Honor Thy Father (42 page)

Bill was the central attraction at the bar, and he was reminded of the days when he had his own club in Phoenix, the Romulus, and he lived in a house on Camelback Mountain that had a swimming pool and six telephones. That was back in 1961, two years before he had left Phoenix in an embittered mood and with the lingering memory of patrol cars parked outside the Romulus and the police interrogating the customers each night as they left. But now he felt good about being back, surrounded by those who accepted him; and, on leaving, the proprietor shook his hand and asked him to stop in again on his return to Phoenix. Bill said he would. It was like old times; the old mystique was still there.

Bill woke up late the next morning, and after breakfast in the coffee shop, he went for a swim in the motel’s pool. It was a warm sunny day in Phoenix and he felt refreshed after the swim. Later, as he sat under an umbrella at poolside relaxing with the previous day’s edition of
The New York Times
, the cool and pleasant feeling began to leave him as he read the text of President Nixon’s anti-Mafia speech. The story of the speech was at the top of page one under the headline
NIXON REQUESTS WIDE u.s. POWERS TO COMBAT MAFIA
, and it was featured above a story announcing the seizure of the Biafran capital by Nigerian troops, and above the North Korean government’s castigation of Nixon for continuing to send American spy planes over North Korean territory and for permitting American forces in South Korea to fire heavy weapons into areas in violation of the Korean armistice agreement. Although Bill Bonanno was familiar with the high points of Nixon’s speech from yesterday’s radio reports and the local press, the thrust of the President’s attack seemed somehow more preponderant in the sober gray columns of the
Times
. As Bill read and reread certain paragraphs from the text, he became irritated by its naïveté and somewhat defensive. To the president’s statement that “many decent Americans contribute regularly, voluntarily, and unwittingly to the coffers of organized crime,” Bill Bonanno objected to the term
unwittingly
, convinced that anyone who dealt with a bookmaker was well aware of what was going on. In fact, the horseplayer or numbers bettor had to take the initiative to place an illegal bet, had to seek out the bookie, an individual who did not advertise and who was wary of customers he did not know personally or had not met through a trustworthy contact.

To the president’s statement that the Mafia’s victims included such divergent groups as the suburban housewife and the college student, the secretary and the bricklayer, and “the middle-class businessman enticed into paying usurious loan rates,” Bonanno again took exception to the term
enticed
and he also wondered if the president knew that most citizens who sought money from loan sharks were individuals who had failed to pay off debts in the past, were wheeler-dealer types and chronic gamblers, were the sort who would accept money and agree to the terms and then, rather than pay it back would go to the police and inform on the loan shark. If the so-called victims of loan sharks were reliable people, Bill thought, they would undoubtedly have found a banker at Bankers Trust, or a friend at Chase Manhattan, or a benefactor in government, and would not have sought out a loan shark in Harlem or Brooklyn.

The general tone of the president’s speech that Bonanno quarreled with was the notion that most of the citizens who contributed to the multibillion-dollar crime industry were mindless individuals who had no will of their own, no responsibility for their own acts, they were innocent and pure and had been corrupted by mobsters. Among those “corrupted” in the president’s speech were the police who took bribes, as if the mob had to force money into the pocket of the policeman. There was also the suggestion that illegal gambling flourished because the public was “apathetic,” when in fact, Bill felt that the public found nothing immoral in such gambling, it being the one form that they could easily afford; they could wager a few dollars every day of the week and still find it cheaper than the expense of one afternoon at Aqueduct or a night at the trotters. Also if they hit the number or scored heavily with the bookie, they could avoid the taxes, it being one of the few loopholes for the workingman who could not write off winter business trips to Florida that coincided with the opening of Hialeah.

By the middle of the afternoon Bill was on the road to Tucson, driving for two hours over a desert highway at great speed, seeing no cars behind him and nothing around him but cactus plants, distant mesas, and wide stretches of copper-colored sand reflecting in the sun. Though he drove with the windows up and the air-conditioner turned to “super cool,” he could feel the intense desert heat from memory, recalling the many afternoons that he had spent as a boy following his father’s instructions and sitting with his left ear cocked toward the sun to stop the draining, and he reminded himself now that Arizona no longer offered any cure for his problems—it merely seemed to add to them.

His Tucson visits in recent years had invariably produced confrontations with the police, and during his last extended stay he was arrested twice and was blown out of a tree by bomb blasts. Although there had been no explosions since September 1968, seven months ago, the FBI and the police had failed so far to identify the bombers, not even the woman Bill saw throwing a package of dynamite from a car as it cruised past his father’s home last summer. Perhaps his father now had new information, Bill thought, and maybe that was what he was attempting to convey during the incomprehensible telephone talk a few days ago.

As Bill approached the city he could feel his muscles tensing; the long road trip from San Jose had been marvelously relaxing, but now with his destination in sight he felt his freedom constricted, and slowing down below the speed limit he automatically began to dart glances at the rearview mirror. It was not only being in Tucson that alerted him, but approaching his father, returning to live for even a few days in a house where he would become again the son, subjected to another man’s rules, even a man whom he deeply loved; his reaction being new, he did not pretend to understand it fully, for he had felt it only occasionally and briefly since his father’s reappearance in 1966. It might have evolved out of their sudden and increased interdependence on one another after the years of separate solidarity in better times, but Bill was aware that he was now more self-conscious in his father’s presence, more on guard.

Nearing his father’s house on the corner of East Elm Street, Bill saw his younger brother Joseph leaning against a car parked at the curb talking with a few girls and young friends. Bill waved as he passed, noticing Joseph’s long hair and thinking how characteristic that before leaving San Jose he had had his own hair cut. As he turned the corner to enter the garage, his father came out to greet him, and the watchdog was barking.

The elder Bonanno was deeply tanned, and his bright dark eyes and silver-gray hair accentuated his handsome features. He wore tan linen trousers, Indian moccasins, and a green knit turtleneck shirt through which could be seen the outline of a gold medal and chain around his neck. Bill was pleased and surprised at how well he looked. Bill noticed that the portions of the brick wall that had been destroyed by bombs had now been rebuilt, and he also noticed, after entering the house and kissing his mother, that certain furniture had been rearranged and that his father’s office was undergoing a kind of spring cleaning—books were stacked on the floor, drawers were open, and on top of the desk were framed photographs, documents from the filing cabinet, several old photo albums, personal mementos and letters.

“Look,” his father said, leading Bill by the arm into the office, “I want to show you something I found.” The elder Bonanno flipped through a pile of papers and, smiling, held up a report card from his grammar school days more than a half century ago. Pointing to a grade in arithmetic, he announced, “Ninety-eight,” and he added in what was typical of his humor, “not bad for an Italian.”

Bill also saw several photographs showing his father posing with politicians, priests, and Tucson businessmen at banquets years ago, and there was one large inscribed photograph of a powerful minister in the Italian government named Bernardo Mattarella, a native of Castellammare and a boyhood friend of Joseph Bonanno. There were photographs, too, of the elder Bonanno’s parents, and on the wall a framed map of Castellammare, and a small colored postcard that Bonanno had recently received showing an aerial view of the Sicilian town as it looks today. “Castellammare has not changed at all,” Joseph Bonanno said, “and that is what I like about it, and why I wish that before I die I could see it once more. How nice it is to go back to the place where you were young and to see that it has not changed.”

Bill excused himself a moment and went into his bedroom to unpack the small suitcase that he carried. The room was now as it had been when he lived in this house twenty years ago, and the window next to his bed was secured by the lock that he had occasionally unhitched in the middle of the night when sneaking out to keep a date with a young woman whom he had never dared to introduce to his father. In such situations Bill behaved so differently than his brother Joseph did, who made no secret of his private life, coming and going as he wished, and if the elder Bonanno objected, Joseph Jr. would express indignation and would argue with his father in ways that Bill never would have done, and would still not do. His twenty-three-year-old brother had essentially grown up without a father, for the elder Bonanno was on the move so much during young Joseph’s formative years, although young Joseph did carry the burden of the name. Once, in military school, Joseph took a swing at an instructor who asked while reprimanding him: “Are you going to grow up to become a gangster like your father?” Joseph soon left that school without protest from the faculty, and in recent years, failing to complete college, he divided his time between bronco riding and car racing, managing a rock group and having his own difficulties with the law.

A year ago in Beverly Hills he and the twenty-two-year-old son of Peter Licavoli of Detroit and Tucson were arrested on suspicion of car theft and armed robbery, an incident that made national headlines but was later dismissed for lack of evidence. The car was registered to Sam Perrone, and Joseph Jr. complained after the case that the Los Angeles police had been tailing him constantly, trying to provoke an incident. It would not be difficult for the police to provoke Joseph because, as Bill knew, his brother was very sensitive to caustic remarks or innuendos from the authorities, and with the anti-Mafia campaign so rampant in the nation now, particularly in Tucson, it was inevitable that Joseph Bonanno, Jr., would have problems.

Bill often thought that it would be better if Joseph left Tucson, but he had no idea where he might go to settle down; he had already left home once or twice after disputes with his father, and these had been bitter experiences for the elder Bonanno, who after Joseph’s departure would ritualistically remove all pictures of his youngest son from the wall and would turn facedown those that were on bureaus or tables.

While Joseph had many girl friends, one a tobacco heiress from North Carolina, he had so far terminated every relationship that might have led to marriage, which pleased his mother. She liked having him home. Joseph’s interest in car racing, which had once kept him traveling, now seemed to have subsided although Joseph still kept his trophies on display in the house. Perhaps one reason that Joseph had stopped, which might also partially explain why he was now living with his parents, was that his driver’s license had been suspended after his conviction on eleven traffic violations. Bill remembered hearing that when the motor vehicle inspector came to the Bonanno home looking for Joseph, the inspector was attacked by the German shepherd, who bit him on the leg, thereby producing another summons for the Bonanno family. It was the second such summons for the dog, and Bill thought that the animal was a very compatible pet.

In the living room, Bill joined his parents for a drink. It was close to dinner time now, and Mrs. Bonanno turned on more lights, including those that focused on the painted protraits of herself and her husband that hung on the wall behind the television set. Bill noticed that his father had smiled for the artist in the same serene way that he had for so many newspaper photographers, while his mother’s portrait was more formal, her dark eyes and lean face pensive if not melancholy and her hair less gray than it was now. Still, Bill thought, his mother had now regained the poise that she had temporarily lost during the bombing incidents of last summer, and she also was spry and quick as she moved about the room.

The conversation in the living room was general, centered around references to Bill’s children in San Jose and the forthcoming wedding in June of Rosalie’s sister Josephine—which Mrs. Bonanno, who was Josephine’s godmother, planned to attend. Then Bill remembered that he had brought with him a book about the Mafia, called
Theft of the Nation
, that his father had wanted to read; the book was written by a professor of sociology named Donald R. Cressey, who had been a national crime consultant in Washington. The elder Bonanno, like his son, read books about organized crime as avidly as people in show business read
Variety;
and while Joseph Bonanno believed that much of the reporting about the Mafia was fictitious he nonetheless was interested in references to himself, a subject that he did not find unfascinating.

In handing the book to his father, Bill indicated that his father came off perhaps better than most who were mentioned in the book, although Bill knew that there was a reprint of an FBI transcript quoting a Rhode Island don as saying that the elder Bonanno “was the cause of his own downfall because he was so greedy.” Joseph Bonanno inspected the book’s black jacket momentarily, the red letters of the title on top and below a white drawing of the Capitol dome in Washington smeared with big black fingerprints obviously meant to represent the Mafia. Bonanno smiled softly, shook his head. He flipped through the book, noting that it contained no photographs but that it did contain charts of the five New York “families” that were organized after the Castellammarese War in 1931. Of the five charter member dons of 1931 in New York—Luciano, Mangano, Gagliano, Joseph Profaci, and Joseph Bonanno—only Bonanno was still alive. Bonanno placed the book gently on the table next to his chair, thanking Bill for bringing it. Bill was almost sorry that he had, for on page 156 there was an insulting reference to himself; the author had reported Bill as being “rather stupid and eccentric,” which prompted Bill to conclude that Cressey was rather stupid and eccentric, but Bill did not cite the reference to his father.