Boston today is a wealthy city, an innovation and educational lodestone where the majority of the population is made up of minorities. Providence is center for arts and food, a city of fine colleges and preserved history. It’s also a majority minority city; the last two mayors have been Latino.
You would never know that from the run of pop culture about these two ancient New England ports, the two closest state capitols in America. Since the “Friends of Eddie Coyle” in 1973, Boston has been home to countless movies and books about the city’s florid underside. In the Friends film, guns were bought illegally in, where else, Rhode Island.
“Mystic River”, the “Departed,” and “The Fighter” (The Fighter shows nearby Lowell) all depict a gritty city of Irish Catholic neighborhoods, a mélange of dark taverns, triple-deckers, priests and parochialism. All wrapped in the region’s fingernails-on-chalkboard accent. Books like “Black Mass” portray the Irish mob’s corruption of the FBI.
Providence has hosted similar worship at the mafia alter. Geoffrey Wolff’s novel “Providence” kicked this off back in the 1980s. Then came the movie “Federal Hill” in the 1990s. Since there have been a passel of books, including “Down City,” “The Heist,” “Doctor Broad,” and the podcast hit “Crimetown.” Now the Buddy Cianci play, the “Prince of Providence,” is packing the house at Trinity.
And more organized crime lore is in the works; retired Rhode Island State Police Supt. Brendan Doherty says he’s writing a book about his years as a mob chaser.
These criminal cultural magnets bask in a world of ethnic neighborhoods where outsiders are eyed suspiciously. Kinship trumps law. Old World blue-collar ways are celebrated; the existential threats come not from lawbreakers, but from a new generation of white-collar professionals.
“The yuppies are coming,” complains a cop in “Mystic River.” Truth was, by the mid-1970s, Boston’s white ethnics feared blacks more than any other group. It was a bastion of racism egged on by such divisive pols as Louise Day Hicks and Pixie Palladino. Mayor Kevin White would characterize Boston’s busing crisis as the city’s nervous breakdown.
There are no people of color in most of these films. The exception is “Patriots Day,” which has Red Sox slugger David Ortiz delivering an expletive-laced defense of Boston.
These works are suffused by demented male violence; Cianci torturing his ex-wife’s lover or Bulger savagely beating rivals. The women characters are the one-dimensional mothers, spouses, lovers and enablers.
Rhode Island is seen as a place so provincial you can leave for 20 years, return, and walk back into the same conversation. Often, that was: What’s Buddy up to?
As mayor, Cianci turned the Public Works Department into a hiring hall for mobbed-up thugs. Guys named Buckles, Blackjack and Cha-Cha. Manhole covers were stolen and melted for scrap metal.
Buddy entertained voters. He boasted of attending any event, including the opening of a garage door. His nightly, liquid tours of saloons were grist for more antics, such as the evening at the Capital Grille when he flashed a Hitler salute at Statehouse leader he was feuding with.
But the smallest state’s biggest celebrity ran an administration as a pay-to-play favor factory. Financially he took Providence to the edge of a precipice. His legacy: a pension system drowning in red ink that could push the city he claimed to love into bankruptcy.
So long as there is money to be made, the mob infatuation will rock on. Yet maybe it’s time for a more accurate, 21st Century view of things. Underworld Irish Boston and Italian Providence have been waning for decades. The state now books the sports wagers that once sent the mobbed up to jail.
Instead of longing for Tony Soprano, it seems New Englanders need a collective session with his shrink, Dr. Jennifer Melfi, the Lorraine Bracco character. As a Tufts grad, she knows the territory.
Scott MacKay’s commentary can be heard every Monday morning at 6:45 and 8:45 and at 5:44 in the afternoon.