Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter 18

Monday, July 06, 2015

H. Philip West Jr.

Between 1986 and 2006, Rhode Island ran a gauntlet of scandals that exposed corruption and aroused public rage. Protesters marched on the State House. Coalitions formed to fight for systemic changes. Under intense public pressure, lawmakers enacted historic laws and allowed voters to amend defects in the state’s constitution.

Since colonial times, the legislature had controlled state government. Governors were barred from making many executive appointments, and judges could never forget that on a single day in 1935 the General Assembly sacked the entire Supreme Court.

Without constitutional checks and balances, citizens suffered under single party control. Republicans ruled during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; Democrats held sway from the 1930s into the twenty-first century. In their eras of unchecked control, both parties became corrupt.

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H Philip West's SECRETS & SCANDALS tells the inside story of events that shook Rhode Island’s culture of corruption, gave birth to the nation’s strongest ethics commission, and finally brought separation of powers in 2004. No single leader, no political party, no organization could have converted betrayals of public trust into historic reforms. But when citizen coalitions worked with dedicated public officials to address systemic failures, government changed.

Three times—in 2002, 2008, and 2013—Chicago’s Better Government Association has scored state laws that promote integrity, accountability, and government transparency. In 50-state rankings, Rhode Island ranked second twice and first in 2013—largely because of reforms reported in SECRETS & SCANDALS.

Each week, GoLocalProv will be running a chapter from SECRETS & SCANDALS: Reforming Rhode Island, 1986-2006, which chronicles major government reforms that took place during H. Philip West's years as executive director of Common Cause of Rhode Island. The book is available from the local bookstores found HERE.

18

When Prosecutors Fail (1992–98)

The legal case against Edward DiPrete tested Rhode Island’s justice system. By the end of 1991, when the Ethics Commission fined the former governor $30,000, a grand jury was preparing criminal indictments. Few could have imagined the bizarre turns this case would take; only a mystery writer could have plotted the blunders and blind alleys that lay ahead. It turned out that the attempts to try DiPrete would put Rhode Island’s attorney general and Supreme Court on trial as well.

In August 1992, Superior Court Judge Paul P. Pederzani Jr. upheld the Ethics Commission’s finding that Edward DiPrete and James Taft were “business associates” under the law and that DiPrete had intervened on the Jamestown Bridge contract. He also ruled that DiPrete had selected Tutela for the Olney Pond contract and that the governor had “reason to believe or expect” monetary gain in the form of Tutela’s large campaign contributions. “The absence of any formal understanding, written or oral, is hardly surprising,” Pederzani wrote, adding that politicians know enough “not to corroborate the fact that an agreement existed.” The judge concluded that the Ethics Commission’s ruling “was supported by competent, reliable, and probative evidence.” Predictably, DiPrete rejected this as “unfair” and “erroneous,” and appealed to the Supreme Court, insisting again that he had done nothing wrong.

Over a year later, on October 7, 1993, Joseph Kelly stepped to the central podium of the Rhode Island Supreme Court. “May it please the Court,” he said respectfully, then launched a blistering attack on the Ethics Commission. “There’s a misconception down there that any action by anybody is a violation of the statute. I would have stood a better chance if I had faced a herd of stampeding pachyderms.”

“The fact-finders,” Kelly groused, “left their table in order to greet and shake hands with the attorney for Common Cause, who was prosecuting this case.”

I wanted to stand up and protest that Kelly was lying to the court. He knew that Rae Condon had not prosecuted the case, and he misrepresented her brief exchange with members of the former Conflict of Interest Commission — where she had served for ten years as executive director — as if it were proof of bias. Furthermore, DiPrete had appointed all but one member of the adjudicative panel that weighed the evidence. Even Ernest Ashton, DiPrete’s long-time confidant and final appointment, had joined in the unanimous ruling against him.

Kelly argued, “The statute contemplates a quid pro quo or an explicit understanding, and there is not a scintilla of evidence that Tutela knew he was going to get anything or that DiPrete did anything for him.” Outside, after the oral arguments, DiPrete repeated his mantra to reporters: “I don’t think I’ve done anything wrong, or we wouldn’t even be here arguing this.”

 

Five years after I delivered our complaint against Gov. DiPrete to the Ethics Commission, on January 11, 1994, the Supreme Court issued its ruling. Outside the court clerk’s office, I scanned the decision Justice Florence Murray had written for the unanimous court. The justices agreed that “whether by recommending or selecting” Tutela, DiPrete had steered the Olney Pond contract to him and had taken $20,500 worth of campaign contributions from him. The governor had violated his own executive order and failed to step away from a potential conflict of interest.

But then the justices tacked away, insisting on an explicit deal. “We believe that there must be some evidence to suggest that some form of a quid pro quo existed between the contributor and the official regarding the inspiration behind the donation . . . We find no such understanding or agreement in any evidence of record.” In a few paragraphs the justices tossed out half the meager remains of our original complaint. They wiped out the finding that DiPrete had steered the Olney Pond contract to Domenic Tutela. Gone also were $15,000 in fines.

On the Jamestown Bridge case, they agreed that DiPrete had maneuvered the contract for litigation to James Taft and that Taft was the governor’s business associate, as charged. They left only $15,000 for DiPrete still to pay for steering the litigation to Taft.

My heart sank.

“So what do you think?” asked Providence Journal reporter Tom Frank. He had been waiting near the antique bronze elevators until I finished reading. I reminded him that all five members of the Supreme Court had served in the General Assembly. “They know that candidates and contributors are sophisticated enough not to cut specific deals in the course of a campaign. The kind of payback a contributor wants may not even be visible on the horizon — much less already on the table — when the contribution goes in.”

Eleven weeks later, on a rainy winter Tuesday, Atty. Gen. Jeffrey Pine unsealed criminal indictments against Edward and Dennis DiPrete. Although a Republican like DiPrete, Pine declared that the governor and his son had “solicited and accepted bribes in excess of $294,000 from state vendors, namely architects, engineers and developers, in exchange for contracts.”

The first count charged that during and possibly before his terms as governor DiPrete had conspired to conduct a criminal enterprise, as defined under the state’s RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Law. The corrupt organization was described as a group that raised “campaign contributions for the Friends of DiPrete, and other money for the benefit of Edward D. DiPrete and that of Dennis DiPrete.” A second count cited the DiPretes and three Cranston men — Rodney M. Brusini, Frank N. Zaino and Michael Piccoli — for conducting and participating in the RICO organization.

Then followed twenty charges that named specific architects, engineers, contractors, and developers. Ten counts alleged that Edward DiPrete — either alone or with Dennis — had extorted bribes. Ten further counts cited the DiPretes for agreeing to accept or actually accepting bribes in exchange for state contracts. Those who gave bribes were named but were what the indictment artfully called “unindicted co-conspirators.” I assumed that most had been promised immunity in exchange for agreeing to testify against the DiPretes. Their projects ranged from a modernist addition to the library at the University of Rhode Island to leases for state offices, mostly in converted mill buildings scattered across downtown Providence. From the lists, it looked like state agencies were paying exorbitant rents and the developers had kicked cash back to the governor.

I recognized some of the names. Joe Mollicone, whose $13 million embezzlement had triggered the RISDIC collapse, had apparently made a $12,000 payoff to the DiPretes. In return, the state’s troubled housing finance corporation, RIHMFC, signed a lease for far more than market rent and moved its offices into a building Mollicone co-owned with developer Joseph M. Cerilli.

Architects had also paid to play. David Presbrey, noted for his historic restorations, was alleged to have paid $32,850 in campaign contributions between March of 1988 and September of 1990 in return for state contracts.

Two final charges almost burned the page. Counts 23 and 24 charged that Edward and Dennis DiPrete had committed perjury before the Ethics Commission on December 10, 1991. That was the day they had bobbed and weaved through testimony that the governor had recommended but not chosen Tutela for the Olney Pond contract.

These perjury indictments brought me a rush of satisfaction. The Supreme Court had vacated that portion of our complaint, but Pine and his prosecutors would now try to prove that both DiPretes had perjured themselves. Charges of extortion and bribery seemed to vindicate our complaint that Tutela’s $20,500 in campaign contributions paid for the Olney Pond contract. The Supreme Court had dismissed our charge for lack of a quid pro quo, but Pine would present evidence that cash for contracts was DiPrete’s modus operandi.

As they had each time before, both Edward and Dennis DiPrete again proclaimed their innocence. “I’m really as shocked as anyone at the allegations that came down today,” Ed DiPrete said at a press conference outside Joe Kelly’s office. “These allegations are completely untrue. In the end, I have no doubt as to the fact that we will be vindicated.”

Standing with DiPrete and Kelly during the press conference was Richard Egbert, a Boston lawyer who specialized in defending mobsters and politicians. Egbert ridiculed the indictments as based on the word of people who had “sold their souls in order to testify.” Predicting acquittal for both father and son, he echoed the refrain of DiPrete’s defenders since the beginning that the charges had been “brought for political purposes, with witnesses who have no right being in our system of criminal justice.” Dennis DiPrete faxed a press release asserting that he and his father looked forward to “refuting those charges and clearing our names.”

 

I had first met J. Richard Ratcliffe in the fall of 1991, when he asked the Ethics Commission to delay the adjudicative hearings on the Tutela/Olney Pond case. I had no idea that the thin, balding man in his mid-thirties had already been working nearly a year to unravel snarled strands of evidence involving figures high in the DiPrete administration. Ratcliffe and investigators working with him had dug their way into the heart of DiPrete’s corruption from an unlikely angle, a separate probe of Joseph Mollicone Jr., the flamboyant banker who precipitated RISDIC’s collapse.

Ratcliffe had already proved himself a master of forensic detail, and he had help from a state police lieutenant with twenty years of experience investigating white-collar crimes, Robert P. Mattos. Tall and taciturn, Mattos had a reputation for stunning witnesses with quick and deadly questions. Other detectives nicknamed him “the Cobra.”

Before the 1990 election, Atty. Gen. James E. O’Neil had assigned Ratcliffe to investigate a bank examiner’s report that Mollicone’s family bank was short $13 million, but Ratcliffe and Mattos had barely begun their investigation when Mollicone vanished. Many knew that Joe Mollicone, like his father before him, had provided banking services for the Patriarca crime family. Rumors flew that the Mob had hidden Mollicone to protect its secrets or that mobsters had buried the fugitive banker in cement. Some speculated that Mollicone had fled because he feared the Mafia more than the prosecutors.

While the drama of Mollicone’s embezzlement and disappearance continued, and the newly-elected Gov. Bruce Sundlun closed insolvent credit unions and savings-and-loans in January of 1991, Ratcliffe and Mattos had continued their investigation behind closed doors. Meticulously they traced leads from Joe Mollicone’s financial tangles into the heart of DiPrete’s corrupt administration. Their vital clue was a stub in Mollicone’s checkbook that noted payment of $875 to Anjoorian Carpets for “Renza’s rug.”

John S. Renza headed DiPrete’s Department of Employment Security, which had leased office space in a building that Mollicone co-owned with businessman Henry W. Fazzano, a wealthy businessman who served as DiPrete’s last chief of staff. Under pressure of a grand jury investigation, John Renza admitted that he had received the rug and other gifts from the building’s owners: Joe Mollicone, Henry Fazzano, and Rodney Brusini, DiPrete’s long-time friend and fundraiser. DiPrete insiders got $350,000 for unauthorized renovations and $10 million for a ten-year lease.

Ratcliffe and Mattos targeted individuals who participated in pay-to-play contracts, but the criminal case against Ed DiPrete was vastly more complicated than the complaint Common Cause had filed with the Ethics Commission in 1989. Over two painstaking years, the investigators saw how DiPrete insulated himself from the tawdry deals done in his name. Meticulously, Ratcliffe and Mattos wrapped up otherwise reputable architects, engineers, developers, and builders who had paid the legal limit in campaign contributions and switched to envelopes full of cash. O’Neil and his lead investigators granted immunity to several in exchange for testimony.

On January 13, 1993, Richard Ratcliffe sent the newly inaugurated Atty. Gen. Pine a twenty-seven-page memo that laid out what a Providence Journal special report would later call the “interlocking intrigues, stories of payoffs, deceptions, confessions, denials — corruption on a grand scale.” Only a year younger than his new boss, Ratcliffe had spent years on the case and knew its details intimately.

But Pine brought back a disgraced former prosecutor named Michael F. Burns, who had been forced to resign abruptly in 1989 when a Mob informant in his custody died mysteriously while driving alone to go skydiving in Connecticut. In the dead mobster’s parachute bag, detectives found nineteen packets of cocaine.

No one outside Pine’s office and the State Police Financial Crimes Unit understood the intricate case Richard Ratcliffe had been assembling against the DiPretes, so few noticed when Pine put Burns in charge of the Special Prosecutions Unit and its most crucial case.

Pine also appointed Joseph L. DeCaporale Jr. to the prosecution team, seemingly unaware that the Supreme Court had reprimanded him for professional misconduct. DeCaporale had faced two separate hearings before the court’s disciplinary panel for mishandling clients’ funds. His record was also littered with a divorce, professional failure, and two bankruptcies. Finally, the new attorney general promoted Burns to head the Criminal Division and appointed DeCaporale to run the Special Prosecutions Unit. In a word, Pine handed the most complex and crucial prosecution in Rhode Island’s history to two tainted attorneys.

After building his case against Edward and Dennis DiPrete for nearly five years, Richard Ratcliffe found himself shouldered aside. He tried to balance his sense of obligation as a prosecutor with his concerns about these flawed supervisors who would now control his every move. Without public announcement, he quietly resigned.

These tensions lay beneath the surface when Pine unsealed the grand jury indictments against Edward and Dennis DiPrete on March 29, 1994. Evidence compiled by Ratcliffe and Mattos suggested that DiPrete’s surrogates had routinely extorted anyone who wanted state business to contribute the maximum amounts allowed by law to the governor’s campaign war chest. Once donors reached their legal contribution limits, DiPrete surrogates pushed to have contractors’ family members and employees make “straw” contributions. Such “straws” were illegal but hard to prove, since reimbursements could be disguised as legitimate business expenses. Lies spread like crabgrass, as employers gave “bonuses” that employees then passed on to Friends of DiPrete.

Straw contributions had fueled the RISDIC conflagration. The insurer reimbursed its president, Peter A. Nevola, for roughly $35,000 worth of straw contributions and DiPrete ignored multiple warnings. During those years, Nevola alone contributed $5,875 to Friends of DiPrete, and RISDIC corporations, officers, and straws gave many times that amount. An investigation by U.S. Attorney Lincoln C. Almond revealed that between 1988 and 1990, Marquette Credit Union also secretly reimbursed its employees nearly $25,000 for straw contributions to top elected officials. Marquette was dangerously leveraged and top-heavy with risky loans. By the time Joe Mollicone’s embezzlement from Heritage drained RISDIC’s reserves, Marquette was also insolvent. After proudly serving generations of French Canadian immigrants in Woonsocket, Marquette collapsed and never reopened.

Ratcliffe and Mattos had discovered that straw contributions did not satisfy the DiPrete machine. Architect David A. Presbrey confessed to the grand jury that he had been moved up from straw contributions to envelopes full of $100 bills that he avoided touching. “You’ve got to remember,” Presbrey testified, “they never said to me, ‘Give me ten thousand dollars, and I’ll give you this contract.’ ” But he learned the formula: pay in advance five percent of the project fee. The price of entry for a $200,000 contract would be $10,000. Presbrey’s payments totaled $27,500 during DiPrete’s final two-year term, and he received plenty of state architectural work. Presbrey testified before the grand jury that he thought Dennis DiPrete and his father were using the Architects and Engineers Committee to sanitize their decisions. Ironically, Presbrey and others had spilled their stories to the grand jury in November 1991, only days before the former governor and his son swore before the ethics panel that they were innocent of all wrongdoing.

Presbrey’s testimony remained under seal in January 1994, when the Supreme Court dismissed the Tutela/Olney Pond portion of the Common Cause complaint, but the felony indictments unsealed two months later revealed widespread and systematic extortion.

Pine made a cataclysmic mistake when he assigned Burns and DeCaporale to run the case that Ratcliffe and Mattos had developed. Neither was as detail-oriented as Ratcliffe, yet they became responsible for discovery, the legal process of disclosing evidence that might assist the DiPretes’ defense. Under their supervision, prosecutors turned over six hundred cartons of documents and two hundred volumes of grand jury transcripts to lawyers for the former governor.

Skirmishes over these documents exposed Pine’s new prosecutors to public ridicule. In a hearing before Superior Court Judge Dominic F. Cresto on August 24, 1995, DiPrete’s lawyers demanded any further exculpatory evidence, particularly plea agreements prosecutors might have made with the bevy of witnesses named as participants in the DiPretes’ alleged pay-to-play schemes. DeCaporale, head of the Special Prosecutions Unit, invited DiPrete’s lawyers to go through “everything” for themselves. In one phone call DeCaporale said there were five or six boxes of documents left. When he hung up, a staff member corrected him — there were around thirty. The DiPretes’ lawyers promptly charged the attorney general’s office with prosecutorial misconduct for withholding evidence.

The battle raged. In October 1996, a newly assigned assistant attorney general, Bruce Astrachan, faced withering cross-examination about what promises might have been made to witnesses against DiPrete. Defense lawyer Richard Egbert had just received a memo dated four years earlier that showed that prosecutors had intended to charge DiPrete confidant Rodney Brusini with perjury. He demanded that Astrachan explain. Feebly, Astrachan replied that the document had been prepared before his involvement in this case or even his association with the attorney general’s office.

“So was the Constitution,” Egbert fired back.

Astrachan gamely said that he had relied on the word of his superiors, Burns and DeCaporale. The more he spoke, the worse it sounded.

Judge Cresto listened to days of back-and-forth about the state’s failure to turn over evidence. The DiPretes’ lawyers charged that prosecutors were still withholding exculpatory evidence and demanded that the case be dismissed.

Then Pine’s team found twenty audiotapes of grand jury testimony that they had overlooked. Even with credible witnesses and mountains of documents, prosecutors were flailing. They denied that they had intentionally held anything back.

Cresto was perturbed. “The allegations being made are most distasteful to me,” he declared. “They should be distasteful to anybody involved in the criminal justice system and anybody in the legal profession.”

Under oath and close questioning, chief prosecutor Michael Burns admitted that he had just read Ratcliffe’s 1993 memo to Pine describing developments since the case began. Then, when it seemed nothing worse could happen, a woman who worked in the State Police Financial Crimes Unit discovered eleven spiral notebooks of interviews in a drawer. A state police investigation never determined whether the notebooks had been there all along or how they got there.

 

In February of 1997 Pine replaced the entire DiPrete prosecution team, but the damage had been done. On March 11 Judge Cresto dismissed the case against Edward and Dennis DiPrete. “The manner and magnitude of the prosecutorial misconduct found by the court to exist in this case,” Cresto wrote in a thirty-eight-page decision, “has not only resulted in substantial prejudice to the defendants, but has the effect of eroding confidence in the criminal justice system.”

To ordinary people watching the news on television or reading their morning paper, this dismissal made no sense. As far as most could tell, their former governor was corrupt, their prosecutors were incompetent, and a judge had used a technicality to make the case go away.

Atty. Gen. Jeffrey Pine appealed to the Rhode Island Supreme Court, and the high court heard oral arguments on November 12, 1997. Prosecutor Michael Burns, who had been promoted to supervising prosecutor in the DiPrete case, sat in that majestic forum and heard his errors dissected.

Ten days later, Burns walked into snowy woods near his home. The next day, state police followed the trail of his solitary footprints in fresh snow to his body with a single gunshot wound in the head.

William Devereaux, a lawyer who had worked with Burns in organized crime prosecutions, told reporters it was a mistake for Burns to have been saddled with responsibility for overseeing both the DiPrete prosecution and the Criminal Division. “He felt like a good pitcher who had been shelled in the early innings,” Devereaux said.

On January 9, 1998, nine years after Common Cause filed its ethics complaint against Gov. DiPrete, a sharply divided Rhode Island Supreme Court issued an order reinstating criminal charges against Edward and Dennis DiPrete. Two retired justices, Florence K. Murray and Donald F. Shea, had come out of retirement to hear the case. Both joined with Chief Justice Joseph R. Weisberger in a majority opinion that ordered the case to go forward. The full decision, issued on May 1, revealed the depth of the justices’ dismay.

Weisberger wrote for the majority that Superior Court Judge Dominic F. Cresto had taken “a drastic step” that could “increase to an intolerable degree interference with the public interest in having the guilty brought to book.” Murray and Shea joined the chief justice in ruling that the DiPretes had not been “irreparably prejudiced” by mistakes of the prosecutors. The case, Weisberger wrote, was one of discovery delayed, not discovery denied.

But the two other sitting justices, John P. Bourcier and Victoria S. Lederberg, backed Cresto’s dismissal. They declared the prosecutors’ misconduct so egregious that a fair trial would be impossible: “The prosecution apparently immunized witnesses, entered into nonprosecution agreements, took other active steps to sanitize state witnesses, and then deliberately withheld this information from the defendants.” Bourcier wrote that the prosecutors had used “deceit and trickery” to deny the DiPretes their right to a speedy trial, adding that the misconduct had been “flagrant and intentional.”

Still, the majority ordered the DiPretes’ case to trial. Weisberger wrote: “We must bear in mind that when a grand jury returns an indictment, the people of the State of Rhode Island are entitled to have the issues of fact and the issues of guilt or innocence tried on their merits. The punishment of an errant prosecutor by the dismissal of charges is, in effect, a punishment imposed upon the people of this state.”

Judge Cresto removed himself from the controversial case, and Atty. Gen. Jeffrey Pine then announced that he would not run for re-election. Pine insisted that his decision had nothing to do with the bungled DiPrete prosecutions, but he refused interviews with Providence Journal reporters who were compiling a massive summary of the case. Pine accused them of “reportorial misconduct.”

Their special report appeared on two successive Sundays in August 1998. At 53,500 words, it could have been a paperback book whose title — Rhode Island on Trial: The Story of the Case against Edward DiPrete — understated its drama. A prologue noted that much rode on the trial, finally to begin on January 4, 1999: “The stakes are high. This case has grown to involve more than just the DiPretes’ innocence or guilt. Rhode Island itself is on trial — its political culture, its way of government, its system of justice. The story of the State v. DiPrete stands as a morality play, depicting power, greed, and infidelity in a place where the motto is Hope.”

On December 11, 1998, seven years and one day after he testified to his innocence before the Ethics Commission, Edward DiPrete stood before Superior Court Judge Francis J. Darigan in a courtroom of wooden walls and pillars. Jeffrey Pine, now a lame-duck attorney general, personally read a lengthy plea agreement that summarized the eighteen felonies.

Darigan peered down from the bench. “To those charges, how do you plead, Mr. DiPrete?”

“Guilty, your honor.”

The former governor then apologized “for the trauma, the pain and the suffering that I have caused to my entire family. And to the people of the state,” DiPrete added. “I’m deeply sorry.”

But in his prepared statement, DiPrete rationalized. He insisted that he was taking the plea agreement to spare his son time in prison and to save his family from the agony of a trial. He added that he regretted “mistakes of judgment” in connection with his war chest. “The pressures of raising money for campaign spending obviously clouded my perspective.” Nor could he resist a final word of self-justification: “At no time did I ever select or recommend for selection any firm which I did not believe to be eminently qualified to perform the best possible services to the citizens of this state.”

Darigan read from his prepared statement that the guilty pleas brought closure “to a particularly sad and sordid chapter of Rhode Island history.” He added that the scandal had “consumed public interest and attention for too many years.” Then he looked down from the bench at DiPrete. “You have betrayed the public trust bestowed on you,” he said, “and that is most reprehensible and contemptible.”

Under the plea agreement, Edward DiPrete became the first governor in the state’s history to be sentenced to time in prison: one year that allowed work release. If the case had gone to trial and DiPrete had been convicted on all counts, he could have been sentenced to 395 years in prison. His son, Dennis DiPrete, confessed guilt for a misdemeanor: illegally accepting a $1,000 straw contribution. He would be required to pay a $1,000 fine but would not be sentenced to time in prison.

Now retired, former State Police Lt. Robert “the Cobra” Mattos, who had played a key role in tracking the massive fraud, told reporters he was disappointed the case had not gone to trial, where the evidence would have been laid out, day after day, for all to see. Without watching the trial, Mattos said, the people of Rhode Island would not comprehend “how the corruption worked.” He said, “The governor’s house was for sale. You could walk into the State House, and everything was up for grabs.”

But Richard Ratcliffe, who had led the criminal investigation until Pine shoved him aside, told reporters he was glad the case had finally come to its end. “Everybody always asks me, ‘Is he guilty?’ Now, he is.” Then he added that the guilty plea was finally good for Rhode Island. “If the governor goes to jail, it shows that the system worked. Nobody’s above the law.”

 

H. Philip West Jr. served from 1988 to 2006 as executive director of Common Cause Rhode Island. SECRETS & SCANDALS: Reforming Rhode Island, 1986-2006, chronicles major government reforms during those years.

He helped organize coalitions that led in passage of dozens of ethics and open government laws and five major amendments to the Rhode Island Constitution, including the 2004 Separation of Powers Amendment.

West hosted many delegations from the U.S. State Department’s International Visitor Leadership Program that came to learn about ethics and separation of powers. In 2000, he addressed a conference on government ethics laws in Tver, Russia. After retiring from Common Cause, he taught Ethics in Public Administration to graduate students at the University of Rhode Island.

Previously, West served as pastor of United Methodist churches and ran a settlement house on the Bowery in New York City. He helped with the delivery of medicines to victims of the South African-sponsored civil war in Mozambique and later assisted people displaced by Liberia’s civil war. He has been involved in developing affordable housing, day care centers, and other community services in New York, Connecticut, and Rhode Island.

West graduated, Phi Beta Kappa, from Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y., received his masters degree from Union Theological Seminary in New York City, and published biblical research he completed at Cambridge University in England. In 2007, he received an honorary Doctor of Laws degree from Rhode Island College.

Since 1965 he has been married to Anne Grant, an Emmy Award-winning writer, a nonprofit executive, and retired United Methodist pastor. They live in Providence and have two grown sons, including cover illustrator Lars Grant-West. 

This electronic version of SECRETS & SCANDALS: Reforming Rhode Island, 1986-2006 omits notes, which fill 92 pages in the printed text.

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Related Slideshow: Rhode Island’s History of Political Corruption

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• Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter One
• Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Two
• Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Three
• Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Four
• Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Five
• Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Six
• Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Seven
• Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Eight
• Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Nine
• Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Nine
• Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Ten
• Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Eleven
• Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Twelve
• Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Thirteen
• Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter Fourteen
• Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter 15
• Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter 16
• Secrets and Scandals - Reforming Rhode Island 1986-2006, Chapter 17

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