Honor Thy Father (5 page)

Sitting quietly in the apartment, after Notaro had left and Labruzzo was sleeping, Bonanno remembered an incident earlier in the year when his advice to his children seemed to boomerang. The family were spending the day at a relative’s home in Brooklyn, and during the afternoon one of the aunts complained that the little wagon she kept in the backyard for hauling laundry had been taken and that the children, who had been playing with it earlier, claimed not to know who had taken it out of the yard. Bonanno then approached the children, lining them up for questioning, and when none gave any information about the wagon, he said in a forceful tone that he was going to take a walk around the block and that when he returned he wanted to see the wagon back in the yard. He did not care who had taken it, there would be no punishment; he just wanted it back. After his walk, Bonanno returned to the yard. The children were out of sight, but the wagon had reappeared.

While Bonanno was not overly concerned about his children’s well-being during his absence, knowing Rosalie’s capabilities as a mother, he was worried about the loneliness and anxiety that she would undoubtedly feel each night after the four children went to sleep. Her mother, who lived fortyfive minutes away in Brooklyn, would certainly visit; but Mrs. Profaci did not drive a car, and it would not be easy for her to arrange transportation. Her relatives, as well as most relatives on the Bonanno side of the family, were hesitant about appearing at Bill Bonanno’s home, fearing the publicity and the police investigation that might follow. Bonanno’s sister, Catherine, who feared neither publicity nor the police, would have been a great comfort to Rosalie but she lived in California with her husband and young children. Bonanno’s mother was probably in Arizona, or else living in seclusion with friends. And his eighteen-year-old brother, Joseph Jr., was a student at Phoenix College. Knowing Joseph, he doubted that he was attending classes very often. Joseph was the wild one of the family, a drag racer, a bronco rider, a nonconformist who was so thoroughly undisciplined that he could never become a member of the organization, Bill Bonanno felt sure. The elder Bonanno had been on the run during much of his younger son’s adolescence, dodging the Kefauver committee or the McClellan committee or some other investigation or threat; and Joseph Jr. had been left under the supervision of his mother, who could not control him. In any case, Joseph Jr. was now in Phoenix, and Rosalie was in Long Island, and Bill Bonanno only hoped that she could manage things alone and not crack under the continued pressure that she had been forced to face in recent years.

He knew that Rosalie would probably be surprised if she knew his thoughts at this moment, having heard her accuse him so often of caring only about “those men” and never about her. But he was sincerely concerned about her, and was also aware of a certain guilt within himself which would be hard to admit, at least to a wife. That he loved her he had no doubt, but the responsibilities that he felt toward his father’s world, and all that had happened to him because of it, had destroyed a part of him, perhaps the better part. He knew that he could not justify much of what he had done with regard to Rosalie since their marriage, nor would he try. To himself he saw it all as a temporary escape from the tight terrifying world that he had inherited, an indulgence to his restlessness between the brief moments of action and interminable hours of boredom, the months of waiting and hiding and the machinations attached to the most routine act, like making a telephone call or answering a doorbell—in such a strange and excruciating world, he had done some damnable things, but now he could only hope that his wife would concentrate on the present, forgetting the past temporarily. He hoped that she would run the home efficiently, borrowing money from her relatives if necessary, and not become overly embarrassed by what she read in the newspapers, saw on television, or heard in the street. This was asking a lot, he knew, particularly since she had not been prepared as a girl for the life she was now leading. He remembered her description of how her family had sought to protect her from reality and of how accustomed she had become as a girl to finding holes in the newspapers around the house, sections cut out where there had been photographs or articles dealing with the activities of the Profaci organization.

His homelife as a boy had been different. His father had never seemed defensive about any aspect of his life, seeming only proud and self-assured. The elder Bonanno had somehow suggested the nature of his life so gradually and casually, at least to Bill, that the ultimate realization of it was neither shocking nor disillusioning. As a boy Bonanno had noticed his father’s rather odd working hours. His father seemed either to be home all day and out at night or to be at home constantly for weeks and then gone for weeks. It was very irregular, unlike the routines of the fathers of the boys Bill had first gone to school with in Long Island. But he was also aware that his father was a busy man, involved in many things, and at first this awareness satisfied his curiosity about his father and seemed to explain why his father kept a private office in the house.

During this period of Bill Bonanno’s life, in the 1940s, his father had a cheese factory in Wisconsin, coat factories and a laundry in Brooklyn, and a dairy farm in Middletown, New York, on which were forty head of cattle and two horses, one named after Bill and the other after Catherine. The family’s home was in Hempstead, Long Island, a spacious two-story red brick Tudor-style house with lovely trees and a garden, not far from East Meadow, where Rosalie and Bill now lived. The family moved to Hempstead from Brooklyn in 1938, and Bill attended school in Long Island for four years, until a serious ear infection, a mastoid condition that required operations, led to his being transferred to schools in the dry climate of Arizona. His father selected a boarding school in Tucson and would come to Arizona with his wife to visit Bill for the entire winter, renting an apartment there at first, later buying a house. Within four or five years Bill gradually became aware of the many men who frequently visited his father there, men who seemed respectful and deferential. These were many of the same men he remembered seeing around the house as a boy in Long Island; and he also recalled a particular cross-country automobile trip that the Bonanno family had taken years before, when Bill was about eight years old, traveling from New York to California, visiting the Grand Canyon and other sites, and in every large city in which they stopped his father seemed to know numbers of people, friendly men who made a great fuss over young Bill and his sister.

After Bill Bonanno got his driver’s license, which was obtainable at sixteen in Arizona, his father sometimes asked him to meet certain men arriving at the Tucson train station or the airport, men Bill knew well now and had become fond of—they were like uncles to him. When he eventually began to recognize these same men’s photographs in newspapers and magazines and to read articles describing them as thugs and killers, he concluded, after a brief period of confusion and doubt, that the newspapers were uninformed and prejudiced. The characterization of the men in the stories bore little resemblance to the men he knew.

Perhaps his first personal involvement with his father’s world occurred while he was a student at Tucson Senior High School in 1951, on a day when he was called out of class and told to report to the principal’s office. The principal seemed upset as he asked, “Bill, are you in any kind of trouble with the law?”

“No,” Bonanno said.

“Well, there are two men from the FBI in my outer office,” the principal said, adding, “Look, Bill, you don’t have to talk to them if you don’t want to.”

“I have nothing to hide,” he said.

“Would you prefer that I be present?”

“Sure, if you want to.”

The principal led Bill Bonanno, who was seventeen, into the outer office and introduced him to the agents, who asked if he knew anything about the disappearance and possible murder of the Mafia boss Vincent Mangano. Bill Bonanno said that he knew nothing about it. He had heard that name before, but it had been in connection with James Mangano, who had an asthmatic daughter and had rented the Bonanno’s Tucson home one summer when they were away. The agents took notes, asked a few more questions, then left. Bill Bonanno returned to his classroom somewhat shaken. He felt the eyes of the other students on him, but he did not face anyone as he took his seat; he felt separated from his classmates in a way that he had not felt before.

It was a feeling, he was sure, that Rosalie never had as a girl, and he even wondered if she had it now. She seemed totally unaware and naïve about his world. While he occasionally interpreted this as self-protectiveness on her part, a determination to ignore what she disapproved of, he also believed sometimes that his wife was genuinely remote from reality, as if her parents had really fulfilled their ambition to separate Rosalie from the embarrassing aspects of their past. But this could not be entirely true, for if they had really wished to separate her from themselves they would never have condoned her marriage to him. Still, for whatever reason, his wife’s quality of detachment irritated him at times, and he hoped that now, following his father’s disappearance, she would respond to the emergency and do nothing foolish or careless. He hoped, for example, that when she left their house with the children she would remember to lock the front and back doors and would be certain that all the windows were securely bolted. He was worried that FBI men, posing as burglars, would break into the house and infest the interior with electronic bugs. They often did this, he had heard. They would enter a house and overturn a few pieces of furniture and plow through the bureau drawers and closets, giving the impression that they were thieves looking for valuables, but what they really were doing was installing bugs. Once the agents got into a house, he knew, it was nearly impossible to detect their little handiwork, conceding that in this area the FBI was very creative and clever. He knew of a case in which the agents had even bugged a house
before
the carpenters finished building it. It happened to Sonny Franzese, an officer in the Profaci organization; the agents had apparently gone to the construction site of Franzese’s new home in Long Island after the workmen had left for the day, inserting bugs into the framework and foundation. Franzese later wondered why the agents knew so much about him.

Bill Bonanno kept an electronic debugging device in his closet at home, a kind of plastic divining rod with an antenna that was supposed to vibrate when sensing bugs, but he was not sure how trustworthy it was. If the agents did get into his house, he was sure that they could find some things that would serve as evidence against him. They would find a few rifles in the garage and pistols in his bedroom bureau. They might find a false identification card or two and various drivers’ licenses and passports. They would discover his vast collection of quarters, several dollars’ worth neatly packed in long thin plastic tubes that fit into the glove compartment of his car and were used for long-distance calls at telephone booths. The agents would probably help themselves to the excellent Havana cigars that he remembered having left on the top of his bedroom bureau, in a jar that also contained Q-tip cotton swabs on sticks that he used for draining his left ear in the morning, the infected ear that had gotten him to Arizona, where he wished he was at this moment. The agents might be interested in some of the books in his library, which included three books on the FBI and all the books about the Mafia, including ones by Senators Kefauver and McClellan. They would find several other books that he suspected would be over the agents’ heads—the Churchill volumes, books by Bertrand Russell, Arthur Koestler, Sartre, and the poetry of Dante. But there was one book that they would surely like to thumb through—the large photo album of his wedding. The album, which consisted of several photographs of the reception, including the crowded ballroom scene at the Astor, would identify most of the distinguished guests; and what the album failed to reveal, the movie of the wedding, packed in a tin can at the bottom of a bookshelf,
would
reveal. There was more than 2,000 feet of home-movie film on the wedding, and he and Rosalie had enjoyed looking at it from time to time during the past seven years. The wedding event, the extravagance and splendor of it, probably marked the highpoint of Joseph Bonanno’s life, the pinnacle of his prestige; and a social historian of the underworld, should one ever exist, might describe the event as the “last of the great gangster weddings,” coming before the Apalachin exposure and other vexations had put an end to such displays.

One of the things that most fascinated Bill Bonanno about the film, after he had seen it three or four times, was what it revealed about the caste-consciousness of the mafiosi who attended, and no doubt the FBI would be equally interested if it could review the film. By observing the way that a mafioso dressed, one could determine his rank within the organization. The lower-echelon men, Bonanno had noticed, all wore white dinner jackets to the wedding, while the middle-level men, the lieutenants and captains, wore light blue dinner jackets. The top men, the dons, all were dressed in black tuxedos, except, of course, the principal males in the wedding party, who wore cutaways.

On November 5, which was Bill Bonanno’s thirty-second birthday and was fifteen days after the elder Bonanno’s disappearance, five of the Bonanno officers decided that they had had all the confinement they could stand—they needed a short vacation. Bill Bonanno agreed. It did not appear that their enemies planned an armed confrontation at this time, not with so many police on the alert, and Bonanno also welcomed a change of scenery. He sent word to Rosalie through one of his men that he was alive. He said no more than that, nor did Rosalie expect more. The question facing Bonanno now was where to go to find rest and relaxation and not attract attention. He and his men could not fly south because the airports were too well patrolled and, even with their disguises, they might be spotted. He also did not want to venture too far from New York because there was always the chance of some new development concerning his father. They would have to use their cars, traveling at night. After a few hours of thought, Bonanno decided that they should visit the ski country of New England. None of the men had ever been on skis, nor did they intend to try. They merely wished to experience again the act of movement, to travel over open roads in the brisk outdoors, to clear their minds, recharge the batteries of their cars, and walk their dogs away from the repressive environment of New York.