A tale of two mayors
Yorke came to the attention of many listeners as part of the media scrum that focused public attention on Cianci’s Plunder Dome trial in the middle of 2002. While DePetro, the self-styled “Independent Man,” was a caustic Cianci critic, Yorke adopted a skeptical view of the prosecution while attending court sessions and reporting back on what he witnessed.

“I called it the way I saw it,” he says. “I said you couldn’t tell the good guys from the bad guys on a number of occasions.” The verdict — with one conviction, for racketeering conspiracy, after Cianci had been charged with 29 counts — makes it seem “like they won it in the last two minutes.”

Yorke makes no bones about how he likes the charismatic rogue — whose first tenure at City Hall was rife with corruption — and he says he took an open-minded look at the evidence presented against Cianci.

When Yorke came to Rhode Island in 1999, seven months after the Plunder Dome investigation became public when the FBI raided City Hall, he met with Cianci and told him, “I find you fascinating, but I’m not afraid of you. I will applaud you, I will criticize you, but all I ask is that you return the phone call . . . . I think he respected that.” The mayor appeared on Yorke’s show about 20 times before making the trip to a federal prison in Fort Dix, New Jersey, in December 2002. “Did I have a pang of sympathy when he went to jail?” Yorke asks. “You bet.”

By contrast, Providence Mayor David N. Cicilline, who has won national plaudits for bringing a cleaner style of governance to Rhode Island’s capital city, has been a steady target of Yorke’s withering criticism. “On a personal level, we bump into each other and we are pleasant to one another,” Yorke says. “It’s his issue, not mine.”

The talk-show host, who calls Cicilline “the most thin-skinned politician I’ve ever encountered,” seems most irked by the mayor’s unwillingness in recent years to appear on his show. As Jim Taricani related in a recent profile of Yorke in Rhode Island Monthly, the talk-show host — whose mantra is that he won’t say anything about people that he won’t say to their face — tends to save his most fiery tirades for news figures that spurn his interest in an interview.

In Cicilline’s case, Yorke points to how a private fund managed by the Rhode Island Foundation pays a fraction of the nearly $200,000 salary earned by John Simmons, the mayor’s director of administration. While the mayor has said that Simmons’ private-sector experience has yielded millions in savings for the city, through enhanced bond ratings, Yorke calls the arrangement’s partial anonymity at odds with open government and Cicilline’s self-description as a reformer.

Asked about the strained relationship between Yorke and the mayor, Cicilline spokeswoman Karen Southern said, “I’m not interested in commenting on that,” and she declined to comment on related questions.

Considering Cianci’s well-chronicled excesses in public life, Yorke’s gripes about Cicilline seem like small beer by comparison. Still, Yorke has a point when he talks about an absence of critical news stories about the mayor in the Providence Journal.

It’s an instructive point, since Yorke — who leans Republican, but isn’t above excoriating local members of the GOP — is one of the very few members of the local media willing to take a tough look at the ProJo. When, prior to the November election, the paper abruptly reversed its long-held editorial opposition to a Narragansett Indian casino, for example, he rightly recognized the paper’s lack of acknowledgement about that change as a glaring omission.

HYPER-ARTICULATE: Cianci’s post-prison plans remain unknown, but it’s widely expected that he’ll land on talk-radio.

An audience at the state house
Although Yorke was less than enthused last week about discussing Bush’s troop surge, he was more animated in describing how he had worked until 10 pm the previous night, and a few hours more that morning, developing a subject, he promised, “[that] you will find immensely provocative.”

This kind of enterprise work is a signature for the talk-show host and one of the sources of his success. “I think people have the expectation that they’re going to hear some in-the-street work from me,” Yorke says. “The [accumulation] of that is my stamp.” Asked about his best stories or top moments in Rhode Island, “I think it’s more the style of how I go about looking at stuff, rather than a story or two.”

(He does cite his Plunder Dome coverage and scrutiny cast on Beacon Mutual — the state’s dominant workers’ compensation insurer, where outside auditors found wrongdoing last year, and which became a focus for Governor Carcieri — among his particular highlights. Yorke was also a staunch casino opponent last year, and one source credits him with helping to displace Roger Begin, who was dogged by controversy, as chair of the state Board of Elections.)