See No Evil (23 page)

O
n May 18, 2002, I flew to Tucson to attend the wake and funeral of Joseph Bonanno, who had died earlier that month. It seemed appropriate in a number of ways, the first being that at this point, two years after we’d met, I
considered
Bill Bonanno a friend who’d encouraged my writing both with
The
Privacy
War
and
See
No
Evil.
More, during my research, I’d come to better understand him, his father, and the tradition that they wrote about and had lived.

The wake, itself, was a low-key affair held at Bring’s Funeral Home in midtown Tucson, attended mostly by
family
members, a priest with whom Joseph Bonanno had spent many of his last days, and some out-of-town associates, long removed from any business dealings, who out of respect had come to show their faces.

Throughout those days leading to the limousine ride to Saint Peter and Paul Catholic Church, and finally Holy Hope Cemetery where the ninety-seven-year-old godfather was buried, it occurred to me that there could be no conclusion to my book more fitting than this occasion for, truly, with this man an era had ended.

During my time in Tucson, I heard stories that went back generations to Giuseppe Bonanno, patriarch of one of the wealthy families that controlled Sicilian society, who’d been assassinated by a rival faction in 1899. Others about how his son, Salvatore, had promised that if he had a male child, he would offer him to his enemy as a godson to end the bloody feud. It was for this reason that Joseph Bonanno was known as the “Angel of Peace,” I learned, a name he lived up to after he came to America in 1924.

Preaching “accommodation” over “violence,” he, along with his mentor Salvatore Maranzano, became the architect of the
Commizione
del
Pace,
an arbitration board created to defuse conflicts between the families. Obviously, in a world as volatile as the “Volcano,” his name for the New York underworld, negotiation was not always possible. Despite the fact that he orchestrated “Pax Bonanno,” an era of peace that began after Maranzano’s assassination in September 1931 and ended with the murder of Albert Anastasia in October 1957, he fought when necessary, driving a bulletproof Cadillac equipped with submachine guns through the Castellammarese War and
taking
his family “to the mattresses” during the bloody “Banana War” of the late-1960s.

Later, I listened to Bill Bonanno as he recalled one of his father’s favorite sayings. “Friendship. Family ties. Trust. Loyalty. Obedience. That is the glue that holds us together.” It was at that moment that it became apparent to me why the tradition of what came to be known as La Cosa Nostra could not survive in America. What Maranzano, Bonanno, Profaci, and the others had created was a secret society, a subculture within America, based on Sicilian codes of respect, honor, and dignity. These were not uneducated thugs, but men who had created and lived in an alternate society apart from our own with separate rules, customs, and governing bodies. With the
entry of Luciano, the entrepreneur, Capone, the Neapolitan gangster, Meyer Lansky, the corrupt businessman, La Cosa Nostra became the Syndicate, a conflicted enterprise that put American and Sicilian values on a collision course that could only end in self-destruction.

There was another reason why the Mafia, under the
steerage
of unsophisticated criminals like Joe Columbo, a
small-time
gambler, John Gotti, a hijacker, Sammy Gravano, a
construction
worker-murderer, could not survive in America, I concluded. If all you’re bringing to the table is an “
enterprise
,” think again, because America is the Ultimate Enterprise. The United States government came to the
conclusion
sometime during the early 1960s, as the CIA began to flex its muscles, that it didn’t need La Cosa Nostra any longer, viewed it as competition, and could use the Mafia to
consolidate
its power against a created “enemy.”

Assassinations, known as “wet jobs,” a euphemism for “liquidations within the CIA, could be done in-house. Narcotics trafficking, a multibillion-dollar industry, could be carried out clandestinely, the money used to support secret wars in South America, Southeast Asia, or the Middle East. Gambling, once the stock and trade of the Mafia, could be used as a hidden tax on American citizens, creating huge
revenues
to help finance state and local governments.

La Cosa Nostra, out in the open since the televised McClellan Subcommittee Hearings, had become a
hobbyhorse
for law enforcement. Street soldiers, capos, and even godfathers became easy prey for the insurance of government funding in lean times and an opportunity for the institutions of law enforcement to dig their tendrils deeper into citizens’ Fourth Amendment rights during good ones, thanks to the star status demanded by Americanized Mafiosi like John Gotti.

I got a taste of this that day when I left Bring’s Funeral Home in one of the twelve limousines that made up the
caravan
headed for Saint Peter and Paul Catholic Church. There were hundreds of people in attendance. Earlier the church had been swept by local police for bombs, and it was clear to me that in addition to the half-dozen television crews present, FBI agents were busy photographing immediate family
members
and those of us along with them. Since I would probably have to leave early to catch a plane back East, I left my
briefcase
with the driver, asking that he keep an eye on it until I reclaimed it to head to the airport by taxi.

As it turned out, time became a problem, and I was forced to leave the church about ten minutes before the service
concluded
. As planned, I walked up to Limousine #3 in the
waiting
procession of cars, collected my briefcase, handing the driver a $10 bill for his trouble, then walked to the bus stop where a cab had been instructed to meet me.

Paying attention to the main street where cars were
passing
at a forty-mile-per-hour clip and looking for my cab, I
suddenly
noticed that two uniformed policemen had walked over to the bus stop. “Good morning, officers,” I said, continuing my lookout for the taxi as two more officers approached so that I was now literally boxed in by them. Next, I looked up to see my cab being flagged to the roadside by yet another cop and noticed, to my amazement, that the television crews had converged on top of me and were shooting footage!

“Is there some problem?” I asked the officer nearest me.

“Who are you with?” he asked.

I hesitated. “I’m not with anyone.”

“Who do you know here?”

“I know Bill Bonanno. Is that a crime?”

“Is that your briefcase?”

I glanced over to the cab driver, who I’m sure was
thinking
his next ride if he made it out of town at all would be some kind of latter-day Al Capone. “Yes, it’s my briefcase. Why do you ask?”

“Did you just get that briefcase from one of those
limousines
over there?” the cop asked pointing.

“Yes, I did. It’s mine. I gave it to him to hold while I was inside the church for Mass.”

“May we look inside that briefcase?” he pressed.

Understanding that I was already late for my plane and would no doubt be held until they could obtain a search
warrant
, I handed the briefcase over, and they searched it.

“What is this?” one of the cops asked holding up a sheaf of papers, the bag’s only contents outside of some pens and a pack of Juicy Fruit.

“It’s the manuscript for a book I’m writing. It’s about a physician who leads a kind of double life, working at a famous New York hospital, while also working as a doctor with patients in the Mafia. That’s how I know Bill. I’m an author. He gave me an introduction to the main character.”

The police officer loaded the contents back in my
briefcase
. “Okay, Mr. Felber, you can leave now. Who knows, maybe someday I’ll read your book.”

I entered the cab as the television crews, some probably FBI investigators, melted away, repositioning themselves back near the church’s exits to cover the mourners as they made their way to Holy Hope Cemetery where fifty doves would be released as Joseph Bonanno, the last founding member of the Commission, was laid to rest.

Afterward, looking at Elliot Litner, his life, and this book, I knew that my initial hunch about doing his story was
correct
. The experience had allowed me to see through him an intimate history of the Mafia in America that would never have been otherwise accessible. In doing the research for this
book, he had taken me along with him on a trip through his experiences with Carlo Gambino, perhaps the last true
godfather
, to the goring and imminent demise of some imitation of that proud beast, relentlessly pursued by prosecutors like Rudolph Giuliani, served up to them on a silver platter by the last man who would call himself godfather, John Gotti.

Through that period, Elliot had evolved, but in
significantly
different ways. Unlike the organization that so intrigued and fascinated him, what he saw and felt during those years changed, but did not break him. Early along, I wondered, “Was there a price to be paid for living a double life? What did it cost a man for living too much?” The answer is in a song called “Judy Blue Eyes” by Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young.

Elliot Litner did both the traveling and the burning. In his case, he was lucky, and the flames that might have consumed him became a baptism of fire that purified the instincts he already had in him and the lessons he’d been taught as a child by relatives like Uncle Saul. If Elliot’s first take on life was to yield to the temptations of easy money, friends, and women, the price he paid was the loss of all of those comforts, along with the enduring necessities one genuinely treasures: family, friends, even his identity. Fortunately, he had his heritage and upbringing to save him.

Today the fabric of institutions in the United States are falling apart before our eyes, much as the fabric of La Cosa Nostra fell apart before his: divorce, corporations pushing for productivity at the expense of children, pedophilia in the
Catholic Church, skyrocketing drug dependencies, hypocrisy in politics, bio-weapons and diseases, some of them man made and without cure, all part of the unbridled enterprise mentality.

In that sense, Joseph Bonanno was correct. Americans yearn for
closeness.
They need family. They long for a “father.”