PROVIDENCE, R.I. — THE biggest story in Rhode Island this fall isn’t the potential election on Nov. 4 of the state’s first female governor, Gina M. Raimondo, a Democrat, or its first Asian-American governor, Allan Fung, a Republican. Instead it’s the improbable comeback of Buddy Cianci, the felonious former mayor of Providence, who spent two decades in City Hall and is now running for yet another term. Hailed as a savior, condemned as a sinner, the 73-year-old is a fractured city monument who could steal the epitaph from H. P. Lovecraft’s tombstone at Swan Point Cemetery: I am Providence.

Stories of the Good Buddy and the Bad Buddy are legion, and legend. He moved rivers. He took bribes. He built a mall. He was accused of raping a woman at gunpoint in law school. He championed WaterFire, the festive floating bonfires on downtown rivers. He assaulted a guy and tried to jab a lit cigarette in his eye while a police bodyguard stood by. He raised a city’s self-esteem. He turned City Hall into a cesspool. The judge who sentenced him to five years in prison, for running City Hall as a criminal enterprise, called him Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. (The ever witty Buddy cracked, “He didn’t give me two [expletive] paychecks.”)

As Buddy’s unauthorized biographer, I have long been fascinated by his enduring appeal, and what it says about American politics. Elected in 1974 as the anti-corruption candidate, Mr. Cianci was forced to resign in 1984 after a felony assault conviction for that incident with the cigarette, came back in 1991 and was forced to resign again in 2002 after another felony conviction, for racketeering conspiracy. He belongs to that great American pantheon of rogues whose corruption was tolerated because of their populist appeal to voters and the perception that they “got things done” — Boss Tweed, Huey Long, James Michael Curley, Edwin Edwards.

His seventh run for mayor is an irresistible story, one that has drawn the national news media back to Providence. Years ago, when a TV reporter asked Mr. Cianci what he thought of the media circus at his racketeering trial, he quipped, “Are you calling yourself a clown?” The mayor in fact had a real clown on the payroll, to entertain at his grandchildren’s birthdays. An aide justified the use of campaign funds by explaining that children are future voters.