Honor Thy Father (28 page)

Rosalie stepped down into the living room, smiling, embracing the middle-aged women and men from Brooklyn and Long Island who stood around her father-in-law. Most of them were relatives or friends of the Profaci side of the family, being merely acquainted with Joseph Bonanno, but Rosalie invited them to dinner because she had not seen them in a long time. They had been very considerate of her and her children during the many disruptions of the past two years, and she also had grown tired of seeing only her husband’s and father-in-law’s friends around the house. On this Sunday, except for Carl Simari, the men were told to stay away until evening, canceling the afternoon card game usually held in the basement.

Seeing the people in the living room, Bill Bonanno came in from the patio, wiped his hands in the kitchen, then came in to shake hands with everyone. The children followed shyly, facing people they did not know, but they were quickly met by delighted shrieks from the women who rushed to embrace them, kiss them, and exclaim on how much they had grown, especially Felippa, who had not even been walking when they had last seen her, before the elder Bonanno’s disappearance. Joseph Bonanno, smiling, reached down and grabbed Tory. He tossed him high in the air, and asked in his soft accented voice, “You like-a me?”

“Yes,” Tory said, grinning, as his grandfather bounced him in the air.

“You like-a me?” Joseph Bonanno repeated, holding him higher, bouncing him faster.

“Yes,” Tory giggled, “
yes
.” Bonanno let him drop, caught him again, hugged him, kissed him.

Everyone sat down and drinks were served. As Bill returned to the patio to put the chicken on the broiler, one of the visiting men said that he had recently been to California and had seen Joseph Bonanno’s daughter, Catherine. Bonanno suddenly seemed almost misty-eyed.

“You have
seen
my daughter?” he asked in a voice filled with wonder, tenderness. He himself had not seen Catherine in nearly two years, and while he was immediately curious as to how this man had met her, a man he was now meeting for the first time, he waited patiently for an explanation.

The man said that they had met through mutual friends in San Mateo, that they had gone one night to Catherine’s house for cocktails, and that she and her husband had later been among the crowd that had gone to dinner in a restaurant. Catherine was a charming, bright and lovely girl, the man continued, as Joseph Bonanno remained silent. Fie seemed to be many miles away, drifting in some private memory; and when the man perceived the effect he was having on Bonanno, he stopped talking, and there were moments of awkward silence. Finally one of the women, pointing to Bill standing in the smoke of the charcoal burner, added that the elder Bonanno also had a right to be proud of his son.

Bonanno looked at her, looked at his son, and slowly nodded. Then in a voice still choked with emotion, he said slowly and in a special and formal way: “The mother, the mother—she is responsible for my wonderful family. All credit to the mother. My wife. Fay. She is to be thanked for these children.” He paused for a moment, and looking at the woman who had spoken, he added: “Also, I appreciate it to hear this about my son. My son and I, he is my little brother.” There were smiles around the room, the lifting of glasses in a toast. Then Bill came in to the living room again, and, noticing that his father’s brandy snifter was empty, he poured him another drink.

“Thank you, little brother,” said Joseph Bonanno. “Thank you.”

Outside it was becoming suddenly darker, windier, and Bill returned to the patio to look up at the sky. Clouds were forming, and the sun was no longer visible.

“It looks like rain,” Bill said. “Maybe I’d better move everything inside.”

His father appeared on the patio, looked up at the sky, studied the cloud formations for several moments with his navigator’s knowledge.

“It will not rain,” the elder Bonanno said, still squinting at the sky. “It will not rain,” he repeated. And it did not.

T
HE SUMMER PASSED SLOWLY AND SOMBERLY FOR
R
OSALIE
, as summers for her always had, evoking girlhood memories of stagnant lakes at inland resorts, of hot afternoons at her father’s farm in Newburgh with horseflies buzzing around the lopsided picnic table, of weekends spent in the kitchen helping her mother prepare food for the omnipresent guests. Her life had not changed much in twenty years; except now, during the summer of 1966, she barely had an opportunity to get out of the house and had no chance of escaping the rising tension within it.

She did not know precisely what was happening, but the men suddenly seemed more restless, ill-tempered, anxious. They were smoking more, as she could see from the ashtrays filled to the brim each night with cigarette butts of almost every major brand. Sam Perrone seemed to be averaging close to three packs of Chesterfields a day, or so the rumpled wrappers he left behind indicated. Peter Magaddino, who had switched from Marlboros exclusively to Kents, was up to two packs a day. Frank Labruzzo, who had been suffering from emphysema and should not have been smoking at all, was unable to stop. Even when he was admitted to a hospital in late July and was known to have cancer, Labruzzo arranged to have cigarettes smuggled in to him by members of his crew.

Although Bill managed to resist cigarettes, he was eating more, and his weight was now about 230 pounds. The elder Bonanno displayed no signs of physical change and appeared to be as controlled as ever, and yet his customary sense of caution now bordered on obsession. When a tube burned out in the color television set, he would not have it sent out to be repaired—it was as if he feared that it might be returned containing electronic bugging devices, or maybe a time bomb. He temporarily borrowed the portable set from Rosalie’s bedroom, returning it after the men had appeared one night with a new color set. Then the malfunctioning set was placed in a corner of the library, remaining there through the summer and fall.

From what Rosalie could gather from the newspaper and radio reports, and from what she overheard around the house, the Bonanno organization was suffering from a series of recent defections by members responding to the economic pressures of the unions. There were also references to gunfighting—Frank Mari, who was said to have been Di Gregorio’s top triggerman in the Troutman Street ambush attempt on Bill Bonanno in January, was himself set up to be “hit.” He was trailed and trapped in the crossfire of the Bonanno gunmen in the Bay Ridge section of Brooklyn, was shot in the left shoulder and grazed on the temple, but Mari managed to escape. Another defector from the Bonanno organization, Angelo Presenzano, who was in University Hospital in Manhattan for surgery, was reported in the
Times
to have been discovered by a nurse to be keeping a loaded .38-caliber revolver in his night table—protection he apparently thought he needed in the hospital against uninvited visitors. The gun was removed, but a police guard was stationed outside of Presenzano’s room.

In August, the Bonanno household was grieved by the death of Frank Labruzzo. He had been in a Brooklyn hospital for weeks; his cancer was found to be incurable, and he died quickly. He was fifty-five. Among the membership Bill was the most shaken by Labruzzo’s death. In many ways nobody had been closer to him than Labruzzo, with whom he had had an intellectual rapport that was uncommon among men in the underworld. Labruzzo was the only individual that Bill had ever known who could pass the idle hours between dangerous assignments reading worthwhile books, fiction by J. D. Salinger, essays by Mark Twain, William Shirer’s
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
. Labruzzo, like himself, was a kind of misfit, an outsider in a secret society, a man born into a special way of life from which he had not chosen to escape but in which he did not entirely belong, particularly in its present condition of deterioration.

Bill felt embittered and betrayed at the time of Labruzzo’s passing—many low-echelon men had just gone over to Di Gregorio’s side because they no longer wished to be deprived of the money they earned as supervisors or workers in trucking firms, or on the waterfront, or in factories, or in utility trades whose union leaders were abiding by the commission’s request to keep the Bonanno loyalists idle. In the old days, Bill was sure, loyalty was based on more than money, and he wondered, as he stood among his men at Labruzzo’s funeral, which of the remaining members would be the next to defect. Those who had already defected had not really been starving—true, their illegal operations had declined during the months of unrest, and they were undoubtedly hard-pressed because of the loss of their legitimate income, but Bill was nonetheless depressed and angered by their unwillingness to make sacrifices.
This thing of ours is absolutely going to the dogs
, he thought.

With Labruzzo gone, and with Joseph Notaro having died three months before, the Bonanno organization had lost two officers for which it had no comparable replacements. Its membership was now perhaps less than 200—it was impossible to know the exact figure because many men had recently disappeared from sight, taking prolonged summer vacations rather than remain in New York and face the problem of choosing sides. The six remaining captains were, like Bill, still under John Morale, the number two man, although Morale was rarely reachable at the Brooklyn tavern that he owned, and Bill began to sense a distance between Morale and himself when they were together. Bill wondered if John Morale felt that he had somehow been shelved or had lost some of the respect of the membership since the elder Bonanno had returned to live in East Meadow and was relying more closely on Bill. But Bill could not believe that Morale would be that sensitive to the tight father-son relationship that was part of a temporary emergency arrangement. Bill wanted to believe that Morale had been an intimate part of the Bonanno family for too many years to ever feel left out, or to want to get out; he had joined the organization as a young man in Brooklyn during the Castellammarese War, had lived for long periods in the elder Bonanno’s homes in Brooklyn and Long Island, and during much of his boyhood Bill thought of John Morale as his brother. Later, Morale married the daughter of Vito Bonventre, Joseph Bonanno’s mother’s brother.

After the elder Bonanno’s disappearance in 1964, Morale’s home in Queens was under constant watch by the police, and in September 1965—after Morale had successfully evaded federal interrogators for twenty-two years—he was caught by the FBI near his home and was held on $50,000 bail. He appeared before the grand jury on several occasions since then and was subjected to close police observation wherever he traveled; and Bill preferred to believe that it was Morale’s ultracaution and the continuing tension that were responsible for changes in his manner.

The tension and pressure continued unabated through the summer into the fall. While the feuding factions headed by Bonanno and Di Gregorio felt haunted and hunted by each other, they were pursued indiscriminately by federal agents and the police, as the government’s campaign against the Mafia remained a national policy, a political issue, and a subject for headlines. Even the mayor of New York, John V. Lindsay, became involved in Mafia news in 1966 because two of his Youth Board officials had solicited the help of the Gallo brothers’ gang in suppressing racial disorders between whites and blacks in a Brooklyn neighborhood. Albert Gallo met with white youths in a predominantly Italian area of South Brooklyn and warned them to “cool it” with regard to forays with the neighboring blacks—and it worked. But despite the positive results, the Gallo role was protested by a Brooklyn civic group, by the Brooklyn District Attorney, and by the Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association, all of which denounced the impropriety of employing mafiosi as peacemakers. Mayor Lindsay disagreed, saying that when it came to preventing the escalation of rioting in a neighborhood where there had already been one death and considerable hostility, “you can’t always deal with people who are leaders in the Boy Scout movement.” The Brooklyn District Attorney, Aaron E. Koota, nevertheless insisted that the decision represented a “deplorable abdication of official responsibility,” and he began an investigation of Albert and Larry Gallo’s relationship with the Youth Board officials who had approached them.

But before this investigation progressed very far, the headlines shifted suddenly to the Queens District Attorney’s office, where it was announced that thirteen Mafia figures were subpoenaed to appear before a special grand jury after being caught in the basement dining room of La Stella Restaurant in Forest Hills. The men were in the middle of lunch when the police arrived to break up what Chief Inspector Sanford D. Garelik called a Little Apalachin Meeting, adding that the raid was part of the police department’s campaign “to rid the city of top hoodlums.”

The men, though surprised by the intrusion, offered no resistance, and a few continued to eat. But they were forced to leave the table, and to enter the police cars outside, neglecting to pay the check. Though they did not carry guns, the police search revealed that they carried considerable cash—the least amount in anyone’s pocket being $600, most of it in $50 and $ 100 bills. They were at first charged with consorting with known criminals—that is, themselves—but this was then changed by the Queens District Attorney, Nat H. Hentel, who, fearing that it might permit the men to go free on low bail, decided to hold them each as a material witness in a grand jury investigation, and bail was set at $100,000 each. Among the thirteen diners identified by the police were Santo Trafficante of Miami, Carlos Marcello of New Orleans, and such men from New York as Carlo Gambino, Joseph Colombo, and two ranking officers from the Vito Genovese family, Thomas Eboli and Mike Miranda. They had assembled, according to law enforcement officials, to discuss pressing problems in the underworld—particularly, the Bonanno situation, certain dissatisfactions in the Genovese family since their leader went to jail, and the question of the most capable candidate to replace the ailing Thomas Lucchese, who was now in a coma with a brain tumor at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center.

When they appeared before the Queens grand jury, the men refused to testify, pleading the First, Fourth, Fifth, Eighth, and Fourteenth amendments to the Constitution. Outside the jury room, their attorneys complained to the press that their clients’ rights to assembly had been violated, that they had been arrested unlawfully without a probable case, that their bail was excessive, and that they had been denied counsel while being detained for thirteen hours. Although their clients’ personal possessions seized by the police had been returned, the attorneys said that their money was still in the hands of detectives and that legal action would be forthcoming to determine which detectives took the money so that it might be recovered. The attorneys’ complaints were supported in several instances by the New York Civil Liberties Union, which accused the Queens District Attorney and the police of flagrant violations of civil liberties and suggested that Hentel, who was up for reelection in November, was using the grand jury hearings for personal publicity. Hentel indignantly denied this.

Eight days after the raid, five of the men returned at lunchtime to La Stella Restaurant to try again. This time they brought two lawyers with them, and they also invited to their table two plainclothesmen who were following them. But the detectives refused, choosing to sit solemnly two tables away. News photographers and three reporters also observed the luncheon, and the mafiosi cooperated by posing for pictures as they consumed linguine with white clam sauce, striped bass, baked clams, fresh fruit, and espresso coffee. The bill for the seven men came to $49.05, and they left a $10.95 tip. When asked by the reporter how long the grand jury hearings would continue, one of the lawyers replied, “Until the election is over.”

By the time the election was over—Hentel had lost—Bill Bonanno was in jail. He was serving a thirty-day sentence for contempt of court because, during a Brooklyn grand jury session held in July, he had refused to talk about the Troutman Street shooting that occurred on the night of the previous January 28. He began serving this sentence in mid-October; and of all his jailhouse experiences, he was finding this one the most tolerable. The quarters were clean and un-crowded and without the rats and the nonworking toilets and washbasins that had characterized his stay in the Federal House of Detention on West Street during the winter of 1965. Located on West Thirty-seventh Street in Manhattan, this civil jail was largely populated by men refusing to pay alimony. The guards here seemed almost sympathetic to the inmates, and they were also polite to Rosalie when she came to visit. They did not object to her slipping to Bill through the gate a book that he wanted to read—a new book on the Mafia,
The Secret Rulers
by Fred J. Cook. They also did not object when Sam Perrone brought Bill a hero sandwich that Perrone had gotten from Manganaro’s Restaurant on Ninth Avenue. Perrone even succeeded in getting a few bottles of wine and chunks of imported cheese to Bill, a violation of prison policy that would never have been condoned had Bill not recently done a favor for one of the resident prison officials.

Bill had overheard, shortly after his arrival, that the official was rudely awakened early each morning by the clanging of garbage cans and the grinding of truck gears by the private collection agency that serviced an all-night diner across from the officer’s home in Queens. When Bill informed one of the guards that he might be able to solve the officer’s problem and was given permission to try, he telephoned Sam Perrone, who quickly sent a few men to visit the garbage collectors. On the following morning, the cans were handled with incredible delicacy and silence.

A second privilege that Bill obtained through the favor was the acquisition of practically the entire third-floor prison space for himself and seven other members of the organization who were also serving thirty-day sentences for their refusal to testify about the Troutman Street incident. One of these was John Morale. Morale was friendly to Bill, but Bill again felt an undercurrent of resentment on Morale’s part. It was not from anything that Morale said—indeed, none of the men said anything in jail about the organization, aware of the possibility of bugging—but there was nonetheless a remoteness about Morale that was disquieting to Bill. Morale seemed more pensive than usual, perplexed, perhaps searching for an explanation to the problems that had suddenly befallen the organization, an organization that had existed for decades without serious problems. Perhaps Morale blamed Bill for what had happened, tracing all trouble from the moment Bill came East from Arizona in 1963, blaming Bill because he could not bring himself to blame Joseph Bonanno, the man who had been his boss for more than thirty years.