Buddy Cianci’s charities overhauled a year after his death

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) - The charitable endeavors started by former Providence Mayor Buddy Cianci have been overhauled, a year after Cianci died at age 74.

Cianci was one of the most famous mayors in America during two runs in city hall that spanned from 1975 to 2002. He was forced from office twice due to felonies, and served 4 ½ years in federal prison for a corruption conviction. The ongoing serial podcast “Crimetown,” which tells the story of his outsized personality, political career and crimes, has sparked a resurgence of interest in his life.

Some of Cianci’s charitable work was controversial during his lifetime. He produced a pasta sauce, the Mayor’s Own Marinara Sauce, which promised that sales benefited Providence schoolchildren. But an AP investigation in 2014 - when Cianci waged an ultimately unsuccessful campaign to return to city hall - found that for years, no money from the sauce’s sales had been donated to a scholarship fund that was supposed to benefit. A Cianci adviser revealed that from 2009 to 2012, the sauce made a total of $3 in income.

Since his death in January 2016, Cianci’s nephew, Brad Turchetta, has been managing Cianci’s estate. He reorganized the scholarship charity, as well as one set up to preserve Cianci’s papers, merging them into the Cianci Educational Foundation. Its new mission is to support scholarships as well as local arts, urban development and other efforts close to Cianci’s heart.

Turchetta, an orthodontist, said that since he has taken over, the sauce makes somewhere around $500 and $1,200 in monthly gross income before expenses such as labels and accounting costs. The rest is paid to the charity, he said. Turchetta said this week he did not have an exact amount of how much has been donated, but estimated it was close to $1,500 in the past few months.

“It just depends on how much sauce they sell,” he said.

In addition to giving out grants to arts groups and other organizations, which the foundation began doing last year, Turchetta said they are cutting down on the number of scholarships they give out but are making them more generous. In the past they gave as many as 13 scholarships of $1,000 each, they will now give out two for $5,000 each, starting this year.

The charity that owned Cianci’s extensive collections, kept on dozens of pallets in two warehouses, had little money in its accounts when it was combined into the Cianci Educational Foundation last year, according to filings with the IRS. The combined foundation had approximately $450,000 in assets as of June 30, 2016, according to filings made with the IRS in August.

Daniel Borochoff, president of the watchdog group CharityWatch, said it was important to honor the original mission of the fund, which was scholarships, and said it should be moving more swiftly to give out the money because there is a cost to having the money be stagnant. He said it would be most cost-effective to give it to an existing fund, or to a group such as United Way or Rhode Island Foundation to find recipients.

Turchetta said his family felt they could “maintain and propagate” Cianci’s legacy best this way.

“We decided we wanted to do this ourselves. Buddy did it. We felt as though we could continue his legacy better as family members,” Turchetta said.

As for Cianci’s papers, Paul Campbell, the former archivist for the city of Providence, has sorted through 70 percent to 80 percent of the material in one warehouse and is cataloging everything, Turchetta said. They still have not decided what to do with it once they have sorted through everything.

“We don’t know who would want it,” he said. “We know we can’t afford to buy a museum and maintain it.”