Fung Says He was Misled by Former Chief, Made Deals to Avoid Lawsuits

Cranston Mayor Allan W. Fung Wednesday answered questions following the Monday release of the scathing 182-page state police report on the operations of the city’s police department under its former leadership team.

In prepared remarks before answering questions from reporters, Fung said that he made mistakes, apologized to residents of Cranston for his errors in addition to the flagrant abuse of power and misconduct detailed in the report alleged to have been committed by the former police chief, the former second in command, and a police caption and former union boss up on internal charges for launching the Ticketgate scandal.

“I recognize I am not perfect. But the measure of a man is not the mistakes he’s made in the past but how he grows from them, and I’m growing,” Fung said.

Fung said he “absolutely” will not resign and said he loves his job as mayor.

At the same time, Fung distanced himself from assertions in the report that he repeatedly interfered with the investigation by trying to broker a deal with Capt. Stephen Antonucci, who ordered the ticketing barrage in retaliation for a City Council rejection of a proposed new union contract in 2013. The report scolded Fung’s “extraordinary” personal relationship with Antonucci and characterized the attempt to work out a deal as back-handed since the talks were in private and without the knowledge of the new police chief.

Instead, Fung said he was trying to save taxpayers money since Antonucci had filed multiple lawsuits in connection with the Law Enforcement Officer Bill of Rights charges against him. As a lawyer and person “looking at the situation from not just a one department perspective,” Fung said, he was hoping to diplomatically resolve the situation at the best cost. And that meant avoiding lengthy court battles, he said.

His efforts to secure Antonucci reinstatement without a demotion, even at risk of losing the new police chief, Col. Michael J. Winquist Jr., the former second-in-command of the state police, was not for political reasons or because it was “business as usual,” Fung said.

Winquist, upon learning of the secretive dealmaking, told Fung that he would consider resigning if Antonucci were allowed to return as it would undermine his leadership and credibility with the rank and file who need to trust their chief and believe things had actually changed. Fung said that he can’t deny that the exchange between himself and Winquist got “heated,” but the report has helped him realize that he should have consulted Winquist first.

“I realized I need to trust my department heads more,” Fung said, noting that his “open door policy” that has encouraged city employees to reach out to the administration directly undermines the chain of command.

Fung also said he was repeatedly misled by the former police chief, Marco Palombo Jr., who was severely admonished in the report for a series of actions that were described as egregious violations of ethics and conduct standards, such as when he ordered a private IT contractor be followed and intimidated because he was angry over the delay in a computer integration and then allowed the overtime to be listed for an unrelated armed robbery, or when he hired a private investigator to track an officer he was trying to force out of the department -- unheard of for a police department.

“I was misled,” Fung said. “He let me down.”

In fact, Palombo’s alleged misdeeds as chief have stunned many who’ve poured over the lengthy report, which includes a dizzying array of remarkable details of the extent to which the department had become mismanaged.

This story will be updated.