The Prince of Providence

Advance praise for The Prince of Providence

“The Prince of Providence reminds me of Orson Welles’s great line from The Third Man: ‘In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed—they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.’ Mike Stanton’s portrait of Mayor Vincent ‘Buddy’ Cianci places Cianci among the Borgias, a late-twentieth-century prince who championed the arts, dark and bright both, to resurrect a great American city.”
—Chris Matthews

“Mike Stanton is our preeminent aficionado and raconteur of Rhode Island’s flamboyantly criminal political follies, and The Prince of Providence is the chronicle of a great American rogue, Mayor Buddy Cianci—a paragon of charisma and corruption.”
—Philip Gourevitch, author of A Cold Case

“Rollicking, frolicking, and superbly reported. Politics has never been this bizarre, this corrupt, or, for that matter, this much fun. Sit back and hold on tight, because The Prince of Providence is one helluva rollercoaster ride.”
—Buzz Bissinger, author of A Prayer for the City and Friday Night Lights

“The Prince of Providence is a gritty, textured account of urban corruption and urban renewal, and a vivid portrait of a charismatic scoundrel and true American original—Rhode Island’s Huey Long.”
—John Taylor, author of The Count and the Confession

“A blistering and memorable portrait of a man and a city … the kind of successfully fluid story that could be written only by someone who has seen and connected the dots.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

Mike Stanton heads the investigative reporting team at The Providence Journal, Rhode Island’s leading newspaper. He has broken stories about mobsters, a crooked governor and a crooked Supreme Court justice, wayward cops and prosecutors, and sleazy bankers and developers. Stanton has also written for The Washington Post, the Columbia Journalism Review, and The Boston Globe. He shared the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting, exposing widespread corruption at the Rhode Island Supreme Court. In 1997, he received the Master Reporter Award, for career achievement, from the New England Society of Newspaper Editors. He has also won prizes from Investigative Reporters and Editors, the American Society of Newspaper Editors, and the Associated Press. He is a graduate of Syracuse University and Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Stanton lives in Rhode Island with his wife, Susan Hodgin, and their two children.

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