Honor Thy Father (27 page)

Faced with the death penalty for the brutal slaying, Valachi decided to cooperate with the federal government to save his own life, and in so doing he made life miserable for every don in America. What little privacy they had after the endless investigations and publicity in the wake of Apalachin was invaded by Valachi. Testifying before the Senate on nationwide television, and with his words also disseminated through national magazines and a best-selling book by Peter Maas, Valachi described the organizational structure of the Mafia, unmasked many of its leaders, and recalled old feuds and murders. He told how he had been recruited in 1930 to fight on Maranzano’s side in the Castellammarese War and how he later was initiated into the brotherhood with Joseph Bonanno performing the ritual. After the death of Maranzano, Valachi was absorbed into the Luciano family, where, even though he never rose higher than the rank of soldier, he managed to prosper and survive for many years until the recent terror tactics of Genovese influenced his fate and that of many other mafiosi.

It was during this period, in the early 1960s, that Joseph Bonanno seriously contemplated his retirement as the head of his family and as a member of the commission. He was disgusted with the way things had gone in the past few years, and he doubted that the situation would or could improve. The decline of the Profaci family was particularly upsetting because he believed that two members of the commission, Lucchese and Gambino, had encouraged the Gallo brothers’ revolt against Profaci, violating the commission’s own policy against interference in the internal affairs of a family. With the death of Joseph Profaci in 1962, and Joseph Magliocco a year later, Bonanno lost two strong allies.

Bonanno also felt that he had nothing to gain and much to lose by remaining in the chaotic atmosphere of the Northeast in the company of fellow dons that he could no longer trust. He was approaching sixty, and he had been a don for thirty years. He would be happier living in retirement in Arizona or Canada or Wisconsin or California and letting younger men assume the role of leadership over his organization. The only problem was in finding a younger man capable of succeeding him. Unfortunately for Bonanno, he realized too late that the experienced men upon whom he had most relied during the last decade were either his own age or older—such men as Garofalo, Bonventre, Angelo Caruso, the imprisoned Carmine Galante, Gaspar Di Gregorio, and John Tartamella, who had just had a heart attack. And the younger officers in the family were not that much younger: John Morale was in his fifties, as was Frank Labruzzo Vito De Filippi, Thomas Di Angelo, Paul Sciacca, and the ailing Joseph Notaro. Charles Battaglia was in his forties, but he was in the Arizona branch of the family and Bonanno liked having him there.

Among the ranks of soldiers, there were few who had particularly impressed Bonanno by their leadership potentialities; in fact, Bonanno felt that the average Mafia soldier today, not only in his own family but also throughout the national syndicate, was far less disciplined than were the soldiers he had known thirty years ago in Maranzano’s time. The younger men today were for the most part American-born, were not as cool or quick under pressure as the men from the old country had been, not as driven or alienated; and Bonanno believed that just as Italian prizefighters were now declining after years of prominence in the American ring, so too would the Italian and Sicilian gangsters soon be replaced by a tougher breed of men. Twice during the past year Bonanno had heard his captains complain that soldiers had asked to be relieved of an assignment because they had to be with their wives on that particular evening.

The younger members, or the associate members—those men awaiting a family vacancy or commission approval of their initiation—were too often the dregs of the second generation, the element left behind at the bottom of the barrel. They were not suited to an executive career in the legitimate world—such as Notaro’s son, who became a lawyer, or Lucchese’s son, who graduated from West Point and helped to run his father’s large garment manufacturing business—nor were they sufficiently authoritative and shrewd and motivated to become a Mafia don. And so if they gained admission into a Mafia family, perhaps having had a father or uncle who had been a member, they usually spent the best years of their lives taking orders from aging superiors, doing the dirty work as gunmen and hijackers; or they worked as managers of nightclubs, as second-echelon labor organizers, or overseers of numbers networks and bookmaking rings. In any case, they would never acquire the qualities of leadership that Bonanno sought in the younger generation; in fact, in his whole organization there was perhaps only one individual he considered bright enough, bold enough—and trustworthy enough—to someday become a don, and that was the person about whom he had the most reservations, his son Bill.

Bill Bonanno at this time had just moved East from Arizona to tidy up his problems with Rosalie and to help look after his father’s interests while his father kept on the move to escape the notoriety of the Valachi testimony and other rumblings rising out of rumors linking him to Magliocco’s alleged scheme to murder Lucchese and Gambino for their part in the Gallo brothers’ revolt. While Joseph Bonanno was comforted by his son’s presence in New York and was relieved of various responsibilities, he regretted that his son was now becoming more deeply involved in the management affairs of the secret society at a time when the elder Bonanno saw grave problems ahead. And he was even more apprehensive, and yet strangely proud, when he was informed in Canada in February 1964 that his captains, following his suggestion, had held a meeting to elect an officer to take over the number three position vacated by John Tartamella, who had just suffered another stroke that left him partially paralyzed and restricted him to a wheel chair. Tartamella’s successor was his son Bill.

The number three job in a Mafia family, often referred to as the
consigliere
or counselor, was an advisory as well as strategy-planning position that coordinated the proposals and tactics emanating from the captains and presented these to the boss and underboss for final approval. While the scope of the
consigliere
varied from family to family, depending largely on the management style of the boss—in some families the
consigliere
was merely an amiable confessor, in others he was a strong buffer between the two top men and the rest of the subordinates—the
consigliere
in the Bonanno family was of real significance, was perhaps more important than even the underboss, because of the closeness between father and son. It meant that the underboss, John Morale—who had recently been appointed by Bonanno to take over for the retired Garofalo—was now almost a supernumerary, since the captains and crews would assume that what Bill Bonanno said or did had the approval of his father. Thus the role of Morale, who would normally be the boss’s spokesman in the boss’s absence, was diminished.

But if John Morale was upset by this, he gave no hint of it at the secret meeting of the captains; in fact, he, together with Labruzzo and Notaro, strongly supported Bill Bonanno’s nomination as
consigliere
after it had been proposed in a loquacious speech delivered in Sicilian by the patriarchal Angelo Caruso, an old intimate of Maranzano. Caruso had used the nomination speech to recall at length the tradition of the Bonannos in Sicily and to recount the three decades of outstanding leadership in New York under Joseph Bonanno, whom he referred to reverentially as Don Peppino; and nothing would be more appropriate, Caruso continued, than to elevate to the rank of leadership the courageous young man who bore the same name and heritage.

The response to Caruso’s suggestion was unanimous except for one man, Gaspar Di Gregorio, who could not conceal the look of disappointment on his face. For a moment he seemed stunned, speechless. Then he recovered his composure, stood before his fellow captains and made a motion that the nomination be seconded. And it was.

It was not until many months later that the depth of Di Gregorio’s disapproval became known to the membership in the Bonanno family. Joseph Bonanno learned of it from his friend Peter Magaddino, who had left Buffalo in 1964 and returned to live in New York. Bonanno was also in New York in the fall of 1964, having abandoned Canada after a summer of problems with the immigration authorities. Di Gregorio was embittered; but besides that, Bonanno heard, Stefano Magaddino was now using the unhappiness of his brother-in-law as an excuse to force Joseph Bonanno into coming before the commission to explain the -procedure by which Bill Bonanno had been selected and to respond to charges that the nomination had been so quickly contrived that no other member had had a chance. Joseph Bonanno believed that these charges were false, and in any case he did not intend to appear before his fellow commissioners to explain a situation that was none of their business.

Another part of Stefano Magaddino’s strategy, Bonanno heard, was the spreading of stories that disparaged the character of Bill Bonanno and focused upon his controversial past—his Arizona mistress and the child, Rosalie’s alleged suicide attempt, his being in Magliocco’s car when the contract was given for the murder of Gambino and Lucchese. If these and other issues were successfully exploited by Magaddino, the commission might recognize as valid the objection to the younger Bonanno’s elevation to
consigliere
, and then the elder Bonanno might be pressed to defend his son and to answer other questions as well—Joseph Bonanno would be on the defensive, which was precisely where Magaddino wanted him to be.

Joseph Bonanno had much to answer for, in Magaddino’s view: Bonanno had lived safely and elusively for years, skillfully side-stepping the government and the commission while other dons had squirmed uncomfortably in the public eye. Magaddino felt uneasy about Bonanno’s presence in Canada, circulating close to Magaddino’s territory that was centered in Toronto, and Magaddino also suspected, as he had for years, that Joseph Bonanno was slowly angling to take over the entire underworld, to become the boss of bosses. Having placed his organization under his son, Joseph Bonanno was now free to float around the country to rally support for his higher ambition. It was a propitious time for such dreaming, for there was suddenly a power vacuum in New York. Vito Genovese, sixty-seven, was serving a fifteen-year term in prison, and the Genovese family was without a strong successor. The Profaci family, not yet disembroiled from its internal difficulties, was reportedly under a new untested leader named Joseph Colombo. Although the plot to eliminate Gambino and Lucchese had failed, there was no guaranteeing that another attempt would not be made. The big bosses in other cities—Giancana of Chicago, Zerilli of Detroit, Bruno of Philadelphia—either were facing jail terms or were inhibited by the close scrutiny of the police. Magaddino himself could not wander far from his front door without attracting patrol cars, which followed his every move.

But with the help of his brother-in-law in New York—the despondent Di Gregorio—Magaddino saw a way of neutralizing Bonanno’s position by splintering the family. Magaddino began by sending coded messages to Di Gregorio to boycott Bonanno family meetings, inasmuch as Bonanno had repeatedly ignored the commission’s request that he meet with its representatives. Di Gregorio was later informed that Bonanno and the son were due to be suspended from leadership, and Di Gregorio was to organize an anti-Bonanno group among the members which the commission would support and protect from reprisals. A few dozen members responded immediately, and many more men joined Di Gregorio’s faction when the commission, working through the labor unions in which it had influence in New York and New Jersey, ordered all of Bonanno’s soldiers who were on the payroll as union workers or officials to be deprived of earnings unless they affiliated themselves with Di Gregorio. Despite the economic squeeze, most members continued to be loyal to Bonanno through the fall of 1964; and Bonanno stubbornly refused to meet with the commission, insisting that it had no authority to interfere in his affairs. He was aware that if he agreed to a meeting he might be setting himself up to be “hit.”

So he kept on the move through the month of October as rival gangs tried to learn where he was living and as the government sought to bring him before the federal grand jury to testify. But his exact whereabouts remained a mystery until the dramatic announcement of October 22 that he had been kidnaped the night before by two gunmen on Park Avenue and was presumed to be dead.

Then nineteen months later, after an attempt on his son’s life had failed and with the underworld as tense as ever, Joseph Bonanno had made his remarkable reappearance. Now, free on $150,000 bail, he was living at his son’s home in East Meadow, Long Island. It was spring and the flowers and trees were in bloom along Tyler Avenue, and Bonanno’s four young grandchildren played on the swing in the yard under the watchful eye of bodyguards who squinted through the lace-curtained windows. Occasionally an automobile would pull into the driveway, and men would be admitted into the house to confer briefly with Bonanno in the living room, speaking softly before the sound of the ever-playing stereo. Then the men would leave, and the children would receive Joseph Bonanno’s full attention, being bounced on his knee, being held high in his arms. Sometimes neighbors would stop on the front lawn and attempt to get a look at the man who had received so much publicity; but he did not venture outdoors, and, except for visits of various men during the day, there was nothing about the quiet ranch-style house that would mark it as the new headquarters of the Bonanno organization.

J
OSEPH
B
ONANNO, HIS EYES HALF-CLOSED, RECLINED IN A
soft chair in the living room listening to the soothing sounds of Mantovani on the stereo. He wore a gray zippered cashmere sweater over his tan silk shirt; his feet, shod in doeskin Indian slippers from Arizona, hung limply over a footstool, and within easy reach on a small table was a snifter of brandy. It was nearly three in the afternoon, a mild cloudy day in the middle of June, and Joseph Bonanno was getting a few moments of rest before having to get up, put on a tie, and greet the arriving guests.

Rosalie, after spending the last two hours in the kitchen with her mother preparing dinner for a dozen people, was now moving about the dining room in a sullen mood, rattling the stacks of dishes she carried and the silverware in a way she hoped would distract the burly bodyguard, Carl Simari, who sat smoking a cigar at one end of the table reading a newspaper spread out before him. She wished that Simari would take himself and his smelly cigar into another room or, better yet, would go out to the patio where the children were watching her husband light the charcoal burner. But no subtle hints were getting through to Carl Simari on this afternoon, and Rosalie did not yet feel that she could complain openly—her father-in-law and his men had been living there less than a month—still, she did not know how much more she could take. Since their arrival in May, it had been a daily routine of endless cooking, of men coming and going at odd hours, sometimes taking naps on her sofa; and she was often awakened in the middle of the night by the sound of heavy snoring soaring up from the basement where the bodyguards slept on cots directly below her own bedroom.

She preferred to believe that the snoring was not coming from Carl Simari, who, despite his cigars and the moments of minor irritation he caused her, she found to be ruggedly handsome, with interesting blue eyes and an engaging manner, a man who was not above looking after the children once in a while, during which time they behaved ideally. The supersnorer, she believed, was probably none other than her father-in-law’s old sidekick, Peter Magaddino, a stocky man with a sizable nose and a gravel voice who chain-smoked all day, alternating between Marlboros and Kents, and doubtless had difficulty breathing at night. What made Magaddino’s snoring particularly bothersome was not that it was loud, which it was, but rather that it lacked a familiarizing rhythm, a consistent noise pattern that one could eventually adjust to. Sometimes his snoring would be punctuated by abrupt snorts and gasps, at other times it was characterized by elongated flowing sounds under which could be heard elaborate little hisses and whistles. Not surprisingly, her husband was never disturbed by it; nor, she was sure, was her father-in-law, the sole occupant of the guest room down the hall, out of range.

As if by agreement, the men appeared for breakfast each morning at precisely 8:40. This was ten minutes after Rosalie’s three sons left for school. During this reprieve, she usually managed, though not always, to clear the children’s dishes, to release two-year-old Felippa from the high chair, and to reset the table for the second shift. The men were invariably cheerful in the morning, clear-eyed, smelling of her husband’s Aqua Velva, and usually fully dressed in business suits and ties. They looked like commuters, except that they did not commute. Their completeness in dress, which reflected the propriety of her father-in-law, who would never have tolerated his men appearing in front of Rosalie in their bathrobes, meant that she too was influenced by the demands of modesty, and she therefore did not venture beyond her bedroom door in her robe, or display her hair in curlers, or reveal her legs uncovered by hose. The sense of formality and preciseness reminded her of her days in the convent, and she recognized, beneath her irritation, a feeling that was strangely comforting.

Although she had been married to Bill for nearly ten years, she still regarded her father-in-law as a distant, almost occult, figure, one whom she most comfortably referred to not as Dad but as Mister B. Having assumed until recently that he was dead and having prayed for the redemption of his soul, she now could not quite take casually his presence around the house. He moved quietly, spoke softly, was immaculate about his appearance, orderly in every way. She had never known him to lose his composure or to utter a word of profanity. Everything on the top of his bedroom bureau was carefully arranged, as were the clothes in his closet, which she imagined was one of the habits he passed down to her husband. Both men stuffed the shoes they were not wearing with wooden shoe trees, both adorned their pinky fingers with beautiful rings, neither man smoked cigarettes.

By ten thirty each morning, her husband and Carl Simari usually left the house for some unknown destination, possibly to make phone calls, and as Rosalie cleaned up in the kitchen or changed Felippa’s diapers, she could overhear the conversation in the living room. Her father-in-law and Peter Magaddino, having read
The New York Times
that was delivered each morning to the door, were often engrossed in discussions about the latest news, about which they were keenly interested but emotionally detached. They sometimes talked about the war in Vietnam, but not in the passionate, contemporary terms that she heard on the television debates. To her father-in-law and Peter Magaddino, Vietnam was just another invasion in many centuries of invasions, a situation in which official governments professing peace at home committed atrocities beyond their borders, and justified it. It was an old story.

Oddly, though the word “Mafia” was in newspaper headlines nearly every day, she never heard mention of it in conversations around the house. If and when the men were dealing with the subject, it was obscured in such a way that she was never sure what they were specifically discussing. They seemed to have a language all their own; it was a mixture of certain English phrases and Sicilian phrases that, though she understood Sicilian, she could not translate, and she assumed that they had turned their vocabulary around in such a way that necessitated being familiar with things other than those expressed in order to achieve understanding.

What she could understand and enjoyed overhearing were the lengthy reminiscences of her father-in-law and Peter Magaddino about their youth in Castellammare, their student days in Palermo, and the elder Bonanno’s nautical training and his dreams of piloting a great sinking ship and dying a captain’s death. He seemed as preoccupied with death as the eighteenth-century English poets she had read in school, and more than once he expressed the wish that he would live long enough to return once more to Castellammare to visit his parents’ grave. He was remarkably unembarrassed at admitting to certain fears and doubts, even in front of her, although she concluded that this was probably his way of trying to convince her that he was as normal as anyone else and was not the mystical creature she might imagine him to be or the murderous monster that was portrayed in the press.

Still, she felt shy and awkward when she was alone with him, confused by so many things about him. He was so unlike her own diffident father, nor was he like her more blusterous uncles, Magliocco and Joseph Profaci, whose notoriety in the newspapers was so carefully clipped and concealed from her innocent eyes. Joseph Bonanno seemed open, proud of what he was, except Rosalie did not know exactly what he was. She would sometimes see his softly smiling photograph in
The New York Times
resting on the breakfast table, a celebrity of sorts given equal space with General de Gaulle and the president of General Motors. Occasionally she heard the Bonanno name referred to on WINS’ radio news show that was played continuously through the day, items concerning private wars, midnight shootings on the streets of Brooklyn, missing bodies. Then she would hear her father-in-law’s gentle voice coming from the living room, would see him sitting comfortably across from Peter Magaddino and recalling, as might old men in a cafe, the simple pleasures of the past. And then her children would return from school, would run toward their grandfather, embracing him warmly, freely, feeling none of the restraint and confusion that she felt.

She was neither so naïve nor personally unaware to fail to admit privately that some of her reservations about him were based on envy, envy of that part of his relationship with her husband that excluded her. She was also deeply resentful of the ruinous effect that that relationship had on Bill, although the degree that she felt this varied from day to day. There were moments when she truly hated her father-in-law for failing to keep his son out of his world. At other times she was not ashamed of his way of life or Bill’s—the larger world outside, blind to its own worst ills, used such men as the Bonannos as its scapegoats. Bill had said this, and she believed him. Yet she frequently wished that she and her children were free of the pressure of being a Bonanno. She wished that he children could be spared the embarrassment of going to school and hearing from other students that their father was a gangster, an event that had not occurred but was sure to happen when they were a bit older. She also wished that, at the age of thirty, she did not contemplate and fear the prospect of widowhood, and also see it as a certain escape.

It would be an escape not only from the strange men coming and going in her house but also from her father-in-law who somehow created tension within her by merely speaking to her for a few moments. When he asked her a question she felt the necessity of answering intelligently, wisely, carefully—it was almost as if she were being tested. She remembered hearing her husband speak of his days as a schoolboy and how his father would sometimes help Bill and his sister Catherine with their homework—and then, days later, when they least expected it, their father would suddenly quiz them, demanding the precise answer to the lessons they had studied a few nights before. Rosalie was also conscious, when speaking with her father-in-law, of the possibility that he would detect any sign of insincerity in her words, her private thoughts about him, her mixed emotions. And thus she marveled at the ease with which her eight-year-old son, Charles, responded to Joseph Bonanno’s teaching him Italian. Each evening at the dinner table, if there were not other guests, Charles sat next to his grandfather and proudly recited an Italian prayer of thanks which the elder Bonanno had taught him.

All the places at dinner were somehow prearranged, as if there were place cards: Joseph Bonanno and Bill sat at either end of the table; to the elder Bonanno’s left was Charles, and next to Charles sat his six-year-old brother, Joseph, and to the left of young Joseph was Rosalie. Between Rosalie and Bill was the baby Felippa, and on Bill’s right was Carl Simari. On Simari’s left was Bill’s third son, Salvatore, not quite three and a half, and next to him was Peter Magaddino.

Young Salvatore had insisted from the beginning that he be allowed to sit between the thick-armed bodyguards, whose rugged features attracted him, or so it was interpreted by Bill Bonanno, who believed that Salvatore was by nature a tough, strong-willed little boy, and that if any of his sons would follow in his footsteps, it would be Tory. Charles, the adopted son, seemed too easygoing and unrebellious for a life outside the legitimate system. The six-year-old, Joseph, thin and weak from childhood ailments, was intense, alert, and bright in school—he was Bill’s top candidate in the family for a full-time legitimate career. Tory was different in that he was bold and fearless, was unafraid of the dark, was always into some household mischief, and was already trying to give orders to his older brothers.

When Bill looked at Tory, he was reminded of his own childhood photographs—the boy had large brown eyes, broad shoulders, and a round innocent-looking face that belied a quick temper. Bill sometimes admitted, though never to Rosalie, that if Tory became a mafioso in twenty years or so—if there was a Mafia then; Bill had his doubts—he would not be disappointed. Bill would not concede, even to himself, that what he did in life was morally wrong. He was no more wrong than an American combat officer in the jungles of Southeast Asia or at the Berlin Wall—except that his main enemy at the moment was not Ho Chi Minh or the Soviets but the Mafia’s national commission. If his son Tory someday believed that there was an issue worth fighting for, and risking his life for, then Bill thought that his son should fight and take his chances.

Bill had high hopes for Tory. So did Simari and Peter Magaddino, who liked to wrestle on the rug with Tory, tease him a bit, and watch his temper flare up. Magaddino could always provoke Tory by referring to him as a little girl, sometimes calling him Josephine. “You have a brother named Joseph, and your name is Josephine,” Magaddino would say, as Tory would frown and make threatening gestures with his little fist. One evening before dinner when Magaddino called him Josephine, Tory suddenly dropped his pants to the floor, grabbed his penis, thrust it at Magaddino and said, “
I’m
not a little girl!”

As the guests arrived for Sunday dinner, Joseph Bonanno, wearing a white shirt and gray silk tie, stood greeting them as they entered the living room. Bill was outside on the patio stoking the charcoal fire, and he had not heard the front doorbell ringing because his son Charles was noisily hammering nails, constructing a small shed out of orange crates. Bill was proud of Charles’s skill at carpentry. It was the one thing, the only thing, that Charles excelled at, and Bill did not have the heart to complain about the noise, although it was slowly giving him a headache.

Carl Simari, who had opened the door and escorted the people into the living room, was now back at the dining room table, sitting in Joseph Bonanno’s place, reading the Sunday
Times
and smoking a cigar. Simari believed in smoking a cigar until the lighted end almost burned his lips, and, having reached that point now, he crushed the butt into an ashtray and was about to light up a fresh cigar when, from the kitchen, Rosalie appeared with two bottles of wine for him to uncork. Simari took the wine but, before removing the corks, he lit the new cigar.