Another Life (68 page)

I gave Mr. F. a couple of names, which he wrote down on the back of an envelope, and promised to make a few calls on his behalf myself. I made the calls, as promised, and shortly afterward heard that he had bought a pony, paying in cash.

A few weeks later, I saw him again. This time he came across to me himself, followed by his bodyguard, and shook my hand warmly. I congratulated him on his purchase. He took me by the arm and leaned close. “Listen,” he said. “You did me a favor. I want to do you one.”

I told him that wasn’t necessary.

He shook his head impatiently. “I found out a little bit about you, my friend,” he said. “Turns out you’re some kind of big-shot boy wonder in book publishing. No offense, but if you’re such a big shot, why are you driving a piece a shit like this?” He gave the left front tire of my VW a contemptuous kick. What kind of car did I like? he asked. Maybe a Chrysler, a Mercury? Or a Buick?

I was partial to Buicks, I allowed, maybe because my father had owned one when we lived in Beverly Hills.

“Al-
right
!” Mr. F. said with enthusiasm. “Now we’re talking.” How would I like a good-as-new Buick, leather seats, air, power windows, the works, for, say, my VW plus two grand?

Two grand sounded like a steal to me, I thought (but did not say), for it was beginning to dawn on me that if I said yes, Mr. F. would almost certainly send his bodyguard out to steal a late-model Buick off
the streets for me. Besides, Mr. F.’s generosity was not only criminal, it was spurious. It would cost him nothing to steal a car, in exchange for which he would be getting a perfectly legitimate Beetle, with a proper VIN and registration, plus two thousand dollars in cash. I, on the other hand, would have a bigger, more glamorous car, for which I might go to prison the first time I was stopped by the police.

I managed to get out of the “gift” by blaming my wife and her sentimental fondness for the VW, though not before Mr. F., the bodyguard, and I had dinner together at a dark little Italian restaurant in deepest Brooklyn, where the bar was occupied entirely by wide-hipped figures straight out of
Guys and Dolls
. I was an object of considerable merriment, since Mr. F. introduced me to everyone as the man who had turned down a free Buick.

We remained in touch and on friendly terms for many years, until Mr. F. was eventually sentenced to life imprisonment. It is a measure of what the supposed good life in the Mafia was
really
like that when Mr. F. was arrested, among the many charges, including conspiracy to murder, was the one that he had neglected to pay sales tax on the purchase of the pony for his daughter.

Perhaps because my relationship with Mr. F. had been cordial, I was an easy mark when an old-time Hollywood agent called to ask if I would read the autobiography of Mr. B.—as Joseph Bonanno was known to his associates. To his intimates he was Don Peppino, to his subordinates simply Mr. B. or The Don, and to law-enforcement people and the tabloid press he was Joe Bananas.

Under any name, Bonanno, then seventy-seven years old, was one of the most feared and respected figures in organized crime, the associate of Charles (“Lucky”) Luciano, Alberto Anastasia, Carlo Gambino, and Joe Profaci (whose daughter Bonanno’s elder son married), indisputably the boss of his own “family,” and perhaps the highly controversial “Boss of Bosses” and head of “The Commission.” It was widely rumored that Mario Puzo had based Don Corleone in
The Godfather
on the character and the career of Bonanno, and Gay Talese had written a much-acclaimed, best-selling book,
Honor Thy Father
, about Bonanno’s relationship with his son Salvatore (“Bill”) and with his contentious colleagues on The Commission.

Being the subject of a book, fiction or nonfiction, though bad enough, was one thing; writing one’s own was quite another. No “godfather” had ever written a book or even been tempted to, and Bonanno’s
decision to do so was bewildering to his fellow mafiosi that the subject came up on countless FBI taped intercepts of their conversations. For example, at a meeting in the Staten Island home of Paul Castellano, the boss of the Gambino crime family, the FBI heard the family consigliere, Joe N. Gallo, remark to his don, on the subject of Bonanno’s book, “It makes you wonder, is this son of a bitch senile, or is he a fucking nut?” Many of Bonanno’s rivals doubted that he was a nut and assumed that the book was some form of plea bargain with the feds. It was certainly the most eagerly awaited book in Mafia history—a group of people not hitherto known for their interest in literature.

Even in a world full of colorful figures, Bonanno was regarded as something of an eccentric. While the other dons lived in the shadows, Bonanno was a public figure and courted the media. He was viewed by most of his colleagues with a combination of suspicion and bewilderment. In a world where most of the players were, at best, semiliterate, Bonanno read poetry, boasted of his knowledge of the classics, and gave advice to his cohorts in the form of quotes from Thucydides or Machiavelli.

Of course Bonanno’s manuscript did not exactly spill the beans on the Mafia. It was, to put it mildly, an exercise in caution, almost written in code. While Bonanno wrote at length and in detail about The Commission (the existence of which other Mafia headliners had always denied), his point of view was that the whole thing was just an example of old-fashioned Sicilian patriotism, that
cosa nostra
consisted merely of men of honor and goodwill banding together to defend the ancient Sicilian virtues in a new and materialistic world.

Still, reading between the lines, the history of the Mafia in America was there, written by an insider and a participant. He described in great detail his own rise to power, the jockeying among the various factions, and the gangland executions by which “order” was maintained, often uneasily, among them. He gave a frank account of his attempt to machine-gun some of Al Capone’s men, who had unwisely journeyed from Chicago to interfere in the affairs of the New York families. Bonanno described Capone (who was apparently not a sore loser, since he presented Bonanno with a gold and diamond watch) as “a rather jolly fellow,” but he judged people and events by his own strict Sicilian standards, and seldom criticized those who, like Capone, had not been born into “the tradition,” with its unforgiving code of behavior. Bonanno’s admiration went to men such as his father-in-law, Don Calorio Labruzzo,
a retired butcher, whose pride was so touchy that he carried a thick cane with which to beat anyone who insulted his sense of honor.

Although Bonanno had a literary agent, his real representative was in fact his son Bill. Tall, good-looking, conservatively, even elegantly, dressed, Bill Bonanno rather resembled Kris Kristofferson and did not show any obvious sign of following in his father’s footsteps, except for the fact that he required his parole officer’s permission to travel.

It was to him, therefore, that I expressed certain questions and reservations about the book, once we had bought it. In some areas, I felt, his father was being remarkably, perhaps even dangerously, frank, while in others I felt that he was holding back. Bill Bonanno did not disagree but did not want to suggest what his father might or might not add. He was being uncharacteristically cautious, I discovered, because his father had been outraged by
Honor Thy Father
, in part because Bill had cooperated with Talese rather too fully. The quarrel had since been patched up, but it had made Bill gun-shy of any direct involvement in literary matters concerning his father, quite apart from the fact that this book was intended to be a reply to Talese’s assertions about the Mafia and organized crime. If we wanted changes, Bill said, we would have to go to Tucson and see his father.

Since it seemed like a good opportunity to escape from winter in New York, I made arrangements to fly with Margaret to Tucson, close to where Bonanno lived.

T
HE
B
ONANNO
home bore no relationship to the grandiose and funereal family compound of
The Godfather
. A modest brick house with a narrow patch of lawn, it resembled its neighbors and showed no signs of any special concern for security.

Bonanno had gone to a good deal of trouble to make our stay agreeable. He had flown his daughter Catherine in from California, to act as Margaret’s companion, in case she wanted to go shopping, and laid on a lavish spread for the luncheon that celebrated our arrival. The don himself was a ruddy, cheerful man. Despite the heart attacks and an operation for bladder cancer, he seemed fairly robust, although one had the sense that age and illness had somehow shrunken him. For a man who had lived most of his life in the United States, his English was difficult to understand, first because he talked in a low, whispering (but by no stretch
of the imagination menacing) growl, and second because his Sicilian accent was impenetrably thick. For a man of his age, he seemed astonishingly lively and energetic, but he was able to change himself into a mumbling, forgetful, harmless old man in an instant, with a skill that Laurence Olivier would have envied. At such times, his English deserted him altogether, his hands trembled, and he walked with his back bent. It is not for nothing that Mr. B. was a knowledgeable admirer of Italian grand opera. The opera, after all, is about the same things as the Mafia is: murder, passion, intrigue, and pride, together with the desire to cut, as Italians put it,
una bella figura
. As a boy, Bonanno had been a keen actor in an amateur theatrical group and fancied a career on the stage, but his father had been “a man of the tradition,” deeply involved in vendettas and determined that his son should carry them on in the new world.

His generation of “godfathers” mostly kept to themselves and discussed business in Sicilian whenever possible. In his heyday, Bonanno, with his conservative, respectable, well-tailored business suits and far-flung business interests, had seemed the most assimilated of the dons, and indeed he had irritated members of The Commission by urging them to invest in legitimate American businesses. Bonanno’s ambition seemed to be to succeed as an American businessman, out in the open, with a smile and a courteous handshake for everyone and an A-
I
credit rating. He owned a controlling interest in two garment-center coat companies, a funeral home, and a cheese company in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin.

Bonanno took me on a tour of his home, accompanied by his dog, “Greasy” Bonanno, an elderly Doberman. Here was the brick barbecue pit, which had been badly damaged when somebody—“Clowns!” Bonanno said contemptuously—threw dynamite over the fence; here the “secret room,” concealed behind a wall in the bedroom, where Bonanno could take refuge in an emergency; here the cork-lined basement office from which the FBI had taken his private papers and his arsenal when they raided the house; here the picture window through which the FBI had tried to film him from an unmarked van, so that lip-readers could try to transcribe his conversations with friends. That unmarked van, it appeared, was a more or less permanent presence on the street. Even Bonanno’s garbage was the object of their scrutiny.
^*
The house was decorated in a homey, comfortable style, with plush velour furniture, lots of tourist-quality Sicilian wood carvings of donkeys and children, and a collection of porcelain birds. There was a big brick fireplace in the living room and much dark, heavy, formal furniture, which looked as if it had originated in the East—or perhaps even Sicily—and been shipped out to Tucson.

Bonanno showed us with pride framed photographs of his late wife, Faye, a ceramic tile with the Bonanno family crest, paintings of his birthplace in Sicily (a matter of some consequence, given the Sicilian habit of carrying ancient feuds from the old country to the new world, so that most of his trusted companions—and not a few of his most dangerous enemies—were from the same village as he), the Christmas cards he received from Dr. and Mrs. Billy Graham, and a huge framed photograph of his son Bill’s wedding to Rosalie Profaci, the Mafia equivalent of a royal wedding, for Profaci was the head of his own Mafia family, one of New York’s Five Families and an ally of Bonanno’s—the wedding had attracted nearly three thousand guests and featured a wedding cake that towered over the bride and groom, and a guest list that included a congressman, a judge, several clergymen, and a newspaper publisher.

These, Bonanno said, his eyes turning damp, had been the good old days, before everything turned sour. First there had been Apalachin, and the accusation that Bonanno, who had advised against a “national meeting” of The Commission, had been present, when in fact he wasn’t there at all, and had merely lent his driver’s license to somebody else who presented it to the state police when they broke up the meeting. Then there had been the troubles with his cousin Stefano Maggadino, boss of his own crime family in Buffalo, New York, who may have masterminded the kidnapping of Joe Bonanno from the streets of New York, and possibly an attempt to kill Bill. Troubles rained down upon Bonanno’s head after that. There was the problem of Bill’s divorce from Rosalie, all the more difficult since it was at once a marriage and an alliance, then Gay Talese’s book, with its defamation of the “traditions” by which Bonanno lived, his own failing health, the death of Faye, the government persecution that sent both his son Bill and his son Joe to prison, the FBI’s endless attempts to send
him
to prison, and, as if all that weren’t enough, the decline of his “tradition,” supplanted by men who did not value honor as he did, who traded in narcotics, prostitution, and pornography, which he had forbidden in his family.

Mr. B. wound up our tour of his house and took us into the kitchen, where a big table was set for lunch, by a window overlooking the famous barbecue pit that had been damaged by a bomb thrown by unknown assailants. The assailants were only unknown to the
police
, of course; Bonanno doubtless knew perfectly well who they were himself. Here, his good spirits revived—he took his duties as a host seriously. We had an
aperitivo
, then a long meal of many courses, prepared by his daughter Catherine, with plenty of good wine.