Honor Thy Father (55 page)

“Is there anything you want to add to that, Mr. Notaro?” asked the judge.

“No, Your Honor.”

“Let me ask a few questions. The presentence report shows that you are fifty-six years of age, is that right?”

Before Notaro could reply, Kasanof remembered something he had forgotten a moment before, and he said: “Your Honor, let me say that there was some significant question about who was in which car and where what weapons were recovered [in Montreal, November 1966], and that case was disposed of by a plea with the anticipation of a prompt deportation from Canada.”

“Well, that may be,” said the judge. Then, turning to Notaro, he asked, “But are you now saying you were not guilty of the charge, but that you pleaded guilty in order to be deported in a hurry? Is that about what you are saying?”

“It is not far,” Kasanof interjected. “There was a close question there, Your Honor. I don’t think that it is a major matter. I am trying to give Your Honor a fair picture of what had transpired.”

“I am only trying to make sure that in passing sentence I am not being influenced by any misinformation, that is all,” said Judge Mansfield. “I don’t think—let me add quickly—that the Probation Department would ever consciously put anything in that was a misstatement, but I want to make absolutely sure.”

“I am sure they wouldn’t,” Kasanof quickly agreed, “and that is not the thrust of my remarks. The defendant tells me that the car in which he was there were no weapons. In the other car, which was in proximity, there were, apparently, some weapons. All of the participants were charged together and they all pleaded guilty and were promptly thereafter deported.”

“Now I also see,” the judge said, looking at the document, “that it shows as pending this case down in Tucson charging conspiracy to obstruct justice, but I understand that has ended with an acquittal?”

“Yes, Your Honor,” said Notaro.

“Is that the same case?” the judge asked, referring to the one in which Notaro and the elder Bonanno had been charged by the FBI with plotting to get Battaglia’s sentence reduced in Leavenworth prison.

“That is the same case,” Kasanof said. “That was a jury acquittal on the direct merits.”

“All right,” the judge said, putting the document aside, and looking at the men who stood before him and also at the spectators in the courtroom. “I have given quite a lot of thought to this. And with respect to the defendant Bonanno you stand convicted on fifty-five counts of three different crimes, conspiracy, and then the use of the Diners’ Club card, and, finally, perjury before the grand jury. With all due respect to what your counsel has so eloquently said on your behalf, I don’t think that you are a victim of circumstances.

“You have had a relatively good education,” the judge said, speaking slowly, directly at Bill. “You have had comforts provided you in your youth, and there is hardly any excuse for the type of conduct of which you were found guilty here. This was a case where you didn’t just yield to a passing temptation but over a period of time engaged in pretty extensive fraudulent use of this card. There is no indication of any economic compulsion. You are not the product of a ghetto. I don’t see that because of the family relationships to which Mr. Krieger referred you were under any great handicap that required you to use these cards. You could have gotten a job. There was no need to do what you did.

“Furthermore,” the judge continued, as Bill stood thinking that the sentence was going to be a long one, “the record shows that this, apparently, is not exactly an isolated use. You have used another card of Levine, the evidence in the case showed, and then there is this reference to the use of the rental car, which you say was paid for, but I don’t know whether it was completely paid for. You also have a prior record of passing a bad check and your conduct in the use of a weapon as charged and of which you were found guilty, as well as the circumstances surrounding your being in Montreal, all indicate a proclivity toward antisocial conduct.

“I have given a lot of thought to it,” the judge repeated, as the tension was building within Bill, his mind racing with anticipation, though his face showed nothing, “and I have decided, after listening to counsel, that the sentence in the case of the defendant Salvatore V. Bonanno is that it is adjudged that he be committed to the custody of the Attorney General or his authorized representative for a term of four years on counts 1 through 55, the sentences to run concurrently. In addition it is adjudged that the defendant pay a fine to the United States pursuant to his conviction on count 1 of $10,000. That is the sentence of the court. The fine is a committed fine.”

Bill, almost breathless, had been waiting for more years to be added on, and when the judge turned to Notaro, Bill could barely conceal the sense of relief that he felt, the ecstatic and grateful realization that it would be
four
years and not
ten
as he had almost become resigned to and not the lifetime in prison that had been predicted for him by some people he knew. Four years!—he thought, trying to concentrate on what Judge Mansfield was saying to Notaro: “… it seems to me that there are different influences in your case. You didn’t have the advantages that the defendant Bonanno had. You have had a fairly hard life. You haven’t had the education, and the part you played in these crimes was, without minimizing the crimes, a relatively minor part. You were going along—and I have no doubt well aware of what was being done. You, as I recall the evidence, participated in obtaining airline tickets at the Tucson Airport from the American Airlines representative there by signing the name of Torrillo, and using his card…. There was evidence that you had opened up an account under ‘Peter Joseph,’ as I recall it. After considering the whole picture and the fact that your record is limited to this one instance in Quebec, the sentence of the court will be that you are committed to the custody of the Attorney General or his duly authorized representative for a term of one year, and you are adjudged to pay a fine to the United States in the sum of $1,000.” Notaro lowered his head slightly. He was neither pleased nor disappointed; he had thought that there was a chance of an acquittal, but he accepted the judge’s verdict and was relieved that the situation, the suspense, and was finally over.

“Your Honor,” Krieger said, “I have a notice of appeal here in the courtroom which I would request my client file immediately upon leaving Your Honor’s presence. I would also ask on his behalf, Your Honor, for a fixation of bail pending appeal. The defendant presently is at large on a surety bond in the sum of $15,000,1 believe it is, Your Honor. There has never been any problem whatsoever in the defendant’s appearance here in response to the court’s directions and in response to the mandates of the court and, needless to say, he was here for sentence, Your Honor.”

“Your Honor,” said Phillips, “I take it that the same application is made on behalf of Mr. Notaro?”

“Yes, sir,” said Kasanof.

“I would like to address myself to both applications at this time,” Phillips said. “The government opposes the applications for the following reasons: Your Honor has just imposed a substantial prison sentence on Mr. Bonanno and also, Your Honor, on Mr. Notaro. Although Mr. Bonanno has appeared every time he was required to do so, this prison sentence does substantially increase the likelihood that he will not appear at the time that he is required to start serving the sentence…”

The judge, however, disagreed and he said he would continue the defendants in their present bail on two conditions: “First, if there comes to the attention of the court any indication whatsoever that they are threatening, expressly or impliedly, any third persons or witnesses, the government may immediately apply for an increase in bail pending appeal; secondly, I do so on the condition that there will be a diligent prosecution of the appeal so that we do not find, as I have found in some cases, that years go by before the adjudication of the court ever become effective.”

The defendants and their attorneys expressed agreement, and after the judge dismissed them, they thanked him and left the courtroom. In the corridor, newspaper reporters asked Bill what he thought of the sentence, but before he could reply Krieger stepped in to say that there would be no comment and that the decision would be appealed. While they questioned. Krieger further, Bill pressed the elevator button and stood waiting with Notaro. Notaro smiled and seemed satisfied, and although he said nothing, Bill was sure that Notaro held no ill feelings toward him because of the credit card case. Notaro was not a complainer. As the judge had said in the final remarks, Notaro’s life had not been easy; and Notaro, who had long ago adjusted to that fact, was not the sort of man who would be shattered or disillusioned by a higher authority’s verdict that he should spend a year in jail.

As the elevator arrived, Krieger quickly left the reporters and departed behind Bill, Notaro, and Kasanof. It was after one o’clock, and they decided to have a leisurely lunch and a few drinks, and as they walked down the stone steps of the federal courthouse they were almost in a festive mood. It was over, the dreaded case was over, and Bill admitted to Krieger that the judge’s sentence could have been a lot worse. Krieger quickly agreed and was pleased that Bill was looking at the brighter side of the situation. Krieger was also appreciative of Bill’s expressed gratitude for the legal efforts that had been made; Krieger was fond of Bill personally, and while he knew that the sentence could have been harsher, he still felt that four years was a heavy price to pay for what he considered a $2,400 misunderstanding. While the case might be reversed on appeal, Krieger was not optimistic, and so he was relieved that Bill seemed prepared for jail.

In the restaurant Bill called Rosalie from a telephone booth, and after he had relayed the news and had emphasized that the decision could have been worse, she seemed more cheerful—although as she listened she was crying. She was free to release her emotions now because the children were in school, it was midmorning in California. He said that he had a few legal details to complete with Krieger later in the evening and that he would return home on the following morning. Rosalie said that she would call Catherine and others and that they would have a large family dinner after he returned. She also said, reflecting further on the prison term, that he would be only forty when released and that all the children would most likely still be living at home then. He agreed, and he was about to add that there was the pending appeal to consider, and that he might also be free to spend the entire summer at home before having to surrender—but he withheld these comments; his conversation was undoubtedly being recorded, and he thought that perhaps one bonus accompanying his imprisonment was that the FBI would stop tapping his phone.

Saying good-bye to Rosalie, he returned to the table, where the men were laughing and finishing their first round of drinks. Bill picked up the Scotch that had been ordered for him, held it up in a sign of toast, finished it in two swallows, and ordered another.

He had dinner that evening in Brooklyn with the Di Pasquales, and on the following morning boarded a plane for San Francisco, pleased that the flight was not crowded. He preferred sitting by himself and not having to converse with anyone who might recognize him because his photograph had been in the morning editions of the
News
and the
Times
. He thought that he looked better in the
News
—his face was thinner, it was an older picture, and he was not wearing a hat as he was in the
Times
’s photograph. The
Times
’s picture had obviously been taken by a cameraman bending low, and it emphasized his jowly look, heavier face, and the shadows under his eyes. The
News
also gave him a better play, a five-column headline reading
COURT SLIPS YOUNG BONANNO A FOUR-YEAR TERM;
while the
Times
’s was a one-column head written from a more patriarchal viewpoint
BONANNO SON GETS FOUR YEARS IN PRISON
As the stewardess hung up his jacket, Bill sat against the window in the front row, alone, flipping through the pages of the
Times
, reading the international news, the financial section, the theater reviews, the sports page; but then he again folded the paper back and reread what had been written about him.

S
PRING AND SUMMER CAME AND WENT QUICKLY, FOLLOWED
by a melancholy autumn during which Bill expected at any moment to be told that he had two weeks left in which to surrender. His appeal had been rejected by the higher court—and he was not surprised to learn that Torrillo, after pleading guilty to the ninety-nine-count securities indictment, received a suspended sentence. Such were the vagaries of justice—Torrillo was a free man; David Hale, the FBI’s bomber, was free; the Green Beret’s assassin in Songmy was free; and Tucson’s Charles Battaglia, who had allegedly tried to force a bowling alley manager into installing a vending machine, received ten years. It was a bizarre period, a time when the nation seemed pulled between its twin forces of violence and puritanism, balanced by hypocrisy, and perhaps that was one reason why Bill was unable to explain during the summer to his children, and to himself, why he was going to be spending four years in jail.

He was in one sense going to jail because, desperate for cash in 1968, and with the Banana War going badly and his life in danger (excuses he could hardly offer in his own behalf in federal court) he had done the expedient thing and not the wise thing in using Torrillo’s credit card; but that did not fully explain why he would be going away for four years or why he had already been in and out of jails: there were other important, complex factors that had shaped him, had influenced what he had done and what had been done to him, and in order to explain these to his children he would want to explain his whole life, beginning with his birth in 1932 and the beat of the different drum to which he had marched during most of his maturity. He would want to explain his father’s life, the spirit of that loving and destructive father-son relationship, the period and place in which it was set, beginning with his father’s arrival in America during Prohibition, that glamorous, lush, lawless era in which fortunes had been made by men who might otherwise have labored all their lives digging ditches or driving trucks.

Bill remembered the story of how his father—shortly after being chased out of Sicily by Mussolini and after sailing from Marseilles to Cuba—had settled in Brooklyn and. was offered a job as a barber by an uncle named Bonventre, an offer that Joseph Bonanno politely refused. If he had accepted it, the recent history of the Bonannos would doubtless be quite different today—Bill almost certainly would not now be going to jail; but if his father had accepted the job, he would not have been Joseph Bonanno, the vain, proud, unusual man that Bill had tried without success to emulate. Bill saw his father as a misplaced masterpiece of a man who had been forged in a feudalistic tradition but had been flexible enough to survive and prosper in midtwentieth-century America, albeit not in the manner of which Judge Mansfield would approve.

Judge Mansfield, the Harvard-educated son of a former mayor of Boston, saw the world through different eyes than did Joseph Bonanno of Castellammare del Golfo; and Bill remembered from his own recent trial in federal court the judge’s words on the day of sentencing:
There is hardly any excuse for the type of conduct of which you were found guilty…. You are not the product of a ghetto…. I don’t see that because of family relationships you were under any great handicap…. you could have gotten a job
…

Yes, Bill thought, I could have gotten a job—but doing what? After all the publicity that had been attached to the Bonanno name since the Kefauver hearings twenty years ago —a time in which Bill himself had been called out of a high school classroom to be questioned by the FBI about the Mangano murder—he doubted that he could have gotten a job worthy of his intelligence; doubted, for example, that he could have joined the training program of a large American corporation and risen within the structure unless he had changed his name or had disowned his father. And, if he had done that, he would not have been Bill Bonanno, a son who deeply loved his father although recognizing that the relationship had been destructive; curiously, more destructive to him than it had been to his father, who had not spent time in jail, who had fewer legal problems than Bill, and was no doubt more cunning, more careful, stronger, more selfish perhaps, and less loving.

Joseph Bonanno, an orphan at fifteen, had been independent and self-reliant and had never had a father to answer to except in a mystical sense—his father, dead at thirty-seven, became an idealized figure preserved in a dozen sepia photographs and religious cards and in the exalted, reverential collections of Joseph Bonanno, recollections that were all part of his dated, idealized world rife with ritual and rigidity. Bill Bonanno had been lured into that world through the magnetism of his father, realizing too late that his father was a rare natural inhabitant of that demanding state of mind; and it was not surprising now, in the fall of 1970, that his father was one of that world’s few survivors. Most of the powerful dons who had immigrated during the 1920s were now dead, decrepit, or very old, and their Americanized sons were too smart, or not smart enough, to replace them. Bill Bonanno was among the last of his generation to make the attempt, and he would not have tried had his father not been so successful and awesome, offering to Bill what appeared to be great opportunities and advantages, a status at birth that had seemed almost regal.

But now those times were past; and the government, continuing its crime-busting crusade reminiscent of Mussolini’s successful anti-Mafia campaign in Sicily, disregarding civil rights as it invaded privacy and relied on shady informers, recorded a series of highly publicized arrests of mafiosi and reputed mafiosi, incarcerating many men who seemed ready for an old-age home. Before his own conviction, Bill had read in the newspapers that sixty-eight-year-old Gerardo Catena, alleged successor to the late Vito Genovese, was sent to jail for an indefinite term for refusing to answer questions about organized crime; and the sixty-seven-year-old New Jersey
capo
, Angelo De Carlo, a victim of FBI eavesdropping, received a two-year sentence and $20,000 fine for conspiracy and extortion. On his way to a federal penitentiary in Danbury, Connecticut, De Carlo shrugged his shoulders at reporters and said, “I’ve got to die sometime, so I might as well go this way.”

Carlo Gambino, a sixty-seven-year-old don of one of New York’s five “families,” was surrounded and seized by FBI agents as he was with his wife and daughter-in-law in a car in Brooklyn, and he was charged with conspiracy to hijack an armored car carrying $3 million to $5 million in cash belonging to the Chase Manhattan Bank. The FBI’s informant against Gambino was a veteran bank robber from Boston, John Kelley, who had been arrested in May 1969 for the $542,000 robbery of a Brinks truck in 1968 and who was awaiting trial in that case. Gambino was furious over the FBI’s allegations, and after bail was set at $75,000 Gambino refused to let a waiting bondsman post bail, declaring: “I’ll stay in jail—I’m innocent from this accusation and I won’t put up five cents for bail.” But after twenty minutes of persuasion by his son and his lawyer and after the tiny white-haired don popped a heart-stimulant pill into his mouth, he reluctantly signed the bail application.

In Miami, customs agents arrested Meyer Lansky, sixty-seven, the most prominent Jewish gangster in organized crime, for carrying in his suitcase, as he returned from Mexico, a quantity of Donnatal that he used for his nervous indigestion, but for which he did not have a prescription. Angelo Bruno, sixty-year-old don of Philadelphia and South Jersey, was jailed for an indefinite term for refusing to testify before the New Jersey State Commission of Investigation, and in New York it was reported, though not confirmed, that seventy-nine-year-old Frank Costello was forced out of retirement to help fill the Mafia’s leadership vacuum.

Bill Bonanno also read, as he awaited his notification to surrender, of the arrest in New York of thirty-five underworld figures that had been carried out as early as 6:00
A.M.
by 100 men from the police department and the Brooklyn District Attorney’s office. The arrested men, charged with refusing to testify after they had been granted immunity from prosecution by the Kings County grand jury, included the leaders of the dwindling dozen or so members still linked to what was once the 350-member Bonanno organization: Natale Evola, sixty-three, who had been associated with the elder Bonanno for thirty years, and the ailing Paul Sciacca, who had recently relinquished the leadership of the faction he inherited from Caspar Di Gregorio—who, on the day after the raid, died of lung cancer, at sixty-five. Some of those sought in the raid could not be found—among them was Frank Mari, the man believed to have murdered Hank Perrone and to have led the Troutman Street ambush against Bill and who had been listed as missing and probably dead since September 1968.

Perhaps the individual who received the most attention from the police, the FBI, and the press during the summer and fall of 1970, and continued to receive it in 1971, was an affable, neatly dressed, short dark-haired man named Joseph Colombo, who, after being indicted by a federal grand jury in Brooklyn for income tax evasion (in the total amount of $19,168 between 1963–1967), was charged with criminal contempt by a Nassau County grand jury in Long Island for refusing to answer questions about organized crime. At the same time, one of his four sons, twenty-three-year-old Joseph Colombo, Jr., was arrested by federal agents on charges of conspiring with other young men to melt United States silver coins, profiting because the face value of the coins was less than the intrinsic value of the metal. The government’s case against the younger Colombo, which was again based on evidence from an opportunistic informer with whom the FBI had made a deal, may have been one of the more imprudent moves made by the government in its years of vigilant anti-crime crusading: the case suddenly boomeranged against the FBI, as the elder Colombo, who regarded his son as a legitimate young businessman who was being framed, organized a group of protesters to picket FBI headquarters at Sixty-ninth Street and Third Avenue in Manhattan, protesters who carried signs and shouted slogans claiming that law enforcement authorities were waging a vendetta against Italo-Americans, defaming an entire ethnic group of patriotic, law-biding Italo-Americans by using such words as “Mafia” or “Cosa Nostra.” Spokesmen for the FBI countered by saying that the protest was a Mafia-inspired ploy designed to weaken the government’s attack on organized crime, and the press quoted from government data in several articles identifying Joseph Colombo, Sr., as a member of the Mafia commission and as the head of the “family” once ruled by Joseph Profaci and Joseph Magliocco. Colombo had been a subordinate officer in the Profaci organization, the articles said, when the Gallo brothers led a revolt in 1960–61 and it was Colombo who had later arranged the concessions with the Gallos that had ended the feuding.

The press also cited Colombo as the man who in 1963 tipped off Carlo Gambino and Thomas Lucchese to Magliocco’s murder plot against them, a plot that some reports stated was Joseph Bonanno’s idea; and while it had not been carried out, Magliocco’s position was in jeopardy, and after his fatal heart attack in December 1963 the Profaci “family” was taken over by Joseph Colombo, Sr. The elder Colombo’s father, who was killed in 1938, was also described in the press as a onetime member of the Profaci organization.

Little was known about Joseph Colombo’s boyhood except that he was born in Brooklyn forty-eight years ago—making him by far the youngest don of any importance—that he had attended two years of school at New Utrecht High, and that from 1942 to 1945 he had served as an enlisted man in the Coast Guard, being discharged with a disability allowance of $11.50 a month for a service-connected nervous disorder. After the war, he was arrested on several occasions on charges ranging from running crap games to consorting with known criminals, and in 1966 he was among those arrested in the so-called Little Apalachin Meeting held at La Stella Restaurant in Forest Hills. He was also arrested later for dining in the House of Chan Restaurant in Manhattan in the company of Carlo Gambino and Angelo Bruno.

Colombo was connected with several legitimate businesses, the principal among them being his listed occupation as a real estate broker, with estimated annual earnings of between $30,000 and $40,000. But because he had allegedly lied about his criminal record when applying for his real estate broker’s license, the government in 1970 brought a perjury indictment against him; this charge, however, together with the many others that were widely publicized, did not seem to hurt his popularity with hundreds of Italo-Americans who joined him and his sons on the picket lines night after night outside FBI headquarters in the summer of 1970. These protesters were the nucleus of a much larger organization that Colombo was helping to form, a militant pressure group called the Italian-American Civil Rights League.

The League, which hoped to do for Italo-Americans what the Jewish Anti-Defamation League had done for Jews and similar organizations had done for other minorities, was conceived as a national body that would appeal to a large percentage of the estimated twenty-two million Americans of Italian ancestry, an assumption that was initially greeted with skepticism by many Italo-American politicians and leading citizens. They recalled that previous attempts to unify Italo-Americans had failed or had proven to be ineffective, and they suggested that Italians were inherently individualistic, were not group-oriented, were so far removed from the melting pot and so integrated into the American mainstream that they no longer identified with, or wished to be reminded of, their ethnic past. Many of the Little Italys in large cities were disintegrating in the wake of modern construction, a new mobile society, the flight to the suburbs; and it was also pointed out that second-generation Italians were marrying non-Italians and that what remained of the traditional clannishness and what Lampedusa in
The Leopard
referred to as a “terrifying insularity of mind” was now dying with the aging immigrants who had passed through Ellis Island a half century ago, was dying with the Mafia.