Edward D. DiPrete, Rhode Island’s 70th governor and the first and only Rhode Island governor ever to go to jail, died this week. DiPrete had just celebrated his 91st birthday with family and friends.
“He represented the end of an era,” said Philip West, the former executive director of the ethics watchdog Common Cause. West chronicled the DiPrete era in his book Secrets and Scandals.
West also filed one of the first ethics complaints against DiPrete, but state law actually prohibited him from speaking publicly about it at the time.
DiPrete rose through the ranks from Cranston, positioning himself as a reformer. First elected in 1970 to the Cranston School Committee, he later served as a Cranston City Councillor and mayor. In 1984 he won the Rhode Island governor’s office and was reelected twice before being defeated by Gov. Bruce Sundlun in 1990.
DiPrete touted himself as an “everyman.” During a snowstorm in 1987, he parked his mobile home right next to the statehouse to ensure he could still get to work.
Behind the scenes, though, DiPrete steered state contracts to friends and political cronies in exchange for kickbacks. He eventually pleaded guilty to 18 counts of bribery, extortion and racketeering and admitted pocketing more than $250,000 in bribes.
“DiPrete’s corruption was well within the bounds of what was traditional in Rhode Island at that time,” West said. “Corruption was widespread and taken for granted here.”
It was during DiPrete’s tenure that Rhode Island voters approved sweeping changes to the state’s ethics laws and ultimately succeeded in enshrining a strict Code of Ethics into the state Constitution.
Those reforms did not come soon enough to stave off a banking crisis in the 1990s. State officials and their cronies had been using a public employees credit union as a piggy bank for years until ultimately there was a run on the bank.
The collapse came after Sundlun took office and, West says, undeservedly much of the blame.
West says DiPrete bears plenty of responsibility for the crisis because he failed to act on obvious signs of corruption.
“After the banking collapse, people were so outraged at the legislature and the governor because they felt they had been betrayed,” he said.
In 1998, following a series of court cases, DiPrete pleaded guilty to corruption charges, admitting that he accepted $250,000 in bribes while in office. He was sentenced to a year in the work-release program at the Adult Correctional Institutions. And in 1999, a judge stripped him of his $50,000 state pension.
Sen. Jack Reed had fond memories of DiPrete and expressed condolences to the former governor’s family.
“He was a devoted family man,” Reed said in a statement. ‘“n his later years, Ed would beam discussing his twenty grandchildren, many great grandchildren, and beloved hometown of Cranston.’
Current Rhode Island Gov. Dan McKee ordered state flags to be lowered to half-staff in honor of the former governor.
“We offer our condolences to the DiPrete family on the passing of their patriarch, former Governor Edward DiPrete,” McKee said in a statement. “Ed will always be remembered as a down-to-earth, approachable leader who cared deeply for his home state.”
This developing story has been updated with additional information. The Public’s Radio’s Jeremy Bernfeld contributed to this story.
