Altonites in the News 4.61

These are the positings from the old message board !!

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Michael Kupersmith

Altonites in the News 4.61

Post by Michael Kupersmith »

Altonites may be interested in excerpts from the newly published "The Prince of Providence" by Mike Stanton "Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist," which features the life and times of Buddy Cianci. You may recall that Cianci is the former mayor of Providence whom Altonite Richard Egbert defended in a federal racketeering trial last year. This is what Stanton says about Egbert:

"In a hallway outside the courtroom, Richard Egbert hitched up his pants like a gunfighter. A short, fifty-five-year-old man with a bristly mustache and round wire-rimmed glasses, Egbert, one of the top criminal-defense lawyers in the Northeast, was 'the guy you don?t want to see represent the guy you arrested,' said the retired commander of the Rhode Island State Police Brian Andrews. A manic worker, Egbert would awake at four o?clock in the morning and walk around the city at dawn, . . ..

"Providence was not like Egbert?s home base of Boston. It was smaller, more intimate. For all the years that Egbert had been coming down to Rhode Island, he still found it strange to see his face staring out from a newspaper box, or have passersby stop him on the street and urge him to keep up the good fight. He had defended prominent Rhode Island mobsters and politicians, including the former governor Edward DiPrete; the mayor of North Providence, who was acquitted of taking bribes from developers; and the chief justice of the state supreme court, who was impeached for consorting with mobsters.

"Egbert was no stranger to federal corruption probes of Buddy Cianci?s City Hall; in the 1980s he had represented two of Cianci?s former top aides, Ronald Glantz and Joseph DiSanto.. . .

"The son of a Jewish garment worker and a housewife who traced their roots to Nazi-occupied Austria, Egbert grew up around Boston and came of age during the turbulent sixties. As a student at the University of Massachusetts, he had seen his best friend?s head split open by a policeman?s baton during an antiwar protest, a searing memory that served to remind him of his adversary in the courtroom ?'a government out of control.' A plaque hanging in Egbert?s office, from a client acquitted in a bank-fraud case, said, ACT LIKE A SICILIAN AND THINK LIKE A JEW.[fn*] Egbert saw himself as a check against the power of prosecutors and the police.. . .

"In the courtroom, Egbert was a tenacious cross-examiner, someone who would methodically exhume every skeleton from a government witness?s closet and then reassemble it, piece by piece, in front of the jury. His withering interrogation of mob informant Billy Ferle, in a 1988 trial in Providence, had helped mobster Bobo Marrapese ? whom Cianci had once prosecuted ? win acquittal for the baseball-bat murder of a motorist after a traffic-altercation. Ferle, Bobo?s alleged accomplice, kept saying that 'Bobo made me do it.' Egbert pounded away at Ferle as if he were the speed bag that the lawyer pummeled at home. He demanded to know whether Ferle would also attribute the sun?s coming up in the morning to Bobo. A defeated Ferle agreed. When Egbert sat down, he knew he had nailed it. He turned to Bobo, who said, 'I?m so happy I could burn a church.'. . ."

The Prince of Providence by Mike Stanton pp 239-241.

* This is not the first Sicilian-Jewish connection in Alton history. In the 1959 Counselor?s Show, it was disclosed for the first time that Chief, a/k/a Philippo Marsoni, was ?an Italian Jew, a Sicilian, too.?



kuper@mail.crt.state.vt.us
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