Honor Thy Father (57 page)

“I’m Salvatore Bonanno,” Bill said, and Newman nodded, unsmiling; he was expecting him. Newman picked up the phone, and placed a call to New York. Bill stood waiting. He heard Ernest Newman asking to speak to Walter Phillips, the Assistant United States Attorney; and when Phillips came to the phone, Bill heard Newman say, in a very official manner, “Salvatore Bonanno has surrendered.”

T
his book evolved out of my father’s embarrassment, my Italian-born father’s embarrassment over the fact that gangsters with Italian names invariably dominate the headlines and most television shows dealing with organized crime. My father, a proud and consummate custom-tailor who immigrated from Italy in 1920 and prospered on the resort island of Ocean City, New Jersey—where I was born during the winter of 1932—always encouraged me to take pride in my ethnic heritage, a heritage he identified with such names as Michelangelo and Dante, Medici and Galileo, Verdi and Caruso. But as I grew up in the early 1940s, the Italian names I saw most frequently on the front pages were those belonging to the reputed leaders of the Mafia—Charles (Lucky) Luciano and Al Capone; Vito Genovese, Carlo Gambino, Frank Costello, Thomas (Three-Finger Brown) Lucchese, and Joseph (Joe Bananas) Bonanno.

Whenever my father saw me reading articles about such individuals he would shake his head and say things like: “It’s all exaggerated! The press will do anything to sell newspapers.” At times he denied the very existence of the Mafia, suggesting it was the creation of publicity-craving FBI agents, or Senate committeemen seeking more attention, or Hollywood moguls and other mythmakers pandering to the American public’s historic fascination with villains and fugitives, with Little Caesars and Godfathers—all to the discredit of millions of law-abiding Italian Americans like himself. Inevitably this aroused within me a curiosity about the Mafia that would in time lead me to its doorstep, and ultimately beyond the portal into the private world of one of the Mafia’s leading families, that headed by Joseph Bonanno himself.

My first sight of a Bonanno family member occurred on the afternoon of January 7,1965, when I-had been assigned as a
New York Times
reporter to cover the arrest of thirty-two-year-old Bill Bonanno, a rising lieutenant in his father’s organization. The mysterious disappearance of his father six weeks earlier had brought pressure on Bill Bonanno to explain his father’s whereabouts (had the elder Bonanno staged his own kidnapping in order to elude federal authorities investigating his alleged plot to assassinate three rival bosses, or had he already been killed and privately buried by his intended victims?); and when Bill Bonanno failed to cooperate with the FBI, he was subpoenaed to appear before a federal grand jury in lower Manhattan, and it was there that I got my initial glimpse of him.

He was standing with his back to the wall in a dimly lit corridor of the gray stone courthouse talking to one of his attorneys during a recess. Though he seemed deeply engrossed in private conversation, nodding with his head bent low as he listened, he also seemed to be watching through the corner of his eye everyone who came and went along the marble-floored passageway, and he seemed particularly aware of the detectives and news reporters who stood talking in a circle near the door to the jury room. At one point he noticed I was watching him. And, as if he knew me, he smiled.

I was then in my final year at the
Times
, which I had joined ten years earlier; and, approaching the age of thirty-two and aspiring to be a self-employed writer of subjects of my own choosing, I wondered what it must be like to be a young man in the Mafia. Most of what I had read about organized crime in newspapers and books was obtained through sources in the federal government and the police; and this data, which mainly emphasized gangland slayings and grotesque portraits of men with Runyonesque nicknames, did not satisfy my curiosity about life within the secret society. I was more interested in how the men passed the idle hours that no doubt dominated their days, about the role of their wives, about their relationships with their children.

I continued to listen to the reporters and detectives huddled in the corner, but my mind was wandering. Almost impulsively, I detached myself and walked across the corridor toward the tall and clean-cut figure of Bill Bonanno, who was wearing a dark blue suit with a white shirt and maroon silk tie. He was standing next to his principal attorney, Albert J. Krieger, a bald-headed, broad-shouldered man in his forties who was dressed in a gray shark-skinned suit and wore horn-rimmed glasses. As I introduced myself Mr. Krieger quickly stepped forward to declare that his client had nothing to say. I responded that I wanted no statement, conceding that it was an inappropriate time for an interview; but someday, I said, maybe months or years from now, I would like to sit down with Bill Bonanno and discuss the possibility of writing a book about his boyhood. Mr. Krieger repeated that his client had no comment, and Bill Bonanno remained absolutely silent. But I sensed from his expression that he was responding. Perhaps the idea intrigued him.

I called Mr. Krieger’s office in Manhattan several times after that, trying without success or encouragement to arrange a private meeting. But later in the winter, after I had written two letters to Bill Bonanno addressed to his lawyer’s office and had left several messages by telephone, I received word that Mr. Bonanno and his lawyer would meet me for dinner on the following week at a steak house along Second Avenue near the United Nations building.

At dinner, although Bonanno was noncommittal about being the subject of a book, we talked for a few hours and got along extremely well. He seemed to enjoy recalling details from his boyhood, his school days in Arizona, the double life he had led as a university student, escorting pretty coeds to parties on football weekends and then driving alone to the Tucson airport to meet one of his father’s men arriving from the East Coast. Undoubtedly he had never discussed such things with an outsider before, so insular and guarded had his personal life been. In the restaurant I felt that we were both hearing the story for the first time.

Nearly everything in Bill Bonanno’s past had left a sharp, lasting impression. He had almost total recall. He could remember minor incidents in precise detail, could recreate past scenes and dialogue, could describe the places he had seen, what he had felt. Yet he possessed a rare quality of detachment—it was as if a part of him had remained outside of everything he had ever experienced.

Before our discussion ended that night, I asked if he would soon bring his wife to my home for dinner. He said that he would, and he did. After that, sometimes with our wives or children, we met on several occasions, gradually establishing the rapport and trust that was essential to the book I hoped to write, a book that would suggest the complexity of being a Bonanno, the special atmosphere within the home, the pull of the past upon the present.

A year after we met, Bill Bonanno appeared unexpectedly one afternoon at my home in mid-Manhattan. Unshaven and wearing a dark suit and black shirt without a tie, he apologized for the manner of his arrival and then went on to explain with remarkable calm that gunmen had been trying to kill him. He had been “set up” on Troutman Street in Brooklyn three nights before—Friday, January 28, 1966—by a rival faction. Although the entire neighborhood in Brooklyn must have been awakened by the several gun blasts, there had not been a line about it in the newspapers. He was surprised but disappointed. He actually wanted press coverage of the incident, for reasons that I have discussed in this book in Chapter 10. I was no longer working at the
Times
but I volunteered to call an editor friend of mine, and it was this tip that broke the story. It also brought me closer to Bill Bonanno.

Hearing that I was leaving that week for California on an
Esquire
assignment, Bill wrote a letter of introduction for me to his sister, Catherine, who resided near San Francisco, saying that it was all right for her to discuss personal aspects of his life with me. From Catherine I gained valuable insights not only into Bill’s character but also into their father, who was still missing at this time—and was never discussed by her in the present tense. Catherine was also perceptive in her analyses of herself, her mother, and her mother’s family, the Labruzzos.

Later, returning to New York, I was able to meet other family relatives and friends through Bill, and they soon became vaguely aware that I hoped to write a book touching on their lives. But if they were suspicious and skeptical—and they undoubtedly were—they nevertheless accepted me as spoken-for by Bill Bonanno and did not question me too closely. Nor did I question them: I was sensitive to the situation, and at this juncture I was far more interested in the domestic atmosphere and the style of people than in any specific information. I was content to observe, pleased to be accepted. At night, after I returned home, I described on paper what I had seen and heard, my impressions of the people. Soon, as I reread certain scenes, I could see the book taking shape. It seemed to suggest fiction, but each detail was true.

In May 1966 the organization’s leader, Joseph Bonanno, made his dramatic reappearance in New York, surrendering himself to a federal judge without explaining where he had been during the previous nineteen months; and, after his attorneys had arranged for the posting of a $150,000 bond, he temporarily regained his freedom and became a houseguest (along with his bodyguards) in the residence of his son Bill in East Meadow, Long Island. While I was able to meet with the elder Bonanno there and sit in on only a few family dinners, resulting in such scenes as described in Chapter 13, I felt that he had serious reservations about my plans for a book. Consequently Bill Bonanno began to reconsider the project at this time: tension was now building in the underworld, the so-called Banana War was expanding in Brooklyn and Queens, and Bill was perhaps also concerned about my welfare, a concern that I was beginning to share.

The feud intensified in 1967, with shootings and murders reported in the press, and I lost touch with Bill for months at a time. His wife and four young children were often living in tight security at the home in East Meadow. The telephone, when answered at all, was answered by bodyguards who had little to say. I was no longer able to visit.

I was then also concentrating on a book that I had begun in 1966, a history of
The New York Times
entitled
The Kingdom and the Power
. I worked on this through 1967, 1968, and into 1969. Occasionally, when I least expected it, I would hear from Bill Bonanno, who called from a telephone booth to chat briefly and say that he was all right. Once I met him for a drink, and he was then in an angry mood, embittered by the disloyalty and fence-straddling of certain men in his world. He was willing to concede that the great leaders from his father’s era were either dead or now too old and that the younger men who remained could neither lead nor follow.

The Banana War was essentially over in 1969. The feuding factions had become so splintered that nobody knew who was on each side. Disillusioned, the elder Bonanno retired to his winter home in Tucson, Arizona, and Bill settled his family in northern California close to San Jose. During the winter of 1969—after there had been a few bombing incidents on the elder Bonanno’s property in Tucson, and after the federal agent who had allegedly organized the incidents had retired from government service—I flew out to San Jose and spent much of the winter and spring there. I saw various members of the family and their children every day. I also spent time with Bill in New York when he made brief court appearances before his conviction on the credit card case.

Although I had read several books about Sicily—profiting mostly from the splendid volumes by the English author Denis Mack Smith—I found very little useful information about the region where the Bonanno family came from; so, after accepting an offer of family assistance, I flew to Palermo and then drove in a rented car to Castellammare del Golfo.

There I was greeted by a handsome, gray-haired gentleman who identified himself as my escort without giving me his name; and this man, among others, took me through the town and pointed out such sites as the Bonanno family home, the cemetery in which Joseph Bonanno’s parents and earlier ancestors were buried, and also the ancient castle on the gulf that gives the town its name.

Back in the United States, in addition to my continuing visits to Bill Bonanno’s residence in California, I also drove with him on a couple of occasions to Arizona, where he met with some of his associates in Phoenix and spent time with his father in Tucson. His father, always courtly and hospitable in my presence, was no doubt still mildly confused by my relationship to his son but I do not think he attempted to interfere. Bill was his own man now, no longer merely the boss’s son and chosen successor. The deterioration of his father’s organization had liberated him to a degree from the responsibilities that had governed him during the Banana War, although sometimes I saw flashes of bitterness. Bill still felt betrayed, but I believe that deep within himself he harbored no great rancor toward the Mafia rivals who had tried to eliminate him or the government agents who possibly tried to frame him. I think that the sources of conflict within Bill Bonanno were much closer to home, and this might explain why I was able to get close to him and write about him intimately. He was feeling a tremendous need to communicate when I first met him. While my initial proposal to write about him might have been flattering, particularly since he then felt so misunderstood and had gone through life being his father’s son, I do believe that later I served as an instrument through which he could communicate to those closest to him. He could reveal through me, who related to him on his own terms, thoughts and attitudes he did not wish to express directly to his family, to his father. I sensed later that his wife, Rosalie, also confided to me thoughts that she wished to have conveyed to Bill; and Bill’s sister, Catherine, and other members of the family, too, were telling me what they wished others to know. I had become a source of communication within a family that had long been repressed by a tradition of silence.

When
Honor Thy Father
was published in 1971—it was Rosalie who suggested its title—the book became an immediate bestseller and was soon selected to become a CBS television miniseries. Although no one in the Bonanno family had read the book prior to its publication, and at no point during my research and writing did any family member seek to influence my approach to the material—nor would I have submitted to it if any had—I did subsequently learn from Bill that his father was not happy when the book went public. The elder Bonanno was concerned that the vast amount of public attention the book received in the media would encourage crime-fighting officials to seek headlines by singling out the Bonannos, and he also envisioned himself receiving disrespect within the underworld for having a son who, in talking to me, had violated the Mafia’s traditional code of silence known as
omertà
.