M. Charles Bakst: Where Caprio comes from
01:00 AM EST on Sunday, November 20, 2005

State Sen. Frank Caprio, D-Providence, who is running for state general treasurer next year, played football for Harvard.
This is his philosophy about the sport: Capitalize on the breaks that present themselves and then don't let the other team back in the game.
In politics, Caprio, a lawyer, carries it a step further: Capitalize on the breaks and don't let the other guy even get on the field.
Perhaps you've noticed. Caprio, 39-year-old son of Providence Municipal Court Chief Judge Frank Caprio, long ago got his campaign off the ground by loaning it more than $200,000, and now has begun a TV blitz.
Ask him how much he's prepared to spend and he says, "Whatever it takes."
He declares, "I'm competitive. When I begin an endeavor, I want to be successful."
So far, at least, no other Democrat has entered the race to follow the term-limited Paul Tavares, and party chairman Bill Lynch says he is glad to have Caprio in there.
Lynch says voters admire someone who steps out front:
"He just said, 'I'm running. Here's why. This is the kind of campaign I'm going to run and I hope you'll join me.' "
Meanwhile, Republicans scramble to find someone to take on Caprio, whose Harvard degree is in economics and who went on to Suffolk law. The recruitment task won't be any easier when prospective candidates hear what GOP Governor Carcieri says about Caprio, who was an in-house lawyer for Cookson America when Carcieri ran the conglomerate in the 1990s.
When I asked Carcieri how he'd rate Caprio as a potential state treasurer, he tried to choose his words carefully because, he noted, Caprio is running as a Democrat. Nevertheless, Carcieri said, "He's got all the skills . . . He's very bright, hardworking . . . was Senate Finance chair . . . He's got all of the requisite background."
Caprio says he voted in 2002 for Democrat Myrth York for governor, and, though Carcieri has done a "good job," intends to vote for Democratic Lt. Gov. Charlie Fogarty for governor in '06.
In politics as well as sports, Caprio's roots run deep.
In his law office just off Route 95, a couple of blocks from his Federal Hill home, is a photo of California Gov. Jerry Brown in Rhode Island for the 1976 Democratic presidential primary. Caprio's father chaired the successful drive to put Brown across. Young Frank was 10.
He recalls donning his Cub Scout uniform and spending the day stumping with Brown. "I remember going to the 1025 Club with him. I remember him saying, 'In California, we don't do this. We go to the TV stations and give interviews.' "
Caprio says that's when he got interested in politics.
And yes, right near the picture of his Italian immigrant grandfather, Antonio Caprio, and his fruit and vegetable pushcart, there's a photo of Frank with President Bill Clinton in Washington.
Across the room is Caprio's framed Harvard football jersey. (He was a defensive back.) Near Black's Law Dictionary and another page turner, Insurance Coverage Disputes, is a history of the Harvard-Yale grid rivalry.
But forget all that. Caprio also was an outfielder for Harvard's baseball team, and the most interesting artifact in the office may be a photo of him batting against Roger Clemens, young ace of the Boston Red Sox.
It was 1987, the last day of that year's Sox spring training in Winter Haven, Fla. The Boston regulars were out of town, playing the Detroit Tigers. Just that morning, Clemens ended a 29-day holdout and now he was pitching -- six innings of no-hit ball in Chain O'Lakes Park -- for a team of Sox minor leaguers in an exhibition against a thrilled Harvard squad.
Let the late Providence Journal sports writer Bill Parrillo tell you more about the game, which the college kids lost, 8-0. He quoted Caprio as saying, "I couldn't believe it. You see him on TV and you think of the MVP awards and the Cy Young and all that. And now there he is and you're trying to get a hit off him. It was hard to believe."
Indeed, Caprio was the second Harvard player to face Clemens. The first batter struck out. Now, wrote Parrillo:
"Caprio, a junior, missed a high fastball and then fouled off the next two pitches into the right-field stands. Applause. But then Clemens got him on a wicked slider on the outside corner."
Caprio tells me, "Here's what I remember about facing him. His fastball was as fast as any pitch I had ever seen. But what made him great was his other pitches were that much better than any other curveball or slider or changeup that I had ever seen, and he had total control."
He says his son -- there's another Frank -- is impressed. "People come up to me and say, 'I remember when you played against Roger Clemens,' and my son, who's 8 years old, hears that, and he's still watching Clemens on TV . . . Someday he'll realize that it was a spring training game and not the kind of game he watches on TV!"
Caprio, who grew up in Narragansett and went to Hendricken High, gets a kick out of telling the story. But he also says sports taught him a valuable lesson:
"When you're out on the playing field, it doesn't matter where you're from. It doesn't matter what happened yesterday. What matters is what you do when you perform on that given day."
He says that's true in real life too. "You can't rely on the past. You can't take anything or anybody for granted."
Caprio is married to the former Gabriella DiGiacinto, a Central High Spanish and Italian teacher. You catch a glimpse of her in his 30-second spot, one of whose themes is that Caprio is "very honest."
It strikes me as odd that a candidate for Rhode Island treasurer runs an ad that proclaims he's honest. Shouldn't voters be able to assume that? "There's so much negative campaigning in today's environment, I wanted my campaign to be upbeat and positive," Caprio says.
IT MAY SEEM like ancient history now, but Caprio's father was involved in a very rough election when he was the Democratic nominee for attorney general against Richard Israel in 1970.
Republican Israel, an assistant AG who prided himself on prosecuting mob leaders, accused Caprio, then a Providence councilman, of having displayed "an utter indifference to the problem of organized crime" that was headquartered in his Federal Hill area.
Caprio retorted that he had promoted moves in the council to combat crime and that he had issued a 54-page position paper on the mob problem, which he said "must be swept from our society."
A GOP motorcade through the neighborhood was attacked by roving youths who tore up political signs and, as a Journal story put it, pulled "campaign girls" from the tops of cars and spat in their faces. Republicans said most of the teens who attacked them waved pennant sticks with the name of Caprio.
Caprio disassociated himself from the youths but said that Israel had "generated a hostile feeling" on Federal Hill.
Israel won big. Hours after the polls closed, I went to the emptying Holiday Inn ballroom to interview him for the Journal's afternoon paper, the old Evening Bulletin. My story noted that the campaign had been rife with rumors and that Democrats rallying support for Caprio had railed against them. "But," the article went on, "no one ever said what the rumors were or who was spreading them."
Senator Caprio says the 1970 election is mere history and in no way motivates his own campaign for statewide office.
Judge Caprio, who also chairs the state Board of Governors for Higher Education and co-owns the Coast Guard House restaurant in Narragansett and Casey's Grill & Bar in South Kingstown, says, "Rhode Islanders have come to know me in the last 35 years."
He says he is proud of Frank -- and of another son, David, a Narragansett rep -- and has no interest in rehashing 1970.
Israel, who went on to become a Superior Court judge and is now retired, says he hasn't the "foggiest" notion of what the rumors were and never did know.
When I looked at the 1970 Bulletin story, the thing that amazed me most was its reference to interviewing Israel at 2 o'clock in the morning. I then would have had to work toward dawn to get the piece done.
These days, it's hard for me to get to 9 at night without nodding off.

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