.P. Caliber) Ortgies Auto Loading Pistol, serial number 83680, was examined and found to be in operating mechanical condition…
“Items D, E, F, three empty glasses were also examined for drug residues. Results were negative. It would be very difficult to make an identification under these circumstances unless the glass had contained a solution with a relatively high concentration of drug…
“The bedsheet was examined for the presence of semen. Semen was identified chemically in one area and intact spermatozoa were also identified at that spot… Human blood was identified in small spots on the pillow case and also on the sheet… Traces of blood were identified at the crotch area of the victim’s panty girdle. The amount was insufficient for further tests.”
Redick took the lie detector test and passed; Cianci took it three times and failed each time. Harold Block, then a lieutentant with the River Hill Police Department, filed this report:
“…According to State Crime Lab expert, Joe Wilamovksy, the report on the polygraph test showed this to be one of the most clear cut cases of rape he had ever processed in his years with the State Crime Lab. In his opinion, Gayle Redick passed the test beyond a shadow of doubt while Cianci failed completely on three separate testings…”
“We thought we had everything. We thought we had enough to convict him,” Block said recently. “When you think you have enough, you send it on up to the D.A. Then you hope for justice.”
The investigation passed into the hands of the attorneys.
“My attorney didn’t think I was well enough to go on with the case,” Redick said. “So he told me to drop the charges and settle out of court… The only reason I did it was because he advised me to. Otherwise I wouldn’t have.”
Redick says she received a settlement of $3,000 from Cianci, half of which went to her attorney. Sometime between March 2, 1966, when Redick first alleged that she had been raped, and June 29, 1966, when River Hills police were advised that “the matter concerning one Vincent Cianci, Jr., has been resolved,” Redick withdrew her complaint and a decision was made that Cianci would not be charged.
In his final report, Block noted that Milwaukee County District Attorney Hugh O’Connell felt that “due to lack of evidence, prosecution was almost impossible.” Gerald P. Boyle, the assistant district attorney in charge of the case, recently explained that the decision not to prosecute was based on “the facts as I knew them.”
“Those things are very, very difficult cases, “ Boyle noted. “At best, they’re difficult.”
He pointed out two obvious problem areas: The victim, presumably the star witness, settled out of court, and would therefore probably not be willing to testify; and, at that time, the results of lie detector tests were not admissible as evidence in Wisconsin.
Vincent Cianci graduated with the Class of 1966.
Cianci and the event were soon forgotten. But, eleven years later, the memories were unexpectedly resurrected. In 1977, a young reporter who had started out in Providence moved to Milwaukee, where she went to work for a local television station. There, she met Eisenberg, and, eventually, the subject of Cianci came up. “She told me all the things she knew about him,” recalled Eisenberg. “So I mentioned a few things that I knew about him.”
In November of last year, the TV reporter and Eisenberg paid a call on River Hills Police Chief Harold Block, who had worked on the case years before. According to Eisenberg, Block provided them with a copy of what they believed to be Cianci’s complete police file. It was a damaging dossier: In it were a note from a Patrolman Richter to then-Chief Harry Wegner; a two-page statement signed by Redick; a two-page report signed by then-Lieutenant Block; a subsequent two-page report also signed by Block; seven pages of reports from the Wisconsin State Crime Laboratory; correspondence between Assistant District Attorney Boyle and Wegner; and a receipt for an Ortgies pistol. (There was no statement from Cianci in the file.)
After days of searching, Eisenberg and the reporter located the woman: The alleged victim was now a 32-year-old housewife living happily in a suburb of Milwaukee. The reporter phoned her and explained there was something “personal” she wanted to discuss. An hour later, the reporter and Eisenberg were at the front door of Gayle Redick’s pleasant red brick ranch house.
“This was the first thing I showed her,” the reporter said, pointing to a page from the 1966 Marquette yearbook, hilltop. “‘We’re here about this man, Cianci.’ And she looked at that, and she started crying. And she said, ‘I can’t even look at him, I can’t even… Look how gross he is. Look… Yes, he’s the one. He’s the one.’”
Redick confirmed her rape charge against Cianci and discussed the $3,000 settlement.
“She said she wasn’t strong enough to go through a court appearance,” the reporter recalled. “She couldn’t take it anymore with the interrogators, so she settled out of court…”
Shaken by the interview, and by the reporter’s hard-nosed techniques, Redick contacted the attorney who had represented her in 1966. He told her that he wanted no part of the matter and that he no longer even had his notes on the case, but he did phone the reporter and advise her to drop the story. When she called Redick again, Redick hired a new attorney. Shortly thereafter, the new attorney was contacted by counsel for Cianci, who indicated that they knew Redick had spoken with Eisenberg and the reporter, and wanted to know what was happening. Redick’s lawyer met with Cianci’s, and addressed a letter to them in which he stated that his client had no complaint with the way in which the case was settled, nor did she have any further comment.
He also indicated that Eisenberg and the television reporter had obtained information from Redick by threatening and intimidating her, and, in a phone call to the the reporter, threatened her with a lawsuit if the story were used.
By mid-December, her station had heard from Cianci’s representatives; it became quite obvious that if the story were used, there would be a number of lawsuits. The assault was effective. The reporter, who had shared her findings with her old station in Providence, remained confident that they story would eventually be told, but both stations decided to pass.
This time, however, the story was not about to sink from sight. Anne Gaylor, a feminist who knew Eisenberg, brought the story to the attention of several friends in the media – at the wire services, the newsmagazines and the networks. All were leery but, finally, she found a receptive audience – Bert Wade, a reporter with the Accent/Focus section of the Providence Journal. A copy of the police file was sent to her.
“Those documents spread around the newsroom very quickly,” a reporter with the paper noted. “There wasn’t much security… so an awful lot of people read them.”
Journal staffers were shocked by the details: Here was a major story in the form of a police file – the victim’s statement, the lab reports, Block’s comments on the alleged crime. The copy of the file, even if it were incomplete, seemed to represent a significant indictment of the mayor. The Journal, a prestigious paper with a reputation for aggressive reporting, decided to investigate.
Though Bert Wade (whose brother, incidentally, is G. William Miller, the new chairman of the Federal Reserve Board) was better known for her feature writing than for her news reporting, she was allowed to remain on the story. The paper teamed her with Randall Richard, a veteran investigative reporter. On January 18, the two flew to Milwaukee.
They met with the television reporter, had dinner with Eisenberg, spoke to Block…
They also discovered that the police file that Block had copied for Eisenberg and the TV Reporter (and that the Journal itself had copies of) was no longer available. “We were able to get verbal confirmation of some of those records, which [we were told] were expunged while we were there,” Wade explained. “We spoke to Redick’s attorney; they [the records] didn’t disappear per se – they were legally required to be destroyed at the complainant’s request – at her lawyer’s request.” (The police file may, in fact, have been sealed by the village attorney, and not destroyed.)
The two reporters also called on Redick. “We visited her at her home, but she wouldn’t let us inside,” Wade said. “She seemed like a very upset woman, but pretty well pulled together considering the circumstances… There was nothing to indicate that she had anything to do with this being brought up again – she’s sort of the second-time-around victim…”
For three days, Richard and Wade checked out leads and sources – the district attorney, the Milwaukee County medical examiner, the dean of Marquette Law School, Robert F. Boden.
By Friday, January 20, the material was well in hand. Richard and Wade wanted to do some additional checking, but their editors were concerned that the Journal might be scooped since the story had been fed to several Providence stations as well. Plans were laid to go with the story on Sunday – it would appear on page one.
On Saturday, using the offices of the Milwaukee Journal as temporary field headquarters, Richard and Wade began Telexing information to their paper. In Providence, Ron Winslow, an environmental specialist, would write the story; Doane Hulick, a city hall reporter, would obtain Cianci’s response; and the Journal’s attorney would carefully inspect the final product. It was a well-organized campaign.
At about noon, Winslow sat down at a typewriter console and, using the Xeroxed documents and the Telex material, began to punch the story into the typesetting computer. The lead would say that the mayor of Providence, while a law student at Marquette, had been accused of rape, that he had failed lie detector tests three times, and that the charges were dropped after an exchange of money.
An hour later, Hulick called from city hall and said that Cianci would not meet with him; instead, he wanted to speak with the publisher about “the conduct of a reporter during the investigation of the story.” Eventually, a compromise was reached: Two editors and the paper’s attorneys met with Cianci and his advisers. The meeting, in the mayor’s office, lasted about an hour.
Cianci’s team had obviously spoken with Dean Boden – at length. They recounted the conversation between Boden and Wade, claiming that Wade had raised some demonstrably false allegations against Cianci in order to coax information from Boden. Cianci’s attorneys said that Wade’s comments were clearly “slanderous,” and indicated that she had malicious intent. Beyond that, Cianci’s attorneys raised questions about the reliability of the paper’s sources for the story. The editors were shaken by the accusations, their confidence in the strength of their own position was undermined.
When they returned to the newsroom at about 3 p.m., the editors told Winslow that a serious problem had come up and that the story would not be running on Sunday. They gathered up all of his notes and shunted the story to a high security section of the computer. Wade and Richard were recalled.
The story was effectively dead.
There were a few subsequent attempts to revive it – editors indicated that it was still in the works and, as late as April, Wade was saying, “It’s waiting to happen…” But when the newspaper learned that the victim might not cooperate in the event of a lawsuit, the plug was pulled and the last rites reluctantly read. All that remained of the Journal’s efforts were a few bootleged copies of the story, apparently finagled from the computer.
Some of the paper’s editorial staffers were disturbed that the story hadn’t run, and there was the inevitable newsroom grumbling – that the Journal was a Republican paper; that it had gone soft on investigative journalism; that its law firm was too conservative; that the editors were gutless – but it was all pro forma. No one really believed that the paper’s politics or professional ethics had been compromised. Wade had made a tactical error, and the Journal was paying for it. (Wade was, in fact, briefly suspended because of the incident.)
“I think they had legitimate grounds for not doing the story,” one reporter said. “They must have assumed that their chances of losing a substantial lawsuit were great enough – their risks were just so badly out of proportion – that it didn’t make any sense.”
Others were less forgiving. “I think we should have gone with it,” a newsman averred. “They made the wrong decision for the right reason.”
Officially, the paper would say nothing about its decision to scrap the story. James Wyman, metro managing editor and one of the editors who met with Cianci, noted that “like any newspaper, we pursue lots of stories. Some of them we feel confident to go with, some of them we don’t; and it’s not unusual, certainly, to spend time with a story and not go with it. That’s done day in and day out, week in and week out. As far as this particular story… I have no comment, and the paper would have no comment… in any way, shape or form.”
The decision had a significant ripple effect. The Journal, and to a lesser extent its sister paper, the Evening Bulletin, dominate news coverage in Rhode Island; other media not only rely on them for information but frequently assume their sensibilities as well. When the Journal dropped its story it was an omen that other outlets could not easily ignore. Paul Giacobbe, a reporter investigating the rape charge for WJAR-TV, discovered that when he reached Cianci’s Providence attorney.
“Basically, he pointed out that the newspaper and the other television station had decided not to go with the story,” Giacobbe explained, “and said he was sure that any publication of it would be met by a lawsuit.
“We chatted about whether there wasn’t a story in the documents – just the fact that they existed and were a matter of public record… and got into the matter of, ‘Yeah, they existed maybe at one time, but they don’t exist now, do they?’” (They may, in fact, still exist.)
“We have yet to make the final decision whether or not to do the story,” Giacobbe said recently. “But it looks like we’re leaning toward not doing the story… First of all, we’re not really sure we have a lead to hang it on…”
Almost every newspaper, radio and television station in the city of Providence had heard the story, but not one of them would report it.
If, as it was once claimed, the entire matter was merely a shakedown, it was definitely of the nickel and dime variety: For the nominal sum of $3,000, Cianci had managed to buy his way out of a possible felony charge.
Unlike tryst-and-tell heroines Judith Exner and Elizabeth Ray, Redick hasn’t attempted to capitalize on her experience. Since she was first caught off guard by Eisenberg and the television reporter, Redick has been reluctant to talk about the alleged rape. She has confirmed her account for several journalists and says that she did receive a $3,000 payoff, but doesn’t want to discuss the details. The reticence seems borne not of moral doubt – “I have… daughters, and one day they’re going to be 20,” she said. “If a man did this to one of them, I wouldn’t let him get away with it” – but rather of fear.
“What do I have to gain out of this?… This man is powerful; he’s rich. I’m afraid that the first thing he’ll do is come after us… We can’t afford any more lawyers – we’ve already spent $400 just to have one tell us to shut up.”
Her husband is even more adamant. “I don’t care what is, and I don’t care what ain’t,” he said. “All I want is for us to be left alone… I heard about this once before – before we were married – and I said ‘Okay, I don’t want to hear about it any more.’ And all I’ve done is hear about it ever since. First there were two reporters, and then there were two more…
“This man is rich, and I don’t fight people that are richer than me…”
The press is now busy pursuing fresher stories, and the 12-year-old rape charge has once again faded away. The Milwaukee television reporter has local crimes to cover on her beat; Wade is back writing for the Journal’s Accent/Focus section; and Eisenberg has just concluded another battle – a case involving a battered wife who was charged with murdering her husband and then setting their house on fire.
Still, the questions hang in the air. Rape at gunpoint is too serious a charge to ignore, even if the victim who leveled it has long since tried to forget. Cianci himself, who is clearly aware of the story that has been circulating around Providence, has tried privately to stop it, but not publicly to explain it. And so, we’d like to ask once and for all, and on the record: Mayor, what did transpire that morning of March 2, 1966? It is a question that should be answered, and certainly before the night of November 7, 1978.